"I'll look to the future," said Bean, "and I'll help you all I can. But I'll regret whatever I want to regret."
"Fair enough," said Peter. "Now that we've agreed on that, I think you should know. I've decided to revive the office of Strategos."
Bean gave one hoot of derision. "You're putting that title on the commander of a force of two hundred soldiers, a couple of planes, a couple of boats, and an overheated company of strategic planners?"
"Hey, if I can be called Hegemon, you can take on a title like that."
"I notice you didn't want any vids of me getting that title."
"No, I didn't," said Peter. "I don't want people to hear the news while looking at vids of a kid. I want them to learn of your appointment as Strategos while seeing stock footage of the victory over the Formics and hearing voice-overs about your rescue of the Indian Battle Schoolers."
"Well, fine," said Bean. "I accept. Do I get a fancy uniform?"
"No," said Peter. "At the rate you're growing lately, we'd have to pay for new ones too often, and you'd bankrupt us."
A thoughtful expression passed across Bean's face.
"What," said Peter, "did I offend again?"
"No," said Bean. "I was just wondering what your parents said, when you declared yourself to be Locke."
Peter laughed. "Oh, they pretended that they'd known it all along. Parents."
At Bean's suggestion, Peter located the headquarters of the Hegemony in a compound just outside the city of Ribeirao Preto in the state of Sao Paulo. There they would have excellent air connections anywhere in the world, while being surrounded by small towns and agricultural land. They'd be far from any government body. It was a pleasant place to live as they planned and trained to achieve the modest goal of freeing the captive nations while holding the line against any new aggressions.
The Delphiki family came out of hiding and joined Bean in the safety of the Hegemony compound. Greece was part of the Warsaw Pact now, and there was no going home for them. Peter's parents also came, because they understood that they would become targets for anyone wanting to get to Peter. He gave them both jobs in the Hegemony, and if they minded the disruption of their lives, they never gave a sign of it.
The Arkanians left their homeland, too, and came gladly to live in a place where their children would not be stolen from them. Suriyawong's parents had made it out of Thailand, and they moved the family fortune and the family business to Ribeirao Preto. Other Thai and Indian families with ties to Bean's army or the Battle School graduates came as well, and soon there were thriving neighborhoods where Portuguese was rarely heard.
As for Achilles, month after month they heard nothing about him. Presumably he got back to Beijing. Presumably, he was worming his way into power one way or another. But they allowed themselves, as the silence about him continued, to hope that perhaps the Chinese, having made use of him, now knew him well enough to keep him away from the reins of power.
On a cloudy winter afternoon in June, Petra walked through the cemetery in the town of Araraquara, only twenty minutes by train from Ribeirao Preto. She took care to make sure she approached Bean from a direction where he could see her coming. Soon she stood beside him, looking at a marker.
"Who is buried here?" she asked.
"No one," said Bean, who showed no surprise at seeing her. "It's a cenotaph."
Petra read the names that were on it.
Poke.
Carlotta.
There was nothing else.
"There's a marker for Sister Carlotta somewhere in Vatican City," said Bean. "But there was no body recovered that could actually be buried anywhere. And Poke was cremated by people who didn't even know who she was. I got the idea for this from Virlomi."
Virlomi had set up a cenotaph for Sayagi in the small Hindu cemetery that already existed in Ribeirao Preto. It was a bit more elaborate--it included the dates of his birth and death, and called him "a man of satyagraha."
"Bean," said Petra, "it's quite insane of you to come here. No bodyguard. This marker standing here so that assassins can set their sights before you show up."
"I know," said Bean.
"At least you could have invited me along."
He turned to her, tears in his eyes. "This is my place of shame," he said. "I worked very hard to make sure your name would not be here."
"Is that what you tell yourself? There's no shame here, Bean. There's only love. And that's why I belong here--with the other lonely girls who gave their hearts to you."
Bean turned to her, put his arms around her, and wept into her shoulder. He had grown, to stand tall enough for that. "They saved my life," he said. "They gave me life."
"That's what good people do," said Petra. "And then they die, every one of them. It's a damned shame."
He gave one short laugh--whether at her small levity or at himself, for weeping, she did not know. "Nothing lasts long, does it," said Bean.
"They're still alive in you."
"Who am I alive in?" said Bean. "And don't say you."
"I will if I want. You saved my life."
"They never had children, either one of them," said Bean. "No one ever held either Poke or Carlotta the way a man does with a woman, or had a baby with them. They never got to see their children grow up and have children of their own."
"By Sister Carlotta's choice," said Petra.
"Not Poke's."
"They both had you."
"That's the futility of it," said Bean. "The only child they had was me."
"So . . . you owe it to them to carry on, to marry, to have more children who'll remember them both for your sake."
Bean stared off into space. "I have a better idea. Let me tell you about them. And you tell your children. Will you do that? If you could promise me that, then I think that I could bear all this, because they wouldn't just disappear from memory when I die."
