Shadow of the giant

the kitchen. "Anybody else want something to eat?"
     
     
    That night, Petra couldn't sleep. She went out onto the
balcony and looked out over the city.
    Is there anything in this world that I can't leave?
    I've lived apart from my family for so much of my life. Does
that mean I'll miss them more or less?
    But then she realized that this had nothing to do with her
melancholy. She couldn't sleep because she knew that war was coming. Their plan
was to keep the conflict in the mountains, to make the Turks pay for every
meter. But there was no reason to think that Alai's forces—or whatever Muslim
forces they were—would shrink from bombing the big population centers.
Precision bombing had been the rule for so long—ever since Mecca was nuked—that
a sudden reversion to anti-population, saturation bombing would come as a
demoralizing shock.
    Everything depends on our being able to get and keep control
of the air. And the FPE doesn't have as many planes as the Muslim League.
    Damn those short-sighted Israelis for training the Arab air
forces to be among the most formidable in the world.
    Why was Bean so confident?
    Was it only because he knew that he'd soon leave Earth and
wouldn't have to be here to face the consequences?
    That was unfair. Bean had said he'd stay until Peter was
Hegemon in fact as well as name. Bean did not break his word.
    What if they never find a cure? What if we sail on through
space forever? What if Bean dies out there with me and the babies?
    She heard footsteps behind her. She assumed it would be
Bean, but it was her mother.
    "Awake without the babies waking you?"
    Petra smiled. "I have plenty to keep me from
sleeping."
    "But you need your sleep."
    "Eventually, my body takes it whether I like it or
not."
    Mother looked out over the city. "Did you miss
us?"
    She knew her mother wanted her to say, every day. But the
truth would have to do. "When I have time to think about anything at all,
yes. But it's not that I miss you. It's that... I'm glad you're in my life. Glad
you're in this world." She turned to face her mother. "I'm not a
little girl anymore. I know I'm still very young and I'm sure I don't know
anything yet, but I'm part of the cycle of life now. I'm no longer the youngest
generation. So I don't cling to my parents as I once would have liked to. I
missed a lot up there in Battle School. Children need families."
    "And," said Mother sadly, "they make families
out of whatever they have at hand."
    "That will never happen to my children," said
Petra. "The world isn't being invaded by aliens. I can stay with
them."
    Then she remembered that some people would claim that some
of her children were the alien invasion.
    She couldn't think that way.
    "You carry so much weight in your heart," said
Mother, stroking her hair.
    "Not as much as Bean. Far less than Peter."
    "Is this Peter Wiggin a good man?"
    Petra shrugged. "Are great men ever really good? I know
they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them,
whatever they were to start with. It's like war—does any war ever settle
anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it
solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting
it? And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men."
    "If Peter Wiggin is great."
    "Mother, he was Locke, remember? He stopped a war.
Already he was great before I came home from Battle School. And he was still in
his teens. Younger than I am now."
    "Then I asked the wrong question," said Mother.
"Is a world that he rules over going to be a good place to live?"
    Petra shrugged again. "I believe he means it to be. I
haven't seen him being vindictive. Or corrupt. He's making sure that any nation
that joins the FPE does it through the vote of the people, so nothing is being
forced on them. That's promising, isn't it?"
    "Armenia spent so many centuries yearning to have our
own nation. Now we have it, but it seems the price of keeping it is to give it
up."
    "Armenia will still be Armenia, Mother."
    "No, it won't," she said. "If Peter Wiggin
wins everything he's trying to win, then Armenia will be ... Kansas."
    "Hardly!"
    "We'll all speak Common and if you go from Yerevan to
Rostov or Ankara or Sofia, you won't even know you've gone anywhere."
    "We all speak Common now. And there'll never be a time
you can't tell Ankara from Yerevan."
    "You're so sure."
    "I'm sure of a lot of things. And about half the time,
I'm right." She