Shadow of the giant

decided
to 'rescue' him instead."
    "Maybe he's learned from his mistake."
    "He thinks he learned from it," said Bean,
"but Peter is Peter. It wasn't a mistake, it's who he is. He can't listen
to anyone else if he thinks he has a better plan. And he always thinks he has a
better plan."
    "Nevertheless."
    "I can't help Peter because Peter won't be
helped."
    "He took Petra along on his visit to Alai."
    "His top secret visit that the I.F. couldn't possibly
know about."
    "We keep track of our alumni."
    "Is that how you pay for your new-model starships?
Alumni donations?"
    "Our best graduates are still too young to be at the
really high salary levels."
    "I don't know. You have two heads of state."
    "Doesn't it intrigue you, Bean, to imagine what the
history of the world would have been like if there had been two Alexanders at
the same time?"
    "Alai and Hot Soup?" asked Bean. "It'll all
boil down to which of them has the most resources. Alai has most at the moment,
but China has staying power."
    "But then you add to the two Alexanders a Joan of Arc
here and there, and a couple of Julius Caesars, maybe an Attila, and..."
    "You see Petra as Joan of Arc?" asked Bean.
    "She could be."
    "And what am I?"
    "Why, Genghis Khan of course, if you choose to
be," said Rackham.
    "He has such a bad reputation."
    "He doesn't deserve it. His contemporaries knew he was
a man of might who exercised his power lightly upon those who obeyed him."
    "I don't want power. I'm not your Genghis."
    "No," said Rackham. "That's the problem. It
all depends on who has the disease of ambition. When Graff took you into Battle
School, it was because your will to survive seemed to do the same job as
ambition. But now it doesn't."
    "Peter's your Genghis," said Bean. "That's
why you want me to help him."
    "He might be," said Rackham. "And you're the
only one who can help him. Anybody else would make him feel threatened. But
you..."
    "Because I'm going to die."
    "Or leave. Either way, he can have the use of you, as
he thinks, and then be rid of you."
    "It's not as he thinks. It's what you want. I'm a book
in a lending library. You lend me to Peter for a while. He turns me in, then
you send me out on another chase after some dream or other. You and Graff, you
still think you're in charge of the human race, don't you?"
    Rackham looked off into the distance. "It's a job that,
once you take it on, it's hard to let go. One day out in space I saw something
no one else could see, and I fired a missile and killed a Hive Queen and we won
that war. From then on, the human race was my responsibility."
    "Even if you're no longer the best qualified to lead
it."
    "I didn't say I was the leader. Only that I have the
responsibility. To do whatever it takes. Whatever I can. And what I can do is
this: I can try to persuade the most brilliant military mind on Earth to help
unify the nations under the leadership of the only man who has the will and the
wit to hold them all together."
    "At what price? Peter's not a great fan of democracy."
    "We're not asking for democracy," said Rackham.
"Not at first. Not until the power of nations is broken. You have to tame
the horse before you can let it have its head."
    "And you say you're just the servant of humanity,"
said Bean. "Yet you want to put a bridle and saddle on the human race, and
let Peter ride."
    "Yes," said Rackham. "Because humanity isn't
a horse. Humanity is a breeding ground for ambition, for territorial
competitors, for nations that do battle, and if the nations break down, then
tribes, clans, households. We were bred for war, it's in our genes, and the
only way to stop the bloodshed is to give one man the power to subdue all the
others. All we can hope for is that it be a decent enough man that the peace
will be better than the wars, and last longer."
    "And you think Peter's the man."
    "He has the ambition you lack."
    "And the humanity?"
    Rackham shook his head. "Don't you know by now how
human you are?"
    Bean wasn't going to go down that road. "Why don't you
and Graff just leave the human race alone? Let them go on building empires and
tearing them down."
    "Because the Hive Queens aren't the only aliens out
there."
    Bean sat up.
    "No, no, we haven't seen any, we have no evidence. But
think about it. As long as humans seemed to be unique, we could live out our
species history as we always had. But now we know that it's possible for
intelligent life to evolve twice, and in very different ways. If twice, then
why not three