The Shadow of the Hegemon - Orson Scott Card

by Orson Scott Card

  Bean could only take so many hours of frustration before he had to get up and go outside. It wasn't just to get away from his work, however. "The climate agrees with me," he told Sister Carlotta on their second day, when, dripping with sweat, he headed for his third shower since waking. "I was born to live with heat and humidity."

  At first she had insisted on going everywhere with him. But after a few days he was able to persuade her of several things. First, he looked old enough not to be accompanied by his grandmother everywhere he went—"Avo Carlotta" was what he called her here, their cover story. Second, she would be no protection for him anyway, since she had no weapons and no defensive skills. Third, he was the one who knew how to live on the streets, and even though Araraquara was hardly the kind of dangerous place that Rotterdam had been when he was younger, he had already mapped in his mind a hundred different escape routes and hiding places, just by reflex. When Carlotta realised that she would need his protection a lot more than he would need hers, she relented and allowed him to go out alone, as long as he did his best to remain inconspicuous.

  "I can't stop people from noticing the foreign boy."

  "You don't look that foreign," she said. "Mediterranean body types are common here. Just try not to speak a lot. Always look like you have an errand but never like you're in a hurry. But then, it was you who taught me that that was how to avoid attracting attention."

  And so here he was today, weeks after they arrived in Brasil, wandering the streets of Araraquara and wondering what great cause might make his life worthwhile in Carlotta's eyes. For despite all her faith, it was her approval, not God's, that seemed like it might be worth striving for, as long as it didn't interfere with his project of staying alive. Was it enough to be a thorn in Achilles' side? Enough to look for ways to oppose him? Or was there something else he should be doing?

  At the crest of one of Araraquara's many hills there was a sorvete shop run by a Japanese-Brazilian family. The family had been in business there for centuries, as their sign proclaimed, and Bean was both amused and moved by this, in light of what Carlotta had said. For this family, making flavoured frozen desserts to eat from a cone or cup was the great cause that gave them continuity through the ages. What could be more trivial than that? And yet Bean came here, again and again, because their recipes were, in fact, delicious, and when he thought about how many other people for these past two or three hundred years must have paused and taken a moment's pleasure in the sweet and delicate flavours, in the feel of the smooth sorvete in their mouths, he could not disdain that cause. They offered something that was genuinely good, and people's lives were better because they offered it. It was not a noble cause that would get written up in the histories. But it was not nothing, either. A person could do worse than spend some large percentage of his life in a cause like that.

  Bean wasn't even sure what it meant to give himself to a cause. Did that mean turning over his decision-making to someone else? What an absurd idea. In all likelihood there was no one smarter than him on Earth, and though that did not mean he was incapable of error, it certainly meant he'd have to be a fool to turn over his decisions to someone even more likely to be wrong.

  Why he was wasting time on Carlotta's sentiment-ridden philosophy of life he didn't know. Doubtless that was one of his mistakes — the emotional human aspect of his mentality overriding the inhumanly aloof brilliance that, to his chagrin, only sometimes controlled his thinking.

  The sorvete cup was empty. Apparently he had eaten it all without noticing. He hoped his mouth had enjoyed every taste of it, because the eating was done by reflex while he thought his thoughts.

  Bean discarded the cup and went his way. A bicyclist passed him. Bean saw how the cyclist's whole body bounced and rattled and vibrated from the cobblestones. That is human life, thought Bean. So bounced around that we can never see anything straight.

  Supper was beans and rice and stringy beef in the pensao's public dining room. He and Carlotta ate together in near silence, listening to other people's conversations and the clanking and clinking of dishes and silverware. Any real conversation between them would doubtless leak some memorable bit of information that might raise questions and attract attention. Like, why did a woman who talked like a nun have a grandson? Why did this child who looked to be six talk like a philosophy professor half the time? So they ate in silence except for conversations about the weather.

  After supper, as always, they each signed on to the nets to check their mail. Carlotta's mail was interesting and real. All of Bean's correspondents, this week anyway, thought he was a woman named Lettie who was working on her dissertation and needed information, but who had no time for a personal life and so rebuffed with alacrity any attempt at friendly and personal conversation. But so far, there was no way to find Achilles' signature in any nation's behaviour. While most countries simply did not have the resources to kidnap Ender's jeesh in such a short time, of those that did have the resources, there was not one that Bean could rule out because they lacked the arrogance or aggressiveness or contempt for law to do it. Why, it could even have been done by Brasil itself—for all he knew, his former companions from the Formic War might be imprisoned somewhere in Araraquara. They might hear in the early morning the rumble of the very garbage truck that picked up the sorvete cup that he threw away today.

  "I don't know why people spread these things," said Carlotta.

  "What?" asked Bean, grateful for the break from the eye-blearing work he was doing.

  "Oh, these stupid superstitious good-luck dragons. There must be a dozen different dragon pictures now."

  "Oh," said Bean. "They're everywhere, I just don't notice them any more. Why dragons, anyway?"

  "I think this is the oldest of them. At least it's the one I saw first, with the little poem," said Carlotta. "If Dante were writing today, I'm sure there'd be a special place in his hell for people who start these things."

