Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  “The way you mated,” said Thulium. “Impregnate and kidnap. You’re such a noble creature, Father.”

  “I let you talk to me that way,” said Father, “because you’re my child, and therefore the only way to shut you up would be to kill you. So far, I don’t want to kill you. But please remember that every cruel thing you say stabs me to the heart. I’m only human, you know.”

  She stared steadily at him and said, “Humans evolved to live on planetary surfaces, not in flying tombs.”

  “Humans evolved to adapt to living anywhere,” said Father. “And leguminids even more so.”

  Thulium rolled her eyes and stalked out of the room. She didn’t really want to leave, but that seemed the only way to make him feel her disdain for him. Since she didn’t actually feel any disdain, but rather longed for him to notice her, she understood perfectly well that her angry exit was self-defeating. But sometimes you have to defeat yourself a little in order to maintain your independence.

  2

  Carlotta seems to believe that we had these children in order to experience the joy of rearing children. Sergeant seems to think we had the children in order to create an army—of seven. I don’t think the children we got are likely to bring either joy or military triumph.

  But their existence does allow us to study the results of the second generation after we modified Anton’s Key so that giantism is no longer linked to high intellect. It worked to arrest our own growth, of course. We are still a little below average for well-nourished specimens of humankind, but that’s not a problem for people living aboard a ship.

  However, our seven children are not undersized the way Father was and the way we were in our childhood. It appears that removing the giantism component means that from now on our offspring will follow the normal human growth pattern from birth on.

  Sergeant believes I am endangering our children’s future by continuing to distribute the data on our children’s growth and intellectual development to a few research institutions that at least claim to be studying Anton’s Key. Carlotta thinks my efforts along those lines are worthless. They may both be right.

  However, those research institutions have to continue receiving data and at least pretending to incorporate it into their ongoing studies, because we supply their funding, and have for many centuries. Our interstellar travel at near lightspeed had relativistic effects, so that whenever I transmitted a report, it was acknowledged by someone who was not on the project the last time I transmitted.

  I only hope that the data I send is not immediately deleted and vaporized. I hope they are afraid enough of loss of funding to keep careful records so that the data continue to exist, even if there is no actual research going on.

  Meanwhile, our children bicker with siblings and cousins, with only a few alliances here and there among them. They are an unpromising bunch, like the children of royalty throughout history. If they aren’t already conspiring to kill us and take control of the ship, they will begin doing so any time now. After all, we did, or at least Sergeant did and tried to bully Carlotta and me into joining him.

  It is disturbing how similar our children are to the way we were as children. But when I suggested to Carlotta that we jettison the whole tribe of them into the cold of space, she rolled her eyes and said, “Not yet.”

  We may well regret the decision to conceive them in the first place, to take them with us, and to let them grow up. But the urge to reproduce is strong in all animals, even Homo leguminensis. I actually sometimes like my own children, to the point of feeling some slight affection toward them. I could easily dump Sergeant’s twins at any time, but his youngest, Thulium, shows some signs of having a tolerable personality.

  And the only way I could harm Carlotta’s children would be to kill her first, which I will never do. Without Carlotta, we wouldn’t outnumber Sergeant, so my survival would be somewhere between impossible and intolerable.

  Like it or not, we’re stuck with these young hyperhumans until we get a good idea of who they are and what they can accomplish. That’s my research project for now. Collecting data on them makes me look like an attentive father and uncle. So far, so good.

  —Andrew Delphiki, Appendix C, Herodotus Papers

  Sprout had made decorations for his brother Blue’s birthday celebration. The whole concept of keeping the old Earth calendar on a spaceship traveling at relativistic speeds seemed absurd to him, but since the computer maintained both the real-time calendar and the ship’s calendar, there was no reason not to notice when birthdays rolled around.

  Besides, Sprout actually liked Blue. He was a kind boy, and he was happy to befriend any of the cousins. Blue and Thulium got along quite well, which was a kindness, since the twins made Thulium’s life a torture of teasing and deception and disparagement.

  So Sprout programmed birthday displays into all the screens and monitors that were capable of graphics. He did it only in Mother’s quarters, where Sprout and Blue lived with her; he knew that if he tried to put such displays up in the public areas of the ship, Uncle Sergeant and Uncle Ender would make them go away, because the screens were for monitoring ship operations, not celebrating meaningless landmarks in the lives of post-human children, whose genetics were still so unknown that nobody could guess what “age” meant anymore.

  Blue came into the family’s central table, saw the screens on the walls and the holodisplay in the center of the table, and smiled. The holodisplay had balloons infinitely rising, at different rates of speed, new ones appearing at the bottom as the old ones disappeared at the top. The screens on the walls had other celebratory activities going on—fireworks, parades, dancing. The places and the people might have had some meaning, but to children who had memories mostly of living aboard a ship, they were all strangers, and the places carried no sentimental weight.

  “Are any of these places Tochoji?” asked Blue.

  “Sorry,” said Sprout. “I think the uncles have kept the ship’s computer from fulfilling any requests concerning information or images from our birth city.”

