Orson Card - Shadow of the Giant

"Until he makes us stop," said Petra.

"What a relief," said Theresa Wiggin. "Now you won't have to name a child of your own after your brother, Peter."

Peter ignored her, which meant that her words had really stung.

"The baby is named for Saint Andrew," said Petra's mother. "Babies are named for saints, not soldiers."

"Of course, Mother," said Petra. "Ender and our baby were both named for Saint Andrew."

Anton and his team learned that yes, the baby definitely had Bean's syndrome. The Key was turned. And having two sets of genes to compare confirmed that Bean's genetic modification bred true. "But there's no reason to suppose that all the babies will have the modification," he reported to Bean, Petra, and Peter. "The likelihood is that the trait is dominant, however. So any child who has it should be on the fast track."

"Premature birth," said Bean.

"And we can guess that statistically, half the eight babies should have the trait. Mendel's law. Not ironclad, because randomness is involved. So there might be only three. Or five. Or more. Or this might be the only one. But the likeliest thing—"

"We know how probability works, Professor," said Ferreira.

"I wanted to emphasize the uncertainty."

"Believe me," said Ferreira, "uncertainty is my life. Right now we've found either two dozen or nearly a hundred groups of women who gave birth within two weeks of Petra, and who moved at the same time as others in their group, since the day Volescu was arrested."

"How can you not even know how many groups you have?" asked Bean.

"Selection criteria," said Petra.

"If we divide them into groups that left within six hours of each other, then we get the higher total. If we divide them into groups that left within two days of each other, the lower total. Plus we can shift the timeframes and the groups also shift."

"What about prematurity in the babies?"

"That supposes that the doctors are aware that the babies are premature," said Ferreira. "Low birth weight is what we went for. We eliminated any babies that were higher than the low end of normal. Most of them will be premature. But not all."

"And all of this," said Petra, "depends on all the babies being on the same clock."

"It's all we can go on," said Peter. "If it turns out that Anton's Key doesn't make them all trigger delivery after about the same gestation time... well, it's no more of a problem than the fact that we don't know when the other embryos were implanted."

"Some of the embryos might have been implanted much more recently," said Ferreira. "So we're going to keep adding women to the database as they give birth to low-birthweight children and turn out to have moved at about the time Volescu was arrested. You realize how many variables there are that we don't know? How many of the embryos have Anton's Key. When they were implanted. If they were all implanted. If Volescu even had a deadman switch."

"I thought you said he did."

"He did," said Ferreira. "We just don't know what the switch was about. Maybe it was for release of the virus. Maybe for the mothers to move. Maybe both. Maybe neither."

"A lot of things we don't know," said Bean. "Remarkable how little we got from Volescu's computer."

"He's a careful man," said Ferreira. "He knew perfectly well that he'd be caught someday, and his computer seized. We learned more than he could have imagined—but less than we had hoped."

"Just keep looking," said Petra. "Meanwhile, I have a baby-shaped suction cup to go attach to one of the tenderest parts of my body. Promise me that he won't develop teeth early."

"I don't know," said Bean. "I can't remember not having them."

"Thanks for the encouragement," said Petra.

Bean got up in the night, as usual, to get little Ender so Petra could nurse him. Tiny as he was, he had a pair of lungs on him. Nothing small about his voice.

And, as usual, once the baby started suckling. Bean watched until Petra rolled over to feed the baby on the other side. Then he slept.

Until he awoke again. Usually he didn't, so for all he knew it was like this every time. Because Petra was still nursing the baby, but she was also crying.

"Baby, what's wrong?" said Bean, touching her shoulder.

"Nothing," she said. She wasn't crying anymore.

"Don't try to lie to me," said Bean. "You were crying."

"I'm so happy," she said.

"You were thinking about how old little Ender will be when he dies."

"That's silly," she said. "We're going off in a starship until they find a cure. He's going to live to be a hundred."

"Petra " said Bean.

"What. I'm not lying."

"You're crying because in your mind's eye you can already see the death of your baby."

She sat up and lifted the now-sleeping baby to her shoulder. "Bean, you really are bad at guessing things like this. I was crying because I thought of you as a little baby, and how you didn't have a father to go and get you when you cried in the night, and you didn't have a mother to hold you and feed you from her own body, and you had no experience of love."

"But when I finally found out what it was, I got more of it than any man could hope for."

"Damn right," said Petra. "And don't you forget it."

She got up and took the baby back to the bassinet.

And tears came to Bean's eyes. Not pity for himself as a baby. But remembering Sister Carlotta, who had become his mother and stayed with him long before he learned what love was and was able to give any back to her. And some of his tears were also for Poke, the friend who took him in when he was in the last stages of death by malnutrition in Rotterdam.

Petra, don't you know how short life is, even when you don't have some disease like Anton's Key? So many people prematurely in their graves, and some of them I put there. Don't cry for me. Cry for my brothers who were disposed of by Volescu as he destroyed evidence of his crimes. Cry for all the children that no one ever loved.

Bean thought he was being subtle, turning his head so Petra couldn't see his tears when she came back to bed. Whether she saw or not, she snuggled close to him and held him.

How could he tell this woman who had always been so good to him and loved him more than he knew how to return—how could he tell her that he had lied to her? He didn't believe that there would ever be a cure for Anton's Key.

When he got on that starship with the babies that had his same disease, he expected to take off and head outward into the stars. He would live long enough to teach the children how to run the starship. They would explore. They would send reports back by ansible. They would map habitable planets farther away than any other humans would want to travel. In fifteen or twenty years of subjective time they would live a thousand years or more in real time, and the data they collected would be a treasure trove. They would be the pioneers of a hundred colonies or more.

And then they would die, having no memory of setting foot on a planet, and having no children to carry on their disease for another generation.

And it would all be bearable, for them and for Bean, because they would know that back on Earth, their mother and their healthy siblings were living normal lives, and marrying and having children of their own, so that by the time their thousand-year voyage was over, every living human being would be related to them one way or another.

That's how we'll be part of everything.

So no matter what I promised, Petra, you're not coming with me, and neither are our healthy children. And someday you'll understand and forgive me for breaking my word to you.

PENSION

From: PeterWiggin%personal@hegemon.gov

To: Champi%T'it'u@QuechuaNation.Freenet.ne.com