  "What poem?"

  "'Share this dragon,' " Carlotta recited. " 'If you do, lucky end for them and you.'"

  "Oh, yeah, dragons always bring a lucky end. I mean, what does that poem actually say? That you'll die lucky? That it'll be lucky for you to end?" Carlotta chuckled.

  Bored with his correspondence, Bean kept the nonsense going. "Dragons aren't always lucky. They had to discontinue Dragon Army in Battle School, it was so unlucky. Till they revived it for Ender, and no doubt they gave it to him because people thought it was bad luck and they were trying to stack everything against him."

  Then a thought passed through his mind, ever so briefly, but it woke him from his lethargy.

  "Forward me that picture."

  "I bet you already have it on a dozen letters."

  "I don't want to search. Send me that one."

  "You're still that Lettie person? Haven't you been that one for two weeks now?"

  "Five days."

  It took a few minutes for the message to be routed to him, but when it finally showed up in his mail, he looked closely at the image.

  "Why in the world are you paying attention to this?" asked Carlotta.

  He looked up to see her watching him.

  "I don't know. Why are you paying attention to the way I'm paying attention to it?" He grinned at her.

  "Because you think it matters. I may not be as smart as you are about most things, but I'm very much smarter than you are about you. I know when you're intrigued."

  "Just the juxtaposition of the image of a dragon with the word 'end.' Endings really aren't considered all that lucky. Why wouldn't the person write 'luck will come' or 'lucky fate' or something else? Why 'lucky end'?"

  "Why not?"

  "End. Ender. Ender's army was Dragon."

  "Now, that's a little far-fetched."

  "Look at the drawing," said Bean. "Right in the middle, where the bitmap is so complicated—there's one line that's damaged. The dots don't line up at all. It's virtually random."

  "It just looks like noise to me."

>   "If you were being held captive but you had computer access, only every bit of mail you sent out was scrutinised, how would you send a message?" asked Bean.

  "You don't think this could be a message from—do you?"

  "I have no idea. But now that I've thought of it, it's worth looking don't you think?"

  By now Bean had pasted the dragon image into a graphics program and was studying that line of pixels. "Yes, this is random, the whole line. Doesn't belong here, and it's not just noise because the rest of the image is still completely intact except for this other line that's partly broken. Noise would be randomly distributed."

  "See what it is, then," said Carlotta. "You're the genius, I'm the nun."

  Soon Bean had the two lines isolated in a separate file and was studying the information as raw code. Viewed as one-byte or two-byte text code, there was nothing that remotely resembled language, but of course it couldn't, could it, or it would never have got out. So if it was a message, then it had to be in some kind of code.

  For the next few hours Bean wrote programs to help him manipulate the data contained in those lines. He tried mathematical schemes and graphic re-interpretations, but in truth he knew all along that it wouldn't be anything that complex. Because whoever created it would have had to do it without the aid of a computer. It had to be something relatively simple, designed only to keep a cursory examination from revealing what it was.

  And so he kept coming back to ways of re-interpreting the binary code as text. Soon enough he came upon a scheme that seemed promising. Two-byte text code, but shifted right by one position for each character, except when the right shift would make it correspond with two actual bytes in memory, in which case double shift. That way a real character would never show up if someone looked at the file with an ordinary view program.

  When he used that method on the one line, it came up as text characters only, which was not likely to happen by chance. But the other line came up random-seeming garbage.

  So he left-shifted the other line, and it, too, became nothing but text characters.

  "I'm in," he said. "And it is a message."

  "What does it say?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea."

  Carlotta got up and came to look over his shoulder. "It's not even language. It doesn't divide into words."

  "That's deliberate," said Bean. "If it divided into words it would look like a message and invite decoding. The easy way that any amateur can decode language is by checking word lengths and the frequency of appearance of certain letter patterns. In Common, you look for letter groupings that could be 'a' and 'the' and 'and,' that sort of thing.

  "And you don't even know what language it's in."

  "No, but it's bound to be Common, because they know they're sending it to somebody who doesn't have a key. So it has to be decodable, and that means Common."

  "So they're making it easy and hard at the same time?"

  "Yes. Easy for me, hard for everyone else."

  "Oh, come now. You think this was written to you?"

  "Ender. Dragon. I was in Dragon Army, unlike most of them. And whom else would they be writing to? I'm outside, they're in. They know that everyone is there but me. And I'm the only person that they'd know they could reach without tipping their hand to everybody else."

  "What, did you have some private code?"

  "Not really, but what we have is common experience, the slang of Battle School, things like that. You'll see. When I crack it, it'll be because I recognise a word that nobody else would recognise."

  "If it's from them."

  "It is," said Bean. "It's what I'd do. Get word out. This picture is like a virus. It goes everywhere and gets its code into a million places, but nobody knows it's a code because it looks like something that most people think they already understand. It's a fad, not a message. Except to me."

  "Almost thou persuadest me," said Carlotta.

  "I'll crack it before I go to bed."

  "You're too little to drink that much coffee. It'll give you an aneurysm."

  She went back to her own mail.

