“You don’t want me to have it run Ender’s finances?”

“I haven’t changed my mind about that. I’m just wondering—maybe it could look at a really massive database we’ve got here and analyze…well, find some patterns that we’re not seeing.”

“The game was created for a very specific purpose. Pattern finding in databases wasn’t—”

“Oh, come on,” said Bean. “That’s all it did. Patterns in our behavior. Just because it assembled the database of our actions on the fly doesn’t change the nature of what it was doing. Checking our behavior against the behavior of earlier children. Against our own normal behavior. Seeing just how crazy your educational program was making us.”

Graff sighed. “Have your computer people contact my computer people.”

“With your blessing. Not some foot-dragging fob-them-off-with-smoke-and-mirrors ‘effort’ that deliberately leads nowhere.”

“You really care about what we do with Ender’s money?”

“I care about Ender. Someday he may need that money. I once made a promise that I’d keep Peter from hurting Ender. Instead, I did nothing while Peter sent Ender away.”

“For Ender’s own good.”

“Ender should have had a vote.”

“He did,” said Graff. “If he had insisted on going home to Earth, I would have let him. But once Valentine came up to join him, he was content.”

“Fine,” said Bean. “Has he given consent to have his pension pillaged?”

“I’ll see about turning the mind game into a financial manager. The program is a complex one. It does a lot of self-programming and self-alteration. So maybe if we ask it to, it can rewrite its own code in order to become whatever you want it to be. It is magic, after all. This computer stuff.”

“That’s what I always thought,” said Bean. “Like Santa Claus. You adults pretend he doesn’t exist, but we know that he really does.”

When he ended the conversation with Graff, Bean immediately called Ferreira. It was full daylight now, so Ferreira was actually awake. Bean told him about the plan to have the Mind Game program analyze the impossibly large database of vague and mostly useless information about the movements of pregnant women with low-birth-weight babies and Ferreira said he’d get right on it. He said it without enthusiasm, but Bean knew that Ferreira wasn’t the kind of man to say he’d do something and not do it, just because he didn’t believe in it. He’d keep his word.

How do I know that? Bean wondered. How do I know that I can trust Ferreira to go off on wild goose chases, once he gives his word to do it? While I know without even knowing that I know it, that Peter is partly financing his operations by stealing from Ender. That was bothering me for days before I understood it.

Damn, but I’m smart. Smarter than any computer program, even the Mind Game.

If only I could control it.

I may not have the capacity to consciously deal with a vast database and find patterns in it. But I could deal with the database of stuff I observe in the Hegemony and what I know about Peter and without my even asking the question, out pops an answer.