First meetings in the Enderverse

gone.
    Nor, when he tried to return to the form Andrew Wiggin had created, was he able to bring it back. It should have been there, with the young man’s list of holdings intact, so Benedetto could make a run at some of the stocks and funds manually-there were plenty of ways to ransack them, even when he couldn’t get the password from his snitch. But the form was blank.
    The company names had all disappeared.
    What had happened? How could both these things go wrong at the same time?
    No matter. The list was so long it had to have been buffered. Predator would find it. Only now Predator wasn’t responding. It wasn’t in memory either. He had used it only a moment ago!
    This was impossible. This was…
    How could the boy have introduced a virus on his system just by entering tax form information? Could he have embedded it into one of the company names somehow? Benedetto was a user of illegal software, not a designer; but still, he had never heard of anything that could come in through uncrunched data, not through the security of the tax system.
    This Andrew Wiggin had to be some kind of spy. Sorelledolce was one of the last holdouts against complete federation with Starways Congress-he had to be a Congress spy sent to try to subvert the independence of Sorelledolce.
    Only that was absurd. A spy would have come in prepared to submit his tax forms, pay his taxes, and move right along. A spy would have done nothing to call attention to himself. There had to be some explanation. And Benedetto was going to get it. Whoever this Andrew Wiggin was, Benedetto was not going to be cheated out of inheriting his fair share of the boy’s wealth. He’d waited a long time for this, and just because this Wiggin boy had some fancy security software didn’t mean Benedetto wouldn’t find a way to get his hands on what was rightly his.

    ***

    Andrew was still a little steamed as he and Valentine made their way out of the starport. Sorelledolce was one of the newer colonies, only a hundred years old, but its status as an associated planet meant that a lot of shady and unregulatable businesses migrated there, bringing full employment, plenty of opportunities, and a boomtown ethos that made everyone’s step seem vigorous-and everyone’s eyes seem to keep glancing over their shoulder. Ships came here full of people and left full of cargo, so that the colony population was nearing four million and that of the capital, Donnabella, a full million.

    The architecture was an odd mix of log cabins and prefab plastic. You couldn’t tell a building’s age by that, though-both materials had coexisted from the start. The native flora was fern jungle and so the fauna-dominated by legless lizards-were of dinosaurian proportions, but the human settlements were safe enough and cultivation produced so much that half the land could be devoted to cash crops for export-legal ones like textiles and illegal ones for ingestion. Not to mention the trade in huge colorful serpent skins used as tapestries and ceiling coverings all over the worlds governed by Starways Congress. Many a hunting party went out into the jungle and came back a month later with fifty pelts, enough for the survivors to retire in luxury. Many a hunting party went out, however, and was never seen again. The only consolation, according to local wags, was that the biochemistry differed just enough that any snake that ate a human had diarrhea for a week. It wasn’t quite revenge, but it helped. New buildings were going up all the time, but they couldn’t keep up with demand, and Andrew and Valentine had to spend a whole day searching before they found a room they could share. But their new roommate, an Abyssinian hunter of enormous fortune, promised that he’d have his expedition and be gone on the hunt within a few days, and all he asked was that they watch over his things until he returned… or didn’t.
    “How will we know when you haven’t returned?” asked Valentine, ever the practical one.
    “The women weeping in the Libyan quarter,” he replied.
    Andrew’s first act was to sign on to the net with his own computer, so he could study his newly revealed holdings at leisure. Valentine had to spend her first few days dealing with a huge volume of correspondence arising from her latest book, in addition to the normal amount of mail she had from historians all over the settled worlds. Most of it she marked to answer later, but the urgent messages alone took three long days.