Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition Page 7

Carlotta and Cincinnatus had rigged a scaffolding opposite the door, and as they drew him from the bay in the wheel, Bean realized that the cloth under him was a sturdy cargo net -- a hammock, but with rods to keep it from collapsing into a wad with him folded up inside it.

  When he was completely free of the door, he was resting comfortably within the hammock. Then they swayed him down like good sailors, and the illusion of gravity grew for him as gently and naturally as if he had climbed down a ladder.

  It was just a bit more gravity than he had been used to. He had to breathe just a little more deeply and often. But he wasn't panting. He could do this. He could live this way. For a while.

  When he was at rest on the ground, the cloth of the hammock under him, the birds came swooping down, and he realized they were not birds at all. They were the drones.

  They hovered around him, then came to rest on the ground. Ender came then -- the lab wasn't far away -- and he seemed happy. Too happy for the occasion, really -- his lab work must be going well. Bean had been tracking his lines of research as best he could, but Carlotta had set up this network, and Bean found that she had blocked, or simply not created, the back doors and surreptitious channels he had used constantly on the Herodotus. They were cutting him loose from his close supervision of their lives, even as they solemnly obeyed him in all his overt decisions.

  "They want to begin at once," said Ender. "Talking to you."

  "Before you die," said Cincinnatus dryly.

  "Then we'll start at once," said Bean.

  The images came slowly, gently, and feelings were not pushed hard. Suggestions, really.

  At first Bean spoke aloud what he was getting from the drones. Ender, who was also touching them and seeing all, affirmed for him that he was understanding them well.

  Soon it was Carlotta who kept him company. And then Cincinnatus took his turn. The drones also worked in shifts, two at a time staying with him.

  Three days he lived in the dream. Unlike the Hive Queens, Bean did not attempt to hide anything. His whole life he laid bare before the drones. Let them feel what it meant to be a human, a man -- one with responsibilities to others, but ultimately an agent unto himself, free to choose as long as he also accepted the consequences of his choices.

  They marveled. They were horrified at some things -- at the idea of murder. Bean let them see that he thought it was murder when the Hive Queen broke off contact with the mind of a worker, killing her. But the drones were merely amused at his obvious misinterpretation. Not like you, she's not like you humans, you don't understand. They didn't say those words, but he understood the idea from their amused, patient, dismissive feelings. Like adults talking to precocious children. Like Bean talking to his own children when they weren't yet two and had not yet begun to educate themselves completely on their own.

  At last the drones withdrew themselves, and then Bean slept for real, deeply, completely. Not dreamlessly, but they were the comfortable dreams of ordinary sleep. No nightmares.

  Then he woke, and spoke to his children. "I learned much, but what was most interesting were the things the Hive Queen never showed them. They didn't believe that anything was left out, they believed she was completely open to them, but what else could they believe? Their lives were surrounded by the lies she wove for them."

  "Parents do that to protect their children, I heard," said Carlotta.

  "I heard that too," said Bean. "And it's probably necessary. Just frustrating for an inquirer like me."

  "How are you feeling?" she asked him.

  "Physically? Look at the machinery and tell me whether I'm alive or not."

  "Good heartbeat," she said. "Other vitals fine -- for a man your size."

  He slept again. When next he woke, it was dusk, and all three children were gathered around him.

  "Father," said Ender. "I have something to tell you. Good and bad. Good, mostly."

  "Then tell me," said Bean. "I don't want to die during a preamble. Get to the meat."

  "Then here it is," said Ender. "The Formics have inadvertently taught me how to cure our condition. We can turn on the normal human patterns of growth and then the end of growth, without switching off Anton's Key."

  "How?" asked Bean.

  "They do it with organelles. Like our mitochondria. The queens could mix up a bacterial soup in glands that are only vestigial in the workers and drones. Then they infect the eggs of workers with these bacteria, and the bacteria take up residence in every cell in their bodies.

  "The organelles are responsive to the mental connection between the Queen and the workers. They sense whether it's there. And if it isn't, they shut down the metabolism of every cell in the body, virtually at once. We can put the off switch we need in an organelle."

  "You can't just make organelles for humans," said Bean. "We've had mitochondria for so long that -- they joined the cells long before there were humans. The mitochondria reproduce when the cells divide. The Hive Queens had to insert their organelles into every egg."

  "Right," said Ender.

  "This is the clever part," said Carlotta.

  "We use a virus to insert the snippet of altered gene into the naturally occurring mitochondria. They get the off-switch and then express it at the appropriate time."

  "Well, it's not as if we've reached puberty yet," said Ender. "We have to wait and see. But one thing is certain -- the change has gone through every cell in our bodies."

  "You've already done it?" said Bean. His heart raced.

  "Calm, calm, Father," said Carlotta.

  "Of course we did it," said Cincinnatus.

  "And in a few years, we'll see if it worked," said Ender. "If not, we'll still have time to try again. Or try something else."

