But they knew about the woman Achilles loved, and if she had been pregnant when he died, they would have torn the womb out of her so she could lie there in agony and watch them burn the fetus before her eyes.
So to protect the mother and the baby, Achilles had arranged for their embryo to be taken secretly and implanted in the womb of a woman who could be trusted to take the child to term and give him a good home and raise him with full awareness of his vast potential. To teach him secretly who he really was and whose cause he served, so he could grow up to fulfil his father's cruelly-blocked destiny. It was a sacred trust, and Randi was worthy of it.
Bob was not. It was that simple. Randi had always known that she married beneath herself. Bob was a good provider, but he hadn't the imagination to understand anything more important than making a living and planning his next fishing trip. She could just imagine how he would respond if she told him that not only was she pregnant, but the baby was not even hers.
Already she had found several places on the web where people were searching for "lost" or "kidnapped" embryos. She knew--the man who spoke to her had warned her--that these were likely to originate from Achilles's enemies, trolling for information that would lead them to...to her.
She wondered if maybe the very act of searching for people searching for embryos would alert them. The search companies claimed that no government had access to their databases, but it was possible that the International Fleet was intercepting all the messages and monitoring all the searches. People said that the I.F. was really under the control of the United States government, that America's isolationism was a facade and it ran everything through the I.F. Then there were the people who said that it was the other way around--the U.S. was isolationist because that was the way the I.F. wanted it, since most of the space technology they depended on was developed and built in the U.S.
It couldn't be an accident that Peter the Hegemon was American himself.
She would stop searching for information about kidnapped embryos. It was all lies and traps and tricks. She knew she would seem paranoid to anyone else, but that's only because they didn't know what she knew. There really were monsters in the world, and those who kept secrets from them had to live with constant vigilance.
There on the screen was that terrible picture. They showed it over and over again: Achilles's poor broken body lying on the floor in the Hegemon's palace, looking so peaceful, not a wound on his body. Some on the nets said that Delphiki didn't shoot him through the eye at all; that if he had, Achilles's face would have been powder-burned and there would have been an exit wound and blood all over.
No, Delphiki and Wiggin imprisoned Achilles and faked some kind of phony standoff with the police, pretending that Achilles was taking hostages or something, so they'd have an excuse for killing him. But in fact they gave him a lethal injection. Or poisoned his food. Or infected him with a hideous disease so he died writhing on the floor in agony while Delphiki and Wiggin looked on.
Like Richard III murdering those poor princes in the tower.
But when my son is born, Randi told herself, then all these false histories will be destroyed. The liars will be eliminated, and so will their lies.
Then this footage will be used in a true story. My son will see to that. No one will ever even hear the lies they're telling now. And Achilles will be known as the great one, even greater than the son who will have completed his life's work.
And I will be remembered and honored as the woman who sheltered him and gave him birth and raised him up to rule the world.
All I have to do to accomplish that is: nothing.
Nothing that calls attention to me. Nothing that makes me unusual or strange.
Yet the one thing she couldn't bear to do was nothing. Just to sit here, watching the television, worrying, fretting--it had to be harmful for the baby, to have so much adrenalin coursing through her system.
It was the waiting that was making her crazy. Not waiting for the baby--that was natural and she would love every day of her pregnancy.
It was waiting for her life to change. Waiting...for Bob.
Why should she wait for Bob?
She got up from the couch, switched off the television, went into the bedroom, and started packing her cloth
ing and other things into cardboard boxes. She emptied out Bob's obsessive financial records in order to empty the boxes--let him amuse himself by sorting them out later.
Only after she had packed and taped up the fourth box did it occur to her that the normal pattern would have been to tell him about the baby and then make him move out.
But she didn't want a connection with him. Didn't want any dispute about paternity. She just wanted to be gone. Out of his ordinary, meaningless life, out of this pointless town.
Of course she couldn't just disappear. Then she'd be a missing person. She'd be added to databases. Someone would be alerted.
So she took her boxes of clothing and a few favorite pots, pans, and recipe books and loaded them into the car that she had owned before she married Bob and that was still in her name alone. Then she spent half an hour writing different versions of a letter to Bob explaining that she didn't love him anymore and was leaving and didn't want him to look for her.
No. Nothing in writing. Nothing that can be reported to anyone.
She got in the car and drove to the grocery store. On the way in from the parking lot she took a cart that someone had left blocking a parking space and pushed it into the store. Helping keep the parking lot clear of abandoned carts proved that she wasn't vindictive. She was a civilized person who wanted to help Bob do well in his business and his ordinary, ordinary, ordinary life. It would help him not to have such an extraordinary woman and child in that life.
He was out on the floor and instead of waiting in his office, she went in search of him. She found him supervising the unloading of a truck that was late because of a breakdown on the highway, making sure that the frozen foods were at a low enough temperature to be safely offloaded and shelved.
"Can you wait just a minute?" he said. "I know it's important or you wouldn't have come down here, but..."
"Oh, Bob, it won't take more than a second." She leaned close to him. "I'm pregnant and it's not yours."