"Erase it. How can you be given your freedom again? You combine grandiosity with amorality."
"Rather like Peter Wiggin, whom you serve so faithfully. His little toad."
"The word is 'toady,'" said Bean.
"Yet here you are, visiting me. Could it be that Julian Delphiki, my dear half-nephew, has a problem I could help him with?"
"Same questions as before," said Bean.
"Same answer," said Volescu. "I have no idea what happened to your missing embryos."
Bean sighed. "I thought you might want a chance to square things with me and Petra before you leave this Earth."
"Oh, come on," said Volescu. "You're threatening me with the death penalty?"
"No," said Bean. "You're simply...leaving Earth. Peter is turning you over to the I.F. On the theory that your virus is an alien invasion."
"Only if you're an alien invasion," said Volescu.
"But I am," said Bean. "I'm the first of a race of short-lived giant geniuses. Think how much larger a population the Earth can sustain when the average age at death is eighteen."
"You know, Bean, there's no reason for you to die young."
"Really? You have the antidote?"
"Nobody needs an antidote to destiny. Death from giantism comes from the strain on your heart, trying to pump so much blood through so many kilometers of arteries and veins. If you get away from gravity, your heart won't be overtaxed and you won't die."
"You think I haven't thought of that?" said Bean. "I'll still continue to grow."
"So you get large. The I.F. can build you a really big ship. A colony ship. You can gradually fill it up with your protoplasm and bones. You'd live for years, tied to the walls of the ship like a balloon. An enormous Gulliver. Your wife could come visit you. And if you get too big, well, there's always amputation. You could become a being of pure mind. Fed intravenously, what need would you have of belly and bowels? Eventually, all you really need is your brain and spine, and they need never die. A mind eternally growing."
Bean stood up. "Is that what you created me for, Volescu? To be a limbless crippled monster out in space?"
"Silly boy," said Volescu, "to ordinary humans you already are a monster. Their worst nightmare. The species that will replace them. But to me, you're beautiful. Even tethered to an artificial habitat, even limbless, trunkless, voiceless, you'd be the most beautiful creature alive."
"And yet you came within one toilet-tank lid of killing me and burning my body."
"I didn't want to go to jail."
"Yet here you are," said Bean. "And your next prison is out in space."
"I can live like Prospero, refining my arts in solitude."
"Prospero had Ariel and Caliban," said Bean.
"Don't you understand?" said Volescu. "You're my Caliban. And all your little children--they're my Ariels. I've spread them over the earth. You'll never find them. Their mothers have been taught well. They'll mate, they'll reproduce before their giantism becomes obvious. Whether my virus works or not, your children are my virus."
"So that's what Achilles plotted?"
"Achilles?" Volescu laughed. "That bloody-handed little moron? I told him your babies were dead. That's all he wanted. Fool."
"So they're not dead."
"All alive. All implanted. By now, perhaps, some of them born, since those with your abilities will be born two months premature."
"You knew that and didn't tell us?"
"Why should I? The delivery was safe, wasn't it? The baby was mature enough to breathe and function on its own?"