Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 5 - Ender's Shadow Page 4

  CHAPTER 4 — MEMORIES

  "I was mistaken about the first one. He tests well, but his character is not well suited to Battle School."

  "I don't see that on the tests you've shown me."

  "He's very sharp. He gives the right answers, but they aren't true."

  "And what test did you use to determine this?"

  "He committed murder."

  "Well, that is a drawback. And the other one? What am I supposed to do with so young a child? A fish this small I would generally throw back into the stream."

  "Teach him. Feed him. He'll grow."

  "He doesn't even have a name."

  "Yes he does."

  "Bean? That isn't a name, it's a joke."

  "It won't be when he's done with it."

  "Keep him until he's five. Make of him what you can and show me your results then."

  "I have other children to find."

  "No, Sister Carlotta, you don't. In all your years of searching, this one is the best you've found. And there isn't time to find another. Bring this one up to snuff, and all your work will be worth it, as far as the I.F. is concerned."

  "You frighten me, when you say there isn't time."

  "I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia."

  "But it keeps not ending."

  "So far, so good."

  *** At first all Bean cared about was the food. There was enough of it. He ate everything they put before him. He ate until he was full — that most miraculous of words, which till now had had no meaning for him. He ate until he was stuffed. He ate until he was sick. He ate so often that he had bowel movements every day, sometimes twice a day. He laughed about it to Sister Carlotta. "All I do is eat and poop!" he said. "Like any beast of the forest," said the nun. "It's time for you to begin to earn that food." She was already teaching him, of course, daily lessons in reading and arithmetic, bringing him "up to level," though what level she had in mind, she never specified. She also gave him time to draw, and there were sessions where she had him sit there and try to remember every detail about his earliest memories. The clean place in particular fascinated her. But there were limits to memory. He was very small then, and had very little language. Everything was a mystery. He did remember climbing over the railing around his bed and falling to the floor. He didn't walk well at the time. Crawling was easier, but he liked walking because that's what the big people did. He clung to objects and leaned on walls and made good progress on two feet, only crawling when he had to cross an open space. "You must have been eight or nine months old," Sister Carlotta said. "Most people don't remember that far back." "I remember that everybody was upset. That's why I climbed out of bed. All the children were in trouble." "All the children?" "The little ones like me. And the bigger ones. Some of the grown-ups came in and looked at us and cried." "Why?" "Bad things, that's all. I knew it was a bad thing coming and I knew it would happen to all of us who were in the beds. So I climbed out. I wasn't the first. I don't know what happened to the others. I heard the grown-ups yelling and getting all upset when they found the empty beds. I hid from them. They didn't find me. Maybe they found the others, maybe they didn't. All I know is when I came out all the beds were empty and the room was very dark except a lighted sign that said *exit*." "You could read then?" She sounded sceptical. "When I could read, I remembered that those were the letters on the sign," said Bean. "They were the only letters I saw back then. Of course I remembered them." "So you were alone and the beds were empty and the room was dark." "They came back. I heard them talking. I didn't understand most of the words. I hid again. And this time when I came out, even the beds were gone. Instead, there were desks and cabinets. An office. And no, I didn't know what an office was then, either, but now I do know what an office is and I remember that's what the rooms had all become. Offices. People came in during the day and worked there, only a few at first but my hiding place turned out not to be so good, when people were working there. And I was hungry." "Where did you hide?" "Come on, you know. Don't you?" "If I knew, I wouldn't ask." "You saw the way I acted when you showed me the toilet." "You hid inside the toilet?" "The tank on the back. It was hard to get the lid up. And it wasn't comfortable in there. I didn't know what it was for. But people started using it and the water rose and fell and the pieces moved and it scared me. And like I said, I was hungry. Plenty to drink, except that I peed in it myself. My diaper was so waterlogged it fell off my butt. I was naked." "Bean, do you understand what you're telling me? That you were doing all this before you were a year old?" "You're the one who said how old I was," said Bean. "I didn't know about ages then. You told me to remember. The more I tell you, the more comes back to me. But if you don't believe me ..." "I just ... I do believe you. But who were the other children? What was the place where you lived, that clean place? Who were those grown-ups? Why did they take away the other children? Something illegal was going on, that's certain." "Whatever," said Bean. "I was just glad to get out of the toilet." "But you were naked, you said. And you left the place?" "No, I got found. I came out of the toilet and a grown-up found me." "What happened?" "He took me home. That's how I got clothing. I called them clothings then." "You were talking." "Some." "And this grown-up took you home and bought you clothing." "I think he was a janitor. I know more about jobs now and I think that's what he was. It was night when he worked, and he didn't wear a uniform like a