Orson Card - Shadow Puppets

"Laid off, anyway," said Father with a thin smile. "Your budget shrinks month by month."

"I thought we'd solve that by printing our own money," said Peter.

"Good idea," said Father. "A sort of international money that could be equally worthless in every country, so that it becomes the benchmark against which all other currencies are weighed. The dollar is worth a hundred billion 'hedges'-that's a good name for it, don't you think? The 'hedge'?-and the yen is worth twenty trillion, and so on."

"That's assuming that we could keep the value just above zero, said Peter. "The computers would all crash if it ever became truly worthless."

"But here's the danger," said Father. "What if it accidentally became worth something? It might cause a depression as other currencies actually fell against the hedge."

Peter laughed.

"We're both busy," said Father. "What did you want to see me about?"

Peter showed him the vid.

Father shook his head through most of it. "Theresa, Theresa," he murmured at the end.

"What is she trying to do?" asked Peter.

"Well, obviously, she's figured out a way to kill Achilles and it requires getting into his room. Now she'll have to think of another way."

Peter was astounded. "Kill Achilles? You can't be serious."

"Well, I can't think of any other reason for her to be doing this. You don't think she actually cares if his room is clean, do you? More likely she'd carry a basketful of roaches and disease-carrying lice into the room."

"She hates him'? She never said anything about that."

"To you," said Father

"So she's told you she wants to kill him?"

"Of course not. If she had, I wouldn't have mentioned it to you. I don't betray her confidences. But since she hasn't seen fit to tell me what's going on, I'm perfectly free to give you my best guess, and my best guess is that Theresa has decided that Achilles poses a danger to you-not to mention the whole human race-and so she's decided to kill him. It really makes sense, once you know how your mother thinks."

"Mother doesn't even kill spiders."

"Oh, she kills them just fine when you and I aren't there. You don't think she stands in the middle of the room and goes eek-eekeek until we come home, do you?"

"You're telling me that my mother is capable of murder?"

"Preemptive assassination," said Father. "And no, I don't think she's capable of it. But I think she thinks she's capable of it." He thought for a moment. "And she might be right. The female of the species is more deadly than the male, as they say."

"That makes no sense," said Peter.

"Well, then, I guess you wasted your time and mine bringing me down here. I'm probably wrong anyway. There's probably a much more rational explanation. Like... she really cares how well the maids do their work. Or... she's hoping to have a love affair with a serial killer who wants to rule the world."

"Thanks, Father," said Peter. "You've been very helpful. Now I know that I was raised by an insane woman and I never knew it."

"Peter, my boy, you don't know either of us."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You study everybody else, but your mother and I are like air to you: you just breathe us without noticing we're there. But that's all right, that's how parents are supposed to be in their children's lives. Unconditional love, right? Don't you suppose that's the difference between Achilles and you? That you had parents who loved you, and he didn't?"

"You loved Ender and Valentine," said Peter. It slipped out before he realized what he was saying.

"And not you?" said Father. "Oh. My mistake. I guess there is no difference between your upbringing and Achilles's. Too bad, really. Have a nice day, son!"

Peter tried to call him back, but Father pretended not to have heard him and went on his way, whistling the Marseillaise, of all things.

All right, so his suspicions of Mother were absurd, though Father had a twisted way of saying so. What a clever family he had, everybody always making a puzzle or a drama out of everything. Or a comedy. That's what he'd just played out with his father, wasn't it? A farce. An absurdity.

If Achilles had a collaborator here, it was probably not Peter's parents. Who else, then? Should he make something of the way Achilles and Suriyawong consulted? But he'd watched the vids of their occasional lunches and they said nothing beyond ordinary chat about the things they were working on. If there was a code it was a very subtle one. It's not even like they were friends-the conversation was always rather stiff and formal, and if anything bothered Peter about them, it was the way Suriyawong always seemed to phrase things in a subservient way.

He certainly never acted subservient to Bean or to Peter

That was something to think about, too. What had really passed between Suri and Achilles during the rescue and the return to Brazil?

What silliness, Peter told himself. If Achilles has a confederate, they doubtless communicate through dead drops and coded messages in emails or something like that. Spy stuff.

Not dumb attempts to break into Achilles's room-Achilles surely would not stake his life on confederates as dumb as that. And Suriyawong-how could Achilles possibly hope to corrupt him? It's not as if Achilles had influence in the Chinese empire now, so he could use Suri's family as hostages.

No, Peter would have to keep looking, keep the electronic surveillance going, until he found out what Achilles was doing to subvert Peter's work-or take it over.

What was not possible was that Achilles had simply given up on his ambitions and was now trying to make a place for himself in the bright future of a world united under the rule of Peter Wiggin.

But wouldn't it be nice if he had.

Maybe it was time to give up on learning anything from Achilles, and start setting him up for destruction.

THE HUMAN RACE

From: unready%cincinnotus@anon.set

To: Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica org

Re: Ill help you

So, Mr. Wonderboy Hegemon, now that you're no longer Demosthenes of "freeamerica.org", is there any good reason why my telling you what I see from the sky wouldn't be treason?

From: Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica.org

To: unready%cincinnatus@anon.set

Re: Because ...

Because only the Hegemony is actually doing anything about China, or actively trying to get Russia and the Warsaw Pact out of bed with Beijing.

From: unready%cincinnatus@anon.set

To: Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica org

Re: Bullshit

We saw your little army pull somebody out of a prisoner convoy on a highway in China. If that was who we think it was no way are you ever seeing anything from me again. My info doesn't go to psycho megalomaniacs. Except you, of course.

From Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica.org

To: unready%cincinnatus@anon.set

Re: Good call

Good call. Not safe. Here's what. If there's something I should know because you can't act and I can, deaddrop it to my former cinc at a weblink that will come to you from IComeAnon. He'll know what to do with it. He isn't working for me any more for the same reason you're not helping. But he's still on our side-and, fyi,[?] I'm still on our side, too.

Professor Anton had no laboratory and no library. There was no professional journal in his house, nothing to show he had ever been a scientist. Bean was not surprised. Back when the IDL was hunting down anyone doing research into altering the human genome, Anton was considered the most dangerous of men. He had been served with an order of inhibition, which meant that for many years he bore within his brain a device that, when he tried to concentrate on his area of study, he would have a panic attack. He had the strength, once, to hint to Sister Carlotta more than he should have about Bean's condition. But otherwise, he had been shut down in the prime of his career.