Shadow Puppets

  "I see you've become quite involved in the life of this city," said Petra.

  "Superficially," said Anton. "An old Russian, long exiled in Romania, I'm a curiosity. They talk to me, but not about things that matter in their soul."

  "So why not go back to Russia?" asked Bean.

  "Ah, Russia. So many things about Russia. Just to remember them brings back the glorious days of my career, when I was gamboling about inside the nucleus of the human cell like a happy little lamb. But you see, those thoughts make me start to panic a little. So...I don't go where I get reminded."

  "You're thinking about it now," said Bean.

  "No, I'm saying words about it," said Anton. "And besides, if I didn't intend to think about it, I wouldn't have consented to see you."

  "And yet," said Bean, "you seem unwilling to look at me."

  "Ah, well," said Anton. "If I keep you in my peripheral vision, if I don't think about thinking about you...you are the one fruit that my tree of theory bore."

  "There were more than a score of us," said Bean. "But the others were murdered."

  "You survived," said Anton. "The others didn't. Why was that, do you think?"

  "I hid in a toilet tank."

  "Yes, yes," said Anton, "so I gleaned from Sister Carlotta, God rest her soul. But why did you, and you alone, sneak out of your bed and go into the bathroom and hide in such a dangerous and difficult place? Scarcely a year old, too. So precocious. So desperate to survive. Yet genetically identical to all your brothers, da?"

  "Cloned," said Bean, "so...yes."

  "It is not all genetics, is it?" said Anton. "It is not all anything. So much left to learn. And you are the only teacher."

  "I don't know anything about that. I'm a soldier."

  "It is your body that would teach us. And every cell inside it."

  "Sorry, but I'm still using them," said Bean.

  "As I'm still using my mind," said Anton, "even though it won't go where I most want it to take me."

  Bean turned to Petra. "Is that why you brought me here? So Professor Anton could see what a big boy I've become?"

  "No," said Petra.

  "She brought you here," said Anton, "so I can persuade you that you are human."

  Bean sighed, though what he wanted to do was walk away, get a cab to the airport, fly to another country, and be alone. Be away from Petra and her demands on him.

  "Professor Anton," said Bean, "I'm quite aware that the genetic alteration that produced my talents and my defects is well within the range of normal variation of the human species. I know that there is no reason to suppose that I could not produce viable offspring if I mated with a human woman. Nor is my trait necessarily dominant--I might have children with it, I might have children without. Now can we simply enjoy our walk down to the sea?"

  "Ignorance is not a tragedy," said Anton, "merely an opportunity. But to know and refuse to know what you know, that is foolishness."

  Bean looked at Petra. She was not meeting his gaze. Yes, she certainly knew how annoyed he was, and yet she refused to cooperate with him in exiting the situation.

  I must love her, thought Bean. Otherwise I would have nothing to do with her, the way she thinks she knows better than I do what's good for me. We have it on record--I'm the smartest person in the world. So why are so many other people eager to give me advice?

  "Your life is going to be short," said Anton. "And at the end, there will be pain, physical and emotional. You will grow too large for this world, too large for your heart. But you have always been too large of mind for an ordinary life, da? You have always been apart. A stranger. Human by name, but not truly a member of the species, excluded from all clubs."

  Till now, Anton's words had been mere irritants, floating past him like falling leaves. Now they struck him hard, with a sudden rush of grief and regret that left him almost gasping. He could not help the hesitation, the change of stride that showed the others that these words had suddenly begun to affect him. What line had Anton crossed? Yet he had crossed it.

  "You are lonely," said Anton. "And humans are not designed to be alone. It's in our genes. We're social beings. Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association. You are no exception, Bean."

  There were tears in his eyes, but Bean refused to acknowledge them. He hated emotions. They took control of him, weakened him.

  "Let me tell you what I know," said Anton. "Not as a scientist--that road may not be utterly closed to me, but it's mostly washed out, and full of ruts, and I don't use it. But my life as a man, that door is still open."

  "I'm listening," said Bean.

  "I have always been as lonely as you," he said. "Never as intelligent, but not a fool, either. I followed my mind into my work, and let it be my life. I was content with that, partly because I was so successful that my work brought great satisfaction, and partly because I was of a disposition not to look upon women with desire." He smiled wanly. "In that era, of my youth, the governments of most countries were actively encouraging those of us whose mating instinct had been short-circuited to indulge those desires and take no mate, have no children. Part of the effort to funnel all of human endeavor into the great struggle with the alien enemy. So it was almost patriotic of me to indulge myself in fleeting affairs that meant nothing, that led nowhere. Where could they lead?"

  This is more than I want to know about you, thought Bean. It has nothing to do with me.

  "I tell you this," said Anton, "so you understand that I know something of loneliness, too. Because all of a sudden my work was taken away from me. From my mind, not just from my daily activities. I could not even think about it. And I quickly discovered that my friendships were not...transcendent. They were all tied to my work, and when my work went away, so did these friends. They were not unkind, they still inquired after me, they made overtures, but there was nothing to say, our minds and hearts did not really touch at any point. I discovered that I did not know anybody, and nobody knew me."

