Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 7 - Shadow Puppets Page 11

  In the end, it cost them nothing. No loss of job. No loss of prestige. In fact, they ended up greatly honoured as the parents of the saviour 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 check-lists, 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.”

  “You seem to think that anything you don’t know isn’t worth knowing,” said John Paul, not for the first time.

  “And you seem to think that anything I’m doing is not being done well enough,” said Peter for at least the hundredth time.

  That’s how these discussions always went. John Paul did not push it farther than that-he knew that if he became too annoying, if Peter felt too oppressed by having his parents around, they’d be moved out of any position of influence.

  That would be unbearable. It would mean losing the last of their children.

  “We really ought to have another child or two,” said Theresa one day. “I’m still young enough, and we always meant to have more than the three the government allotted us.”

  “Not likely,” said John Paul.

  “Why not? Aren’t you still a good Catholic, or did that last only as long as being a Catholic meant being a rebel?”

  John Paul didn’t like the implications of that, particularly because it might have some truth in it. “No, Theresa, darling. We can’t have more children because they’d never let us keep them.”

  “Who? The government doesn’t care how many children we have now. They’re all future taxpayers or baby makers or cannon fodder to them.”

  “We’re the parents of Ender Wiggin, of Demosthenes, of Locke. Our having another child would be international news. I feared it even before Andrew’s battle companions were all kidnapped, but after that there was no doubt.”

  “Do you seriously think people would assume that because our first three children were so-"

  “Darling.” said John Paul-knowing that she hated it when he called her darling because he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of the term, “they’d have the babies out of the cradle, that’s how fast they’d strike. They’d be targets from the moment of conception, just waiting for somebody to come along and turn them into puppets of one regime or another. And even if we were able to protect them, every moment of their lives would be deformed by the press of public curiosity. If we thought Peter was messed up by being in Andrew’s shadow, think what it would be like for them.”

  “It might be easier for them,” said Theresa. “They would never remember not being in the shadow of their brothers.”

  “That only makes it worse,” said John Paul. “They’ll have no idea of who they are, apart from being somebody’s sib.”

  “It was just a thought.”

  “I wish we could do it,” said John Paul. It was easy to be generous after she had given in.

  “I just.. . miss having children around.”

  “So do I. And if I thought they could be children..."

  “None of our kids was ever really a child,” said Theresa sadly. “Never really carefree.”

  John Paul laughed. “The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.”

  Theresa thought for a moment and then laughed. “You’re right. Everything is either heaven on earth or the end of the world.”

  That conversation had been back in Greensboro, after Peter went public with his real identity and before he was given the nearly empty title of Hegemon. They rarely referred back to it.

  But the idea was looking more attractive now. There were days when John Paul wanted to go home, sweep Theresa into his arms and say, “Darling”-and he wouldn’t be even the tiniest bit sarcastic-”I have our tickets to space. We’re joining a colony. We’re leaving this world and all its cares behind, and we’ll make new babies up in space where they can’t save the world or take it over, either”

  Then Theresa did this business with trying to get into Achilles’s room and John Paul honestly wondered if the stress she was under had affected her mental processes.

  Precisely because he was so concerned about what she did, he deliberately did not discuss it with her for a couple of days, waiting to see if she brought it up.

  She did not. But he didn’t really expect her to.

  When he judged that the first blush of embarrassment was over and she could discuss things without trying to protect herself, he broached the subject over dessert one night.

&
nbsp; “So you want to be a housekeeper,” he said.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to bring that up,” said Theresa with a grin.

  “And I wondered how long before you would,” said John Paul- with a grin as laced with irony as her own.

  “Now you’ll never know,” she said.

  “I think,” said John Paul, “that you were planning to kill him.”

  Theresa laughed. “Oh. definitely, I was under assignment from my controller”

  “I assumed as much.”

  “I was joking,” said Theresa at once.

  “I’m not. Was it something Graff said? Or just a spy novel?”

  “I don’t read spy novels.”

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t an assignment,” said Theresa. “But yes, he did put the thought into my mind. That the best thing for everybody would be for the Beast not to leave Brazil alive.”

  “Actually, I don’t think that’s so,” said John Paul.

  “Why not? Surely you don’t think he has any value to the world.”

  “He brought everybody out of hiding, didn’t he’?” said John Paul. “Everybody showed their true colours.”

  “Not everybody. Not yet.”

  “Things are out in the open. The world is divided into camps. The ambitions are exposed. The traitors are revealed.”

  “So the job is done,” said Theresa, “and there’s no more use for him.”

  “I never really thought of you as a murderer”

  “I’m not.”