  He slept well that night, better than he had in five long years in space, because his children were safe, and perhaps cured, and certainly able to take care of themselves. He had accomplished it all -- if not directly, then by raising them to be the kind of people who would dare to take the steps necessary to save themselves.

  In the morning, they were all busy, but Bean was content to lie there and listen to the sounds of life in the meadow. He didn't know the names of any of the animals, but there were some who hopped and some that chirped and croaked, and some that landed lightly on him and crawled or wriggled to somewhere else and dropped or leapt off of him. He was part of the life here. Soon his body would be even more deeply involved with it. Meanwhile, he was happy.

  And maybe when he died, he'd find out that one religion or another was right after all. Maybe Petra would be there waiting for him -- impatient, scolding. "What took you?"

  "I had to finish my work."

  "Well, you didn't -- the children had to do it."

  And others. Sister Carlotta, who saved his life. Poke, who also saved his life, and also died for it. His parents, though he didn't meet them until after the war. His brother Nikolai.

  Bean woke again. He hadn't known he was going to fall asleep. But now the children were gathered around him, looking serious.

  "You had a little heart incident," said Cincinnatus.

  "It's called happiness," said Bean.

  He propped himself carefully on his elbows and knees. A position he had not adopted in at least a year, ever since he stopped trying to roll over. He hadn't been sure he could even do it. But there he was, on elbows and knees, like a baby. Panting, exhausted. I can't do this.

  "What I want," he said softly, "is to stand in this meadow and walk in the light of the sun."

  "Why didn't you say so?" said Carlotta.

  They got him to lie back down on the hammock cloth, and then they winched him up to sitting position, and then stood him up on his feet.

  The gravity he felt was so slight, so very close to nothing, yet being upright, even with the hammock holding him a little, was taking all his breath.

  "I'm going to walk now," he said.

  His legs were rubbery under him.

  The drones flew to him and clung to his cl
othing, fluttering to help hold him up. The children gathered around his legs and helped him take one step, then another.

  He felt the sun on his face. He felt the ground under his feet. He felt the people who loved him holding on to him and bearing him along.

  It was enough.

  "I'm going to lie down now," said Bean.

  And then he did.

  And then he died.

  The following content was added by Orson Scott Card specifically for this enhanced Ebook version

  Addition to Chapter 3 (1)

  Addition to Chpater 3 (2)

  Addition to Chapter 9

  Additional Content From Chapter 3

  Return to chapter 3

  Sergeant was so proud of his perfect memory, thought Bean. Yet Bean and Petra had never announced anything to him, advanced though he was for a one-year-old. For of the three children on the Herodotus, Sergeant was the one who had never met his mother.

  Petra had given birth to Ender -- Andrew -- from her own body, had nursed him, had known him better than any of the children. All the others had been stolen as embryos and implanted in surrogate mothers. It had taken a long time to track them down.

  Bella -- Carlotta -- had been located while Bean and Petra were still together; Petra knew her, had loved her.

  But Cincinnatus -- Sergeant -- had been located while Petra and Bean were both caught up in military campaigns. She learned of his existence at the same time Bean handed her their divorce papers and announced his decision to take the three children who had Bean's giantism off on a relativistic voyage in order to buy time for scientists to find the cure.

  The closest Sergeant ever came to meeting Petra was that for a time Petra's mother took care of him in Armenia.

  So whatever Sergeant thought he remembered, it was all manufactured memory, based on stories he had heard and opinions he had formed long after the fact. "I never liked you, I liked Petra," Sergeant said. What he really meant was, "I don't like you now, and invoking the name of my mother is the only thing I can think of that will really hurt you."

  Sergeant's complaint was not unjustified. He had been torn from the family into which he had been born. They were given no choice; he was given no choice. And it was likely that Sergeant did have some memories, however fragmentary and vague, of the family that took care of him through the first year of his life. Maybe he even suffered from some separation anxiety for a while.

  But Sergeant was too much like Bean for Bean to believe that it had really bothered him at the time. Sergeant was a fighter, and these words he said were weapons, not memories.

  Return to chapter 3

  Additional Content From Chapter 3

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  The children had grown up with holograms of their mother, Petra, talking to them. "I love you. I miss you. I wish you could have known your brothers and sisters here on Earth. I know that you're still very young in years, and your siblings here are already adults who have moved on into their lives, married, having children. I hope that someday the same things become possible for you. The great regret of my life is that I was separated from the three of you, from your father. But I see now that it was the only decision that offered any kind of hope for a normal life for the children I kept here and for the children your father took with him."

  The children had all memorized every word. They could say them along with her. And at various times they had wept while hearing them, repeated them mockingly, screamed them at the hologram, refused to listen, and finally just watched her thoughtfully.

  Until they stopped summoning the holograms at all.

  Bean thought that the holograms had done their job. They had given the children a relationship with their absent mother. She was grateful that Petra had made the recordings.

  Even thought she had never actually sent them.

