Bean did not know or care whether Anton was right, that this desire was inescapable for all human beings, though he suspected that he was—that this life wish had to be present in all living things for any species to continue as they all desperately struggled to do. It isn’t a will to survive—that is selfish, and such selfishness would be meaningless, would lead to nothing. It is a will for the species to survive with the self inside it, part of it, tied to it, forever one of the strands in the web—Bean could see that now.

  “Even if you’re right,” Bean said, “that only makes me more determined to overcome that desire and never have a child. For the reasons you just named. I grew up among orphans. I’m not going to leave any behind me.”

  “They wouldn’t be orphans,” said Petra. “They’d still have me.”

  “And when Achilles finds you and kills you?” said Bean harshly. “Are you counting on him being merciful enough to do what Volescu did for my brothers? What I cheated myself out of by being so damned smart?”

  Tears leapt to Petra’s eyes and she turned away.

  “You’re a liar when you speak like that,” said Anton softly. “And a cruel one, to say such things to her.”

  “I told the truth,” said Bean.

  “You’re a liar,” said Anton, “but you think you need the lie so you won’t let go of it. I know what these lies are—I kept my sanity by fencing myself about with lies, and believing them. But you know the truth. If you leave this world without your children in it, without having made that bond with such an alien creature as a woman, then your life will have meant nothing to you, and you’ll die in bitterness and alone.”

  “Like you,” said Bean.

  “No,” said Anton. “Not like me.”

  “What, you’re not going to die? Just because they reversed the cancer doesn’t mean something else won’t get you in the end.”

  “No, you mistake me,” he said. “I’m getting married.”

  Bean laughed. “Oh, I see. You’re so happy that you want everyone to share your happiness.”

  “The woman I’m going to marry is a good woman, a kind one. With small children who have no father. I have a pension now—a generous one—and with my help these children will have a home. My proclivities have not changed, but she is still young enough, and perhaps we will find a way for her to bear a child that is truly my own. But if not, then I will adopt her children into my heart. I will rejoin the web. My loose thread will be woven in, knotted to the human race. I will not die alone.”

  “I’m happy for you,” said Bean, surprised at how bitter and insincere he sounded.

  “Yes,” said Anton, “I’m happy for myself. This will make me miserable, of course. I will be worried about the children all the time—I already am. And getting along with a woman is hard even for men who desire them. Or perhaps especially for them. But you see, it will all mean something.”

  “I have work of my own to do,” said Bean. “The human race faces an enemy almost as terrible, in his own way, as the Formics ever were. And I don’t think Peter Wiggin is up to stopping him. In fact it looks to me as if Peter Wiggin is on the verge of losing everything to him, and then who will be left to oppose him? That’s my work. And if I were selfish and stupid enough to marry my widow and father orphans on her, it would only distract me from that work. If I fail, well, how many millions of humans have already been born and died as loose threads with their lives snipped off? Given the historical rates of infant mortality, it might be as many as half, certainly at least a quarter of all humans born. All 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, laughing. “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 selfish!”

  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 himself, 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 fiancée shyly sitting beside him, her children asleep in the back bedrooms.

  “You said it would be 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 him, Julian Delphiki,” said Anton.

  “I do?” asked Bean.

  “He kidnapped you once,” said Anton. “Along with nearly two dozen of your twins. He’s the one who turned that little genetic key they named for me. He’s the one who would have killed you if you hadn’t hid in a toilet.”

  “Volescu,” said Petra, as if the name were a bullet to be pried out of her body.

  Bean laughed grimly. “He’s still alive?”

  “Just released from prison,” said Anton. “The laws have changed. Genetic alteration is no longer a crime against humanity.”

  “Infanticide still is,” said Bean. “Isn’t it?”

  “Technically,” said Anton, “under the law it can’t be murder when the victims had no legal right to exist. I believe the charge was ‘tampering with evidence.’ Because the bodies were burned.”

  “Please tell me,” said Petra, “that it isn’t perfectly legal to murder Bean.”

  “You helped save the world between then and now,” said Anton. “I think the politics of the situation would be a little different now.”

  “What a relief,” said Bean.

  “So this non-murderer, this tamperer with evidence,” said Petra, “I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “I didn’t—I don’t,” said Anton. “I’ve never met him, but he’s written to me. Just a day before Petra did, as a matter of fact. I don’t know where he is. But I can put you in touch with him. You’ll have to take it from there.”

  “So I finally get to meet the legendary Uncle Constantine,” said Bean. “Or, as Father calls him—when he wants to irritate Mother—‘My bastard brother.’”

  “How did he get out of jail, really?” asked Petra.

  “I only know what he told me. But as Sister Carlotta said, the man’s a liar to the core. He believes his own lies. In which case, Bean, he might think he’s your father. He told her that he cloned you and your brothers from himself.”

  “And you think he should help us have children?” asked Petra.

  “I think if you want to have children without Bean’s little problem, he’s the only one who can help you. Of course, many doctors can destroy the embryos and tell you whether they would have had your talents and your curse. But since my little key has never been turned by nature, there’s no nondestructive test for it. And in order to get anyone to develop a test, you would have to subject yourself to examination by doctors who would regard you as a career-making opportunity. Volescu’s biggest advantage is he already knows about you, and he’s in no position to brag about finding you.”

  “Then give us his email,” said Bean. “We’ll go from there.”

  8

  TARGETS

  From: Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com [FREE email! Sign up a friend!]

  To: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com [JESUS loves you! ChosenOnes.Org]

  Re: Thanks for your help

  Dear Anonymous Benefactor,

  I may have been in prison but I wasn’t hiding under a rock. I know who you are, and I know what you’ve done. So when you offer to help me continue the research that was interrupted by my life sentence, and imply that you are responsible for having my charges reduced and my sentence commuted, I must suspect an ulterior motive.