  “But you had a plan, right?”

  “I was testing to see if any plan was possible-if I could get into his room. The answer was no.

  “Ah. So the objective remains the same. Only the method has been changed.”

  “I probably won’t do it,” said Theresa.

  “I wonder how many assassins have told themselves that-right up to the moment when they fired the gun or plunged in the knife or served the poisoned dates?”

  “You can stop teasing me now,” said Theresa. “I don’t care about politics or the repercussions. If killing the Beast cost Peter the Hegemony, I wouldn’t care. I’m just not going to sit back and watch the Beast devour my son.

  “But there’s a better way,” said John Paul.

  “Besides killing him?”

  “To get him away from where he can kill Peter. That’s our real goal, isn’t it? Not to save the world from the Beast, but to save Peter. If we kill Achilles-”

  “I don’t recall inviting you into my evil conspiracy.”

  “Then yes, the Beast is dead, but so is Peter’s credibility as Hegemon. He’s forever after as tainted as Macbeth.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “What we need is to taint the Beast, not Peter.”

  “Killing is more final.”

  “Killing makes a martyr, a legend, a victim. Killing gives you St. Thomas a Becket. The Canterbury pilgrims.”

  “So what’s your better plan?”

  “We get the Beast to try to kill us.”

  Theresa looked at him dumbfounded.

  “We don’t let him succeed,” said John Paul.

  “And I thought Peter was the one who loved brinksmanship. Good heavens. Johnny P, you’ve just explained where his madness comes from. How in the world can you arrange for someone to try to kill you in such a public way that it becomes discovered-and at the same time be absolutely sure that he won’t succeed.”

  “We don’t actually let him fire a bullet,” said John Paul, a little impatiently. “All we do is gather evidence that he’s preparing the attempt. Peter will have no choice but to send him away-and then we can make sure people know why. I may be resented a bit here, but people really like you. They won’t like the Beast after he plotted to harm their Teresa.

  “But nobody likes you,” said Theresa. “What if it’s you he goes for first?”

  “Whichever,” said John Paul.

  “And how will we know what he’s plotting?”

  “Because I put keyboard-reading programs into all the computers on the system and software to analyse his actions and give me reports on everything he does. There’s no way for him to make a plan without emailing somebody about something.”

  “I can think of a hundred ways, one of which is-he does it himself, without telling anybody.”

  “He’ll have to look up our schedule then, won’t he? Or something. Something that will be suspicious. Something that I can show to Peter and force him to get rid of the boy.”

  “So the way to shoot down the Beast is to paint big targets on our own foreheads.” said Theresa.

  “Isn’t that a marvellous plan?” said John Paul, laughing at the absurdity of it. “But I can’t think of a better one. And it’s nowhere near as bad as yours. Do you actually believe you could kill somebody?”

  “Mother bear protects the cub,” said Theresa.

  “Are you with me? Promise not to slip a fatal laxative into his soup?”

  “I’ll see what your plan is, when you actually come up with one that sounds like it might succeed.”

  “We’ll get the beast thrown out of here,” said John Paul. “One way or another” That was the plan-which, John Paul knew, was no plan at all, since Theresa hadn’t actually promised him she’d give up on her plot to become a killer-by-stealth.

  The trouble was that when he accessed the programs that were monitoring Achilles’s computer use, the report said, “No computer use.”

  This was absurd. John Paul knew the boy had used a computer because he had received a few messages himself-innocent inquiries, but they bore the screen name that Peter had given to the Beast.

  But he couldn’t ask anybody outright to help him figure out why his spy programs weren’t catching Achilles’s sign-ons and reading his keystrokes. The word would get around, and then John Paul wouldn’t seem quite such an innocent victim when Achilles’s plot-whatever it was-came to light.

  Even when he actually saw Achilles with his own eyes, logging in and typing away on a message, the report that night-which affirmed that the keystroke monitor was at work on that very machine- still showed no activity from Achilles.

  John Paul thought about this for a good long while, trying to imagine how Achilles could have circumvented his software without logging on at least once.

  Until it finally dawned on him to ask his software a different question.

  “List all log-ons from that computer today,” he typed into his desk.

  After a few moments, the report came up: “No log-ons.”

  No log-ons from any of the nearby computers. No log-ons from any of the faraway computers. No log-ons, apparently, in the entire Hegemony computer system.

  And since people were logging on all the time, including John Paul himself, this result was impossible.

  He found Peter in a meeting with Ferreira, the Brazilian computer expert who was in charge of system security. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but it’s even better to tell you this when both of you are together.”