  Since the words weren't separated, Bean had to look for other patterns that might give things away. There were no obvious repeated two-letter or three-letter patterns that didn't lead to obvious dead ends. That didn't surprise him. If he had been composing such a message, he would have dropped out all the articles and conjunctions and prepositions and pronouns that he possibly could. Not only that, but most of the words were probably deliberately misspelled to avoid repetitive patterns. But some words would be spelled correctly, and they would be designed to be unrecognisable to most people who weren't from the Battle School culture.

  There were only two places where the same character was apparently doubled, one in each line. That might just be the result of one word ending with the same letter that began another, but Bean doubted it. Nothing would be left to chance in this message. So he wrote a little program that would take the doubled letters in one word and, beginning with "aa," show him what the surrounding letters might be to see if anything looked plausible to him. And he started with the doubled letters in the shorter line, because that pair was surrounded by another pair, in a 1221 pattern.

  The obvious failures, like "xddx" and "pffp," took no time, but he had to investigate all the variants on "abba" and "adda" and "deed" and "effe" to see what they did to the message. Some were promising and he saved them for later exploration.

  "Why is it in Greek now?" asked Carlotta.

  She was looking over his shoulder again. He hadn't heard her get up and come over behind him.

  "I converted the original message to Greek characters so that I wouldn't get distracted by trying to read meanings into letters I hadn't decoded yet. The ones I'm actually working on are in Roman letters."

  At that moment, his program showed the letters "iggi."

  "Piggies," said Sister Carlotta.

  "Maybe, but it doesn't flag anything for me." He started cycling through the dictionary matches with "iggi," but none of them did any better than "piggies" had.

  "Does it have to be a word?" said Carlotta.

  "Well, if it's a number, then this is a dead end," said Bean.

  "No, I mean, why not a name?"

  Bean saw it at once. "How blind can I be." He plugged the letters w and n to the positions before and after "iggi" and then spread the results through the whole message, making the program show hyphens for the undeciphered letters. The two lines now read

  —-n————g—-n—-n—-n—-i——n—- g -n-n-wiggin—-

  "That doesn't look right for Common," said Carlotta. "There should be a lot more i's than that."

  "I'm assuming that the message deliberately leaves out letters as much as possible, especially vowels, so it won't look like Common."

  "So how will you know when you've decoded it?"

  "When it makes sense."

  "It's bedtime. I know, you're not sleeping till you've solved it." He barely noticed that she moved away from behind him. He was busy trying the other doubled letter. This time he had a more complicated job, because the letters before and after the double pair were different. It meant far more combinations to try, and being able to eliminate g, i, n, and w didn't speed up the process all that much.

  Again, there were quite a few readings that he saved—more than before—but nothing rang a bell until he got to 'Jees." The word that Ender's companions in the final battle used for themselves. "Jeesh." Could it be? It was definitely a word that might be used as a flag.

  h—n—jeesh-g-_en—s-ns—n——si—- n—- s—g -n-n-wiggin—-

  If those twenty-seven letters were right, then he had only thirty left to solve. He rubbed his eyes, sighed, and set to work.

  It was noon when the smell of oranges woke him. Sister Carlotta was peeling a mexerica orange. "People are eating these things on the street and spitting the pulp on the sidewalk. You can't chew it up enough to swallow it. But the juice is the best orange you'll ever tas
te in your life."

  Bean got out of bed and took the segment she offered him. She was right. She handed him a bowl to spit the pulp into. "Good breakfast," said Bean.

  "Lunch," she said. She held up a paper. "I take it you consider this to be a solution?"

  It was what he had printed out before going to bed.

  hlpndrjeeshtgdrenrusbnstun6rmysiz4Ontrysbtg bnfndwigginptr

  "Oh," said Bean. "I didn't print out the one with the word breaks." Putting another mexerica segment in his mouth, Bean padded on bare feet to the computer, called up the right file, and printed it. He brought it back, handed it to Carlotta, spat out pulp, and took his own mexerica from her shopping bag and began peeling.

  "Bean," she said. "I'm a normal mortal. I get 'help' and is this 'Ender'?"

  Bean took the paper from her.

  hlp ndr jeesh tgdr en rus bns tun 6 rmy siz 40 n try sbtg bn fnd wiggin ptr

  "The vowels are left out as much as possible, and there are other misspellings. But what the first line says is, 'Help. Ender's jeesh is together in Russia-'"

  "T-g-d-r is 'together'? And 'in' is spelled like French?"

  "Exactly," said Bean. "I understood it and it doesn't look like Common." He went on interpreting. "The next part was confusing for a long time, until I realised that the 6 and the 40 were numbers. I got almost all the other letters before I realised that. The thing is, the numbers matter, but there's no way to guess them from context. So the next few words are designed to give a context to the numbers. It says 'Bean's toon was 6'—that's because Ender divided Dragon Army into five toons instead of the normal four, but then he gave me a sort of ad hoc toon, and if you added it to the count, it was number six.

  Only who would know that except for somebody from Battle School? So only somebody like me would get the number. Same thing with the next one. 'Army size 40.' Everyone in Battle School knew that there were forty soldiers in every army. Unless you counted the commander, in which case it was forty-one, but see, it doesn't matter, because that digit is trivial."