Here's the lesson Bean took from his own dream: Don't be one of the scurrying, struggling ants.
Be the shoe.
Sister Carlotta had reached a dead end in her search of the nets. Plenty of information on human genetics studies, but nothing like what she was looking for.
So she sat there, doodling with a nuisance game on her desk while trying to think of what to do next and wondering why she was bothering to look into Bean's beginnings at all, when the secure message arrived from the I.F. Since the message would erase itself a minute after arrival, to be re-sent every minute until it was read by the recipient, she opened it at once and keyed in her first and second passwords.
{FROM: [email protected]
RE: Achilles
Please report all info on "Achilles" as known to subject.}
As usual, a message so cryptic that it didn't actually have to be encrypted, though of course it had been. This was a secure message, wasn't it? So why not just use the kid's name. "Please report on 'Achilles' as known to Bean."
Somehow Bean had given them the name Achilles, and under circumstances such that they didn't want to ask him directly to explain. So it had to be in something he had written. A letter to her? She felt a little thrill of hope and then scoffed at her own feelings. She knew perfectly well that mail from the kids in Battle School was almost never passed along, and besides, the chance of Bean actually writing to her was remote. But they had the name somehow, and wanted to know from her what it meant.
The trouble is, she didn't want to give him that information without knowing what it would mean for Bean.
So she prepared an equally cryptic reply:
{Will reply by secure conference only.}
Of course this would infuriate Graff, but that was just a perk. Graff was so used to having power far beyond his rank that it would be good for him to have a reminder that all obedience was voluntary and ultimately depended on the free choice of the person receiving the orders. And she would obey, in the end. She just wanted to make sure Bean was not going to suffer from the information. If they knew he had been so closely involved with both the perpetrator and the victim of a murder, they might drop him from the program. And even if she was sure it would be all right to talk about it, she might be able to get a quid pro quo.
It took another hour before the secure conference was set up, and when Graff's head appeared in the display above her computer, he was not happy. "What game are you playing today, Sister Carlotta?"
"You've been putting on weight, Colonel Graff. That's not healthy."
"Achilles," he said.
"Man with a bad heel," she said. "Killed Hector and dragged his body around the gates of Troy. Also had a thing for a captive girl named Briseis."
"You know that's not the context."
"I know more than that. I know you must have got the name from something Bean wrote, because the name is not pronounced uh-KILL-eez, it's pronounced ah-SHEEL. French."
"Someone local there."
"Dutch is the native language here, though Fleet Common has just about driven it out as anything but a curiosity."
"Sister Carlotta, I don't appreciate your wasting the expense of this conference."
"And I'm not going to talk about it until I know why you need to know."
Graff took a few deep breaths. She wondered if his mother taught him to count to ten, or if, perhaps, he had learned to bite his tongue from dealing with nuns in Catholic school.
"We are trying to make sense of something Bean wrote."
"Let me see it and I'll help you as I can."
"He's not your responsibility anymore, Sister Carlotta," said Graff.
"Then why are you asking me about him? He's your responsibility, yes? So I can get back to work, yes?"
Graff sighed and did something with his hands, out of sight in the display. Moments later the text of Bean's diary entry appeared on her display below and in front of Graff's face. She read it, smiling slightly.
"Well?" asked Graff.
"He's doing a number on you, Colonel."
"What do you mean?"
"He knows you're going to read it. He's misleading you."
"You know this?"
"Achilles might indeed be providing him with an example, but not a good one. Achilles once betrayed someone that Bean valued highly."
"Don't be vague, Sister Carlotta."
"I wasn't vague. I told you precisely what I wanted you to know. Just as Bean told you what he wanted you to hear. I can promise you that his diary entries will only make sense to you if you recognize that he is writing these things for you, with the intent to deceive."
"Why, because he didn't keep a diary down there?"
"Because his memory is perfect," said Sister Carlotta. "He would never, never commit his real thoughts to a readable form. He keeps his own counsel. Always. You will never find a document written by him that is not meant to be read."
"Would it make a difference if he was writing it under another identity? Which he thinks we don't know about?"
"But you do know about it, and so he knows you will know about it, so the other identity is there only to confuse you, and it's working."
"I forgot, you think this kid is smarter than God."
"I'm not worried that you don't accept my evaluation. The better you know him, the more you'll realize that I'm right. You'll even come to believe those test scores."
"What will it take to get you to help me with this?" asked Graff.
"Try telling me the truth about what this information will mean to Bean."
"He's got his primary teacher worried. He disappeared for twenty-one minutes on the way back from lunch – we have a witness who talked to him on a deck where he had no business, and that still doesn't account for that last seventeen minutes of his absence. He doesn't play with his desk —"
"You think setting up false identities and writing phony diary entries isn't playing?"
"There's a diagnostic / therapeutic game that all the children play – he hasn't even signed on yet."
"He'll know that the game is psychological, and he won't play it until he knows what it will cost him."
"Did you teach him that attitude of default hostility?"
"No, I learned it from him."
"Tell me straight. Based on this diary entry, it looks as though he plans to set up his own crew here, as if this were the street. We need to know about this Achilles so we'll know what he actually has in mind."
"He plans no such thing," said Sister Carlotta.
"You say it so forcefully, but without giving me a single reason to trust your conclusion."
"You called me, remember?"
"That's not enough, Sister Carlotta. Your opinions on this boy are suspect."
"He would never emulate Achilles. He would never write his true plans where you could find them. He does not build crews, he joins them and uses them and moves on without a backward glance."
"So investigating this Achilles won't give us a clue about Bean's future behavior?"
"Bean prides himself on not holding grudges. He thinks they're counterproductive. But at some level, I believe he wrote about Achilles specifically because you would read what he wrote and would want to know more about Achilles, and if you investigated him you would discover a very bad thing that Achilles did."
"To Bean?"
"To a friend of his."
"So he is capable of having friendships?"
"The girl who saved his life here on the street."
"And what's her name?"
"Poke. But don't bother looking for her. She's dead."
Graff thought about that a moment. "Is that the bad thing Achilles did?"
"Bean has reason to believe so, though I don't think it would be evidence enough to convict in court. And as I said, all these things may be unconscious. I don't think Bean would knowingly try to get even with Achilles, or anybody else, for that matter, but he might hope you'd do it for him."