Shadow Puppets (3 page)

“Well?” said Achilles. “Don’t you have any questions?”

“Yes,” said Suriyawong. “Did you already have breakfast or are you hungry?”

“I never eat breakfast,” said Achilles.

“Killing people makes me hungry,” said Suriyawong. “I thought you might want a snack of some kind.”

Now he caught a couple of the men glancing at him, only their eyes barely moving, but it was enough that Suriyawong knew they were reacting to what he said. Killing makes him hungry? Absurd. Now they must know that he was lying to Achilles. It was important to Suriyawong that his men know he was lying without him having to tell them. Otherwise he might lose their trust. They might believe he had really given himself to the service of this monster.

Achilles did eat, after a while. Then he slept.

Suriyawong did not trust his sleep. Achilles no doubt had mastered the art of seeming to be asleep so he could hear the conversations of others. So Suriyawong talked no more than was necessary to debrief his men and get a full count of the personnel from the convoy that they had killed.

Only when Achilles got off the chopper to pee at the airfield on Guam did Suriyawong risk sending a quick message to Ribeirão Preto.
There was one person who had to know that Achilles was coming to stay with the Hegemon: Virlomi, the Indian Battle-Schooler who had escaped from Achilles in Hyderabad and had become the goddess guarding a bridge in eastern India until Suriyawong had rescued her. If she was in Ribeirão Preto when Achilles got there, her life would be in danger.

And that was very sad for Suriyawong, because it would mean he would not see Virlomi for a long time, and he had recently decided that he loved her and wanted to marry her when they both grew up.

Theresa Wiggin knew Graff was coming, since Elena Delphiki gave her a hurried call as soon as he had left her house. But she did not change her plans in the slightest. Not because she hoped to deceive him, but because there were papayas on the trees in the back yard that had to be harvested before they dropped to the ground. She had no intention of letting Graff interfere with something really important.

So when she heard Graff politely clapping his hands at the front gate, she was up on a ladder clipping off papayas and laying them into the bag at her side. Aparecida, the maid, had her instructions, and so Theresa soon heard Graff’s footsteps coming across the tiles of the terrace.

“Mrs. Wiggin,” he said.

“You’ve already taken two of my children,” said Theresa without looking at him. “I suppose you want my firstborn, now.”

“No,” said Graff. “It’s you and your husband I’m after this time.”

“Taking us to join Ender and Valentine?” Even though she was being deliberately obtuse, the idea nevertheless had a momentary appeal. Ender and Valentine had left all this business behind.

“I’m afraid we can’t spare a followup ship to visit their colony for several years yet,” said Graff.

“Then I’m afraid you have nothing to offer us that we want,” said Theresa.

“I’m sure that’s true,” said Graff. “It’s what Peter needs. A free hand.”

“We don’t interfere in his work.”

“He’s bringing a dangerous person here,” said Graff. “But I think you know that.”

“Gossip flies around here, since there’s nothing else for the parents of geniuses to do but twitter to each other about the doings of their brilliant boys and girls. The Arkanians and Delphikis have their children all but married off. And we get such fascinating visitors from outer space. Like you.”

“My, but we’re testy today,” said Graff.

“I’m sure Bean’s and Petra’s families have agreed to leave Ribeirão Preto so that their children don’t have to worry about Achilles taking them hostage. And someday Nikolai Delphiki and Stefan Arkanian will recover from having been mere bit players in their siblings’ lives. But John Paul’s and my situation is not at all the same.
Our
son is the idiot who decided to bring Achilles here.”

“Yes, it must hurt you to have the one child who simply isn’t at the same intellectual level as the others,” said Graff.

Theresa looked at him, saw the twinkle in his eye, and laughed in spite of herself. “All right, he isn’t stupid, he’s so cocky he can’t conceive of any of his plans failing. But the result is the same. And I have no intention of hearing about his death through some awful little email message. Or—worse—from a news report talking about how ‘the brother of the great Ender Wiggin has failed in his bid to revive the office of Hegemon’ and then watch how even in death Peter’s obituary is accompanied by more footage of Ender after his victory over the Formics.”

“You seem to have a very clear view of all the future possibilities,” said Graff.

“No, just the unbearable ones. I’m staying, Mr. Colonization Min
ister. You’ll have to find your completely inappropriate middle-aged recruits somewhere else.”

“Actually, you’re not inappropriate. You’re still of childbearing age.”

“Having children has brought me such joy,” said Theresa, “that it’s really marvelous to contemplate having more of them.”

“I know perfectly well how much you’ve sacrificed for your children, and how much you love them. And I knew coming here that you wouldn’t want to go.”

“So you have soldiers waiting to take me with you by force? You already have my husband in custody?”

“No, no,” said Graff. “I think you’re right not to go.”

“Oh.”

“But Peter asked me to protect you, so I had to offer. No, I think it’s a good thing for you to stay.”

“And why is that?”

“Peter has many allies,” said Graff. “But no friends.”

“Not even you?”

“I’m afraid I studied him too closely in his childhood to take any of his present charisma at face value.”

“He does have that, doesn’t he. Charisma. Or at least charm.”

“At least as much as Ender, when he chooses to use it.”

Hearing Graff speak of Ender—of the kind of young man Ender had become before he was pitched out of the solar system in a colony ship after saving the human race—filled Theresa with familiar, but no less bitter, regrets. Graff knew Ender Wiggin at age seven and ten and twelve, years when Theresa’s only links to her youngest, most vulnerable child were a few photographs and fading memories and the ache in her arms where she could remember holding him, and the last lingering sensation of his little arms flung around her neck.

