"He was youngest, but he became your protector?"
"No. Not like that. No, he kept it from going on, that's all. He went to the group--it was Bernard, he was getting together the biggest guys, the tough guys--"
"The bullies."
"Yeah, I guess. Only Ender, he goes to Bernard's number one, his best friend. Alai. He gets Alai to be his friend, too."
"So he stole away Bernard's support?"
"No, man. No, it's not like that. He made friends with Alai, and then got Alai to help him make friends with Bernard."
"Bernard . . . he's the one, Ender broke his arm in the shuttle."
"That's right. And I think, really, Bernard never forgave him, but he saw how things were."
"How were things?"
"Ender's good, man. You just--he doesn't hate anybody. If you're a good person, you're going to like him. You want him to like you. If he likes you, then you're OK, see? But if you're scum, he just makes you mad. Just knowing he exists, see? So Ender, he tries to wake up the good part of you."
"How do you wake up 'good parts'?"
"I don't know, man. You think I know? It just . . . you know Ender long enough, he just makes you want him to be proud of you. That sounds so . . . sounds like I'm a baby, neh?"
Bean shook his head. What it sounded like to him was devotion. Bean hadn't really understood this. Friends were friends, he thought. Like Sergeant and Poke used to be, before Achilles. But it was never love. When Achilles came, they loved him, but it was more like worship, like . . . a god, he got them bread, they gave bread back to him. Like . . . well, like what he called himself. Papa. Was it the same thing? Was Ender Achilles all over again?
"You're smart, kid," said Shen. "I was there, neh? Only I never once thought, How did Ender do it? How can I do the same, be like him? It's like that was Ender, he's great, but it's nothing I could do. Maybe I should have tried. I just wanted to be . . . with him."
"Cause you're good, too," said Bean.
Shen rolled his eyes. "I guess that's what I was saying, wasn't it? Implying, anyway. Guess that makes me a brag, neh?"
"Big old brag," said Bean, grinning.
"He's just . . . he makes you want to . . . I'd die for him. That sounds like hero talk, neh? But it's true. I'd die for him. I'd kill for him."
"You'd fight for him."
Shen got it at once. "That's right. He's a born commander."
"Alai fight for him too?"
"A lot of us."
"But some not, yes?"
"Like I said, the bad ones, they hate him, he makes them crazy."
"So the whole world divides up--good people love Wiggin, bad people hate Wiggin."
Shen's face went suspicious again. "I don't know why I told you all that merda. You too smart to believe any of it."
"I do believe it," said Bean. "Don't be mad at me." He'd learned that one a long time ago. Little kid says, Don't be mad at me, they feel a little silly.
"I'm not mad," said Shen. "I just thought you were making fun of me."
"I wanted to know how Wiggin makes friends."
"If I knew that, if I really understood that, I'd have more friends than I do, kid. But I got Ender as my friend, and all his friends are my friends too, and I'm their friend, so . . . it's like a family."
A family. Papa. Achilles again.
That old dread returned. That night after Poke died. Seeing her body in the water. Then Achilles in the morning. How he acted. Was that Wiggin? Papa until he got his chance?
Achilles was evil, and Ender was good. Yet they both created a family. Both had people who loved them, who would die for them. Protector, papa, provider, mama. Only parent to a crowd of orphans. We're all street kids up here in Battle School, too. We might not be hungry, but we're all still wishing for a family.
Except me. Last thing I need. Some papa smiling at me, waiting with a knife.
Better to be the papa than to have one.
How can I do that? Get somebody to love me the way Shen loves Wiggin?
No chance. I'm too little. Too cute. I got nothing they want. All I can do is protect myself, work the system. Ender's got plenty to teach those that have some hope of doing what he's done. But me, I have to learn my own way.
Even as he made the decision, though, he knew he wasn't done with Wiggin. Whatever Wiggin had, whatever Wiggin knew, Bean would learn it.
And so passed the weeks, the months. Bean did all his regular classwork. He attended the regular battleroom classes with Dimak teaching them how to move and shoot, the basic skills. On his own he completed all the enrichment courses you could take at your own desk, certifying in everything. He studied military history, philosophy, strategy. He read ethics, religion, biology. He kept track of every student in the school, from the newly arrived launchies to the students about to graduate. When he saw them in the halls, he knew more about them than they knew about themselves. He knew their nation of origin. He knew how much they missed their families and how important their native country or ethnic or religious group was to them. He knew how valuable they might be to a nationalist or idealist resistance movement.
And he kept reading everything Wiggin read, watching everything Wiggin watched. Hearing about Wiggin from the other kids. Watching Wiggin's standings on the boards. Meeting more of Wiggin's friends, hearing them talk about him. Bean listened to all the things Wiggin was quoted as saying and tried to fit them into some coherent philosophy, some worldview, some attitude, some plan.
