Orson Card - Shadow Puppets

He could not plead jet lag. There was only an hour's time difference between Ribeirao Preto and Greensboro. It would be a great embarrassment if he did not get up. So he would get up. Very soon now.

Not that it would make any difference. He might, for the moment, still have the title of Hegemon, but there were people in many countries with tides like "king" and "duke" and "marquis," who nevertheless cooked or took pictures or fixed automobiles for a living. Perhaps he could go back to college under another name and train himself for a career like his father's, a quiet one working for a company somewhere.

Or he could go into the bathroom and fill the tub with water and lie down in it and breathe the water in. A few moments of panic and flailing around, and then the whole problem would go away. In fact, if he hit himself very hard in various places on his body, it might look as though he struggled with an assailant and was murdered. He might even be considered a martyr At least people might think that he was important enough to have an enemy who thought he was worth killing.

Any minute now, thought Peter, I will get up and shower so I don't look so bedraggled to the media.

I ought to prepare a statement, he thought. Something to the effect of, "Why I am not as pathetic and stupid as my recent actions prove me to be." Or perhaps the direct approach: "Why I am even more pathetic and stupid than my recent actions might indicate."

Given his recent track record, he would probably be saved from the bathtub, given CPR, and then someone would notice the bruises on his body and the lack of an assailant and the story would get out about his pathetic effort to make his suicide attempt look like a brutal murder, thus making his life even more worthless than it already was.

Another knock on the door Couldn't the maid read the do-not-disturb sign? It was written in four languages. Could she possibly be illiterate in all four of them? No doubt she was also illiterate in a fifth.

Twenty-five minutes until the press conference. Did I doze off? That would be nice. Just... doze... off. Sorry, I overslept. I've been so very busy. It's exhausting work to turn over-to a megalomaniac killer-everything I built up through my entire life.

Knock knock knock. It's a good thing I didn't kill myself all this knocking would have ruined my concentration and entirely spoiled my death scene. I should die like Seneca, with fine last speeches. Or Socrates, though that would be harder, since I don't have hemlock but I do have a bathtub. No razor blades, though. I don't grow enough of a beard to need any. Just another sign that I'm only a stupid kid who should never have been permitted to take a role in the grownup world.

The door to his room opened and jammed against the locking bar.

How outrageous! Who dare to use a passkey on his room?

And not just a passkey! Someone had the tool that opened the locking bar and now his door was wide open.

Assassins! Well, let them kill me here in the bed, facing them, not cowering in a corner begging them not to shoot.

"Poor baby," said Mother

"He's depressed," said Father "Don't make fun of him."

"I can't help but think of what Ender went through, fighting the Formics almost every day for weeks, completely exhausted, and yet he always got up and fought again."

Peter wanted to scream at her How dare she compare what he had just gone through with Ender's legendary "suffering." Ender never lost a battle, did she think of that? And he had just lost the war! He was entitled to sleep

"Ready? One, two, three."

Peter felt the whole mattress slide down the bed until he was awkwardly dumped onto the floor, banging his head against the frame of the bedsprings.

"Ow!" he cried.

Wouldn't that make a noble last word to be recorded by posterity?

How did the great Peter Wiggin, Hegemon of Earth (and, of course, brother of Ender Wiggin, sainted savior), meet his end?

He sustained a terrible head injury when his parents dragged him out of a hotel bed the morning after his ignominious escape from his own compound where not one person had threatened him in any way and he had no evidence of any impending threat against his person.

And what were his last words?

A one-word sentence, fit to be engraved on his monument. Ow.

"I don't think we can get him into the shower without actually touching his sacred person," said Mother

"I think you're right," said Father

"And if we touch him," said Mother, "there's a real possibility that we will be struck dead on the spot."

Other people had mothers who were compassionate, tender, comforting, understanding. His mother was a sarcastic hag who clearly hated him and always had.

"Ice bucket," said Father.

"No ice."

"But it holds water."

This was too stupid. The old throw-water-on-the-sleeping-teenager trick.

"Just go away, I'm getting up in a couple of minutes."

"No," said Mother. "You're getting up now. Your father is filling the ice bucket. You can hear the water running."

"OK, OK, leave the room so I can take my clothes off and get in the shower. Or is this just a subterfuge so you can see me naked again? You've never let me forget how you used to change my diapers, so apparently that was a very important stage in your life."

He was answered by having water dashed in his face. Not a whole bucketful, but enough to soak his head and shoulders.

"Sorry I didn't have time to fill it," said Father. "But when you started making crude sexual innuendos to my wife, I had to use whatever amount of water was at hand to shut you up before you said enough that I would have to beat your bratty little face in."

Peter got up from the mattress on the floor and pulled off the shorts he slept in. "Is this what you came in to see?"

"Absolutely," said Father. "You were wrong, Theresa: he does have balls."

"Not enough of them, apparently."

Peter stalked between them and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

Half an hour later, after keeping the press waiting only ten minutes past the appointed time, Peter walked alone onto the platform at one end of a packed conference room. All the reporters were holding up their little steadycams, the lenses peering out between the fingers of their clenched fists. It was the best turnout he had ever had at a press conference-though to be fair he had never actually held one in the United States. Maybe here they would all have been like this.

"I'm as surprised as you are to find myself here today," said Peter with a smile. "But I must say I'm grateful to the source that provided me with information that allowed me to make my exit, along with my family, from a place that had once been a safe haven, but which had become the most dangerous place in the world to me.

"I am also grateful to the government of the United States, which not only invited me to bring the office of Hegemon here, on a temporary basis, of course, but also provided me with a generous contingent of the Secret Service to secure the area. I don't believe they're necessary, at least not in such numbers, but then, until recently I didn't think I needed any protection inside the Hegemony compound in Ribeirao Preto."

His smile invited a laugh, and he got one. More of a release of tension than real amusement, but it would do. Father had stressed that-make them laugh now and then, so everybody feels relaxed. That will make them think you're relaxed and confident, too.

"My information suggests that the many loyal employees of the Office of Hegemon are in no danger whatsoever, and when a new permanent headquarters is established, I invite all those who want to, to resume their jobs. The disloyal employees, of course, already have other employment."

Another laugh-but a couple of audible groans, too. The press smelled blood, and it didn't help that Peter looked-and was-so very young. Humor, yes, but don't look like a wise-cracking kid. Especially don't look like a wise-cracking kid whose parents had to drag him out of bed this morning.