“We ask only one thing,” said Rackham.

Bean laughed. “I knew it.”

“As long as you’re waiting around anyway, searching for your children,” said Rackham. “We’d like you to help Peter unite the world under the office of the Hegemon.”

Bean was so astonished he stopped laughing. “So the fleet intends to meddle in earthside affairs.”

“We aren’t meddling at all,” said Rackham. “You are.”

“Peter doesn’t listen to me. If he did, he would have let me kill Achilles back in China when we first had the chance. Peter decided to ‘rescue’ him instead.”

“Maybe he’s learned from his mistake.”

“He thinks he learned from it,” said Bean, “but Peter is Peter. It wasn’t a mistake, it’s who he is. He can’t listen to anyone else if he thinks he has a better plan. And he always thinks he has a better plan.”

“Nevertheless.”

“I can’t help Peter because Peter won’t be helped.”

“He took Petra along on his visit to Alai.”

“His top secret visit that the I.F. couldn’t possibly know about.”

“We keep track of our alumni.”

“Is that how you pay for your new-model starships? Alumni donations?”

“Our best graduates are still too young to be at the really high salary levels.”

“I don’t know. You have two heads of state.”

“Doesn’t it intrigue you, Bean, to imagine what the history of the world would have been like if there had been two Alexanders at the same time?”

“Alai and Hot Soup?” asked Bean. “It’ll all boil down to which of them has the most resources. Alai has most at the moment, but China has staying power.”

“But then you add to the two Alexanders a Joan of Arc here and there, and a couple of Julius Caesars, maybe an Attila, and…”

“You see Petra as Joan of Arc?” asked Bean.

“She could be.”

“And what am I?”

“Why, Genghis Khan of course, if you choose to be,” said Rackham.

“He has such a bad reputation.”

“He doesn’t deserve it. His contemporaries knew he was a man of might who exercised his power lightly upon those who obeyed him.”

“I don’t want power. I’m not your Genghis.”

“No,” said Rackham. “That’s the problem. It all depends on who has the disease of ambition. When Graff took you into Battle School, it was because your will to survive seemed to do the same job as ambition. But now it doesn’t.”

“Peter’s your Genghis,” said Bean. “That’s why you want me to help him.”

“He might be,” said Rackham. “And you’re the only one who can help him. Anybody else would make him feel threatened. But you…”

“Because I’m going to die.”

“Or leave. Either way, he can have the use of you, as he thinks, and then be rid of you.”

“It’s not as he thinks. It’s what you want. I’m a book in a lending library. You lend me to Peter for a while. He turns me in, then you send me out on another chase after some dream or other. You and Graff, you still think you’re in charge of the human race, don’t you?”