  Return to chapter 3

  Additional Content From Chapter 9

  Return to chapter 9

  It made Carlotta feel a little bitter that the communication between the Hive Queen and her daughters had been so perfect that they didn't need writing, they didn't need intercoms or radios, they didn't even need language. Memories were transferred perfectly. The mother was present within her children's minds always.

  While my mother ...

  Alone of the children, Carlotta knew that Mother had never sent them the hologram messages they had played over and over again.

  The question had arisen quite early. "Why are the holograms so jumpy? Between every sentence she shifts."

  The Giant's explanations had made perfect sense. "Your mother didn't like making speeches or sending messages. She always felt like she made constant mistakes. I'm sure she edited this a hundred times before she sent it."

  Ender had been his normal complacent self, accepting the explanation completely. Sergeant had naturally made snotty remarks about how it was so nice of her to go to so much trouble to send them exactly one highly-edited, unnatural message in all the years that she had known they were on this voyage.

  Carlotta alone seemed to understand that the Giant's explanation sounded like a just-so story, designed to fend off a child's question without actually answering it.

  Obviously the holograms had been edited. Also, the histories and biographies agreed that Petra wasn't much for public speaking and had largely dropped out of public life after she married Peter the Hegemon. Yet there was still something wrong with the Giant's explanation, and Carlotta thought she knew what it was.

  It seemed obvious to her that it wasn't Mother who had edited her messages, it was the Giant. And that meant that somewhere in the ship's computers there must be some copy or at least a palimpsest of the full, original, uncut message. The Giant had some reason for keeping them from seeing it. Very well, when Carlotta found it, she would keep his secret from the others, if she agreed that the Giant had been right to edit the message.

  But that wouldn't stop her from searching.

  It was that quest that had prompted Carlotta to become so intimately familiar with the computers on the Herodotus, and then all the supporting computer systems and all the ansible record systems on other worlds. Along the way, she became intimately familiar with the inner workings of the ship in a way the others didn't even attempt, and she pretended that her goal was to be able to repair or replace or jury-rig anything.

  But she was searching for Mother's messages.

  And she found them.

  About a year ago, she found a palimpsest in a backup of a backup. It was a fragment of one of the familiar holograms, and the piece that had been accidentally preserved lasted only two seconds. But one of those two seconds had been omitted from the message the Giant had shown them.

  There was a date associated with the backup that had been backed up, which gave her a rough upper time limit for when the Giant had done the editing; the lower time limit was the earliest possible time when Mother could have sent a message saying what it said -- that their full siblings, the five normal children of Julian Delphiki and Petra Arkanian, had all left home and were living adult lives.

  Then she pulled up transmission records from Earthside ansibles until finally, in the storage computer of an ansible relay on a moon of Saturn which was almost never visited and only rarely used, she found the entire original transmission from Mother.

  Mother had never sent it at all.

  Instead, it was part of a message from a computer program that was managing the Giant's investment portfolio. It had been slipped in among financial reports with this notation: "Item culled from the personal computer of Petra Arkanian at the moment of deletion."

  And it was nothing like the holograms that the Giant had spliced together. Oh, every moment of the "message from Mother" was in that long transmission, but most of it was not directed to the children at all. Most of it was an angry, sad, lonely, accusatory, but also yearning and forgiving monologue the Petra had made.

  It had begun as an attempt to send a message to her first husband,
Bean. "I feel like I'm standing at your grave and reporting on my entire life since you died," she began. "Except that unlike most widows, I know you'll actually hear me, and I can really tell you just how much I hate you for stealing three of my children and running away like the coward you always were."

  Oh, she was furious. And unfair. Carlotta knew enough of the real story to know that Petra was talking from pure emotion. She was a middle-aged woman when she recorded it; she had been wife of Peter the Hegemon a long time. Yet her words to Bean sounded as hot with emotion as if she had only been wounded by him the day before.

  In the process of the long diatribe she kept starting over -- not erasing anything, just saying, "No, I'll never send that," and then beginning again. Several times she stopped to wash her face or get a drink or go to the toilet or whatever, so there were long sequences of recorded furniture.

  But at the end, exhausted, sad, she said, "Why should I cause you such pain? To you it's only been a couple of years. And in truth I'm not unhappy. I'm unhappy right now but in the main I've done pretty well with the life I've had here, and Peter is a good husband. At least he never stole half my children from me. There I go again. Bitter and sad, sad and bitter. I'm not going to send this. I suppose it was therapy. Or menopause." Petra sighed. "Delete," she said.

  Only the computer had not deleted it. Or if it had, the deletion had been intercepted by the supposed estate-management software and then sent on to the Giant without any editing at all, and without the knowledge of Petra Arkanian.

  The Hive Queen communicated with her daughters continuously.

  My mother never actually meant to send me a message at all. To the degree she even made a stab at it, she regarded it as a failure and deleted it unsent. The Giant tried to make something out of it. From ten hours of hologram, he had put together five minutes that might be comforting to Petra's children.