guard." "What happened?" "That's when I first found out about legal and illegal. It wasn't legal for him to have a child. I heard him yelling at this woman about me and most of it I didn't understand, but at the end I knew he had lost and she had won, and he started talking to me about how I had to go away, and so I went." "He just turned you loose in the streets?" "No, I left. I think now he was going to have to give me to somebody else, and it sounded scary, so I left before he could do it. But I wasn't naked or hungry any more. He was nice. After I left I bet he didn't have any more trouble." "And that's when you started living on the streets." "Sort of. A couple of places I found, they fed me. But every time, other kids, big ones, would see that I was getting fed and they'd come shouting and begging and the people would stop feeding me or the bigger kids would shove me out of the way or take the food right out of my hands. I was scared. One time a big kid got so mad at me for eating that he put a stick down my throat and made me throw up what I just ate, right on the street. He even tried to eat it but he couldn't, it made him try to throw up, too. That was the scariest time. I hided all the time after that. Hid. All the time." "And starved." "And watched," said Bean. "I ate some. Now and then. I didn't die." "No, you didn't." "I saw plenty who did. Lots of dead children. Big ones and little ones. I kept wondering how many of them were from the clean place." "Did you recognise any of them?" "No. Nobody looked like they ever lived in the clean place. Everybody looked hungry." "Bean, thank you for telling me all this." "You asked." "Do you realise that there is no way you could have survived for three years as an infant?" "I guess that means I'm dead." "I just... I'm saying that God must have been watching over you." "Yeah. Well, sure. So why didn't he watch over all those dead kids?" "He took them to his heart and loved them." "So then he didn't love me?" "No, he loved you too, he —" "Cause if he was watching so careful, he could have given me something to eat now and then." "He brought me to you. He has some great purpose in mind for you, Bean. You may not know what it is, but God didn't keep you alive so miraculously for no reason." Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn't figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as Bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. If God loved them so much, and he could do whatever he wanted, then why wasn't there more food for these kids? And if God just wanted them dead, why didn't he let them die sooner or not even be born at all, so
they didn't have to go to so much trouble and get all excited about trying to be alive when he was just going to take them to his heart. None of it made any sense to Bean, and the more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge? But when he tried to say things like that to her, she got really upset and talked even more about God and used words he didn't know and it was better just to let her say what she wanted and not argue. It was the reading that fascinated him. And the numbers. He loved that. Having paper and pencil so he could actually write things, that was really good. And maps. She didn't teach him maps at first, but there were some on the walls and the shapes of them fascinated him. He would go up to them and read the little words written on them and one day he saw the name of the river and realised that the blue was rivers and even bigger blue areas were places with even more water than the river, and then he realised that some of the other words were the same names that had been written on the street signs and so he figured out that somehow this thing was a picture of Rotterdam, and then it all made sense. Rotterdam the way it would look to a bird, if the buildings were all invisible and the streets were all empty. He found where the nest was, and where Poke had died, and all kinds of other places. When Sister Carlotta found out that he understood the map, she got very excited. She showed him maps where Rotterdam was just a little patch of lines, and one where it was just a dot, and one where it was too small even to be seen, but she knew where it would be. Bean had never realised the world was so big. Or that there were so many people. But Sister Carlotta kept coming back to the Rotterdam map, trying to get him to remember where things from his earliest memories were. Nothing looked the same, though, on the map, so it wasn't easy, and it took a long time for him to figure out where some of the places were where people had fed him. He showed these to Sister and she made a mark right on the map, showing each place. And after a while he realised — all those places were grouped in one area, but kind of strung out, as if they marked a path from where he found Poke leading back through time to ... To the clean place. Only that was too hard. He had been too scared, coming out of the clean place with the janitor. He didn't know where it was. And the truth was, as Sister Carlotta herself said, the janitor might have lived anywhere compared to the clean place. So all she was going to find by following Bean's path backward was maybe the janitor's flat, or at least where he lived three years ago. And even then, what would the janitor know? He would know where the clean place was, that's what he'd know. And now Bean understood: It was very important to Sister Carlotta to find out where Bean came from. To find out who he really was. Only ... he already knew who he really was. He tried to say this to her. "I'm right here. This is who I really am. I'm not pretending." "I know that," she said, laughing, and she hugged him, which was all right. It felt good. Back when she first started doing it, he didn't