And he found out something interesting. Despite Wiggin's altruism, despite his willingness to sacrifice, not one of his friends ever said that Wiggin came and talked over his problems. They all went to Wiggin, but who did Wiggin go to? He had no more real friends than Bean did. Wiggin kept his own counsel, just like Bean.
Soon Bean found himself being advanced out of classes whose work he had already mastered and being plunged into classwork with older and older groups, who looked at him with annoyance at first, but later simply with awe, as he raced past them and was promoted again before they were half done. Had Wiggin been pushed through his classwork at an accelerated rate? Yes, but not quite as fast. Was that because Bean was better? Or because the deadline was getting closer?
For the sense of urgency in teacher evaluations was getting greater. The ordinary students--as if any child here were ordinary--were getting briefer and briefer notations. They weren't being ignored, exactly. But the best were being identified and lifted out.
The seeming best. For Bean began to realize that the teachers' evaluations were often colored by which students they liked the best. The teachers pretended to be dispassionate, impartial, but in fact they got sucked in by the more charismatic children, just as the other students did. If a kid was likable, they gave him better comments on leadership, even if he was really just glib and athletic and needed to surround himself with a team. As often as not, they tagged the very students who would be the least effective commanders, while ignoring the ones who, to Bean, showed real promise. It was frustrating to watch them make such obvious mistakes. Here they had Wiggin right before their eyes--Wiggin, who was the real thing--and they still went on misreading everybody else. Getting all excited about some of these energetic, self-confident, ambitious kids even though they weren't actually producing excellent work.
Wasn't this whole school set up in order to find and train the best possible commanders? The Earthside testing did pretty well--there were no real dolts among the students. But the system had overlooked one crucial factor: How were the teachers chosen?
They were career military, all of them. Proven officers with real ability. But in the military you don't get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with.
The result was that you ended up with a command structur
e that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out.
That was the military. These teachers were all the kind of people who thrived in that environment. And they were selecting their favorite students based on precisely that same screwed-up sense of priorities.
No wonder a kid like Dink Meeker saw through it and refused to play. He was one of the few kids who was both likable and talented. His likability made them try to make him commander of his own army; his talent let him understand why they were doing it and turn them down because he couldn't believe in such a stupid system. And other kids, like Petra Arkanian, who had obnoxious personalities but could handle strategy and tactics in their sleep, who had the confidence to lead others into war, to trust their own decisions and act on them--they didn't care about trying to be one of the guys, and so they got overlooked, every flaw became magnified, every strength belittled.
So Bean began constructing his own anti-army. Kids who weren't getting picked out by the teachers, but were the real talents, the ones with heart and mind, not just face and chat. He began to imagine who among them should be officers, leading their own toons under the command of . . .
Of Ender Wiggin, of course. Bean could not imagine anyone else in that position. Wiggin would know how to use them.
And Bean knew just where he should be. Close to Wiggin. A toon leader, but the most trusted of them. Wiggin's righthand man. So when Wiggin was about to make a mistake, Bean could point out to him the error he was making. And so that Bean could be close enough to maybe understand why Wiggin was human and he himself was not.
Sister Carlotta used her new security clearance like a scalpel, most of the time, slicing her way into the information establishment, picking up answers here and new questions there, talking to people who never guessed what her project was, why she knew so much about their top-secret work, and quietly putting it all together in her own mind, in memos to Colonel Graff.
But sometimes she wielded her top security clearance like a meat-ax, using it to get past prison wardens and security officers, who saw her unbelievable level of need-to-know and then, when they checked to make sure her documents weren't a stupid forgery, were screamed at by officers so high-ranked that it made them want to treat Sister Carlotta like God.
That's how, at last, she came face to face with Bean's father. Or at least the closest thing to a father that he had.
"I want to talk to you about your installation in Rotterdam."
He looked at her sourly. "I already reported on everything. That's why I'm not dead, though I wonder if I made the right choice."
"They told me you were quite the whiner," said Sister Carlotta, utterly devoid of compassion. "I didn't expect it to surface so quickly."
"Go to hell." He turned his back on her.
As if that meant anything. "Dr. Volescu, the records show that you had twenty-three babies in your organ farm in Rotterdam."
He said nothing.
"But of course that's a lie."
Silence.
"And, oddly enough, I know that the lie is not your idea. Because I know that your installation was not an organ farm indeed, and that the reason you aren't dead is because you agreed to plead guilty to running an organ farm in exchange for never discussing what you were really doing there."
He slowly turned around again. Enough that he could look up and see her with a sidelong glance. "Let me see that clearance you tried to show me before."
She showed it to him again. He studied it.
"What do you know?" he asked.
"I know your real crime was continuing a research project after it was closed down. Because you had these fertilized eggs that had been meticulously altered. You had turned Anton's key. You wanted them to be born. You wanted to see who they would become."
"If you know all that, why have you come to me? Everything I knew is in the documents you must have read."
"Not at all," said Sister Carlotta. "I don't care about confessions. I don't care about logistics. I want to know about the babies."