"Of course I'll do that, Bean, but you're talking as if your life were already over, and it's just beginning. Look at you, you're getting along, you'll have a man's height before long, you'll--"
He touched her lips, gently, to silence her. "I'll have no wife, Petra. No babies."
"Why not? If you tell me you've decided to become a priest I'll kidnap you myself and get you out of this Catholic country."
"I'm not human, Petra," Bean replied. "And my species dies with me."
She laughed at his joke.
But as she looked into his eyes, she saw that it wasn't a joke at all. Whatever he meant by that, he really thought that it was true. Not human. But how could he think that? Of all the people Petra knew, who was more human than Bean?
"Let's go back home," Bean finally said, "before somebody comes along and shoots us just for loitering."
"Home," said Petra.
Bean only halfway understood. "Sorry it's not Armenia."
"No, I don't think Armenia is home either," she said. "And Battle School sure wasn't, nor Eros. This is home, though. I mean, Ribeirao Preto. But here, too. Because. . . my family's here, of course, but. . ."
And then she realized what she was trying to say.
"It's because you're here. Because you're the one who went through it all with me. You're the one who knows what I'm talking about. What I'm remembering. Ender. That terrible day with Bonzo. And the day I fell asleep in the middle of a battle on Eros. You think you have shame." She laughed. "But it's OK to remember even that with you. Because you knew about that, and you still came to get me out."
"Took me long enough," said Bean.
They walked out of the cemetery toward the train station, holding hands because neither of them wanted to feel separate right now.
"I have an idea," said Petra.
"What?"
"If you ever change your mind--you know, about marrying and having babies--hang on to my address. Look me up."
Bean was silent for a long moment. "Ah," he finally said, "I get it. I rescued the princess, so now I can marry her if I want."
"That
's the deal."
"Yeah, well, I notice you didn't mention it until after you heard my vow of celibacy."
"I suppose that was perverse of me."
"Besides, it's a cheat. Aren't I supposed to get half the kingdom, too?"
"I've got a better idea," she answered. "You can have it all."
AFTERWORD
Just as Speaker for the Dead was a different kind of novel from Ender's Game, so also is Shadow of the Hegemon a different kind of book from Ender's Shadow. No longer are we in the close confines of Battle School or the asteroid Eros, fighting a war against insectoid aliens. Now, with Hegemon, we are on Earth, playing what amounts to a huge game of Risk--only you have to play politics and diplomacy as well in order to get power, hold onto it, and give yourself a place to land if you lose it.
Indeed, the game that this novel most resembles is the computer classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is itself based on a Chinese historical novel, thus affirming the ties between history, fiction, and gaming. While history responds to irresistible forces and conditions (pace the extraordinarily illuminating book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which should be required reading by everyone who writes history or historical fiction, just so they understand the ground rules), in the specifics, history happens as it happens for highly personal reasons. The reasons European civilization prevailed over indigenous civilizations of the Americas consist of the implacable laws of history; but the reason why it was Cortez and Pizarro who prevailed over the Aztec and Inca empires by winning particular battles on particular days, instead of being cut down and destroyed as they might have been, had everything to do with their own character and the character and recent history of the emperors opposing them. And it happens that it is the novelist, not the historian, who has the freer hand at imagining what causes individual human beings to do the things they do.
Which is hardly a surprise. Human motivation cannot be documented, at least not with any kind of finality. After all, we rarely understand our own motivations, and so, even when we write down what we honestly believe to be our reasons for making the choices we make, our explanation is likely to be wrong or partly wrong or at least incomplete. So even when a historian or biographer has a wealth of information at hand, in the end he still has to make that uncomfortable leap into the abyss of ignorance before he can declare why a person did the things he did. The French Revolution inexorably led to anarchy and then tyranny for comprehensible reasons, following predictable paths. But nothing could have predicted Napoleon himself, or even that a single dictator of such gifts would emerge.
Novelists who write about Great Leaders, however, too often fall into the opposite trap. Able to imagine personal motivations, the people who write novels rarely have the grounding in historical fact or the grasp of historical forces to set their plausible characters into an equally plausible society. Most such attempts are laughably wrong, even when written by people who have actually been involved in the society of movers and shakers, for even those caught up in the maelstrom of politics are rarely able to see through the trees well enough to comprehend the forest. (Besides, most political or military novels by political or military leaders tend to be self-serving and self-justifying, which makes them almost as unreliable as books written by the ignorant.) How likely is it that someone who took part in the Clinton administration's immoral decision to launch unprovoked attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan in the late summer of 1998 would be able to write a novel in which the political exigencies that led to these criminal acts are accurately recounted? Anyone in a position to know or guess the real interplay of human desires among the major players will also be so culpable that it will be impossible for him to tell the truth, even if he is honest enough to attempt it, simply because the people involved were so busy lying to themselves and to each other throughout the process that everyone involved is bound to be snow-blind.
