First Meetings Read online

  In fact, if it had become known that such a trust fund existed, it would have become a public scandal. But the interstellar fleet was slow to convert to the idea that destroying the Buggers had been a bad idea. And so they carefully shielded the trust fund from public view, dispersing it among many mutual funds and as stock in many different companies, with no single authority controlling any significant portion of the money. Effectively, they had made the money disappear, and only Andrew himself and his sister Valentine knew where the money was, or how much of it there was.

  One thing, though, was certain: By law, when Andrew reached the subjective age of twenty, the tax-exempt status of his holdings would be revoked. The income would start being reported to the appropriate authorities. Andrew would have to file a tax report either every year or every time he concluded an interstellar voyage of greater than one year in objective time, the taxes to be annualized and interest on the unpaid portion duly handed over.

  Andrew was not looking forward to it.

  “How does it work with your book royalties?” he asked Valentine.

  “The same as anyone,” she answered, “except that not many copies sell, so there isn’t much in the way of taxes to pay.”

  Only a few minutes later she had to eat her words, for when they sat down at the rental computers in the starport of Sorelledolce, Valentine discovered that her most recent book, a history of the failed Jung and Calvin colonies on the planet Helvetica, had achieved something of a cult status.

  “I think I’m rich,” she murmured to Andrew.

  “I have no idea whether I’m rich or not,” said Andrew. “I can’t get the computer to stop listing my holdings.”

  The names of companies kept scrolling up and back, the list going on and on.

  “I thought they’d just give you a check for whatever was in the bank when you turned twenty,” said Valentine.

  “I should be so lucky,” said Andrew. “I can’t sit here and wait for this.”

  “You have to,” said Valentine. “You can’t get through customs without proving that you’ve paid your taxes and that you have enough left over to support yourself without becoming a drain on public resources.”

  “What if I didn’t have enough money? They send me back?”

  “No, they assign you to a work crew and compel you to earn your way free at an extremely unfair rate of pay.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t. I’ve just read a lot of history and I know how governments work. If it isn’t that, it’ll be the equivalent. Or they’ll send you back.”

  “I can’t be the only person who ever landed and discovered that it would take him a week to find out what his financial situation was,” said Andrew. “I’m going to find somebody.”

  “I’ll be here, paying my taxes like a grown-up,” said Valentine. “Like an honest woman.”

  “You make me ashamed of myself,” called Andrew blithely as he strode away.

  Benedetto took one look at the cocky young man who sat down across the desk from him and sighed. He knew at once that this one would be trouble. A young man of privilege, arriving at a new planet, thinking he could get special favors for himself from the tax man. “What can I do for you?” asked Benedetto—in Italian, even though he was fluent in Starcommon and the law said that all travelers had to be addressed in that language unless another was mutually agreed upon.

  Unfazed by the Italian, the young man produced his identification.

  “Andrew Wiggin?” asked Benedetto, incredulous.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Do you expect me to believe that this identification is real?” He was speaking Starcommon now; the point had been made.

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “Andrew Wiggin? Do you think this is such a backwater that we are not educated enough to recognize the name of Ender the Xenocide?”

  “Is having the same name a criminal offense?” asked Andrew.

  “Having false identification is.”

  “If I were using false identification, would it be smart or stupid to use a name like Andrew Wiggin?” he asked.

  “Stupid,” Benedetto grudgingly admitted.

  “So let’s start from the assumption that I’m smart, but also tormented by having grown up with the name of Ender the Xenocide. Are you going to find me psychologically unfit because of the imbalance these traumas caused me?”

  “I’m not customs,” said Benedetto. “I’m taxes.”

  “I know. But you seemed preternaturally absorbed with the question of identity, so I thought you were either a spy from customs or a philosopher, and who am I to deny the curiosity of either?”

  Benedetto hated the smart-mouthed ones. “What do you want?”

  “I find my tax situation is complicated. This is the first time I’ve had to pay taxes—I just came into a trust fund—and I don’t even know what my holdings are. I’d like to have a delay in paying my taxes until I can sort it all out.”

  “Denied,” said Benedetto.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” said Benedetto.

  Andrew sat there for a moment.

  “Can I help you with something else?” asked Benedetto.

  “Is there any appeal?”

  “Yes,” said Benedetto. “But you have to pay your taxes before you can appeal.”

  “I intend to pay my taxes,” said Andrew. “It’s just going to take me time to do it, and I thought I’d do a better job of it on my own computer in my own apartment rather than on the public computers here in the starport.”

  “Afraid someone will look over your shoulder?” asked Benedetto. “See how much of an allowance Grandmother left you?”

  “It would be nice to have more privacy, yes,” said Andrew.

  “Permission to leave without payment is denied.”

  “All right, then, release my liquid funds to me so I can pay to stay here and work on my taxes.”

  “You had your whole flight to do that.”

  “My money had always been in a trust fund. I never knew how complicated the holdings were.”

  “You realize, of course, that if you keep telling me these things, you’ll break my heart and I’ll run from the room crying,” said Benedetto calmly.

  The young man sighed. “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

  “Pay your taxes like every other citizen.”

