Orson Card - Shadow of the Giant

"What then?"

"Volescu thinks he's God. Or at least he's playing dress-up with God's clothing. He's trying to jump the whole human race to the next stage of evolution. Spread this disease so that no normal children can be born, ever again."

"But that's insane. Everybody dying so young—"

"No, no, Julian. No, not insane. Why do humans live so long? Mathematicians and poets, they burn out in their mid-twenties anyway. We live so long because of grandchildren. In a difficult world, grandparents can help ensure the survival of their grandchildren. The societies that kept their old people around and listened to them and respected them—that fed them—always do better. But that's a community on the edge of starvation. Always at risk. Are we at risk so much today?"

"If these wars keep getting worse—"

"Yes, war," said Anton. "Kill off a whole generation of men, yet the grandfathers keep their sexual potency. They can propagate the next generation even if the young ones are dead. But Volescu thinks we're ready to move beyond planning for the deaths of young men."

"So he doesn't mind having generations that are less than twenty years."

"Change society's patterns. When were you ready to assume an adult role, Bean? When was your brain ready to go to work and change the world?"

"Age ten. Earlier, if I'd had good education."

"So you get good education. All our schools change because children are ready to learn at age three. Age two. By age ten, if Volescu's gene change takes place, the new generation is completely ready to take over for the old. Marry as early as possible. Breed like bunnies. Become giants. Irresistible in war. Until they keel over from heart attacks. Don't you see? Instead of spending the young men in violent death, we send the old men—the eighteen-year-olds. While all the work in science, technology, building, planting, everything—all done by the young men. The ten-year-olds. All of them like you."

"Not human anymore."

"A different species, yes. The children of Homo sapiens. Homo lumens, maybe. Still capable of interbreeding, but the old style of human—they grow to be old, but they are never big. And they are never very smart. How can they compete? They are gone, Bean. Your people rule the world."

"They wouldn't be my people."

"It's good that you're loyal to old humans like me. But you are something new, Bean. And if you have any children with my little key turned, no, they won't be fast like what Volescu has designed, but they'll be brilliant. Something new in the world. When they can talk to each other, instead of being alone like you, will you be able to keep up with them? Well, maybe yes, for you. But will I be able to keep up with them?"

Bean laughed bitterly. "Will Petra? That's what you're saying."

"You had no parents to be humiliated when they found out that you were learning faster than they can teach."

"Petra will love them just as much."

"Yes, she will. But all her love won't turn them human."

"And here you told me that I'm definitely human. Not true after all."

"Human in your loves, your hungers. In what makes you good and not evil. But in the speed of your life, the intellectual heights, are you not alone in this world?"

"Unless that virus is released."

"How do you know it won't still be released?" asked Anton. "How do you know he hasn't already completed a batch and disseminated it? How do you know he didn't infect himself and now he spreads it wherever he goes? In these past weeks since he got here, how many people in the Hegemony compound have had a cold? Sniffly nose, itchy penis, tender nipples—yes, he used that virus as his base, he has a sense of humor, an ugly kind."

"I haven't checked on the subtler symptoms, but we've had the normal number of colds."

"Probably not," said Anton. "He probably didn't make himself a carrier. What would be the point? He wants other people to spread it."

"You're saying that it's already out there."

"Or he has a website that he has to check every week or every month. And then one month he doesn't do it. So a signal is sent out to some of Achilles's old network. The virus gets broken out and used. And all Volescu had to do to trigger it was ... be a captive with no access to computers."

"Was his research that complete? Could he have a working virus?"

"I don't know. All his records were changed when he moved. When you sent him a message, you told me about that, yes? You sent him a message and he moved to Rwanda. Before that maybe he had an earlier version of the virus. Maybe not. Maybe this is the first time he put the changed human genes into the virus. If that's the case, then no, it has not been released. But it could be. It's ready. Ready enough. Maybe you caught him just in time."

"And if it is out there, what?"

"Then I hope the baby my wife is pregnant with, I hope it's one like you, and not one like me."

"Why?"

"Your tragedy, Bean, is that you are the only one. If all the world will soon be like you, then you know what that makes you."

"A damn fool."

"It makes you Adam."

Anton was unbearably complaisant about this. What Bean was, what was happening to him, he wouldn't wish that on anyone. Not his child, and not Anton's. But Anton could be forgiven for his idiotic wish. He had not been so small; he had not been this large. He could not know how ... how larval the early stage was.

Like silkworms, the larva of my species does all the work of its life while it's young. Then the big butterfly, that's what people see, but all it has left to do in its life is get laid, then lay eggs, then die.

Bean talked it through with Petra, and then they went to Ferreira and Peter. Now the computer search was geared—with some urgency— toward detecting any kind of dead-man switch that Volescu was signing on to every day or every week. No doubt the dead-man switch was set to destroy itself as soon as its message was sent. Which meant that if it was already sent, it wouldn't be there anymore. But somewhere there were tracks. Backups. Records of one kind or another. Nobody traveled the networks clean.

Not even Bean. He had made himself untraceable by constantly changing everything. But Volescu had stayed rooted in a lab here or a lab there, as long as he could. He might not have been as careful in his maneuvers through the nets. After all, Volescu might think he was brilliant, but he was no Bean.

AN OFFER

From: PeterWiggin%private@hegemon.gov

To: Vlad%lmpaled@gcu.ru.gov

Re: my brother's friends

I'd like to have a chance to talk with you. Face to face. For my brother's sake. On neutral territory.

Peter arrived in St. Petersburg ostensibly to be an observer and consultant at the Warsaw Pact trade talks that were part of Russia's ongoing effort to set up an economic union to rival the western European one. And he did attend several meetings and kept his suite humming with conversations. Of course, his agenda was quite different from the official one, and he made good headway with—as expected— representatives from some of the smaller or less prosperous countries. Latvia. Estonia. Slovakia. Bulgaria. Bosnia. Albania. Croatia. Georgia. Every piece in the puzzle counted.

Not every piece was a country. Sometimes it was an individual.

That's why Peter found himself walking in a park—not one of the magnificent parks in the heart of St. Petersburg, but a smallish park in Kohtla-Järve, a town in northeastern Estonia with delusions of city-hood. Peter wasn't sure why Vlad had chosen a town that involved crossing borders—nothing could have made their encounter more obvious. And being in Estonia meant there'd be two intelligence services watching them, Estonia's and Russia's. Russia hadn't forgotten history: They still watched over Estonia using their domestic spy service rather than the foreign one.