“Well, where does that leave us? The nicest thing we could do for Achilles would be to post our address on the nets and wait for him to send someone to kill us.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Carlotta. “Christ said be good to your enemies. It wouldn’t be good for Achilles to find us, because then he’d kill us and have even more murders to answer for before the judgment bar of God. The best thing we can do for Achilles is to keep him from killing us. And if we love him, we’ll stop him from ruling the world while we’re at it, since power like that would only compound his opportunities to sin.”

  “Why don’t we love the hundreds and thousands and millions of people who’ll die in the wars he’s planning to launch?”

  “We do love them,” said Carlotta. “But you’re confused the way so many people are, who don’t understand the perspective of God. You keep thinking that death is the most terrible thing that can happen to a person, but to God, death just means you’re coming home a few moments ahead of schedule. To God, the dreadful outcome of a human life is when that person embraces sin and rejects the joy that God offers. So of all the millions who might die in a war, each individual life is tragic only if it ends in sin.”

  “So why are you going to such trouble to keep me alive?” asked Bean, thinking he knew the answer.

  “You want me to say something that will weaken my case,” said Carlotta. “Like telling you that I’m human and so I want to prevent your death right now because I love you. And that’s true, I have no children but you’re as close as I come to having any, and I would be stricken to the soul if you died at the hands of that twisted boy. But in truth, Julian Delphiki, the reason I work so hard to prevent your death is because, if you died today, you would probably go to hell.”

  To his surprise, Bean was stung by this. He understood enough of what Carlotta believed that he could have predicted this attitude, but the fact that she put it into words still hurt. “I’m not going to repent and get baptized, so I’m bound to go to hell, therefore no matter when I die I’m doomed,” he said.

  “Nonsense. Our understanding of doctrine is not perfect, and no matter what the popes have said, I don’t believe for a moment that God is going to damn for eternity the billions of children he allowed to be born and die without baptism. No, I think you’re likely to go to hell because, despite all your brilliance, you are still quite amoral. Sometime before you die, I pray most earnestly that you will learn that there are higher laws that transcend mere survival, and higher causes to serve. When you give yourself to such a great cause, my dear boy, then I will not fear your death, because I know that a just God will forgive you for the oversight of not having recognized the truth of Christianity during your lifetime.”

  “You really are a heretic,” said Bean. “None of those doctrines would pass muster with any priest.”

  “They don’t even pass muster with me,” said Carlotta. “But I don’t know a soul who doesn’t maintain two separate lists of doctrines—the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by. I’m simply one of the rare ones who knows the difference. You, my boy, are not.”

  “Because I don’t believe in any doctrines.”

  “That,” said Carlotta with exaggerated smugness, “is proof positive of my assertion. You are so convinced that you believe only what you believe that you believe, that you remain utterly blind to what you really believe without believing you believe it.”

  “You were born in the wrong century,” said Bean. “You could make Thomas Aquinas tear out his hair. Nietzsche and Derrida would accuse you of obfuscation. Only the Inquisition would know what to do with you—toast you nice and brown.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve actually read Nietzsche and Derrida. Or Aquinas, for that matter.”

  “You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake.”

  “You arrogant impossible boy.”

  “But Geppetta, I’m not a real boy.”

  “You’re certainly not a puppet, or not my puppet, anyway. Go outside and play now, I’m busy.”

  Sending him outside was not a punishment, however. Sister Carlotta knew that. From the moment they got their desks linked to the nets, they had both spent most of every day indoors, gathering information. Carlotta, whose identity was shielded by the firewalls in the Vatican computer system, was able to continue all her old relationships and thus had access to all her best sources, taking care only to avoid saying where she was or even what time zone she was in. Bean, however, had to create a new identity from scratch, hiding behind a double blind of mail servers specializing in anonymity, and even then he kept no identity for longer than a week. He formed no relationships and therefore could develop no sources. When he needed specific information, he had to ask Carlotta to help him find it, and then she had to determine whether it was something she might legitimately ask, or whether it was something that might be a clue that she had Bean with her. Most of the time she decided she dared not ask. So Bean was crippled in his research. Still, they shared what information they could, and despite his disadvantages, there was one advantage that remained to him: The mind looking at his data was his own. The mind that had scored higher than anyone else on the Battle School tests.

  Unfortunately, Truth did not care much about such credentials. It refused to give up and reveal itself just because it realized you were bound to find it eventually.

  Bean could only take so many hours of frustration before he had to get up and go outside. It wasn’t just to get away from his work, however. “The climate agrees with me,” he told Sister Carlotta on their second day, when, dripping with sweat, he headed for his third shower since waking. “I was born to live with heat and humidity.”

  At first she had insisted on going everywhere with him. But after a few days he was able to persuade her of several things. First, he looked old enough not to be accompanied by his grandmother everywhere he went—“Avó Carlotta” was what he called her here, their cover story. Second, she would be no protection for him anyway, since she had no weapons and no defensive skills. Third, he was the one who knew how to live on the streets, and even though Araraquara was hardly the kind of dangerous place that Rotterdam had been when he was younger, he had already mapped in his mind a hundred different escape routes and hiding places, just by reflex. When Carlotta realized that she would need his protection a lot more than he would need hers, she relented and allowed him to go out alone, as long as he did his best to remain inconspicuous.

