Orson Card - Shadow of the Giant

Bean walked up to his biological half-uncle. He towered over him.

"My," said Volescu. "What big teeth you have."

Bean took him by the shoulders. Volescu's arms seemed so small and fragile within the grasp of Bean's huge hands. Bean probed and pressed with his fingers. Volescu winced.

Bean's hands wandered idly along Volescu's shoulders until his right hand nested the back of the man's neck, and his thumb played with the point of Volescu's larynx. "Lie to me again," whispered Bean.

"You'd think," said Volescu, "that someone who used to be small would know better than to be a bully."

"We all used to be small," said Petra. "Let go of his neck, Bean."

"Let me crush his larynx just a little."

"He's too confident," said Petra. "He's very sure we'll never find them."

"So many babies," said Volescu genially. "So little time."

"He's counting on us not torturing him," said Bean.

"Or maybe he wants us to," said Petra. "Who knows how his brain works? The only difference between Volescu and Achilles is the size of their ambitions. Volescu's dreams are so very, very small."

Volescu's eyes were welling up with tears. "I still think of you as my only son," he said to Bean. "It grieves me that we don't communicate any better than this."

Bean's thumb massaged the skin of Volescu's throat in circles around the point of his larynx.

"It surprises me that you can always find a place to do your sick little brand of science," said Petra. "But this lab is closed now. The Rwandan government will have its scientists go over it to find out what you were doing."

"Always I do the work while others get the credit," said Volescu.

"Do you see how I nearly encircle his throat with just one hand?" said Bean.

"Let's take him back to Ribeirão Preto, Julian."

"That would be nice," said Volescu. "How are my sister and her husband doing? Or do you see them anymore, now that you've got to be so important?"

"He's talking about my family," said Bean, "as if he were not the monster who cloned my brother illegally and then murdered all but one of the clones."

"They've gone back to Greece," said Petra. "Please don't kill him, Bean. Please."

"Remind me why."

"Because we're good people," said Petra.

Volescu laughed. "You live by murder. How many people have you both killed? And if we add in all the Buggers you slaughtered out in space...."

"All right," said Petra. "Go ahead and kill him."

Bean tightened his fingers. Not that much, really. But Volescu made a strangled sound in his throat and in moments his eyes were bugging out.

At that moment Suriyawong entered the lab. "General Delphiki, sir," he said.

"Just a minute, Suri," said Petra. "He's killing somebody."

"Sir," said Suriyawong. "This is a war materials lab."

Bean relaxed his grip. "Still genetic research?"

"Several of the other scientists working here had misgivings about Volescu's work and the sources of his grants. They were collecting evidence. Not much to collect. But everything points to Volescu breeding a common-cold virus that would carry genetic alterations."

"That wouldn't affect adults," said Bean.

"I shouldn't have said war materials," said Suriyawong, "but I thought that would stop your little game of strangulation faster."

"What is it, then?" asked Bean.

"It's a project to alter the human genome," said Suriyawong.

"We know that's what he worked with," said Petra.

"But not with viruses as carriers," said Bean. "What were you doing here, Volescu?"

Volescu choked out some words. "Fulfilling the terms of my grants."

"Grants from whom?"

"The grant granters," said Volescu.

"Lock this place down," said Bean to Suriyawong. "I'll call the Hegemon to request a Rwandan perimeter guard."

"I think," said Petra, "that our brilliant scientist friend had some bizarre notion of remaking the human race."

"We need Anton to look at what this sick little disciple of his was doing," said Bean.

"Suri," said Petra. "Bean wasn't really going to murder him."

"Yes I was," said Bean.

"I would have stopped him," said Petra.

Suri barked out a little laugh. "Sometimes people need killing. So far, Bean's record is one for one."

Petra stopped going along on the interviews with Volescu. They could hardly be called interrogations—direct questions led nowhere, threats seemed to mean nothing. It was maddening and stressful and she hated the way he looked at her. Looked at her belly, which was showing her pregnancy more and more every day.

But she still kept on top of what they were calling, for lack of a better name, the Volescu project. The head of electronic security, Ferreira, was working most intensely on trying to track down everything Volescu had been doing with his computer and tracking his various identities through the nets. But Petra made sure that the database searches and indexes that they already had under way continued. These babies were out there somewhere, implanted in surrogate mothers, and at some point they were going to give birth. Volescu wouldn't risk their lives by forbidding the mothers access to good medical care—in fact, that was bound to be a minimum. So they would be born in hospitals, their births registered.

How they would find these babies in the millions that would be born in that timeframe, Petra couldn't begin to guess. But they'd collect the data and index it on every conceivably useful variable so it was there to work with when they finally figured out some identifying marker.

Meanwhile, Bean conducted the interviews with Volescu. They were yielding some information that proved accurate, but it was hard for Bean to decide whether Volescu was unconsciously letting useful information slip, or deliberately toying with them by bleeding out little bits of information that he knew would not be terribly useful in the end.

When he wasn't with Volescu, Bean was with Anton, who had come away from retirement and accepted a heavy level of drugs to control his aversive reaction to working in his field of science. "I tell myself every day," he said to Bean, "that I'm not doing science, I'm merely grading a student's assignments. It helps. But I still throw up. This is not good for me."

"Don't push any harder than you can."

"My wife helps me," said Anton. "She's very patient with this old man. And you know what? She's pregnant. In the natural way!"

"Congratulations," Bean said, knowing how hard this was for Anton, whose sexual desires did not tend in the same direction as his reproductive plans.

"My body knows how, even at this old age." He laughed. "Doing what comes unnaturally."

But his personal happiness aside, the picture Anton began to paint looked worse and worse. "His plan was simple enough," said Anton. "He planned to destroy the human race."

"Why? That makes no sense. Vengeance?"

"No, no. Destroy and replace. The virus he chose would go straight to the reproductive cells in the body. Every sperm, every ovum. They infest, but they don't kill. They just snip and replace. All kinds of changes. Strength and speed of an East African. A few changes I don't understand because nobody's really mapped that part of the genome— not for function. And some I don't even know where they fit on the human genome. I'd have to try them out and I can't do that. That would be real science. Someone else. Later."

"You're sidestepping the big change," said Bean.

"My little key," said Anton. "His virus turns the key."

"So he has no cure. No way to switch the key for intellectual ability without also triggering this perpetual growth pattern."

"If he had it, he'd use it. There's no advantage not to."

"So it is a biological weapon."

"Weapon? Something that affects only your children? Makes them die of giantism before they're twenty? Oh, that would make armies run in panic."