Shadow of the Giant Page 0,120
to punish his father for being better than them? When instead he could grow up on a clean new colony world, where no one would care that the baby wasn't really hers or that he was small, if he was smart and worked hard and she raised him right? They promised that there would be trade back and forth between colony worlds, and visits from starships. When the time was right for Achilles II to claim his heritage, his legacy, his throne, she would bring him aboard one of those starships and they'd come back to Earth.
She had studied the relativistic effects of star travel. It might be as much as a hundred years or more - fifty years out and fifty years back, say - but it would only be three or four years of voyaging. So all of Achilles's enemies would be long since dead. Nobody would bother spreading vicious lies about him anymore. The world would be ready to hear of him with fresh ears, with open minds.
She couldn't leave him alone in the apartment. It was a drizzly afternoon, though. Was it worth risking him catching cold?
She bundled him well and carried him in a sling in front of her. He was so small, it felt like he was lighter than her purse. Her umbrella shielded them both from the rain. They'd be fine.
It was a long walk to the Metro station, but that was the best - and the driest - way to get to the liaison office of the Ministry of Colonization, where she could sign up. That would be a risk, of course. They might fingerprint her. They might run a check. But... surely they knew that many people would choose to go on a colony ship because they needed to get away from their old lives. And if they found that she had changed her name, the shoplifting arrest might explain it. She had been drifting into crime and ... what would they assume? Drugs, probably ... but now she wanted a fresh start, under a new name.
Or maybe she should use her real name.
No, because under that name she had no baby. And if they questioned whether "Randall" was really hers and ran a genetic test, they'd find that he had none of her genes. They'd wonder where she had kidnapped him. He was so small they'd think he was a newborn. And the birth had been so easy, there'd been no tearing - did they have tests to determine if she had ever given birth? Nightmares, nightmares. No, she'd give them her new name and then be prepared to run if they came looking for her. What else could she do?
It was worth the risk, to get him off planet.
On the way to the Metro she walked past a mosque, but there were cops outside, directing traffic. Had there been a bombing? Those were happening in other places - Europe, she kept hearing - but not in America, surely. Not lately, anyway.
No, not a bombing. Just a speaker. Just...
"Caliph Alai." She heard someone say it, almost as if they had been speaking to her.
Caliph Alai! The one man on Earth who seemed to have the courage to stand against Peter Wiggin.
Luckily she had a scarf over her head - she looked Muslim enough for this secular town, where plenty of Muslims wore no special clothing at all. Nobody challenged her, a woman with a baby, though they did make everybody leave things like umbrellas and purses and jackets at the security counter.
She walked into the women's section of the mosque. She was surprised at how the carved and decorated latticework interfered with her ability to see what was going on in the men's part of the mosque. Apparently even liberal American mosques still thought women did not need to see the speaker for themselves. Randi had heard about such things, but the only church she had ever attended was Presbyterian and families sat together there.
There were cameras all over the men's section, so maybe the view from here was as good as most men were getting. She wasn't converting to Islam, anyway, she just wanted to catch a glimpse of Caliph Alai.
He was speaking in Common, not Arabic. She was glad of that.
"I remain Caliph, no matter where I live. I will take with me in my colony only Muslims who believe in Islam as a religion of peace. I leave behind me the bloodthirsty false Muslims who called their