Orson Scott Card - Ender 08 - Shadow of the Giant Read online

  "Easy to say."

  "Because my plan was for the Turkish troops to take Beijing while most of the Chinese forces were tied up in India, at which point the Chinese troops would have been called back from India. Your heroic action saved many lives and made our victory quicker. By about two weeks and an estimated hundred thousand casualties. So I'm grateful. But you've never led large armies into combat."

  Virlomi waved it away, as if such a gesture could make the fact of it disappear.

  "Virlomi," said Alai. "I love you, and I'm not trying to hurt you, but you've been fighting all this time against very bad commanders. You've never come up against someone like me. Or Han Tzu. Or Petra. And definitely no one like Bean."

  "The stars of Battle School!" said Virlomi. "Ancient test scores and membership in a club whose president got outmanoeuvred and sent into exile. What have you done lately, Caliph Alai?"

  "I married a woman with a bold plan," said Alai.

  "But what did I marry?" asked Virlomi.

  "A man who wants the world to be united in peace. I thought the woman who built the Great Wall of India would want the same thing. I thought our marriage was part of that. I never knew you were so bloodthirsty."

  "Not bloodthirsty, realistic. I see our true enemy and I'm going to fight him."

  "Our rival is Peter Wiggin," said Alai. "He has a plan for uniting the world, but his depends on the Caliphate collapsing into chaos and Islam ceasing to be a force in the world. That's what the Martel essay was designed to do—provoke us into doing something stupid in Armenia. Or Nubia."

  "Well, at least you see through that."

  "I see through all of it," said Alai. "And you don't see the most obvious thing of all. The longer we wait, the closer we come to the day when Bean will die. It's a cruel and terrible fact, but when he's gone, then Peter Wiggin loses his greatest tool."

  Virlomi looked at him with withering scorn. "Back to the Battle School test scores."

  "All the kids in Battle School were tested," said Alai. "Including you."

  "Yes, and what did that get any of them? They sat here in Hyderabad like passive slaves while Achilles bullied them. I escaped. Me. Somehow I was different. But did that show up on any of their tests in Battle School? There are things they didn't test for."

  Alai did not tell her the obvious: She was different only because Petra asked her for help, and not someone else. She would not have escaped without Petra's request.

  "Ender's Jeesh didn't come from the tests," said Alai. "We were chosen because of what we did."

  "Because of what you did that Graff thought was important. There were qualities that he didn't know were important, so he didn't watch for them."

  Alai laughed. "What, you're jealous because you weren't in Ender's Jeesh?"

  "I'm disgusted that you still believe that Bean is irresistible because he's so 'smart.' "

  "You haven't seen him in action," said Alai. "He's scary."

  "No, you're just scared."

  "Virlomi," said Alai, "don't do this."

  "Don't do what?"

  "Don't force my hand."

  "I'm not forcing anything. We're equals, right? You'll tell your armies what to do, and I'll tell mine."

  "If you send your troops on a suicide attack against China, then China will be at war with me, too. That's what our marriage means. So you're committing me to war whether I like it or not."

  "I can win without you."

  "Don't believe your own propaganda, my beloved," said Alai. "You aren't a god. You aren't infallible. And right now, you're so irrational that it scares me."

  "Not irrational," said Virlomi. "Confident. And determined."

  "You studied where I did. You already know all the reasons why an attack against China is insane."

  "That's why we'll achieve surprise. That's why we'll win. Besides," said Virlomi, "our battle plans will be drawn up by the great Caliph Alai. And he was a member of Ender's Jeesh!"

  "What happened to the idea of our being equals?" said Alai.

  "We are equals."

  "I never forced you to do anything."

  "And I'm not forcing you, either."

  "Saying that over and over won't make it true."

  "I'm doing what I choose, and you're doing what you choose. The only thing I want from you is—I want your baby inside me before I lead my troops to war."

  "What do you think this is, the middle ages? You don't lead your troops to war."