  Again, that stab of anguish in Bean's heart. This time, though, he was not unprepared, and he breathed a little more deeply and took it in stride.

  "I was angry, of course, as who would not be?" said Anton. "And do you know what I wanted?"

  Bean did not want to say what he immediately thought of: death.

  "Not suicide, never that. My life wish is too strong, and I was not depressed, I was furious. Well, no, I was depressed, but I knew that killing myself would only help my enemies--the government--accomplish their real purpose without having had to dirty their hands. No, I did not wish to die. What I wanted, with all my heart, was...to begin to live."

  "Why do I feel a song coming on?" said Bean. The sarcastic words slipped out of him unbidden.

  To his surprise, Anton laughed. "Yes, yes, it's such a cliche that it should be followed by a love song, shouldn't it? A sentimental tune that tells of how I was not alive until I met my beloved, and now the moon is new, the sea is blue, the month is June, our love is true."

  Petra burst out laughing. "You missed your calling. The Russian Cole Porter."

  "But my point was serious," said Anton. "When a man's life is bent so that his desire is not toward women, it does not change his longing for meaning in his life. A man searches for something that will outlast his life. For immortality of a kind. For a way to change the world, to have his life matter. But it is all in vain. I was swept away until I existed only in footnotes in other men's articles. It all came down to this, as it always does. You can change the world--as you have, Bean, Julian Delphiki--you and Petra Arkanian, both of you, all those children who fought, and the ones who did not fight, all of you--you changed the world. You saved the world. All of humanity is your progeny. And yet...it is empty, isn't it? They didn't take it away from you the way they took my work from me. But time has taken it away. It's in the past, and yet you are still alive, so what is your life for?"

  They were at the stone steps leading down into the water. Bean wanted simpl
y to keep going, to walk into the Mediterranean, down and down, until he found old Poseidon at the bottom of the sea, and deeper, to the throne of Hades. What is my life for?

  "You found purpose in Thailand," said Anton. "And then saving Petra, that was a purpose. But what did you save her for? You have gone to the lair of the dragon and carried off the dragon's daughter--for that is what the myth always means, when it doesn't mean the dragon's wife--and now you have her, and...you refuse to see what you must do, not to her, but with her."

  Bean turned to Petra with weary resignation. "Petra, how many letters did it take to make clear to Anton precisely what you wanted him to say to me?"

  "Don't leap to conclusions, foolish boy," said Anton. "She only wanted to find out if there was any way to correct your genetic problem. She did not speak to me of your personal dilemma. Some of it I learned from my old friend Hyrum Graff. Some of it I knew from Sister Carlotta. And some of it I saw simply by looking at the two of you together. You both give off enough pheromones to fertilize the eggs of passing birds."

  "I really don't tell our business to others," said Petra.

  "Listen to me, both of you. Here is the meaning of life: for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man, the creature most unlike you, and then to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off."

  "That's not the only meaning of life," said Petra, sounding a little annoyed. Well, thought Bean, you brought us here, so take your medicine, too.

  "Yes it is," said Anton. "Do you think I haven't had time to think about this? I am the same man, with the same mind, I am the man who found Anton's Key. I have found many other keys as well, but they took away my work, and I had to find another. Well, here it is. I give it to you, the result of all my...study. Shallow as it had to be, it is still the truest thing I ever found. Even men who do not desire women, even women who do not desire men, this does not exempt them from the deepest desire of all, the desire to be an inextricable part of the human race."

  "We're all part of it no matter what we do," said Bean. "Even those of us who aren't actually human."

  "It's hardwired into all of us. Not just sexual desire--that can be twisted any which way, and it often is. And not just a desire to have children, because many people never get that, and yet they can still be woven into the fabric. No, it's a deep hunger to find a person from that strange, terrifyingly other sex and make a life together. Even old people beyond mating, even people who know they can't have children, there's still a hunger for this. For actual marriage, two unlike creatures becoming, as best they can, one."

  "I know a few exceptions," said Petra wryly. "I've known a few people of the 'never-again' persuasion."

  "I'm not talking about politics or hurt feelings," said Anton. "I'm talking about a trait that the human race absolutely needed to succeed. The thing that makes us neither herd animals nor solitaries, but something in between. The thing that makes us civilized or at least civilizable. And those who are cut off from it by their own desires, by those twists and bends that turn them in another way--like you, Bean, so determined are you that no more children will be born with your defect, and that there will be no children orphaned by your death--those who are cut off because they think they want to be cut off, they are still hungry for it, hungrier than ever, especially if they deny it. It makes them angry, bitter, sad, and they don't know why, or if they know, they can't bear to face the knowledge."

  Bean did not know or care whether Anton was right, that this desire was inescapable for all human beings, though he suspected that he was--that this life wish had to be present in all living things for any species to continue as they all desperately struggled to do. It isn't a will to survive--that is selfish, and such selfishness would be meaningless, would lead to nothing. It is a will for the species to survive with the self inside it, part of it, tied to it, forever one of the strands in the web--Bean could see that now.