know what to do with his hands. She had to show him how to hug her back. He had seen some little kids — the ones with mamas or papas — doing that but he always thought they were holding on tight so they wouldn't drop off onto the street and get lost. He didn't know that you did it just because it felt good. Sister Carlotta's body had hard places and squishy places and it was very strange to hug her. He thought of Poke and Achilles hugging and kissing, but he didn't want to kiss Sister Carlotta and after he got used to what hugging was, he didn't really want to do that either. He let her hug him. But he didn't ever think of hugging her himself. It just didn't come into his mind. He knew that sometimes she hugged him instead of explaining things to him, and he didn't like that. She didn't want to tell him why it mattered that she find the clean place, so she hugged him and said, "Oh, you dear thing," or "Oh, you poor boy." But that only meant that it was even more important than she was saying, and she thought he was too stupid or ignorant to understand if she tried to explain. He kept trying to remember more and more, if he could, only now he didn't tell her everything because she didn't tell him everything and fair was fair. He would find the clean room himself. Without her. And then tell her if he decided it would be good for him to have her know. Because what if she found the wrong answer? Would she put him back on the street? Would she keep him from going to school in the sky? Because that's what she promised at first, only after the tests she said he did very well only he would *not* go in the sky until he was five and maybe not even then because it was not entirely her decision and that's when he knew that she didn't have the power to keep her own promises. So if she found out the wrong thing about him, she might not be able to keep *any* of her promises. Not even the one about keeping him safe from Achilles. That's why he had to find out on his own. He studied the map. He pictured things in his mind. He talked to himself as he was falling asleep, talked and thought and remembered, trying to get the janitor's face back into his mind, and the room he lived in, and the stairs outside where the mean lady stood to scream at him. And one day, when he thought he had remembered enough, Bean went to the toilet — he liked the toilets, he liked to make them flush even though it scared him to see things disappear like that — and instead of coming back to Sister Carlotta's teaching place, he went the other way down the corridor and went right out the door onto the street and no one tried to stop him. That's when he realised his mistake, though. He had been so busy trying to remember the janitor's place that it never occurred to him that he had no idea where this place was on the map. And it wasn't in a part of town that he knew. In fact, it hardly seemed like the same world. Instead of the street being full of people walking and pushing carts and riding bikes or skating to get from one place to another, the streets were almost empty, and there were cars parked everywhere. Not a single store, either. All houses and offices, or houses made into offices with little signs out front. The only building that was different was the very one he had just come out of. It was blocky and square and bigger than the others, but it had no sign out in front of it at all. He knew where he was going, but he didn't know how to get there from here. And Sister Carlotta would start looking for him soon. His first thought was to hide, but then he remembered that she knew all about his story of hiding in the clean place, so she would also think of hiding and she would look for him in a hiding place close to the big building. So he ran. It surprised him how strong he was now. It felt like he could run as fast as a bird flying, and he didn't get tired, he could run forever. All the way to the corner and around it onto another street. Then down another street, and another, until he would have been lost except he started out lost and when you start out completely lost, it's hard to get loster. As he walked and trotted and jogged and ran up and down streets and alleys, he realised that all he had to do was find a canal or a stream and it would lead him to the river or to a place that he recognised. So the first bridge that went over water, he saw which way the water flowed and chose streets that would keep him close. It wasn't as if he knew where he was yet, but at least he was following a plan. It worked. He came to the river and walked along it until he recognised, off in the distance and partly around a bend in the river, Maasboulevard, which led to the place where Poke was killed. The bend in the river — he knew it from the map. He knew where all of Sister Carlotta's marks had been. He knew that he had to go through the place where he used to live on the streets in order to get past them and closer to the area where the janitor might have lived. And that wouldn't be easy, because he would be known there, and Sister Carlotta might even have the cops looking for him and they would look there because that's where all the street urchins were and they would expect him to become a street urchin again. What they were forgetting was that Bean wasn't hungry any more. And since he wasn't hungry, he wasn't in a hurry. He walked the long way around. Far from the river, far from the busy part of town where the urchins were. Whenever the streets started looking crowded he would widen his circle and stay away from the busy places. He took the rest of that day and most of the next making such a wide circ