  "I do," said Virlomi.

  "You do if you're a squad commander. There's no point when you have an army of a million men. They can't see you so it doesn't help."

  "You reminded me a minute ago that you aren't Alexander of Macedon. Well, Alai, I am Jeanne d'Arc."

  "When I said I'm not Alexander," said Alai, "I wasn't referring to his military prowess. I was referring to his marriage to a Persian princess."

  She looked irritated. "I studied his campaigns."

  "He returned to Babylon and married a daughter of the old Persian Emperor. He made his officers marry Persians, too. He was trying to unite the Greeks with the Persians and form them into one nation, by making the Persians a little more Greek, and the Greeks a little more Persian."

  "Your point?"

  "The Greeks said, We conquered the world by being Greek. The Persians lost their empire by being Persian."

  "So you aren't trying to make your Muslims more Hindu or my Hindus more Muslim. Very good."

  "He tried to combine soldiers of Persia and soldiers of Greece into one army. It didn't work. It fell apart."

  "We're not making those mistakes."

  "Exactly," said Alai. "I'm not going to make mistakes that destroy my Caliphate."

  Virlomi laughed. "All right, then. If you think invading China is such a mistake, what are you going to do? Divorce me? Void our treaty? What then? You'll have to retreat from India and you'll look like even more of a zhopa. Or you'll try to stay and then I'll go to war against you. It all comes crashing down, Alai. So you're not going to get rid of me. You're going to stay my husband and you're going to love me and we'll have babies together and we'll conquer the world and govern it together and do you know why?"

  "Why?" he said sadly.

  "Because that's how I want it. That's what I've learned over the past few years. Whatever I think of, if I decide I want it, if I do what I know I need to do, then it happens. I'm the lucky girl whose dreams come true."

  She came to him, wrapped her arms around him, kissed him. He kissed her back, because it would be unwise of him to show her how sad and frightened he was, and how little he desired her now.

  "I love you," she said. "You're my best dream."

  CHAPTER 20 — PLANS

  From: lmperialSelf%[email protected]

  To: Weaver%[email protected], Caliph%[email protected]

  Re: Don't do this

  Alai, Virlomi, what are you thinking? Troop movements can't be hidden. Do you really want this bloodbath? Are you bent on proving that Graff is right and none of us belong on Earth?

  Hot Soup

  From: Weaver%[email protected]

  To: lmperialSelf%[email protected]

  Re: Silly boy

  Did you think that Chinese offences in India would be forgotten? If you don't want bloodshed, then swear allegiance to Mother India and Caliph Alai. Disband your armies and offer no resistance. We will be far more merciful to the Chinese than the Chinese were to India.

  From: Caliph%[email protected]

  To: lmperialSelf%[email protected]

  Re: Look again

  Take no precipitate action, my friend. Things will not go as they appear to be going.

  Mazer Rackham sat across from Peter Wiggin in his office in Rotterdam.

  "We're very concerned," said Rackham.

  "So am I."

  "What have you set in motion here, Peter?"

  "Mazer," said Peter, "all I've done is keep pressing, using what smal
l tools I have. They decide how to respond to that pressure. I was prepared for an invasion of Armenia or Nubia. I was prepared to take advantage of a mass expulsion of Muslims from some or all European nations."

  "And war between India and China? Are you prepared for that?"

  "These are your geniuses, Mazer. Yours and Graff's. You trained them. You explain to me why Alai and Virlomi are doing something so stupid and suicidal as to throw badly armed Indian troops against Han Tzu's battle-hardened, fully equipped, revenge-hungry army."

  "So that's not something you did."