  I think you plan to use my supposed rendezvous with these supposed people as a means of killing them. Sort of like Herod asking the Wise Men to tell him where the newborn king was, so he could go and worship him also.

  From: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com [Don’t go home ALONE! LonelyHearts]

  To: Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com [Your ADS get seen! Free Email!]

  Re: You have misjudged me

  Dear Doctor,

  You have misjudged me. I have no interest in anyone’s death. I want you to help them make babies that don’t have any of the father’s gifts or problems. Make a dozen for them.

  But along the way, if you happen to get any nice little embryos that do have the father’s gifts, don’t discard them, please. Keep them nice and safe. For me. For us. There are people who would very much like to raise a little garden full of beans.

  John Paul Wiggin had noticed some years ago that the whole child-rearing thing wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. Supposedly somewhere there was such a thing as a normal child, but none of them had come anywhere near his house.

  Not that he didn’t love his kids. He did. More than they would ever know; more, he suspected, than he knew himself. After all, you never know how much you love somebody until the real test comes. Would you die for this person? Would you throw yourself on the grenade, step in front of the speeding car, keep a secret under torture, to save his life? Most people never know the answer to that question. And even those who do know are still not sure whether it was love or duty or self-respect or cultural conditioning or any number of other possible explanations.

  John Paul Wiggin loved his kids. But either he didn’t have enough of them, or he had too many. If he had more, then having two of them take off for some faraway colony from which they could never return in his lifetime, that might not have been so bad, because there’d still be several left at home for him to enjoy, to help, to admire as parents wanted to admire their children.

  And if there had been one fewer. If the government had not requisitioned a third child from them. If Andrew had never been born, had never been accepted into a program for which Peter was rejected, then perhaps Peter’s pathological ambition might have stayed within normal bounds. Perhaps his envy and resentment, his need to prove himself worthy after all, would not have tainted his life, darkening even his brightest moments.

  Of course, if Andrew hadn’t been born, the world might now be honeycombed with Formic hives, and the human race nothing but a few ragged bands surviving in some hostile environment like Tierra del Fuego or Greenland or the Moon.

  It wasn’t the government requisition, either. Little known fact: Andrew had almost certainly been conceived before the requisition came. John Paul Wiggin wasn’t all that good a Catholic, until he realized that the population control laws forbade him to be. Then, because he was a stubborn Pole or a rebellious American or simply because he was that peculiar mix of genes and memory called John Paul Wiggin, there was nothing more important to him than being a good Catholic, particularly when it came to disobeying the population laws.

  It was the basis of his marriage with Theresa. She wasn’t Catholic herself—which showed that John Paul wasn’t that strict about following all the rules—but she came from a big-family tradition and she agreed with him before they got married that they would have more than two children, no matter what it cost them.

  In the end, it cost them nothing. No loss of job. No loss of prestige. In fact, they ended up greatly honored as the parents of the savior of the human race.

  Only they would never get to see Valentine or Andrew get married, would never see their children. Would probably not live long enough to know when they arrived at their colony world.

  And now they were mere fixtures attached to the life of the child they liked the least.

  Though truth to tell, John Paul didn’t dislike Peter as much as his mother did. Peter didn’t get under his skin the way he irritated Theresa. Perhaps that was because John Paul was a good counterbalance to Peter—John Paul could be useful to him. Where Peter kept a hundred things going at once, juggling all his projects and doing none of them perfectly, John Paul was a man who had to dot every i, cross every t. So without exactly telling anyone what his job was, John Paul kept close watch on everything Peter was doing and followed through on things so they actually got done. Where Peter assumed that underlings would understand his purpose and adapt, John Paul knew that they would misunderstand everything, and spelled it out for them, followed through to make sure things happened just right.

  Of course, in order to do this, John Paul had to pretend that he was acting as Peter’s eyes and ears. Fortunately, the people he straightened out had no reason to go to Peter and explain the dumb things they had been doing before John Paul showed up with his questions, his checklists, his cheerful chats that didn’t quite come right out and admit to being tutorials.

  But what could John Paul do when the project Peter was advancing was so deeply dangerous and, yes, stupid that the last thing John Paul wanted to do was help him with it?

  John Paul’s position in this little community of Hegemoniacs did not allow him to obstruct what Peter was doing. He was a facilitator, not a bureaucrat; he cut the red tape, he didn’t spin it out like a spider web.

  In the past, the most obstructive thing John Paul could do was not to do anything at all. Without him there, nudging, correcting, things slowed down, and often a project died without his help.

  But with Achilles, there was no chance of that. The Beast, as Theresa and John Paul called him, was as methodical as Peter wasn’t. He seemed to leave nothing to chance. So if John Paul simply left him alone, he would accomplish everything he wanted.

  “Peter, you’re not in a position to see what the Beast is doing,” John Paul said to him.

  “Father, I know what I’m doing.”

  “He’s got time for everybody,” said John Paul. “He’s friends with every clerk, every janitor, every secretary, every bureaucrat. People you breeze past with a wave or with nothing at all, he sits and chats with them, makes them feel important.”

  “Yes, he’s a charmer, all right.”

  “Peter—”

  “It’s not a popularity contest, Father.”

  “No, it’s a loyalty contest. You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you’ll accomplish, and nothing more. They are your power, these public servants you employ, and he’s winning their loyalty away from you.”

  “Superficially, perhaps,” said Peter.

  “For most people, the superficial is all there is. They act on the feelings of the moment. They like him better than you.”