"They're all dead," he said. "We killed them when we knew we were about to be discovered." He looked at her with bitter defiance. "Yes, infanticide. Twenty-three murders. But since the government couldn't admit that such children had ever existed, I was never charged with the crimes. God judges me, though. God will press the charges. Is that why you're here? Is that who gave you your clearance?"
You make jokes about this? "All I want to know is what you learned about them."
"I learned nothing, there was no time, they were still babies."
"You had them for almost a year. They developed. All the work done since Anton found his key was theoretical. You watched the babies grow."
A slow smile crept across his face. "This is like those Nazi medical crimes all over again. You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research."
"You monitored their growth. Their health. Their intellectual development."
"We were about to start the tracking of intellectual development. The project wasn't funded, of course, so it's not as if we could provide much more than a clean warm room and basic bodily needs."
"Their bodies, then. Their motor skills."
"Small," he said. "They are born small, they grow slowly. Undersized and underweight, all of them."
"But very bright?"
"Crawling very young. Making pre-speech sounds far earlier than normal. That's all we knew. I didn't see them often myself. I couldn't afford the risk of detection."
"So what was your prognosis?"
"Prognosis?"
"How did you see their future?"
"Dead. That's everyone's future. What are you talking about?"
"If they hadn't been slaughtered, Dr. Volescu, what would have happened?"
"They would have kept on growing, of course."
"And later?"
"There is no later. They keep on growing."
She thought for a moment, trying to process the information.
"That's right, Sister. You're getting it. They grow slowly, but they never stop. That's what Anton's key does. Unlocks the mind because the brain never stops growing. But neither does anything else. The cranium keeps expanding--it's never fully closed. The arms and legs, longer and longer."
"So when they reach adult height . . ."
"There is no adult height. There's just height at time of death. You can't keep growing like that forever. There's a reason why evolution builds a stop-clock into the growth control of long-lived bodies. You can't keep growing without some organ giving out, eventually. Usually the heart."
The implications filled Sister Carlotta with dread. "And the rate of this growth? In the children, I mean? How long until they are at normal height for their age?"
"My guess was that they'd catch up twice," said Volescu. "Once just before puberty, and then the normal kids would leap ahead for a while, but slow and steady wins the race, n'est-ce pas? By twenty, they would be giants. And then they'd die, almost certainly before age twenty-five. Do you have any idea how huge they would be? So my killing them, you see--it was a mercy."
"I doubt any of them would have chosen to miss out on even the mere twenty years you took from them."
"They never knew what happened to them. I'm not a monster. We drugged them all. They died in their sleep and then the bodies were incinerated."
"What about puberty? Would they ever mature sexually?"
"That's the part we'll never know, isn't it?"
Sister Carlotta got up to go.
"He lived, didn't he?" asked Volescu.
"Who?"
"The one we lost. The one whose body wasn't with the others. I counted only twenty-two going into the fire."
"When you worship Moloch, Dr. Volescu, you get no answers but the ones yo
ur chosen god provides."
"Tell me what he's like." His eyes were so hungry.
"You know it was a boy?"
"They were all boys," said Volescu.
"What, did you discard the girls?"
"How do you think I got the genes I worked with? I implanted my own altered DNA into denucleated eggs."
"God help us, they were all your own twins?"
"I'm not the monster you think I am," said Volescu. "I brought the frozen embryos to life because I had to know what they would become. Killing them was my greatest sorrow."
"And yet you did it--to save yourself."
"I was afraid. And the thought came to me: They're only copies. It isn't murder to discard the copies."
"Their souls and lives were their own."
"Do you think the government would have let them live? Do you really think they would have survived? Any of them?"
"You don't deserve to have a son," said Sister Carlotta.
"But I have one, don't I?" He laughed. "While you, Miss Carlotta, perpetual bride of the invisible God, how many do you have?"
"They may have been copies, Volescu, but even dead they're worth more than the original."
He continued laughing as she walked down the corridor away from him, but it sounded forced. She knew his laughter was a mask for grief. But it wasn't the grief of compassion, or even of remorse. It was the grief of a damned soul.
Bean. God be thanked, she thought, that you do not know your father, and never will. You're nothing like him. You're far more human.
In the back of her mind, though, she had one nagging doubt. Was she sure Bean had more compassion, more humanity? Or was Bean as cold of heart as this man? As incapable of empathy? Was he all mind?
Then she thought of him growing and growing, from this too-tiny child to a giant whose body could no longer sustain life. This was the legacy your father gave you. This was Anton's key. She thought of David's cry, when he learned of the death of his son. Absalom! Oh Absalom! Would God I could die for thee, Absalom, my son!
But he was not dead yet, was he? Volescu might have been lying, might simply be wrong. There might be some way to prevent it. And even if there was not, there were still many years ahead of Bean. And how he lived those years still mattered.
God raises up the children that he needs, and makes men and women of them, and then takes them from this world at his good pleasure. To him all of life is but a moment. All that matters is what that moment was used for. And Bean would use it well. She was sure of that.