  "I'm not like you and Graff," said Peter, irritated. "I don't think I'm some master puppeteer. I've got this amount of power and influence in the world, and it doesn't amount to much. I have a billion or so citizens who have not yet become a genuine nation, so I have to keep dancing just to keep the FPE viable. I have a military force which is well trained and well equipped, has excellent morale, and is so small it wouldn't even be noticed on a battlefield in China or India. I have my personal reputation as Locke and my not-so-empty-any more office as Hegemon. And I have Bean, both his actual abilities and his extravagant reputation. That's my arsenal. Do you see anything in that list that would allow me to even think of starting a war between two major world powers over whom I have no influence?"

  "It just played into your hands so nicely, we couldn't help but think you had something to do with it."

  "No, you did," said Peter. "You made these kids crazy in Battle School. Now they're all mad kings, using the lives of their subjects as playing pieces in a tawdry game of one-upmanship."

  Rackham sat back, looking a little sick. "We didn't want this either. And I don't think they're crazy. Somebody must see some advantage in starting this war, and yet I can't think who. You're the only one who stands to gain, so we thought..."

  "Believe it or not," said Peter, "I would not start a war like this, even if I thought I could profit from picking up the pieces. The only people who start wars that are bound to depend on human waves getting cut down by machine guns are fanatics or idiots. I think we can safely rule out idiocy. So ... that leaves Virlomi."

  "That's what we're afraid of. That she's actually come to believe her image. God-blessed and irresistible." Rackham raised an eyebrow. "But you knew that. You met with her."

  "She proposed marriage to me," said Peter. "I turned her down."

  "Before she went to Alai."

  "I have a feeling that she married Alai on the rebound."

  Rackham laughed. "She offered you India."

  "She offered me an entanglement. I turned it into an opportunity."

  "You knew when you turned her down that she'd be angry and do something stupid."

  Peter shrugged. "I knew she'd do something spiteful. Something to show her power. I had no idea she'd try Alai, and I certainly had no idea he'd actually fall for it. Didn't he know she was crazy? I mean, not clinically, but drunk on power."

  "You tell me why he did it," said Rackham.

  "He was one of Ender's Jeesh," said Peter. "You and Graff must have so much paper on Alai that you know when he scratches his butt."

  Rackham only waited.

  "Look, I don't know why he did it, except maybe he thought he could control her," said Peter. "When he came home from Eros, he was a naive and righteous Muslim boy who's been sheltered ever since. Maybe he just wasn't ready to deal with a real live woman. The question now is, how will this play out?"

  "How do you think it will play out?"

  "Why should I tell you what I think?" said Peter. "What possible advantage will I get from you and Graff knowing what I'm expecting and what I'm preparing to do about it?"

  "How will it hurt?"

  "It'll hurt because if you decide your goals are different from mine, you'll meddle. Some of your meddling I've appreciated, but right now I don't want either the I.F. or ColMin doing one damn thing. I'm juggling too many balls to want some volunteer juggler to come in and try to help."

  Rackham laughed. "Peter, Graff was so right about you."

  "What?"

  "When he rejected you for Battle School."

  "Because I was too aggressive," said Peter wryly. "And look what he actually accepted."

  "Peter," said Rackham. "Think about what you just said."

  Peter thought about it. "You mean about juggling."

  "I mean about why you were rejected for Battle School."

  Peter immediately felt stupid. His parents had been told that he was rejected because he was too aggressive—dangerously so. And he had wormed that information out of them at a very young age. Ever since then, it had been a burden he carried around inside—the judgement that he was dangerous. Sometimes it had made him bold; more often, it had made him not trust his own judgement, his own moral framework. Am I doing this because it's right? Am I doing this because it will really be to my benefit? Or only because I'm aggressive and can't stand to sit back and wait? He had forced himself to be more patient, more subtle than his first impulse. Time after time he had held back. It was because of this that he had used Valentine and now Petra to write the more dangerous, demagogic essays—he didn't want any kind of textual analysis to point to him as the author. It was why he had held back from any kind of serious arm-twisting with nations that kept playing with him about joining the FPE—he couldn't afford to have anyone perceive him as coercive.

  And all this time, that assessment of him was a lie.