  “I can’t stop people from noticing the foreign boy.”

  “You don’t look that foreign,” she said. “Mediterranean body types are common here. Just try not to speak a lot. Always look like you have an errand but never like you’re in a hurry. But then, it was you who taught me that that was how to avoid attracting attention.”

  And so here he was today, weeks after they arrived in Brasil, wandering the streets of Araraquara and wondering what great cause might make his life worthwhile in Carlotta’s eyes. For despite all her faith, it was her approval, not God’s, that seemed like it might be worth striving for, as long as it didn’t interfere with his project of staying alive. Was it enough to be a thorn in Achilles’ side? Enough to look for ways to oppose him? Or was there something else he should be doing?

  At the crest of one of Araraquara’s many hills there was a sorvete shop run by a Japanese-Brazilian family. The family had been in business there for centuries, as their sign proclaimed, and Bean was both amused and moved by this, in light of what Carlotta had said. For this family, making flavored frozen desserts to eat from a cone or cup was the great cause that gave them continuity through the ages. What could be more trivial than that? And yet Bean came here, again and again, because their recipes were, in fact, delicious, and when he thought about how many other people for these past two or three hundred years must have paused and taken a moment’s pleasure in the sweet and delicate flavors, in the feel of the smooth sorvete in their mouths, he could not disdain that cause. They offered something that was genuinely good, and people’s lives were better because they offered it. It was not a noble cause that would get written up in the histories. But it was not nothing, either. A person could do worse than spend some large percentage of his life in a cause like that.

  Bean wasn’t even sure what it meant to give himself to a cause. Did that mean turning over his decision-making to someone else? What an absurd idea. In all likelihood there was no one smarter than him on Earth, and though that did not mean he was incapable of error, it certainly meant he’d have to be a fool to turn over his decisions to someone even more likely to be wrong.

  Why he was wasting time on Carlotta’s sentiment-ridden philosophy of life he didn’t know. Doubtless that was one of his mistakes—the emotional human aspect of his mentality overriding the inhumanly aloof brilliance that, to his chagrin, only sometimes controlled his thinking.

  The sorvete cup was empty. Apparently he had eaten it all without noticing. He hoped his mouth had enjoyed every taste of it, because the eating was done by reflex while he thought his thoughts.

  Bean discarded the cup and went his way. A bicyclist passed him. Bean saw how the cyclist’s whole body bounced and rattled and vibrated from the cobblestones. That is human life, thought Bean. So bounced around that we can never see anything straight.

  Supper was beans and rice and stringy beef in the pensão’s public dining room. He and Carlotta ate together in near silence, listening to other people’s conversations and the clanking and clinking of dishes and silverware. Any real conversation between them would doubtless leak some memorable bit of information that might raise questions and attract attention. Like, why did a woman who talked like a nun have a grandson? Why did this child who looked to be six talk like a philosophy professor half the time? So they ate in silence except for conversations about the weather.

  After supper, as always, they each signed on to the nets to check their mail. Carlotta’s mail was interesting and real. All of Bean’s correspondents, this week anyway, thought he was a woman named Lettie who was working on her dissertation and needed information, but who had no time for a personal life and so rebuffed with alacrity any attempt at friendly and personal conversation. But so far, there was no way to find Achilles’ signature in any nation’s behavior. While most countries simply did not have the resources to kidnap Ender’s jeesh in such a short time, of those that did have the resources, there was not one that Bean could rule out because they lacked the arrogance or aggressiveness or contempt for law to do it. Why, it could even have been done by Brasil itself—for all he knew, his former companions from the Formic War might be imprisoned somewhere in Araraquara. They might hear in the early morning the rumble of the very garbage truck that picked up the sorvete cup that he threw away today.

  “I don’t know why people spread these things,” said Carlotta.

  “What?” asked Bean, grateful for the break from the eye-blearing work he was doing.

  “Oh, these stupid superstitious good-luck dragons. There must be a dozen different dragon pictures now.”

  “Oh, é,” said Bean. “They’re everywhere, I just don’t notice them anymore. Why dragons, anyway?”

  “I think this is the oldest of them. At least it’s the one I saw first, with the little poem,” said Carlotta. “If Dante were writing today, I’m sure there’d be a special place in his hell for people who start these things.”

  “What poem?”

  “‘Share this dragon,’” Carlotta recited. “‘If you do, lucky end for them and you.’”

  “Oh, yeah, dragons always bring a lucky end. I mean, what does that poem actually say? That you’ll die lucky? That it’ll be lucky for you to end?”

  Carlotta chuckled.

  Bored with his correspondence, Bean kept the nonsense going. “Dragons aren’t always lucky. They had to discontinue Dragon Army in Battle School, it was so unlucky. Till they revived it for Ender, and no doubt they gave it to him because people thought it was bad luck and they were trying to stack everything against him.”

  Then a thought passed through his mind, ever so briefly, but it woke him from his lethargy.

