Shadow of the giant

crying."
    "I'm so happy," she said.
    "You were thinking about how old little Ender will be
when he dies."
    "That's silly," she said. "We're going off in
a starship until they find a cure. He's going to live to be a hundred."
    "Petra " said Bean.
    "What. I'm not lying."
    "You're crying because in your mind's eye you can
already see the death of your baby."
    She sat up and lifted the now-sleeping baby to her shoulder.
"Bean, you really are bad at guessing things like this. I was crying
because I thought of you as a little baby, and how you didn't have a father to
go and get you when you cried in the night, and you didn't have a mother to
hold you and feed you from her own body, and you had no experience of
love."
    "But when I finally found out what it was, I got more
of it than any man could hope for."
    "Damn right," said Petra. "And don't you
forget it."
    She got up and took the baby back to the bassinet.
    And tears came to Bean's eyes. Not pity for himself as a
baby. But remembering Sister Carlotta, who had become his mother and stayed
with him long before he learned what love was and was able to give any back to
her. And some of his tears were also for Poke, the friend who took him in when
he was in the last stages of death by malnutrition in Rotterdam.
    Petra, don't you know how short life is, even when you don't
have some disease like Anton's Key? So many people prematurely in their graves,
and some of them I put there. Don't cry for me. Cry for my brothers who were
disposed of by Volescu as he destroyed evidence of his crimes. Cry for all the
children that no one ever loved.
    Bean thought he was being subtle, turning his head so Petra
couldn't see his tears when she came back to bed. Whether she saw or not, she
snuggled close to him and held him.
    How could he tell this woman who had always been so good to
him and loved him more than he knew how to return—how could he tell her that he
had lied to her? He didn't believe that there would ever be a cure for Anton's
Key.
    When he got on that starship with the babies that had his
same disease, he expected to take off and head outward into the stars. He would
live long enough to teach the children how to run the starship. They would
explore. They would send reports back by ansible. They would map habitable
planets farther away than any other humans would want to travel. In fifteen or
twenty years of subjective time they would live a thousand years or more in
real time, and the data they collected would be a treasure trove. They would be
the pioneers of a hundred colonies or more.
    And then they would die, having no memory of setting foot on
a planet, and having no children to carry on their disease for another
generation.
    And it would all be bearable, for them and for Bean, because
they would know that back on Earth, their mother and their healthy siblings
were living normal lives, and marrying and having children of their own, so
that by the time their thousand-year voyage was over, every living human being
would be related to them one way or another.
    That's how we'll be part of everything.
    So no matter what I promised, Petra, you're not coming with
me, and neither are our healthy children. And someday you'll understand and
forgive me for breaking my word to you.
     
     
     
    9
     
    PENSION
     
     
    From: PeterWiggin%[email protected]
    To: Champi%T'it'[email protected]
    Re: The best hope of the Quechua and Aymara peoples
     
    Dear Champi T'it'u,
     
    Thank you for consenting to visit with me. Considering that
I tried to call you "Dumper" as if you were still a child in Battle
School and a friend of my brother, I'm surprised you didn't toss me out on the
spot.
     
    As I promised, I am sending you the current draft of the
Constitution of the Free People of Earth. You are the first person outside the
innermost circle of Hegemony officials to look at it, and please remember that
it is only a draft. I would be grateful for your suggestions.
     
    My goal is to have a Constitution that would be as
attractive to nations that are recognized as states as to peoples that are
still stateless. The Constitution will fail if the language is not identical
for both. Therefore there are aspirations you would have to give up and claims
you would have to relinquish. But I think you will see that the same will be
true for the states that now occupy territory you claim for the Quechua and
Aymara peoples.
     
    The principles of majority, viability, contiguity,