“Even when you brought him back to Earth,” said Theresa to Graff, “you didn’t let us see him. You took Val to him, but not his father, not me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Graff. “I didn’t know he would never come home at war’s end. Seeing you would have reminded him that there was someone in the world who was supposed to protect him and take care of him.”

“And that would have been a bad thing?”

“The toughness we needed from Ender was not the person he wanted to be. We had to protect it. Letting him see Valentine was dangerous enough.”

“Are you so sure that you were right?”

“Not sure at all. But Ender won the war, and we can never go back and try it another way to see if it would have worked as well.”

“And I can never go back and try to find some way through all of this that doesn’t end up filling me with resentment and grief whenever I see you or even think of you.”

Graff said nothing for the longest time.

“If you’re waiting for me to apologize,” began Theresa.

“No, no,” said Graff. “I was trying to think of any apology I could make that wouldn’t be laughably inadequate. I never fired a gun in the war, but I still caused casualties, and if it’s any consolation, whenever I think of you and your husband I am also filled with regret.”

“Not enough.”

“No, I’m sure not,” said Graff. “But I’m afraid my deepest regrets are for the parents of Bonzo Madrid, who put their son into my hands and got him back in a box.”

Theresa wanted to fling a papaya at him and smear it all over his face. “Reminding me that I’m the mother of a killer?”

“Bonzo was the killer, ma’am,” said Graff. “Ender defended himself. You entirely mistook my meaning. I’m the one who allowed Bonzo to be alone with Ender. I, not Ender, am the one responsible for his death. That’s why I feel more regret toward the Madrid family than toward you. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And I can never be sure which ones were necessary or harmless or even left us better off than if I hadn’t made them.”

“How do you know you’re not making a mistake now, letting me and John Paul stay?”

“As I said, Peter needs friends.”

“But does the world need Peter?” asked Theresa.

“We don’t always get the leader that we want,” said Graff. “But sometimes we get to choose among the leaders that we have.”

“And how will the choice be made?” asked Theresa. “On the battlefield or the ballot box?”

“Maybe,” said Graff, “by the poisoned fig or the sabotaged car.”

Theresa took his meaning at once. “You may be sure we’ll keep an eye on Peter’s food and his transportation.”

“What,” said Graff, “you’ll carry all his food on your person, buying it from different grocers every day, and your husband will live in his car, never sleeping?”

“We retired young. One has to fill the empty hours.”

Graff laughed. “Good luck, then. I’m sure you’ll do all that needs doing. Thanks for talking with me.”

“Let’s do it again in another ten or twenty years,” said Theresa.

“I’ll mark it on my calendar.”

And with a salute—which was rather more solemn than she would have expected—he walked back into the house and, presumably, on out through the front garden and into the street.

Theresa seethed for a while at what Graff and the International Fleet and the Formics and fate and God had done to her and her family. And then she thought of Ender and Valentine and wept a few tears onto the papayas. And then she thought of herself and John Paul, waiting and watching, trying to protect Peter. Graff was right. They could never watch him perfectly.

They would sleep. They would miss something. Achilles would have an opportunity—many opportunities—and just when they were most complacent he would strike and Peter would be dead and the world would be at Achilles’s mercy because who else was clever and ruthless enough to fight him? Bean? Petra? Suriyawong? Nikolai? One
of the other Battle School children scattered over the surface of Earth? If there was any who was ambitious enough to stop Achilles, he would have surfaced by now.

She was carrying the heavy bag of papayas into the house—sidling through the door, trying not to bump and bruise the fruit—when it dawned on her what Graff’s errand had really been about.

Peter needs a friend, he said. The issue between Peter and Achilles might be resolved by poison or sabotage, he said. But she and John Paul could not possibly watch over Peter well enough to protect him from assassination, he said. Therefore, in what way could she and John Paul possibly be the friends that Peter needed?

The contest between Achilles and Peter would be just as easily resolved by Achilles’s death as by Peter’s.

At once there flashed into her memory the stories of some of the great poisoners of history, by rumor if not by proof. Lucretia Borgia. Cleopatra. What’s-her-name who poisoned everybody around the Emperor Claudius and probably got him in the end, as well.

In olden days, there were no chemical tests to determine conclusively whether poison had been used. Poisoners gathered their own herbs, leaving no trail of purchases, no co-conspirators who might confess or accuse. If anything happened to Achilles before Peter had decided the monster boy had to go, Peter would launch an investigation…and when the trail led to his parents, as it inevitably would, how would Peter respond? Make an example of them, letting them go on trial? Or would he protect them, trying to cover up the result of the investigation, leaving his reign as Hegemon to be tainted by the rumors about Achilles’s untimely death. No doubt every opponent of Peter’s would resurrect Achilles as a martyr, a much-slandered boy who offered the brightest hope to mankind, slain in his youth by the crawlingly vile Peter Wiggin, or his mother the witch or his father the snake.

It was not enough to kill Achilles. It had to be done properly, in a way that would not harm Peter in the long run.

Though it would be better for Peter to endure the rumors and legends about Achilles’s death than for Peter himself to be the slain one. She dare not wait too long.

My assignment from Graff, thought Theresa, is to become an assassin in order to protect my son.

And the truly horrifying thing is that I’m not questioning whether to do it, but how. And when.