  “I have no way to get to my money until I pay my taxes,” said Andrew. “And I have no way to support myself while I figure out my taxes unless you release some funds to me.”

  “Makes you wish you had thought of this earlier, doesn’t it?” said Benedetto.

  Andrew looked around the office. “It says on that sign that you’ll help me fill out my tax form.”

  “Yes.”

  “Help.”

  “Show me the form.”

  Andrew looked at him oddly. “How can I show it to you?”

  “Bring it up on the computer here.” Benedetto turned his computer around on his desk, offering the keyboard side of it to Andrew.

  Andrew looked at the blanks in the form displayed above the computer, and typed in his name and his tax I.D. number, then his private I.D. code. Benedetto pointedly looked away while he typed in the code, even though his software was recording each keystroke the young man entered. Once he was gone, Benedetto would have full access to all his records and all his funds. The better to assist him with his taxes, of course.

  The display began scrolling.

  “What did you do?” asked Benedetto. The words appeared at the bottom of the display, as the top of the page slid back and out of the way, rolling into an ever tighter scroll. Because it wasn’t paging, Benedetto knew that this long list of information was appearing as it was being called up by a single question on the form. He turned the computer around to where he could see it. The list consisted of the names and exchange codes of corporations and mutual funds, along with numbers of shares.

  “You
see my problem,” said the young man.

  The list went on and on. Benedetto reached down and pressed a few keys in combination. The list stopped. “You have,” he said softly, “a large number of holdings.”

  “But I didn’t know it,” said Andrew. “I mean, I knew that the trustees had diversified me some time ago, but I had no idea the extent. I just drew an allowance whenever I was on planet, and because it was a tax-free government pension I never had to think anymore about it.”

  So maybe the kid’s wide-eyed innocence wasn’t an act. Benedetto disliked him a little less. In fact, Benedetto felt the first stirrings of true friendship. This lad was going to make Benedetto a very rich man without even knowing it. Benedetto might even retire from the tax service. Just his stock in the last company on the interrupted list, Enzichel Vinicenze, a conglomerate with extensive holdings on Sorelledolce, was worth enough for Benedetto to buy a country estate and keep servants for the rest of his life. And the list was only up to the Es.

  “Interesting,” said Benedetto.

  “How about this?” said the young man. “I only turned twenty in the last year of my voyage. Up to then, my earnings were still tax-exempt and I’m entitled to them without paying taxes. Free up that much of my funds, and then give me a few weeks to get some expert to help me analyze the rest of this and I’ll submit my tax forms then.”

  “Excellent idea,” said Benedetto. “Where are those liquid earnings held?”

  “Catalonian Exchange Bank,” said Andrew.

  “Account number?”

  “All you need is to free up any funds held in my name,” said Andrew. “You don’t need the account number.”

  Benedetto didn’t press the point. He wouldn’t need to dip into the boy’s petty cash. Not with the mother lode waiting for him to pillage it at will before he ever got into a tax attorney’s office. He typed in the necessary information and published the form. He also gave Andrew Wiggin a thirty-day pass, allowing him the freedom of Sorelledolce as long as he logged in daily with the tax service and turned in a full tax form and paid the estimated tax within that thirty-day period, and promised not to leave the planet until his tax form had been evaluated and confirmed.

  Standard operating procedure. The young man thanked him—that’s the part Benedetto always liked, when these rich idiots thanked him for lying to them and skimming invisible bribes from their accounts—and then left the office.

  As soon as he was gone, Benedetto cleared the display and called up his snitch program to report the young man’s I.D. code. He waited. The snitch program did not come up. He brought up his log of running programs, checked the hidden log, and found that the snitch program wasn’t on the list. Absurd. It was always running. Only now it wasn’t. And in fact it had disappeared from memory.

  Using his version of the banned Predator program, he searched for the electronic signature of the snitch program, and found a couple of its temp files. But none contained any useful information, and the snitch program itself was completely gone.

  Nor, when he tried to return to the form Andrew Wiggin had created, was he able to bring it back. It should have been there, with the young man’s list of holdings intact, so Benedetto could make a run at some of the stocks and funds manually—there were plenty of ways to ransack them, even when he couldn’t get the password from his snitch. But the form was blank. The company names had all disappeared.

  What happened? How could both these things go wrong at the same time?

  No matter. The list was so long it had to have been buffered. Predator would find it.

  Only now Predator wasn’t responding. It wasn’t in memory either. He had used it only a moment ago! This was impossible. This was…

  How could the boy have introduced a virus on his system just by entering tax form information? Could he have embedded it into one of the company names somehow? Benedetto was a user of illegal software, not a designer, but still, he had never heard of anything that could come in through uncrunched data, not through the security of the tax system.

  This Andrew Wiggin had to be some kind of spy. Sorelledolce was one of the last holdouts against complete federation with Starways Congress—he had to be a Congress spy sent to try to subvert the independence of Sorelledolce.

  Only that was absurd. A spy would have come in prepared to submit his tax forms, pay his taxes, and move right along. A spy would have done nothing to call attention to himself.