  “Forward me that picture.”

  “I bet you already have it on a dozen letters.”

  “I don’t want to search. Send me that one.”

  “You’re still that Lettie person? Haven’t you been that one for two weeks now?”

  “Five days.”

  It took a few minutes for the message to be routed to him, but when it finally showed up in his mail, he looked closely at the image.

  “Why in the world are you paying attention to this?” asked Carlotta.

  He looked up to see her watching him.

  “I don’t know. Why are you paying attention to the way I’m paying attention to it?” He grinned at her.

  “Because you think it matters. I may not be as smart as you are about most things, but I’m very much smarter than you are about you. I know when you’re intrigued.”

  “Just the juxtaposition of the image of a dragon with the word ‘end.’ Endings really aren’t considered all that lucky. Why wouldn’t the person write ‘luck will come’ or ‘lucky fate’ or something else? Why ‘lucky end’?”

  “Why not?”

  “End. Ender. Ender’s army was Dragon.”

  “Now, that’s a little far-fetched.”

  “Look at the drawing,” said Bean. “Right in the middle, where the bitmap is so complicated—there’s one line that’s damaged. The dots don’t line up at all. It’s virtually random.”

  “It just looks like noise to me.”

  “If you were being held captive but you had computer access, only every bit of mail you sent out was scrutinized, how would you send a message?” asked Bean.

  “You don’t think this could be a message from—do you?”

  “I have no idea. But now that I’ve thought of it, it’s worth looking at, don’t you think?”

  By now Bean had pasted the dragon image into a graphics program and was studying that line of pixels. “Yes, this is random, the whole line. Doesn’t belong here, and it’s not just noise because the rest of the image is still completely intact except for this other line that’s partly broken. Noise would be randomly distributed.”

  “See what it is, then,” said Carlotta. “You’re the genius, I’m the nun.”

  Soon Bean had the two lines isolated in a separate file and was studying the information as raw code. Viewed as one-byte or two-byte text code, there was nothing that remotely resembled language, but of course it couldn’t, could it, or it would never have got out. So if it was a message, then it had to be in some kind of code.

  For the next few hours Bean wrote programs to help him manipulate the data contained in those lines. He tried mathematical schemes and graphic reinterpretations, but in truth he knew all along that it wouldn’t be anything that complex. Because whoever created it would have had to do it without the aid of a computer. It had to be something relatively simple, designed only to keep a cursory examination from revealing what it was.

  And so he kept coming back to ways of reinterpreting the binary code as text. Soon enough he came upon a scheme that seemed promising. Two-byte text code, but shifted right by one position for each character, except when the right shift would make it correspond with two actual bytes in memory, in which case double shift. That way a real character would never show up if someone looked at the file with an ordinary view program.

  When he used that method on the one line, it came up as text characters only, which was not likely to happen by chance. But the other line came up random-seeming garbage.

  So he left-shifted the other line, and it, too, became nothing but text characters.

  “I’m in,” he said. “And it is a message.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Carlotta got up and came to look over his shoulder. “It’s not even language. It doesn’t divide into words.”

  “That’s deliberate,” said Bean. “If it divided into words it would look like a message and invite decoding. The easy way that any amateur can decode language is by checking word lengths and the frequency of appearance of certain letter patterns. In Common, you look for letter groupings that could be ‘a’ and ‘the’ and ‘and,’ that sort of thing.”

  “And you don’t even know what language it’s in.”

  “No, but it’s bound to be Common, because they know they’re sending it to somebody who doesn’t have a key. So it has to be decodable, and that means Common.”

  “So they’re making it easy and hard at the same time?”

  “Yes. Easy for me, hard for everyone else.”

  “Oh, come now. You think this was written to you?”

  “Ender. Dragon. I was in Dragon Army, unlike most of them. And whom else would they be writing to? I’m outside, they’re in. They know that everyone is there but me. And I’m the only person that they’d know they could reach without tipping their hand to everybody else.”

  “What, did you have some private code?”

  “Not really, but what we have is common experience, the slang of Battle School, things like that. You’ll see. When I crack it, it’ll be because I recognize a word that nobody else would recognize.”

  “If it’s from them.”

  “It is,” said Bean. “It’s what I’d do. Get word out. This picture is like a virus. It goes everywhere and gets its code into a million places, but nobody knows it’s a code because it looks like something that most people think they already understand. It’s a fad, not a message. Except to me.”

  “Almost thou persuadest me,” said Carlotta.

  “I’ll crack it before I go to bed.”

  “You’re too little to drink that much coffee. It’ll give you an aneurysm.”

  She went back to her own mail.

  Since the words weren’t separated, Bean had to look for other patterns that might give things away. There were no obvious repeated two-letter or three-letter patterns that didn’t lead to obvious dead ends. That didn’t surprise him. If he had been composing such a message, he would have dropped out all the articles and conjunctions and prepositions and pronouns that he possibly could. Not only that, but most of the words were probably deliberately misspelled to avoid repetitive patterns. But some words would be spelled correctly, and they would be designed to be unrecognizable to most people who weren’t from the Battle School culture.