23

COLONIST

From: BlackDog%[email protected]

To: Graff%[email protected]

Encrypted using code: *******

Decrypted using code: *********

Re: Vlad's farewell message

Why I'm writing to you from hiding should be obvious; I'll give you the detailed story at a later date.

I want to take you up on your invitation, if it's still open. I learned recently that while I'm a real whiz at military strategy, I'm a dimwit about what motivates my own people—even those I thought were closest to me. For instance, who would have guessed that they would hate a modernizing, consensus-building black African Caliph a lot more than they hated a dictatorial, idolatrous, immodest Hindu woman?

I was going to simply disappear from history, and was feeling quite sorry for myself in my exile, while grieving for a dear friend who gave his life to save mine in Hyderabad, when I realized that the news reports that endlessly replayed Vlad's message were showing me what I needed to do.

So I've made arrangements to make a vid inside a nearby mosque. In a country where I'll be safe showing my face, so don't worry. I'm not going to let this one be released through you or Peter—that would discredit it immediately. It's going to move out through Muslim channels only.

The thing I realized is this: I may have lost the support of the military, but I'm still Caliph. It's not just a political office, it's also a religious one. And not one of those clowns has the authority to depose me.

Meanwhile, I know now what they called me behind my back. "Black dog." They're going to hear those words back from me, you can be sure.

When the vid is released, then I'll let you know where I am. If you're still willing to take me.

Randi watched the news reports avidly. It seemed so hopeful at first, when they heard that Julian Delphiki had been killed in Iran. Maybe the enemies hunting her baby would be crushed, and she'd be able to come out in the open and proclaim that she was carrying Achilles's son and heir.

But then she realized: the evil in this world would not die just because a few of Achilles's enemies were killed or defeated. They had done too good a job of demonizing him. If they knew who her son was, he would at least be scrutinized and tested constantly; at worst, they'd take him away from her. Or kill him. They'd stop at nothing to erase Achilles's legacy from the earth.

Randi stood by her son's little traveling bed in the former motel room that now was as cheap a one-room hotplate apartment as northern Virginia offered. A traveling bed was all he needed. He was so small.

His birth had taken her by surprise. Months too early. And he came so fast. She couldn't get to a hospital. Not that they would have taken her. She was in the midst of changing her identity. She had no health insurance.

But because he was so small, the birth was easy. He just... came out. And small as he was, he didn't have any problems. He didn't even look like one of those premature babies, the ones who looked so ... fetal. Fishlike. Not her boy. He was beautiful, completely normal looking. Just... small.

Small and brilliant. It almost frightened her sometimes. He had said his first word just a couple of days ago. "Mama," of course—who else did he know? And when she spoke to him, explained things to him, told him about his father, he seemed to be listening intently. He seemed to understand. Was that possible?

Of course it was. Achilles's child would be wiser than normal. And if he was small, well, Achilles himself had been born with a twisted foot. An abnormal body to contain extraordinary gifts.

Secretly, she had named the baby Achilles Flandres II. But she was careful. She didn't write that name anywhere but in her heart. Instead the birth certificate called him Randall Firth. She was going by the name Nichelle Firth now. The real Nichelle Firth was a retarded woman in a special school where she had worked as an aide. Randi looked old enough, she knew, to pass for the right age—being on the run and working so hard and worrying all the time gave her a kind of tired look that aged her. But what did she care about vanity? She wasn't trying to attract a man. She knew men well enough to know that none of them would want to marry a woman only to have her spend all her care on another man's baby.

So she made herself up only enough to be hirable in decent jobs that didn't require a long resume. They'd say, Where have you worked before, and she'd say, Nothing since college, they wouldn't even remember me, I was a stay-at-home mom, but my husband wasn't a sleep-at-home guy, so here I am, no resume except my baby's healthy and my house is clean and I know how to work like my life depended on it cause now it does. That line got her hired anywhere she bothered to apply. She'd never be an executive but she didn't want to be. Just put in her hours, get "Randall" out of daycare, and then talk to him, sing to him, and study about how to be a good mother and raise a healthy, confident baby who would have the strength of character to overcome the bigotry against his father and take on the whole world.

But these wars, and Peter Wiggin's hideous face on the camera, announcing this nation was now in the FPE and that nation was allied with the FPE, it worried her. She couldn't hide forever. Her fingerprints couldn't be changed, and there was that shoplifting arrest when she was in college. It was so stupid. She really had sort of forgotten that she took the thing. If she'd remembered she would have changed her mind and paid for it, like the other times. But she forgot and they stopped her outside the store so she had actually done the theft, they said, and she wasn't a minor so she got the whole arrest treatment. They let her off, but her prints were in the system. So someday somebody would know who she really was. And the man who approached her, who gave her Achilles's baby—how could she be sure he wouldn't tell them? Between what he told them and her fingerprints, they could find her no matter how often she changed her name.

That was when she decided that for the first time in human history, when a person was not safe anywhere on Earth, he had somewhere else to go.

Why should her little Achilles Flandres II be raised here, in hiding, with bloodthirsty monsters out to kill him in order to punish his father for being better than them? When instead he could grow up on a clean new colony world, where no one would care that the baby wasn't really hers or that he was small, if he was smart and worked hard and she raised him right? They promised that there would be trade back and forth between colony worlds, and visits from starships. When the time was right for Achilles II to claim his heritage, his legacy, his throne, she would bring him aboard one of those starships and they'd come back to Earth.

She had studied the relativistic effects of star travel. It might be as much as a hundred years or more—fifty years out and fifty years back, say—but it would only be three or four years of voyaging. So all of Achilles's enemies would be long since dead. Nobody would bother spreading vicious lies about him anymore. The world would be ready to hear of him with fresh ears, with open minds.

She couldn't leave him alone in the apartment. It was a drizzly afternoon, though. Was it worth risking him catching cold?