Shadow Puppets Page 0,62

thing I didn't kill myself all this knocking would have ruined my concentration and entirely spoiled my death scene. I should die like Seneca, with fine last speeches. Or Socrates, though that would be harder, since I don't have hemlock but I do have a bathtub. No razor blades, though. I don't grow enough of a beard to need any. Just another sign that I'm only a stupid kid who should never have been permitted to take a role in the grownup world.

The door to his room opened and jammed against the locking bar.

How outrageous! Who dare to use a passkey on his room?

And not just a passkey! Someone had the tool that opened the locking bar and now his door was wide open.

Assassins! Well, let them kill me here in the bed, facing them, not cowering in a corner begging them not to shoot.

"Poor baby," said Mother

"He's depressed," said Father "Don't make fun of him."

"I can't help but think of what Ender went through, fighting the Formics almost every day for weeks, completely exhausted, and yet he always got up and fought again."

Peter wanted to scream at her How dare she compare what he had just gone through with Ender's legendary "suffering." Ender never lost a battle, did she think of that? And he had just lost the war! He was entitled to sleep

"Ready? One, two, three."

Peter felt the whole mattress slide down the bed until he was awkwardly dumped onto the floor, banging his head against the frame of the bedsprings.

"Ow!" he cried.

Wouldn't that make a noble last word to be recorded by posterity?

How did the great Peter Wiggin, Hegemon of Earth (and, of course, brother of Ender Wiggin, sainted savior), meet his end?

He sustained a terrible head injury when his parents dragged him out of a hotel bed the morning after his ignominious escape from his own compound where not one person had threatened him in any way and he had no evidence of any impending threat against his person.

And what were his last words?

A one-word sentence, fit to be engraved on his monument. Ow.

"I don't think we can get him into the shower without actually touching his sacred person," said Mother

"I think you're right," said Father

"And if we touch him," said Mother, "there's a real possibility that we will be struck dead on the spot."

Other people had mothers who were compassionate, tender, comforting, understanding. His mother was a sarcastic hag who clearly hated him and always had.

"Ice bucket," said Father.

"No ice."

"But it holds water."

This was too stupid. The old throw-water-on-the-sleeping-teenager trick.

"Just go away, I'm getting up in a couple of minutes."

"No," said Mother. "You're getting up now. Your father is filling the ice bucket. You can hear the water running."

"OK, OK, leave the room so I can take my clothes off and get in the shower. Or is this just a subterfuge so you can see me naked again? You've never let me forget how you used to change my diapers, so apparently that was a very important stage in your life."

He was answered by having water dashed in his face. Not a whole bucketful, but enough to soak his head and shoulders.

"Sorry I didn't have time to fill it," said Father. "But when you started making crude sexual innuendos to my wife, I had to use whatever amount of water was at hand to shut you up before you said enough that I would have to beat your bratty little face in."

Peter got up from the mattress on the floor and pulled off the shorts he slept in. "Is this what you came in to see?"

"Absolutely," said Father. "You were wrong, Theresa: he does have balls."

"Not enough of them, apparently."

Peter stalked between them and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

Half an hour later, after keeping the press waiting only ten minutes past the appointed time, Peter walked alone onto the platform at one end of a packed conference room. All the reporters were holding up their little steadycams, the lenses peering out between the fingers of their clenched fists. It was the best turnout he had ever had at a press conference-though to be fair he had never actually held one in the United States. Maybe here they would all have been like this.

"I'm as surprised as you are to find myself here today," said Peter with a smile. "But I must say I'm grateful to the source that provided me with information that allowed me to make my exit, along with my family, from