  "I'm not too aggressive."

  "It's impossible to be too aggressive for Battle School," said Rackham. "Reckless—now, that would be dangerous. But nobody has ever called you reckless, have they? And your parents would have known that was a lie, because they could have seen what a calculating little bastard you were, even at the age of seven."

  "Why thanks."

  "No, Graff looked at your tests and watched what the monitor showed us, and then he talked to me and showed me, and we realised: You weren't what we wanted as commander of the army, because people don't love you. Sorry, but it's true. You're not warm. You don't inspire devotion. You would have been a good commander under someone like Ender. But you could never have held the whole thing together the way he did."

  "I'm doing fine now, thanks."

  "You're not commanding soldiers. Peter, do Bean or Suri love you? Would they die for you? Or do they serve you because they believe in your cause?"

  "They think the world united under me as Hegemon would be better than the world united under anyone else, or not united at all."

  "A simple calculation."

  "A calculation based on trust that I've damn well earned."

  "But not personal devotion," said Rackham. "Even Valentine—she was never devoted to you, and she knew you better than anyone."

  "She pretty much hated me."

  "Too strong, Peter. Too strong a word. She didn't trust you. She feared you. She saw your mind like clockwork. Very smart. She always figured you were six steps ahead of her."

  Peter shrugged.

  "But you weren't, were you?"

  "Ruling the world isn't a chess game," said Peter. "Or if it is, it's a game with a thousand powerful pieces and eight billion pawns, and the pieces keep changing their capabilities, and the game board never stays the same. So just how far ahead can you possibly see? All I could do was put myself into a position with the most possible influence, and then exploit whatever opportunities came."

  Rackham nodded. "But one thing was certain. Your off-the-charts aggressiveness, your passion to control events, we knew that you would place yourself in the centre of everything."

  It was Peter's turn to laugh. "So you left me home from Battle School so I would be what I am now."

  "As I said, you weren't suited for military life. You don't take orders very well. People aren't devoted to you, and you aren't devoted to anyone else."

  "I might be, if I found somebody I respected enough."

  "The only person you ever respected that much is on a colony ship right now and you'll n
ever see him again."

  "I could never have followed Ender."

  "No, you never could. But he's the only person you respected enough. The trouble was, he was your younger brother. You couldn't have lived with the shame."

  "Well, all this analysis is nice, but how does it help us now?"

  "We don't have a plan either, Peter," said Rackham. "We're also just moving useful pieces into place. Taking others out of play. We have some assets, just as you do. We have our arsenal."

  "You have the whole I.F. You could put a stop to all of this."

  "No," said Rackham. "Polemarch Chamrajnagar is adamant about it, and he's right. We could force the world's armies to come to a halt. They would all obey us or pay a terrible price. But who would be ruling the world then?"

  "The fleet."

  "And who is the fleet? It's volunteers from Earth. And from that moment on, who would be our volunteers? People who love the idea of going out into space? Or people who want to control the government of Earth? It would turn us into an Earth-centred institution. It would destroy the colonisation project. And the Fleet would be hated, because it would soon be dominated by people who loved power."

  "Makes you sound like a bunch of nervous virgins."

  "We are," said Rackham. "And that's a strange line, coming from a nervous virgin like you."

  Peter didn't bother responding to that. "So you and Graff won't do anything that would compromise the purity of the I.F."

  "Unless somebody brings out the nukes again. We won't let that happen. Two nuclear wars were enough."

  "We never had a nuclear war."

  "World War II was a nuclear war," said Rackham. "Even if only two bombs were dropped. And the bomb that destroyed Mecca was the end of a civil war within Islam being fought out through surrogates and terrorism. Ever since then, nobody has even considered using nukes. But wars that are ended by nukes are nuclear wars."

  "Fine. Definitions."

  "Hyrum and I are doing everything we can," said Rackham. "So is the Polemarch. And believe it or not, we're trying to help you. We want you to succeed."