Bean stood up. “Is that what you created me for, Volescu? To be a limbless crippled monster out in space?”

“Silly boy,” said Volescu, “to ordinary humans you already are a monster. Their worst nightmare. The species that will replace them. But to me, you’re beautiful. Even tethered to an artificial habitat, even limbless, trunkless, voiceless, you’d be the most beautiful creature alive.”

“And yet you came within one toilet-tank lid of killing me and burning my body.”

“I didn’t want to go to jail.”

“Yet here you are,” said Bean. “And your next prison is out in space.”

“I can live like Prospero, refining my arts in solitude.”

“Prospero had Ariel and Caliban,” said Bean.

“Don’t you understand?” said Volescu. “You’re my Caliban. And all your little children—they’re my Ariels. I’ve spread them over the earth. You’ll never find them. Their mothers have been taught well. They’ll mate, they’ll reproduce before their giantism becomes obvious. Whether my virus works or not, your children are my virus.”

“So that’s what Achilles plotted?”

“Achilles?” Volescu laughed. “That bloody-handed little moron? I told him your babies were dead. That’s all he wanted. Fool.”

“So they’re not dead.”

“All alive. All implanted. By now, perhaps, some of them born, since those with your abilities will be born two months premature.”

“You knew that and didn’t tell us?”

“Why should I? The delivery was safe, wasn’t it? The baby was mature enough to breathe and function on its own?”

“What else do you know?”

“I know that everything will work out. Julian, look at yourself, man! You escaped at the age of one. Which means that seventeen months after conception, you were able to survive without parents. I don’t have even the tiniest worry about the health of your babies, and neither should you. They don’t need you, because you didn’t need anybody. Let them go. Let them replace the old species, bit by bit, over the generations to come.”

“No,” said Bean, “I love the old species. And I hate what you did to me.”

“Without ‘what I did to you,’ all you’d be is Nikolai.”

“My brother is a wonderful person. Kind. And very smart.”

“Very smart, but not as smart as you. Would you really trade with him? Would you really like to be as dull-witted as he is, compared to you?”

Whereupon Bean left, having no answer to Volescu’s last question.

12

ALLAHU AKBAR

From: Graff%[email protected]
To: Borommakot%[email protected]
Forwarded and Posted by IcomeAnon
Encrypted using code ********
Decrypted using code ***********
Re: Investment Counselor

Your idea of converting the Fantasy Game software into an investment counselor is going surprisingly well. We haven’t had time to do more than short-term testing, but so far it has outpicked all the experts. We are paying Ender’s pension funds to it. As you suggested, we are making sure that all investments are under false identities; we are also making sure the software is hooked widely over the nets in endlessly self-varying forms. It will be effectively untraceable and unkillable unless someone is making a systematic international effort to wipe it out, which is unlikely to happen as long as no one suspects it’s there.