Shadow Puppets Page 0,33

lives snipped off? Given the historical rates of infant mortality, it might be as many as halt certainly at least a quarter of all humans born. Alt those meaningless lives. I'll be one of them. I'll just be one who did his best to save the world before he died."

To Bean's surprise-and horror-Anton flung his arms around him in one of those terrifying Russian hugs from which the unsuspecting westerner thinks he may never emerge alive. "My boy, you are so noble!" Anton let go of him, taughing. "Listen to yourself! So full of the romance of youth! You will save the world!"

"I didn't mock your dream," said Bean.

"But I'm not mocking you!" cried Anton. "I celebrate you! Because you are, in a way, a small way, my son. Or at least my nephew. And look at you! Living a life entirely for others!"

"I'm completely selfish!" cried Bean in protest.

"Then sleep with this girl, you know she'll let you! Or marry her and then sleep with anybody else, father children or not, why should you care? Nothing that happens outside your body matters. Your children don't matter to you! You're completely sellfish!"

Bean was left with nothing to say.

"Self-delusion dies hard," said Petra softly, slipping her hand into his.

"I don't love anybody," said Bean.

"You keep breaking your heart with the people you love," said Petra. "You just can't ever admit it until they're dead."

Bean thought of Poke. Of Sister Carlotta,

He thought of the children he never meant to have. The children that he would make with Petra, this girl who had been such a wise and loyal friend to him, this woman whom, when he thought he might lose her to Achilles, he realized that he loved more than anyone else on Earth. The children he kept denying, refusing to let them exist because ...

Because he loved them too much, even now, when they did not exist, he loved them too much to cause them the pain of losing their father, to risk them suffering the pain of dying young when there was no one who could save them.

The pain he could bear himselt he refused to let them bear, he loved them so much.

And now he had to stare the truth in the face: What good would it do to love his children as much as he already did, if he never had those children?

He was crying, and for a moment he let himself go, shedding tears for the dead women he had loved so much, and for his own death, so that he would never see his children grow up, so he would never see Petra grow old beside him, as women and men were meant to do.

Then he got control of himself, and said what he had decided, not with his mind, but with his heart. "If there's some way to be sure that they don't have-that they won't have Anton's Key." Then I'll have children. Then I'll marry Petra.

She felt her hand tighten in his. She understood. She had won.

"Easy," said Anton. "Still just the tiniest bit illegal, but it can be done."

Petra had won, but Bean understood that he had not lost. No, her victory was his as well.

"It will hurt," said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness."

"You're such a poet," murmured Bean. But then he flung one arm over Anton's shoulders, and another around Petra's back, and held to both of them as his blurring eyes looked out over the sparkling sea.

Hours later, after dinner in a little Italian restaurant with an ancient garden, after a walk along the rambla in the noisy frolicking crowds of townspeople enjoying their membership in the human race and celebrating or searching for their mates, Bean and Petra sat in the parlor of Anton's old-fashioned home, his fiancee shyly sifting beside him, her children asleep in the back bedrooms.

"You said it would he easy," said Bean. "To be sure my children wouldn't be like me."

Anton looked at him thoughtfully. "Yes," he finally said. "There is one man who not only knows the theory, but has done the work. Nondestructive tests in newly formed embryos. It would mean fertilization in vitro."

"Oh good," said Petra. "A virgin birth."

"It would mean embryos that could be implanted even after the father is dead," said Anton.

"You thought of everything, how sweet," said Bean.

"I'm not sure you want to meet him," said Anton.

"We do," said Petra. "Soon."

"You have a bit of history with