  There had to be some explanation. And Benedetto was going to get it. Whoever this Andrew Wiggin was, Benedetto was not going to be cheated out of inheriting his fair share of the boy’s wealth. He’d waited a long time for this, and just because this Wiggin boy had some fancy security software didn’t mean Benedetto wouldn’t find a way to get his hands on what was rightly his.

  Andrew was still a little steamed as he and Valentine made their way out of the starport. Sorelledolce was one of the newer colonies, only a hundred years old, but its status as an associated planet meant that a lot of shady and unregulatable businesses migrated here, bringing full employment, plenty of opportunities, and a boomtown ethos that made everyone’s step seem vigorous—and everyone’s eyes seem to keep glancing over their shoulder. Ships came here full of people and left full of cargo, so that the colony population was nearing four million and that of the capital, Donnabella, a full million.

  The architecture was an odd mix of log cabins and prefab plastic. You couldn’t tell a building’s age by that, though—both materials had coexisted from the start. The native flora was fern jungle and so the fauna—dominated by legless lizards—were of dinosaurian proportions, but the human settlements were safe enough and cultivation produced so much that half the land could be devoted to cash crops for export—legal ones like textiles and illegal ones for ingestion. Not to mention the trade in huge colorful serpent skins used as tapestries and ceiling coverings all over the worlds governed by Starways Congress. Many a hunting party went out into the jungle and came back a month later with fifty pelts, enough for the survivors to retire in luxury. Many a hunting party went out, however, and was never seen again. The only consolation, according to local wags, was that the biochemistry differed just enough that any snake that ate a human had diarrhea for a week. It wasn’t quite revenge, but it helped.

  New buildings were going up all the time, but they couldn’t keep up with demand, and Andrew and Valentine had to spend a whole day searching before they found a room they could share. But their new roommate, an Abyssinian hunter of enormous fortune, promised that he’d have his expedition and be gone on the hunt within a few days, and all he asked was that they watch over his things until he returned…or didn’t.

  “How will we know when you haven’t returned?” asked Valentine, ever the practical one.

  “The women weeping in the Libyan quarter,” he replied.

  Andrew’s first act was to sign onto the net with his own computer, so he could study his newly-revealed holdings at leisure. Valentine had to spend her first few days dealing with a huge volume of correspondence arising from her last book, in addition to the normal amount of mail she had from historians all over the settled worlds. Most of it she marked to answer later, but the urgent messages alone took three long days. Of course, the people writing to her had no idea they were corresponding with a young woman of about twenty-five years (subjective age). They thought they were corresponding with the noted historian Demosthenes. Not that anyone thought for a moment that the name was anything but a pseudonym; and some reporters, responding to her first rush of fame with this latest book, had attempted to identify the “real Demosthenes” by figuring out from her long spates of slow responses or no responses at all when she was voyaging, and then working from passenger lists of candidate flights. It took an enormous amount of calculation, but that’s what computers were for, wasn’t it? So several men of varying degrees of scholarliness were accused of being Demosthenes, and some were not trying all that hard to deny it.

  All this amused V
alentine no end. As long as the royalty checks came to the right place and nobody tried to slip in a faked-up book under her pseudonym, she couldn’t care less who claimed the credit personally. She had worked with pseudonyms—this pseudonym, actually—since childhood, and she was comfortable with that odd mix of fame and anonymity. Best of both worlds, she said to Andrew.

  She had fame, he had notoriety. Thus he used no pseudonym—everyone just assumed his name was a horrible faux pas on the part of his parents. No one named Wiggin should have the gall to name their child Andrew, not after what the Xenocide did, that’s what they seemed to believe. At twenty years of age, it was unthinkable that this young man could be the same Andrew Wiggin. They had no way of knowing that for the past three centuries, he and Valentine had skipped from world to world only long enough for her to find the next story she wanted to research, gather the materials, and then get on the next starship so she could write the book while they journeyed to the next planet. Because of relativistic effects, they had scarcely lost two years of life in the past three hundred of realtime. Valentine immersed herself deeply and brilliantly—who could doubt it, from what she wrote?—into each culture, but Andrew remained a tourist. Or less. He helped Valentine with her research and played with languages a little, but he made almost no friends and stayed aloof from the places. She wanted to know everything; he wanted to love no one.

  Or so he thought, when he thought of it at all. He was lonely, but then told himself that he was glad to be lonely, that Valentine was all the company he needed, while she, needing more, had all the people she met through her research, all the people she corresponded with.

  Right after the war, when he was still Ender, still a child, some of the other children who had served with him wrote letters to him. Since he was the first of them to travel at lightspeed, however, the correspondence soon faltered, for by the time he got a letter and answered it, he was five, ten years younger than they were. He who had been their leader was now a little kid. Exactly the kid they had known, had looked up to; but years had passed in their lives. Most of them had been caught up on the wars that tore Earth apart in the decade following the victory over the Buggers, had grown to maturity in combat or politics. By the time they got Ender’s letter replying to their own, they had come to think of those old days as ancient history, as another life. And here was this voice from the past, answering the child who had written to him, only that child was no longer there. Some of them wept over the letter, remembering their friend, grieving that he alone had not been allowed to return to Earth after the victory. But how could they answer him? At what point could their lives touch?