  “I know,” said Blue. “But I also know you’re pretty good at cheating.”

  “Mother would know if I did it,” said Sprout. “And while she thinks—or says she thinks—trying to hide our birth world from us is pointless, she also thinks that it’s a bad thing for us to plunge into the depths of the ship’s computer, because what if we interfered with ship operations?”

  Blue laughed. “As if we would.”

  “She told me that I might damage something without realizing what I was doing.”

  Blue laughed even louder. “Doesn’t she know who you are? Doesn’t she understand what we are?”

  Sprout smiled and shrugged. “Sometimes I don’t think she knows what she is.”

  “I hope Uncle Sergeant lets Thulium come to the party.”

  “He’d better,” said Sprout. “Because it’s not much of a party with just the three of us.”

  “I invited Boss and Little Mum,” said Blue.

  “You really think Uncle Ender will let them come?”

  “He’s a lot nicer than Uncle Sergeant,” said Blue.

  “Nicer, but not more lenient. Whatever they think is right, they stick to it,” said Sprout.

  “I think Mother’s the same way,” said Blue. “She talks like she sympathizes with us and it’s the uncles who won’t let us do things. But I think she secretly agrees with them, but blames it on them because she wants us to think she’s kinder. Or that she loves us more.”

  “Well, you know I agree with you about how deceptive Mother can be,” said Sprout. “I just didn’t realize you were already so cynical.”

  “I’m a leguminid,” said Blue. “We don’t really believe anything that anybody tells us.”

  Sprout pulled out a piece of paper. That instantly silenced Blue, who looked at it in awe. It had a color photograph printed out on one side of it. It had been folded twice, so it could hide inside a pocket.

  “You stole paper,”
said Blue. “You stole printer time. That’s irreplaceable.”

  “It’s perfectly replaceable, any time Mother and the uncles decide to provision our ship on a planet,” said Sprout. “I wanted to give you a present.”

  “All these decorations,” said Blue. “That was plenty. That’s a lot.”

  Meanwhile, Sprout opened up the paper and laid it flat on the table, holding down two of the corners. Blue held down the other two, and looked.

  “It’s Tochoji,” said Sprout.

  “There aren’t any images from Nokonoshima on the ship’s computer!”

  “There are if you search for them with Mother’s log-in. Then it’s easy,” said Sprout.

  “Where did we live?” asked Blue.

  “I don’t know. It’s just an aerial photo of the mouth of the river and the city built on high ground over here, so that when the spring rains cause the river to flood, it doesn’t drown the town.”

  “It’s not a very big place,” said Blue.

  “It’s bigger than the population of this ship,” said Sprout. “And our father Yuuto still lives there.”

  “Do you know that? We’ve been flying for years since we left, and with relativistic time, he might be—”

  “If he was younger than thirty when you were born, Blue,” said Sprout, “then he’s way older now.”

  “Our ship is three thousand years old,” said Blue. “Our relativistic difference is not as great as with really modern starships that come closer to lightspeed. Also, we haven’t been pushing our ship to maximum speed in our lifetime.”

  Sprout shook his head. “All right, maybe he’s still alive and misses you every day.” Immediately he regretted saying that, because tears instantly came to Blue’s eyes, though he blinked them away.

  “I wonder if he ever does think about me,” said Blue.

  “I bet he does. I bet he thinks about me and Mother, too. Even if he married somebody else after we left, even if he has other children, I think he secretly loves us first,” said Sprout.

  “Do you really think so?” asked Blue.

  “No,” said Sprout. “He’s a human, and Uncle Sergeant tells us all the time what perfidious hypocritical monsters humans are.”

  The door had opened silently enough that Sprout had not heard it. But there was Mother, walking into the room. “Speak of Uncle Cincinnatus with respect, please, Brussels Delphiki.”

  “You know he hates that name even worse than—”

  “Why do we have stupid city names?” asked Blue.

  “Since you never use them,” said Mother, “what does it matter what your real names are?”

  “At least we’re not named for rare earth elements, like Sergeant’s kids,” said Sprout.

  “They don’t use those names either,” said Mother. “And Uncle Ender’s children both are named for real people—your grandmother Petra Arkanian and a great military commander, Mazer Rackham, who taught Ender Wiggin and the Giant, as well. But nobody uses those very honorable names, either. I’m disgusted with the whole business of naming.”

  “You gave us names as if you called up a map of the Benelux countries, closed your eyes, and touched the screen with your finger,” said Blue.

  “That’s exactly what I did,” said Mother. “Because the Giant—my father—was born in a city in the Low Countries. I didn’t think Rotterdam would be a good name, because you or your cousins would have made too much of the syllable ‘dam’ and the word ‘rotter.’ So I named you for different cities.”

  “So why am I called Blue?” asked Blue.

  “I’ve told you that story before.”

  “I forget,” said Blue.

  “You don’t forget anything,” said Sprout. “None of us do.”

  “I forget whenever I want Mother to tell me again,” said Blue.