  "Even if you're right," Bean said, "that only makes me more determined to overcome that desire and never have a child. For the reasons you just named. I grew up among orphans. I'm not going to leave any behind me."

  "They wouldn't be orphans," said Petra. "They'd still have me."

  "And when Achilles finds you and kills you?" said Bean harshly. "Are you counting on him being merciful enough to do what Volescu did for my brothers? What I cheated myself out of by being so damned smart?"

  Tears leapt to Petra's eyes and she turned away.

  "You're a liar when you speak like that," said Anton softly. "And a cruel one, to say such things to her."

  "I told the truth," said Bean.

  "You're a liar," said Anton, "but you think you need the lie so you won't let go of it. I know what these lies are--I kept my sanity by fencing myself about with lies, and believing them. But you know the truth. If you leave this world without your children in it, without having made that bond with such an alien creature as a woman, then your life will have meant nothing to you, and you'll die in bitterness and alone."

  "Like you," said Bean.

  "No," said Anton. "Not like me."

  "What, you're not going to die? Just because they reversed the cancer doesn't mean something else won't get you in the end."

  "No, you mistake me," he said. "I'm getting married."

  Bean laughed. "Oh, I see. You're so happy that you want everyone to share your happiness."

  "The woman I'm going to marry is a good woman, a kind one. With small children who have no father. I have a pension now--a generous one--and with my help these children will have a home. My proclivities have not changed, but she is still young enough, and perhaps we will find a way for her to bear a child that is truly my own. But if not, then I will adopt her children into my heart. I will rejoin the web. My loose thread will be woven in, knotted to the human race. I will not die alone."

  "I'm happy for you," said Bean, surprised at how bitter and insincere he sounded.

  "Yes," said Anton, "I'm happy for myself. This will make me miserable, of course. I will be worried about the children all the time--I already am. And getting along with a woman is hard even for men who desire them. Or perhaps especially for them. But you see, it will all mean something."

  "I have work of my own to do," said Bean. "The human race faces an enemy almost as terrible, in his own way, as the Formics ever were. And I don't think Peter Wiggin is up to stopping him. In fact it looks to me as if Peter Wiggin is on the verge of losing everything to him, and then who will be left to oppose him? That's my work. And if I were selfish and stupid enough to marry my widow and father orphans on her, it would only distract me from that work. If I fail, well, how many millions of humans have already been born and died as loose threads with their lives snipped off? Given the historical rates of infant mortality, it might be as many as half, certainly at least a quarter of all humans born. All those meaningless lives. I'll be one of them. I'll just be one who did his best to save the world before he died."

  To Bean's surprise--and horror--Anton flung his arms around him in one of those terrifying Russian hugs from which the unsuspecting westerner thinks he may never emerge alive. "My boy, you are so noble!" Anton let go of him, laughing. "Listen to yourself! So full of the romance of youth! You will save the world!"

  "I didn't mock your dream," said Bean.

  "But I'm not mocking you!" cried Anton. "I celebrate you! Because you are, in a way, a small way, my son. Or at least my nephew. And look at you! Living a life entirely for others!"

  "I'm completely selfish!" cried Bean in protest.

  "Then sleep with this girl, you know she'll let you! Or marry her and then sleep with anybody else, father children or not, why should you care? Nothing that happens outside your body matters. Your children don't matter to you! You're completely selfish!"

&nb
sp; Bean was left with nothing to say.

  "Self-delusion dies hard," said Petra softly, slipping her hand into his.

  "I don't love anybody," said Bean.

  "You keep breaking your heart with the people you love," said Petra. "You just can't ever admit it until they're dead."

  Bean thought of Poke. Of Sister Carlotta.

  He thought of the children he never meant to have. The children that he would make with Petra, this girl who had been such a wise and loyal friend to him, this woman whom, when he thought he might lose her to Achilles, he realized that he loved more than anyone else on Earth. The children he kept denying, refusing to let them exist because...

  Because he loved them too much, even now, when they did not exist, he loved them too much to cause them the pain of losing their father, to risk them suffering the pain of dying young when there was no one who could save them.

  The pain he could bear himself, he refused to let them bear, he loved them so much.

  And now he had to stare the truth in the face: What good would it do to love his children as much as he already did, if he never had those children?

  He was crying, and for a moment he let himself go, shedding tears for the dead women he had loved so much, and for his own death, so that he would never see his children grow up, so he would never see Petra grow old beside him, as women and men were meant to do.

  Then he got control of himself, and said what he had decided, not with his mind, but with his heart. "If there's some way to be sure that they don't have--that they won't have Anton's Key." Then I'll have children. Then I'll marry Petra.

  She felt her hand tighten in his. She understood. She had won.

  "Easy," said Anton. "Still just the tiniest bit illegal, but it can be done."

  Petra had won, but Bean understood that he had not lost. No, her victory was his as well.

  "It will hurt," said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness."

  "You're such a poet," murmured Bean. But then he flung one arm over Anton's shoulders, and another around Petra's back, and held to both of them as his blurring eyes looked out over the sparkling sea.