Shadow of the Giant Page 0,16

at times like this he felt nothing but despair. There was no help for him, and none for them, either. He would not find them. And if he did, he could not help them.

What difference has my life made? I killed one man. He was a monster, but I had it in my power to kill him at least once before, and failed to do it. So don't I share in the responsibility for what he did in the intervening years? The deaths, the misery.

Including Petra's suffering when she was his captive. Including our own suffering over the children he stole from us.

And yet he went on searching, using every contact he could think of, every search engine on the nets, every program he could devise for manipulating the public records in order to be ready to identify which births were of his children, implanted in surrogates.

For of that much he was certain. Achilles and Volescu had never intended to give the embryos back to him and Petra. That promise had only been a lure. A man of less malice than Achilles might have killed the embryos - as he pretended to do when he broke test tubes during their last confrontation in Ribeirão Preto. But for Achilles, killing itself was never a pleasure. He killed when he thought it was necessary. When he actually wanted to make someone suffer, he made sure the suffering lingered as long as possible.

Bean's and Petra's children would be born to mothers unknown to them, probably scattered throughout the world by Volescu.

But Achilles had done his work well. Volescu's travels were completely erased from the public record. And there was nothing about the man to make him particularly memorable. They could show his picture to a million airline workers and another million cab drivers throughout the world and half of them might remember seeing a man who looked "like that" but none of them would be sure of anything and Volescu's path could not be retraced.

And when Bean had tried to appeal to Volescu's lingering shreds of decency - which he hoped existed, against all evidence - the man had gone underground and now all Bean could hope for was that somebody, some agency somewhere, would find him, arrest him, and hold him long enough for Bean to...

To what? Torture him? Threaten him? Bribe him? What could possibly induce Volescu to tell him what he needed to know?

Now the International Fleet had sent him some officer to give him "important information." What could they possibly know? The I.F. was forbidden to operate on the surface of Earth. Even if they had agents who had discovered Volescu's whereabouts, why would they risk exposing their own illegal activities just to help Bean find his babies? They had made a big deal about how loyal they were to the Battle School graduates, especially to Ender's Jeesh, but he doubted it went that far. Money, that's what they offered. All the Battle School grads had a nice pension. They could go home like Cincinnatus and farm for the rest of their lives, without even having to worry about the weather or the seasons or the harvest. They could grow weeds and still prosper.

Instead, I stupidly allowed children of my deformed and self-destructive genes to be created in vitro and now Volescu has planted them in foreign wombs and I must find them before he and people like him can exploit them and use them up and then watch them die of giantism, like me, before they turn twenty.

Volescu knows. He would never leave it to chance. Because he still imagined himself to be a scientist. He would want to gather data about the children. To him, it was all one big experiment, with the added inconvenience of being illegal and based on stolen embryos. To Volescu, those embryos belonged to him by right. To him, Bean was nothing but the experiment that got away. Anything he produced was part of Volescu's long-term study.

An old man sat at the table in the conference room. It took Bean a moment to decide whether his skin was naturally dark or merely weathered into a barnwood color and texture. Both, probably.

I know him, thought Bean. Mazer Rackham. The man who saved humanity in the Second Bugger Invasion. Who should have been dead many decades ago, but who surfaced long enough to train Ender himself for the last campaign.

"They send you to Earth?"

"I'm retired," said Rackham.

"So am I," said Bean. "So is Ender.