  “Delft is a city that became famous for making a certain kind of ceramic dishware, which was called ‘China’ because that kind of ceramic first came from the country of China. So for a while, your nickname was China. And then, because Delft china is always painted with blue designs, we started calling you ‘Blue.’”

  “And I was nicknamed Sprout,” said Sprout, “because when I was born my father Yuuto thought I was so small that I looked like a sprouting plant and—”

  “There was a common miniature variant of the cabbage plant,” said Mother, “that was called ‘Brussels sprouts.’ Your name being Brussels, your uncles started calling you ‘Sprout.’”

  “My father Yuuto called me that first,” said Sprout, “because the uncles had never seen or eaten an actual Brussels sprout, but Father Yuuto had.”

  Mother said nothing. She knew that there was no point in arguing with Sprout when he made a statement like that, because he would never believe any refutation. She explained that to him once, when he said, “If it isn’t true, then why did you stop arguing?” Her explanation was, “I have only so much breath in my life, Brussels Delphiki, and I’m not going to waste any more of it arguing with someone who doesn’t listen.”

  Unlike Thulium, who constantly challenged her father and Uncle Ender and Mother about how they should have stayed on Nokonoshima, Sprout never openly challenged his mother about such things, never in front of the uncles or the cousins. But here, with just the three of them in their own quarters, he felt more free to make it clear that he believed that he and Blue had been cheated when Mother and the uncles stole them away into space.

  “We’re celebrating Blue’s birthday now,” said Mother.

  “Not till Thulium comes,” said Blue.

  “What if she doesn’t come?” asked Mother.

  “We told her eighteen-hundred hours,” said Sprout, “and she still has fifteen minutes.”

  “I don’t think Sergeant’s going to allow her—” Mother began.

  The door slid open. Thulium came trotting in, happy as a lark.

  Too happy, Sprout decided. She didn’t have permission. She had snuck away. “Let’s get this party started,” said Sprout. Who knew how quickly Uncle Sergeant would appear to take her home.

  They had all read about birthday parties in various places; they knew that in some places people ate cake, in others pie, and sugar candies and other treats elsewhere. On the Herodotus, there was only one treat that the ship’s kitchen knew how to make: ice cream. And that was good enough. It’s not as if they had parties every day, though Uncle Ender always remarked about how with seven children practically swamping the boat, they seemed to have a birthday every week of the year.

  Mother served it out in little bowls. “It’s actually the French recipe for a dessert called glace,” she explained.

  “Which is identical to Italian gelato,” said Sprout. “We can read, too.”

  “But it’s the French recipe programmed into the kitchen,” said Mother. “And I can’t help but wish we could have some made with real sugar.”

  “We have sugar,” said Blue. “It’s sweet.”

  “It’s very slightly sweet,” said Mother. “I’ve had the real thing. You have no idea.”

  “We would have an idea,” said Sprout, “if we still lived on Nokonoshima.”

  “What makes you think they have ice cream there?” asked Mother.

  “Because it’s the only place you ever lived where you could have tasted anything real from Earth.”

  “I was born on Earth,” said Mother.

  “And the Giant took you and the uncles with him when you were so young you were still stupid as a human.”

  “Yes,” said Mother. “I tasted ice cream many times in Tochoji.”

  “With our father, Yuuto,” said Blue.

  “He was a kind and generous man,” said Mother. “Which is part of why you are the two kindest, most generous children among the cousins on the Herodotus. No one knows why you are so kind, Thulium.”

  “Now you’re just lying to make us feel better about not having our father,” said Sprout.

  “Eat your ice cream,” said Mother.

  The do
or had not opened since Thulium came in. But now there was a man standing just inside. Neither Sprout nor Blue had noticed him before, if he had been standing there awhile. They looked at him, dumbstruck.

  Mother saw the direction of their gaze, and turned. “Who are you?” she asked. “And how did you get on this ship?”

  “I’m an image, not a person,” said the man. “My data were transferred here over the past several days, so now I dwell inside your ship’s computer, though I’m only a copy of the image and personality and program set inside my ship’s computer.”

  “A lightspeed transfer?” asked Mother. Sprout knew that this would mean that the stranger’s ship was very, very close.

  “An ansible transfer,” said the man. “As you well know.”

  “Nobody knows our ansible address,” said Mother.

  “Many people know it, including all the research foundations you keep funding to pretend to research Anton’s Key,” said the man.

  “Are you from one of those foundations?” asked Mother.

  “I control all their computers and all their ansible communications,” said the man. “I’ve received every report and request that you have sent them and they have sent you over the years. I have always known where you were and what you were doing.”

  “So you’re a spy,” said Mother.

  “If I were a spy, I’d hardly tell you so openly,” said the man. “I gave Julian Delphiki this ship, not because he bought it, but because he needed it and I had ships to give out in those days. I authorized his voyage of research and discovery. He could not have undertaken it if I had not wanted it to happen. And I was there when Petra Arkanian Delphiki said good-bye to the three children that her husband Julian took with him. I knew you in the cradle, Carlotta. I knew the woman that you were named after. I knew the boy that Andrew was named for, while he was still alive.”

  “Andrew Wiggin is dead?” asked Mother.