le that for a while he was not in Rotterdam any more at all, and he saw some of the countryside, just like the pictures — farmland and the roads built up higher than the land around them. Sister Carlotta had explained to him once that most of the farmland was lower than the level of the sea, and great dikes were the only thing keeping the sea from rushing back onto the land and covering it. But Bean knew that he would never get close to any of the big dikes. Not by walking, anyway. He drifted back into town now, into the Schiebroek district, and late in the afternoon of the second day he recognised the name of Rindijk Straat and soon found a cross street whose name he knew, a language he didn't understand. Now he could read the sign above the restaurant and realised that it was Armenian and that's probably what the woman had been speaking. Which way had he walked to come here? He had smelled the food when he was walking along ... here? He walked a little way up, a little way down the street, turning and turning to reorient himself. "What are you doing here, fatso?" It was two kids, maybe eight years old. Belligerent but not bullies. Probably part of a crew. No, part of a family, now that Achilles had changed everything. If the changes had spread to this part of town. "I'm supposed to meet my papa here," said Bean. "And who's your papa?" Bean wasn't sure whether they took the word "papa" to mean his father or the papa of his "family." He took the chance, though, of saying "Achilles." They scoffed at the idea. "He's way down by the river, why would he meet a fatso like you clear up here?" But their derision was not important — what mattered was that Achilles' reputation had spread this far through the city. "I don't have to explain his business to you," said Bean. "And all the kids in Achilles' family are fat like me. That's how well we eat." "Are they all short like you?" "I used to be taller, but I asked too many questions," said Bean, pushing past them and walking across Rozenlaan toward the area where the janitor's flat seemed likeliest to be. They didn't follow him. Such was the magic of Achilles' name — or perhaps it was just Bean's utter confidence, paying them no notice as if he had nothing to fear from them. Nothing looked familiar. He kept turning around and checking to see if he recognised things when looking in the direction he might have been going after leaving the janitor's flat. It didn't help. He wandered until it was dark, and kept wandering even then. Until, quite by chance, he found himself standing at the foot of a street lamp, trying to read a sign, when a set of initials carved on the pole caught his attention. P [heart shape] DVM, it said. He had no idea what it meant; he had never thought of it during all his attempts to remember; but he knew that he had seen it before. And not just once. He had seen it several times. The janitor's flat was very close. He turned slowly, scanning the area, and there it was: A small apartment building with both an inside and an outside stairway. The janitor lived on the top floor. Ground floor, first floor, second floor, third. Bean went to the mailboxes and tried to read the names, but they were set too high on the wall and the names were all faded, and some of the tags were missing entirely. Not that he ever knew the janitor's name, truth to tell. There was no reason to think he would have recognised it even if he had been able to read it on the mailbox. The outside stairway did not go all the way up to the top floor. It must have been built for a doctor's office on the first floor. And because it was dark, the door at the top of the stairs was locked. There was nothing to do but wait. Either he would wait all night and get into the building through one entrance or another in the morning, or someone would come back in the night and Bean would slip through a door behind him. He fell asleep and woke up, slept and woke again. He worried that a policeman would see him and shove him away, so when he woke the second time he abandoned all pretence of being on watch and crept under the stairs and curled up there for the night. He was awakened by drunken laughter. It was still dark, and beginning to rain just a little — not enough to start dripping off the stairs, though, so Bean was dry. He stuck his head out to see who was laughing. It was a man and a woman, both merry with alcohol, the man furtively pawing and poking and pinching, the woman fending him off with half-hearted slaps. "Can't you wait?" she said. "No," he said. "You're just going to fall asleep without doing anything," she said. "Not this time," he said. Then he threw up. She looked disgusted and walked on without him. He staggered after her. "I feel better now," he said. "It'll be better." "The price just went up," she said coldly. "And you brush your teeth first. " "Course I brush my teeth." They were right at the front of the building now. Bean was waiting to slip in after them. Then he realised that he didn't have to wait. The man was the janitor from all those years before. Bean stepped out of the shadows. "Thanks for bringing him home," he said to the woman. They both looked at him in surprise. "Who are you?" asked the janitor. Bean looked at the woman and rolled his eyes. "He's not that drunk, I hope," said Bean. To the janitor he said, "Mama will not be happy to see you come home like this again." "Mama!" said the janitor. "Who the hell are you talking about?" The woman gave the janitor a shove. He was so off balance that he lurched against the wall, then slid down it to land on his buttocks on the side walk. "I should have known," she said. "You bring me home to your wife?" "I'm not married," said the janitor. "This kid isn't mine." "I'm sure you're telling the truth on both points," said the woman. "But you better let him help you up the stairs anyway. Mama's waiting." She started to walk away. "What about my forty gilders?" he asked plaintively, knowing