Shadow Puppets (The Shadow 3)

"Still the one," said Bean. If they had the ordinary amount of good luck.

Which didn't seem to be the trend at the moment.

Still, going to Damascus.... If Alai was really taking them into his protection, Petra would be safe there. Petra and perhaps one child--who might have Anton's Key after all, might be doomed to die without ever seeing the age of twenty. At least those two would be safe.

But the others were out there, children of Bean's and Petra's who would be raised by strangers, as tools, as slaves.

There had been nine embryos. One had been implanted, and three were discarded. That would leave five in the possession of Volescu or Achilles or whoever it was who took them.

Unless Volescu had actually found a way to switch the three that were supposedly discarded, switching containers somehow. There might be eight embryos unaccounted for.

But probably not, probably only the five they knew about. Bean and Petra had both been watching Volescu too carefully for him to get away with the first three, hadn't they?

By force of will, Bean turned his thoughts away from worries he could do nothing about at this moment, and took stock of his situation.

"Thank you," said Bean to the men in the car. "I was careless. Without you, I'd be dead."

"Not careless," said the man in the back. "Young man in love. Wife has baby in her. Time of hope."

Followed immediately, Bean realized, by a time of near despair. He should never have agreed to father children, no matter how much Petra wanted to, no matter how much he loved Petra, no matter how much he too yearned for offspring, for a family. He should have stood firm, because then this would not have been possible. There would have been nothing for his enemies to steal from him. He and Petra would still have been in hiding, undetected, because they would never have had to go to a snake like Volescu.

"Babies good," said the man in the back. "Make you scared, make you crazy. Somebody take away babies, somebody hurt babies, make you crazy. But good anyway. Babies good."

Yeah. Well. Maybe Bean would live long enough to know about that, and maybe he wouldn't.

Because now he knew his life's work, for whatever time he had left before he died of giantism.

He had to get his babies back. Whether they should ever have existed or not, they existed now, each with its own separate genetic identity, each very much alive. Until they were taken, they had been nothing to him but cells in a solution--all that mattered was the one that would be implanted in Petra, the one that would grow and become part of their family. But now they all mattered. Now they were all alive to him, because someone else had them, meant to use them.

He even regretted the ones that had been disposed of. Even if the test had been real, even if they had had Anton's Key, what right did he have to snuff out their genetic identity, just because he oh-so-altruistically wanted to spare them the sorrow of a life as short as his?

Suddenly he realized what he was thinking. What it meant.

Sister Carlotta, you always wanted me to turn Christian--and not just Christian, Catholic. Well, here I am, thinking that as soon as sperm and egg combine, they're a human life, and it's wrong to harm them.

Well, I'm not Catholic, and it wasn't wrong to want children to grow up to have a full life instead of this fifth-of-a-life that I'm headed for.

But how was I different, flushing three of those embryos, from Volescu? He flushed twenty-two of them, I flushed three. He waited till they were nearly two years further along in development--gestation plus a year--but in the end, is it really all that different?

Would Sister Carlotta condemn him for that? Had he committed a mortal sin? Was he only getting what he deserved now, losing five because he willingly threw away three?

No, he could not imagine her saying that to him. Or even thinking it to herself. She would rejoice that he had decided to have a child at all. She would be glad if Petra really was pregnant.

But she would also agree with him that the five that were now in someone else's hands, the five that might be implanted in someone else and turned into babies, he couldn't just let them go. He had to find them and save them and bring them home.

12

PUTTING OUT FIRES

From: Han Tzu

To: Snow Tiger

Re: stones

I am pleased and honored to have the chance once again to offer my poor counsel to your bright magnificence. My previous advice to ignore the piles of stones in the road was obviously foolish, and you saw that a much wiser course was to declare stone-carrying to be illegal.

Now I once again have the glorious privilege of giving bad advice to him who does not need counsel.