Orson Card - Shadow Puppets

From Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com FREE email! Sign up a friend!]

To: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com JESUS loves you! ChosenOnes.0rg]

Re: Thanks for your help

Dear Anonymous Benefactor,

I may have been in prison but I wasn't biding under a rock. I know who you are, and I know what you've done. So when you offer to help me continue the research that was interrupted by my life sentence, and imply that you are responsible far having my charges reduced and my sentence commuted, I must suspect an ulterior motive.

I think you plan to use my supposed rendezvous with these supposed people as a means of killing them. Sort of like Herod asking the Wise Men to tell him where the newborn king was, so be could go and worship him also.

From: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com [Don't go home ALONE! LonelyHearts]

To: Befterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com [Your ADS get seen! Free Email]

Re: You have misjudged me

Dear Doctor,

You have misjudged me. I have no interest in anyone's death. I want you to help them make babies that don't have any of the father's gifts or problems. Make a dozen for them.

But along the way, if you happen to get any nice little embryos that do have the father's gifts, don't discard them, please. Keep them nice and safe. For me. For us. There are people who would very much like to raise a liftle garden full of beans.

John Paul Wiggin had noticed some years ago that the whole childrearing thing wasn't really all it was cracked up to be. Supposedly somewhere there was such a thing as a normal child, but none of them had come anywhere near his house.

Not that he didn't love his kids. He did. More than they would ever know; more, he suspected, than he knew himself. After all, you never know how much you love somebody until the real test comes. Would you die for this person? Would you throw yourself on the grenade, step in front of the speeding car, keep a secret under torture, to save his life? Most people never know the answer to that question. And even those who do know are still not sure whether it was love or duty or self-respect or cultural conditioning or any number of other possible explanations.

John Paul Wiggin loved his kids. But either he didn't have enough of them, or he had too many. If he had more, then having two of them take off for some faraway colony from which they could never return in his lifetime, that might not have been so bad, because there'd still be several left at home for him to enjoy, to help, to admire as parents wanted to admire their children.

And if there had been one fewer If the government had not requisitioned a third child from them. If Andrew had never been born, had never been accepted into a program for which Peter was rejected, then perhaps Peter's pathological ambition might have stayed within normal bounds. Perhaps his envy and resentment, his need to prove himself worthy after all, would not have tainted his life, darkening even his brightest moments.

Of course, if Andrew hadn't been born, the world might now be honeycombed with Formic hives, and the human race nothing but a few ragged bands surviving in some hostile environment like Tierra del Fuego or Greenland or the Moon.

It wasn't the government requisition, either. Little known fact: Andrew had almost certainly been conceived before the requisition came. John Paul Wiggin wasn't all that good a Catholic, until he realized that the population control laws forbade him to be. Then, because he was a stubborn Pole or a rebellious American or simply because he was that peculiar mix of genes and memory called John Paul Wiggin, there was nothing more important to him than being a good Catholic, particularly when it came to disobeying the population laws.

It was the basis of his marriage with Theresa. She wasn't Catholic herself-which showed that John Paul wasn't that strict about following all the rules-but she came from a big-family tradition and she agreed with him before they got married that they would have more than two children, no matter what it cost them.

In the end, it cost them nothing. No loss of job. No loss of prestige. In fact, they ended up greatly honored as the parents of the savior of the human race.

Only they would never get to see Valentine or Andrew get married, would never see their children. Would probably not live long enough to know when they arrived at their colony world.

And now they were mere fixtures attached to the life of the child they liked the least.

Though truth to tell, John Paul didn't dislike Peter as much as his mother did. Peter didn't get under his skin the way he irritated Theresa. Perhaps that was because John Paul was a good counterbalance to Peter-John Paul could be useful to him. Where Peter kept a hundred things going at once, juggling all his projects and doing none of them perfectly, John Paul was a man who had to dot every I, cross every t. So without exactly telling anyone what his job was, John Paul kept close watch on everything Peter was doing and followed through on things so they actually got done. Where Peter assumed that underlings would understand his purpose and adapt. John Paul knew that they would misunderstand everything, and spelled it out for them, followed through to make sure things happened just right.

Of course, in order to do this, John Paul had to pretend that he was acting as Peter's eyes and ears. Fortunately, the people he straightened out had no reason to go to Peter and explain the dumb things they had been doing before John Paul showed up with his questions, his checklists, his cheerful chats that didn't quite come right out and admit to being tutorials.

But what could John Paul do when the project Peter was advancing was so deeply dangerous and, yes, stupid that the last thing John Paul wanted to do was help him with it?

John Paul's position in this little community of Hegemoniacs did not allow him to obstruct what Peter was doing. He was a facilitator, not a bureaucrat; he cut the red tape, he didn't spin it out like a spider web.

In the past, the most obstructive thing John Paul could do was not to do anything at all. Without him there, nudging, correcting, things slowed down, and often a project died without his help.

But with Achilles, there was no chance of that. The Beast, as Theresa and John Paul called him, was as methodical as Peter wasn't. He seemed to leave nothing to chance. So if John Paul simply left him alone, he would accomplish everything he wanted.

"Peter, you're not in a position to see what the Beast is doing," John Paul said to him.

"Father, I know what I'm doing."

"He's got time for everybody," said John Paul. "He's friends with every clerk, every janitor, every secretary, every bureaucrat. People you breeze past with a wave or with nothing at all, he sits and chats with them, makes them feel important."

"Yes, he's a charmer, all right."

"Peter-"

"It's not a popularity contest, Father."

"No, it's a loyalty contest. You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish, and nothing more. They are your power, these public servants you employ, and he's winning their loyalty away from you.

"Superficially, perhaps," said Peter.

"For most people, the superficial is all there is. They act on the feelings of the moment. They like him better than you."

"There's always somebody that people like better," said Peter with a vicious little smile.

John Paul restrained himself from making the obvious one-word retort, because it would devastate Peter The single crushing word would have been "yes."

"Peter," said John Paul, "when the Beast leaves here, who knows how many people he'll leave behind who like him well enough to slip him a bit of gossip now and then? Or a secret document?"

"Father, I appreciate your concern. And once again, I can only tell you that I have things under control."