Shadow of the giant

that they would have taken
her. She was in the midst of changing her identity. She had no health
insurance.
    But because he was so small, the birth was easy. He just...
came out. And small as he was, he didn't have any problems. He didn't even look
like one of those premature babies, the ones who looked so ... fetal. Fishlike.
Not her boy. He was beautiful, completely normal looking. Just... small.
    Small and brilliant. It almost frightened her sometimes. He
had said his first word just a couple of days ago. "Mama," of
course—who else did he know? And when she spoke to him, explained things to
him, told him about his father, he seemed to be listening intently. He seemed
to understand. Was that possible?
    Of course it was. Achilles's child would be wiser than
normal. And if he was small, well, Achilles himself had been born with a
twisted foot. An abnormal body to contain extraordinary gifts.
    Secretly, she had named the baby Achilles Flandres II. But
she was careful. She didn't write that name anywhere but in her heart. Instead
the birth certificate called him Randall Firth. She was going by the name
Nichelle Firth now. The real Nichelle Firth was a retarded woman in a special
school where she had worked as an aide. Randi looked old enough, she knew, to
pass for the right age—being on the run and working so hard and worrying all the
time gave her a kind of tired look that aged her. But what did she care about
vanity? She wasn't trying to attract a man. She knew men well enough to know
that none of them would want to marry a woman only to have her spend all her
care on another man's baby.
    So she made herself up only enough to be hirable in decent
jobs that didn't require a long resume. They'd say, Where have you worked
before, and she'd say, Nothing since college, they wouldn't even remember me, I
was a stay-at-home mom, but my husband wasn't a sleep-at-home guy, so here I
am, no resume except my baby's healthy and my house is clean and I know how to
work like my life depended on it cause now it does. That line got her hired
anywhere she bothered to apply. She'd never be an executive but she didn't want
to be. Just put in her hours, get "Randall" out of daycare, and then
talk to him, sing to him, and study about how to be a good mother and raise a
healthy, confident baby who would have the strength of character to overcome the
bigotry against his father and take on the whole world.
    But these wars, and Peter Wiggin's hideous face on the
camera, announcing this nation was now in the FPE and that nation was allied
with the FPE, it worried her. She couldn't hide forever. Her fingerprints couldn't
be changed, and there was that shoplifting arrest when she was in college. It
was so stupid. She really had sort of forgotten that she took the thing. If
she'd remembered she would have changed her mind and paid for it, like the
other times. But she forgot and they stopped her outside the store so she had
actually done the theft, they said, and she wasn't a minor so she got the whole
arrest treatment. They let her off, but her prints were in the system. So
someday somebody would know who she really was. And the man who approached her,
who gave her Achilles's baby—how could she be sure he wouldn't tell them?
Between what he told them and her fingerprints, they could find her no matter
how often she changed her name.
    That was when she decided that for the first time in human
history, when a person was not safe anywhere on Earth, he had somewhere else to
go.
    Why should her little Achilles Flandres II be raised here,
in hiding, with bloodthirsty monsters out to kill him in order 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