Orson Card - Shadow of the Giant

And when Bean had tried to appeal to Volescu's lingering shreds of decency—which he hoped existed, against all evidence—the man had gone underground and now all Bean could hope for was that somebody, some agency somewhere, would find him, arrest him, and hold him long enough for Bean to...

To what? Torture him? Threaten him? Bribe him? What could possibly induce Volescu to tell him what he needed to know?

Now the International Fleet had sent him some officer to give him "important information." What could they possibly know? The I.F. was forbidden to operate on the surface of Earth. Even if they had agents who had discovered Volescu's whereabouts, why would they risk exposing their own illegal activities just to help Bean find his babies? They had made a big deal about how loyal they were to the Battle School graduates, especially to Ender's Jeesh, but he doubted it went that far. Money, that's what they offered. All the Battle School grads had a nice pension. They could go home like Cincinnatus and farm for the rest of their lives, without even having to worry about the weather or the seasons or the harvest. They could grow weeds and still prosper.

Instead, I stupidly allowed children of my deformed and self-destructive genes to be created in vitro and now Volescu has planted them in foreign wombs and I must find them before he and people like him can exploit them and use them up and then watch them die of giantism, like me, before they turn twenty.

Volescu knows. He would never leave it to chance. Because he still imagined himself to be a scientist. He would want to gather data about the children. To him, it was all one big experiment, with the added inconvenience of being illegal and based on stolen embryos. To Volescu, those embryos belonged to him by right. To him, Bean was nothing but the experiment that got away. Anything he produced was part of Volescu's long-term study.

An old man sat at the table in the conference room. It took Bean a moment to decide whether his skin was naturally dark or merely weathered into a barnwood color and texture. Both, probably.

I know him, thought Bean. Mazer Rackham. The man who saved humanity in the Second Bugger Invasion. Who should have been dead many decades ago, but who surfaced long enough to train Ender himself for the last campaign.

"They send you to Earth?"

"I'm retired," said Rackham.

"So am I," said Bean. "So is Ender. When does he come to Earth?"

Rackham shook his head. "Too late to be bitter about that," he said. "If Ender had been here, do you think there's any chance he would be both alive and free?"

Rackham had a point. Back when Achilles was arranging for all of Ender's Jeesh to be kidnapped, the greatest prize of all would have been Ender himself. And even if Ender had evaded capture—as Bean had done—how long before someone else tried to control him or exploit him in order to achieve some imperial ambition? With Ender, being an American as he was, maybe the United States would have stirred from its torpor and now, instead of China and the Muslim world being the main players in the great game, America would be flexing its muscles again and then the world really would be in turmoil.

Ender would have hated that. Hated himself for being part of it. It really was better that Graff had arranged to send him off on the first colony ship to a former Bugger world. Right now, each second of Ender's life aboard the starship was a week to Bean. While Ender read a paragraph of a book, a million babies would be born on Earth, a million old people and soldiers and sick people and pedestrians and drivers would die and humanity would move forward another small step in its evolution into a starfaring species.

Starfaring species. That was Graff's program.

"You're not here for the fleet, then," said Bean. "You're here for Colonel Graff."

"For the Minister of Colonization?" Rackham nodded gravely. "Informally and unofficially, yes. To inform you of an offer."

"Graff has nothing that I want. Before any starship could arrive on a colony world, I'd be dead."

"You'd undoubtedly be an ... interesting choice to head a colony," said Rackham. "But as you said, your term in office would be too brief to-be effective. No, it's a different kind of offer."

"The only things I want, you don't have."

"Once upon a time, I believe, you wanted nothing more than survival."

"It's not within your power to offer me."

"Yes it is," said Rackham.

"Oh, from the vast medical research facilities of the International Fleet there comes a cure for a condition that is suffered by only one person on Earth?"

"Not at all," said Rackham. "The cure will have to come from others. What we offer you is the ability to wait until it's ready. We offer you a starship, and lightspeed, and an ansible so you can be told when to come home."

Precisely the "gift" they gave Rackham himself, when they thought they might need him to command all the fleets when they arrived at the various Bugger worlds. The chance of survival rang inside him like the tolling of a great bell. He couldn't help it. If there was anything that had ever driven him, it was that hunger to survive. But how could he trust them?

"And in return, what do you want from me?"

"Can't this be part of your retirement package from the fleet?"

Rackham was good at keeping a straight face, but Bean knew he couldn't be serious. "When I come back, there's going to be some poor young soldier I can train?"

"You're not a teacher," said Rackham.

"Neither were you."

Rackham shrugged. "So we become whatever we need to be. We're offering you life. We'll continue to fund research on your condition."

"What, using my children as your guinea pigs?"

"We'll try to find them, of course. We'll try to cure them."

"But they won't get their own starships?"

"Bean," said Rackham. "How many trillions of dollars do you think your genes are worth?"

"To me," said Bean, "They're worth more than all the money in the world."

"I don't think you could pay even the interest on that loan."

"So I don't have as high a credit rating as I hoped."

"Bean, take this offer seriously. While there's still time. Acceleration is hard on the heart. You have to go while you're still healthy enough to survive the voyage. As it is, we'll be cutting it rather fine, don't you think? A couple of years to accelerate, and at the end, a couple more to decelerate. Who gives you four years?"

"Nobody," said Bean. "And you're forgetting. I have to come home. That's four more years. It's already far too late."

Rackham smiled. "Don't you think we've taken that into account?"

"What, you've figured out a way to turn while traveling at light-speed?"

"Even light bends."

"Light is a wave."

"So are you, when you're traveling that fast."

"Neither of us is a physicist."

"But the people who planned our new generation of messenger ship are," said Rackham.

"How can the I.F. afford to build new ships?" asked Bean. "Your funding comes from Earth and the emergency is over. The only reason the nations of Earth even pay your salaries and continue to supply you is because they're buying your neutrality."

Rackham smiled.

"Somebody's paying you to keep developing new ships," said Bean.

"Speculation is pointless."

"There's only one nation that could afford to do that, and it's the one nation that could never keep it secret."

"So it's not possible," said Rackham.

"Yet you're promising me a kind of ship that couldn't exist."

"You go through acceleration in a compensatory gravity field, so there's no additional strain on your heart. That lets us accelerate in a week instead of two years."

"And if the gravity fails?"

"Then you're torn to dust in an instant. But it doesn't fail. We've tested it."