the answer even as he asked. She made an obscene gesture and walked on into the night. "You little bastard," said the janitor. "I had to talk to you alone," said Bean. "Who the hell are you? Who's your mama?" "That's what I'm here to find out," said Bean. "I'm the baby you found and brought home. Three years ago." The man looked at him in stupefaction. Suddenly a light went on, then another. Bean and the janitor were bathed in overlapping flash light beams. Four policemen converged on them. "Don't bother running, kid," said a cop. "Nor you, Mr. Fun Time." Bean recognised Sister Carlotta's voice. "They aren't criminals," she said. "I just need to talk to them. Up in his apartment." "You followed me?" Bean asked her. "I knew you were searching for him," she said. "I didn't want to interfere until you found him. Just in case you think you were really smart, young man, we intercepted four street thugs and two known sex offenders who were after you." Bean rolled his eyes. "You think I've forgotten how to deal with them?" Sister Carlotta shrugged. "I didn't want this to be the first time you ever made a mistake in your life." She did have a sarcastic streak. *** "So as I told you, there was nothing to learn from this Pablo de Noches. He's an immigrant who lives to pay for prostitutes. Just another of the worthless people who have gravitated here ever since the Netherlands became international territory." Sister Carlotta had sat patiently, waiting for the inspector to wind down his I-told-you-so speech. But when he spoke of a man's worthlessness, she could not let the remark go unchallenged. "He took in that baby," she said. "And fed the child and cared for him." The inspector waved off the objection. "We needed one more street urchin? Because that's all that people like this ever produce." "You didn't learn nothing from him," Sister Carlotta said. "You learned the location where the boy was found." "And the people renting the building during that time are untraceable. A company name that never existed. Nothing to go on. No way to track them down." "But that nothing is something," said Sister Carlotta. "I tell you that these people had many children in this place, which they closed down in a hurry, with all the children but one taken away. You tell me that the company was a false name and can't be traced. So now, in your experience, doesn't that tell you a great deal about what was going on in that building?" The inspector shrugged. "Of course. It was obviously an organ farm." Tears came to Sister Carlotta's eyes. "And that is the only possibility?" "A lot of defective babies are born to rich families," said the inspector. "There is an illegal market in infant and toddler organs. We close down the organ farms whenever we find out where they are. Perhaps we were getting close to this organ farm and they got wind of it and closed up shop. But there is no paper in the department on any organ farm that we actually found at that time. So perhaps they closed dow
n for another reason. Still, nothing." Patiently, Sister Carlotta ignored his inability to realise how valuable this information was. "Where do the babies come from?" The inspector looked at her blankly. As if he thought she was asking him to explain the facts of life. "The organ farm," she said. "Where do they get the babies?" The inspector shrugged. "Late-term abortions, usually. Some arrangement with the clinics, a kickback. That sort of thing." "And that's the only source?" "Well, I don't know. Kidnappings? I don't think that could be much of a factor, there aren't that many babies leaking through the security systems in the hospitals. People selling babies? It's been heard of, yes. Poor refugees arrive with eight children, and then a few years later they have only six, and they cry about the ones who died but who can prove anything? But nothing you can trace." "The reason I'm asking," said Sister Carlotta, "is that this child is unusual. Extremely unusual." "Three arms?" asked the inspector. "Brilliant. Precocious. He escaped from this place before he was a year old. Before he could walk." The inspector thought about that for a few moments. "He crawled away?" "He hid in a toilet tank." "He got the lid up before he was a year old?" "He said it was hard to lift." "No, it was probably cheap plastic, not porcelain. You know how these institutional plumbing fixtures are." "You can see, though, why I want to know about the child's parentage. Some miraculous combination of parents." The inspector shrugged. "Some children are born smart." "But there is a hereditary component in this, inspector. A child like this must have ... remarkable parents. Parents likely to be prominent because of the brilliance of their own minds." "Maybe. Maybe not," said the inspector. "I mean, some of these refugees, they might be brilliant, but they're caught up in desperate times. To save the other children, maybe they sell a baby. That's even a smart thing to do. It doesn't rule out refugees as the parents of this brilliant boy you have. " "I suppose that's possible," said Sister Carlotta. "It's the most information you'll ever have. Because this Pablo de Noches, he knows nothing. He barely could tell me the name of the town he came from in Spain." "He was drunk when he was questioned," said Sister Carlotta. "We'll question him again when he's sober," said the inspector. "We'll let you know if we learn anything more. In the meantime, though, you'll have to make do with what I've already told you, because there isn't anything more." "I know all I need to know for now," said Sister Carlotta. "Enough to know that this child truly is a miracle, raised up by God for some great purpose." "I'm not Catholic," said the inspector. "God loves you all the same," said Sister Carlotta cheerfully.