Shadow of the giant

headed for the
ministry of defense.
    The place was as crowded as ever. Pathetically so, thought
Han Tzu. There was a reason for so many military bureaucrats a few years ago,
when China was conquering Indochina and India, its millions of soldiers spread
out to rule over a billion conquered people.
    But now, the government had direct control only over
Manchuria and the northern part of Han China. Persians and Arabs and
Indonesians administered martial law in the great port cities of the south, and
large armies of Turks were poised in Inner Mongolia, ready to slice through
Chinese defenses at a moment's notice. Another large Chinese army was isolated
in Sichuan, forbidden by the government to surrender any portion of their
troops, forcing them to sustain a multimillion-man force from the production of
that single province. In effect, they were under siege, getting weaker—and more
hated by the civilian population—all the time.
    There had even been a coup, right after the ceasefire—but it
was a sham, a reshuffling of the politicians. Nothing but an excuse for
repudiating the terms of the ceasefire.
    No one in the military bureaucracy had lost his job. It was
the military that had been driving China's new expansionism. It was the
military that had failed.
    Only Han Tzu had been relieved of his duties and sent home.
    They could not forgive him for having named their stupidity
for what it was. He had warned them every step of the way. They had ignored every
warning. Each time he had shown them a way out of their self-induced dilemmas,
they had ignored his offered plans and proceeded to make decisions based on
bravado, face-saving, and delusions of Chinese invincibility.
    At his last meeting he had left them with no face at all. He
had stood there, a very young man in the presence of old men of enormous
authority, and called them the fools they were. He laid out exactly why they
had failed so miserably. He even told them that they had lost the mandate of heaven—the
traditional excuse for a change of dynasty. This was the unforgivable sin,
since the present dynasty claimed not to be a dynasty at all, not to be an
empire, but rather to be a perfect expression of the will of the people.
    What they forgot was that the Chinese people still believed
in the mandate of heaven—and knew when a government no longer had it.
    Now, as he showed his expired i.d. at the gate of the
complex and was admitted without hesitation, he realized that there was only
one fathomable reason why they hadn't already arrested him or had him killed:
    They didn't dare.
    It confirmed that Rackham was right to hand him a four-shot
weapon and call it the mandate of heaven. There were forces at work here within
the defense department that Han Tzu could not see, waiting in his apartment for
someone to decide what to do with him. They had not even cut off his salary.
There was panic and confusion in the military and now Han Tzu knew that he was
at the center of it. That his silence, his waiting, had actually been a pestle
constantly grinding at the mortar of military failure.
    He should have known that his j'accuse speech would have
more effects than merely to humiliate and enrage his "superiors."
There were aides standing against the walls listening. And they would know that
every word that Han Tzu said was true.
    For all Han Tzu knew, his death or arrest had already been
ordered a dozen times. And the aides who had been given those orders no doubt
could prove that they had passed them along. But they would also have passed
along the story of Han Tzu, the former Battle Schooler who had been part of
Ender's Jeesh. The soldiers ordered to arrest him would have also been told
that if Han Tzu had been heeded, China would not have been defeated by the
Muslims and their strutting boy-Caliph.
    The Muslims won because they had the brains to put their
member of Ender's Jeesh, Caliph Alai, in charge of their armies—in charge of
their whole government, their religion itself.
    But the Chinese government had rejected their own Enderman,
and now were giving orders for his arrest.
    In these conversations, the phrase "mandate of
heaven" would certainly have been spoken.
    And the soldiers, if they left their quarters at all, seemed
unable to locate Han Tzu's apartment.
    For all these weeks since the war ended, the leadership must
already have come face to face with their own powerlessness. If the soldiers
would not follow them on such a simple matter as arresting the