In Shadow of the Hegemon, I have the advantage of writing a history that hasn't happened, because it is in the future. Not thirty million years in the future, as with my Homecoming books, or even three thousand years in the future, as with the trilogy of Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, but rather only a couple of centuries in the future, after nearly a century of international stasis caused by the Formic War. In the future history posited by Hegemon, nations and peoples of today are still recognizable, though the relative balance among them has changed. And I have both the perilous freedom and the solemn obligation to attempt to tell my characters' highly personal stories as they move (or are moved) amid the highest circles of power in the governing and military classes of the world.
If there is anything that can be called my "life study," it is precisely this subject area: great leaders and great forces shaping the interplay of nations and peoples throughout history. As a child, I would put myself to sleep at night imagining a map of the world as it existed in the late fifties, just as the great colonial empires were beginning to grant independence, one by one, to the colonies that had once made up those great swathes of British pink and French blue across Africa and southern Asia. I imagined all those colonies as free countries, and, choosing one of them or some other relatively small nation, I would imagine alliance, unifications, invasions, conquests, until all the world was united under one magnanimous, democratic government. Cincinnatus and George Washington, not Caesar or Napoleon, were my models. I read Machiavelli's The Prince and Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but I also read Mormon scripture (most notably the Book of Mormon stories of the generals Gideon, Moroni, Helaman, and Gidgiddoni, and Doctrine and Covenants section 121) and the Old and New Testaments, all the while trying to imagine how one might govern well when law gives way to exigency, and the circumstances under which war becomes righteous.
I don't pretend that the imaginings and studies of my life have brought me to great answers, and you will find no such answers in Shadow of the Hegemon. But I do believe I understand something of the workings of the world of government, politics, and war, both at their best and at their worst. I have sought the borderline between strength and ruthlessness, between ruthlessness and cruelty, and at the other extreme, between goodness and weakness, between weakness and betrayal. I have pondered how it is that some societies are able to get young men to kill and die with fervor trumping fear, and yet others seem to lose their will to survive or at least their will to do the things that make survival possible. And Shadow of the Hegemon and the two remaining books in this long tale of Bean, Petra, and Peter are my best attempt to use what I have learned in a tale in which great forces, large populations, and individuals of heroic if not always virtuous character combine to give shape to an imaginary, but I hope believable, history.
I am crippled in this effort by the factor that real life is rarely plausible--we believe that people would or could do these things only because we have documentation. Fiction, lacking that documentation, dares not be half so implausible. On the other hand, we can do what history never can--we can assign motive to human behavior, which cannot be refuted by any witness or evidence. So, despite doing my utmost to be truthful about how history happens, in the end I must depend on the novelist's tools. Do you care about this person, or that one? Do you believe such a person would do the things I say they do, for the reasons I assign?
History, when told as epic, often has the thrilling grandeur of Dvorak or Smetana, Borodin or Mussorgsky, but historical fiction must also find the intimacies and dissonances of the delicate little piano pieces of Satie and Debussy. For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events. Tchaikowsky can carry me away, but I tire quickly of the large effect, which feels so hollow and false on the second hearing. Of Satie I never tire, for his music is endlessly surprising and yet perfectly satisfying. If I can bring off this novel in Tchaikowsky's terms, that is well and good; but
if I can also give you moments of Satie, I am far happier, for that is the harder and, ultimately, more rewarding task.
Besides my lifelong study of history in general, two books particularly influenced me during the writing of Shadow of the Hegemon. When I saw Anna and the King, I became impatient with my own ignorance of real Thai history, and so found David K. Wyatt's Thailand: A Short History (Yale, 1982, 1984). Wyatt writes clearly and convincingly, making the history of the Thai people both intelligible and fascinating. It is hard to imagine a nation that has been more lucky in the quality of its leaders as Thailand and its predecessor kingdoms, which managed to survive invasions from every direction and European and Japanese ambitions in Southeast Asia, all the while maintaining its own national character and remaining, more than many kingdoms and oligarchies, responsive to the needs of the Thai people. (I followed Wyatt's lead in calling the pre-Siamese language and the people who spoke it, in lands from Laos to upper Burma and southern China, "Tai," reserving "Thai" for the modern language and kingdom that bear that name.)
My own country once had leaders comparable to Siam's Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, and public servants as gifted and selfless as many of Chulalongkorn's brothers and nephews, but unlike Thailand, America is now a nation in decline, and my people have little will to be well led. America's past and its resources make it a major player for the nonce, but nations of small resources but strong will can change the course of world history, as the Huns, the Mongols, and the Arabs have shown, sometimes to devastating effect, and as the people of the Ganges have shown far more pacifically.
Which brings me to the second book, Lawrence James's Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (Little, Brown, 1997). Modern Indian history reads like one long tragedy of good, or at least bold, intentions leading to disaster, and in Shadow of the Hegemon I consciously echoed some of the themes I found in James's book.
As always, I relied on others to help me with this book by reading the first draft of each chapter to give me some idea whether I had wrought what I intended. My wife, Kristine; my son Geoffrey; and Kathy H. Kidd and Erin and Phillip Absher were my most immediate readers, and I thank them for helping prevent many a moment of inclarity or ineffectiveness.