Shadow of the giant

So admit what a lousy
follower you are, and go ahead and LEAD.
     
    And just in case you don't know it, you stupidest of all
possible geniuses: I still love you. I've always loved you. But no woman in her
right mind would ever marry you and have your babies because NOBODY COULD STAND
TO RAISE THEM. You will have the most hellish children. So have them in a
colony where there'll be someplace for them to go when they run away from home
about fifteen times before they're ten.
     
    Dink, I'm going to be happy, in the long run. And yes, I did
set myself up for hard times when I married a man who's going to die and whose
children will probably have the same disease. But Dink—nobody ever marries
anybody who ISN'T going to die.
     
    God be with you, my friend. Heaven knows the devil already
is.
     
    Love, Petra
     
     
    Bean held two babies and Petra one on the flight from Kiev
to Yerevan—whichever one was hungriest got mama. Petra's parents lived there
now; by the time Achilles died and they could return to Armenia, the tenants in
their old home in Maralik had changed it too much for them to want to return.
    Besides, Stefan, Petra's younger brother, was quite the
world traveler now, and Maralik was too small for him. Yerevan, while not what
anyone would call one of the great world cities, was still a national capital,
and it had a university worth studying at, when he graduated from high school.
    But to Petra, Yerevan was as unfamiliar a city as Volgograd
would have been, or any of the cities named San Salvador. Even the Armenian
that was still spoken by many on the street sounded strange to her. It made her
sad. I have no native land, she thought.
    Bean, however, was drinking it all in. Petra got into the
cab first, and he handed her Bella and the newest—but largest—of the babies,
Ramon, whom he had picked up in the Philippines. Once Bean was inside the taxi,
he held Ender up to the window. And since their firstborn son was beginning to
show signs that he understood speech, it wasn't just a matter of playfulness.
    "This is your mama's homeland," said Bean.
"All these people look just like her." Bean turned back to the two
that Petra was holding. "You children all look different, because half
your genetic material comes from me. And I'm a mongrel. So in your whole life,
there'll be no place you can go where you'll look like the locals."
    "That's right, depress and isolate the children from
the start," said Petra.
    "It's worked so well for me."
    "You weren't depressed as a child," said Petra.
"You were desperate and terrified."
    "So we try to make things better for our
children."
    "Look, Bella, look, Ramon," said Petra. "This
is Yerevan, a city with lots of people that we don't know at all. The whole
world is full of strangers."
    The taxi driver spoke up, in Armenian: "Nobody in
Yerevan is a stranger to Petra Arkanian."
    "Petra Delphiki," she corrected him mildly.
    "Yes, yes, of course," he said in Common. "I
just meaning that if you want a drink in a tavern, nobody let you pay!"
    "Does that go for her husband?" asked Bean.
    "Man big like you?" said the driver. "They
don't tell you the price, they ask you what you wanting to give!" He
roared with laughter at his own joke. Not realizing, of course, that Bean's
size was killing him. "Big man like you, little tiny babies like
these." He laughed again.
    Think how amused he'd be if he knew that the largest baby,
Ramon, was the youngest.
    "I knew we should have walked from the airport,"
said Bean in Portuguese.
    Petra grimaced. "That's rude, to speak in a language he
doesn't know."
    "Ah. I'm glad to know that the concept of rudeness does
exist in Armenia."
    The taxi driver picked up on the mention of Armenia, even
though the rest of the sentence, being in Portuguese, was a mystery to him.
"You wanting a tour of Armenia? Not a big country, I can take you, special
price, meter not running."
    "No time for that," said Petra in Armenian.
"But thanks for offering."
    The Arkanian family now lived in a nice apartment building—all
balconies and glass, yet upscale enough that there was no hanging laundry
visible from the street. Petra had told her family she was coming, but asked
them not to meet her at the airport. They had gotten so used to the
extraordinary security during the days when Petra and Bean were in hiding from
Achilles Flandres that they accepted this unquestioningly.
    The doorman recognized Petra from her pictures, which
appeared in the Armenian papers whenever