"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 realized that the 6 and the 40 were numbers. I got almost all the other letters before I realized 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."
"How do you know that?"
"Because the next letter is n. For 'north.' The message is telling their location. They know they're in Russia. And because they can apparently see the sun or at least shadows on the wall, and they know the date, they can calculate their latitude, more or less. Six-four-zero north. Sixty-four north."
"Unless it means something else."
"No, the message is meant to be obvious."
"To you."
"Yes, to me. The rest of that line is 'try sabotage.' I think that means that they're trying to screw up whatever the Russians are trying to make them do. So they're pretending to go along but really gumming up the works. Very smart to get that on record. The fact that Graff was court-martialed after winning the Formic War suggests that they'd better get it on record that they were not collaborating with the enemy-in case the other side wins."
"But Russia isn't at war with anybody."
"The Polemarch was Russian, and Warsaw Pact troops were at the heart of his side in the League War. You've got to remember, Russia was the country that was most on the make before the Formics came and started tearing up real estate and forced humanity to unite under the Hegemon and create the International Fleet. They have always felt cheated out of their destiny, and now that the Formics are gone, it makes sense that they'd be eager to get back on the fast track. They don't think of themselves as bad guys, they think of themselves as the only people with the will and the resources to unite the world for real, permanently. They think they're doing a good thing."
"People always do."
"Not always. But yes, to wage war you have to be able to sell your own people on the idea that either you're fighting in self-defense, or you're fighting because you deserve to win, or you're fighting in order to save other people. The Russian people respond to an altruistic sales pitch as easily as anybody else."
"So what about the second line?"
" 'Bean find Wiggin Peter.' They're suggesting that I look for Ender's older brother. He didn't go off on the colony ship with Ender and Valentine. And he's been a player, under the net identity of Locke. And I suppose he's running Demosthenes, too, now that. Valentine is gone."
"You knew about that?"
"I knew a lot of things," said Bean. "But the main thing is that they're right. Achilles is hunting for me and he's hunting for you, and he's got all the rest of Ender's jeesh, but he doesn't even know Ender's brother exists and he wouldn't care if he did. But you know and I know that Peter Wiggin would have been in Battle School except for a little character flaw. And for all we know, that character flaw may be exactly what he needs to be a good match against Achilles."
"Or it may be exactly the flaw that makes it so a victory for Peter is no better than a victory for Achilles, in terms of the amount of suffering in the world."
"Well, we won't know until we find him, will we?" said Bean.
"To find him, Bean, you'd have to reveal who you are."
"Yes," said Bean. "Isn't this exciting?" He did an exaggerated wriggle like a little kid being taken to the zoo.
"This is your life you're playing with."
"You're the one who wanted me to find a cause."
"Peter Wiggin isn't a cause, he's dangerous. You haven't heard what Graff had to say about him."
"On the contrary," said Bean. "How do you think I learned about him?"
"But he might be no better than Achilles!"
"I know of several ways already that he's better than Achilles. First, he's not trying to kill us. Second, he's already got a huge network of contacts with people all over the world, some of whom know he's as young as he is but most of whom have no idea. Third, he's ambitious just like Achilles is, only Achilles has already assembled almost all of the children who were tagged as the most brilliant military commanders in the world, while Peter Wiggin will have only one. Me. Do you think he's dumb enough not to use me?"
"Use you. That's the operative word here, Bean."
"Well, aren't you being used in your cause?"
"By God, not by Peter Wiggin."
"I'll bet Peter Wiggin sends a lot clearer messages than God does," said Bean. "And if I don't like what he's doing, I can always quit."
"With someone like Peter, you can't always quit."
"He can't make me think of what I don't want to think about. Unless he's a remarkably stupid genius, he'll know that."
"I wonder if Achilles knows that, as he's trying to squeeze brilliance out of the other children."
"Exactly. Between Peter Wiggin and Achilles, what are the odds that Wiggin could be worse?"
"Oh, it's hard to imagine how that could be."
"So let's start thinking of a way to contact Locke without giving away our identity and our location."
"I'm going to need more mexerica oranges before we leave Brasil," said Carlotta.
Only then did he notice that the two of them had already blown through the whole bagful. "Me too," he said.
As she left, the empty bag in hand, she paused at the door. "You did very well with that message, Julian Delphiki."
"Thanks, Grandma Carlotta."
She left smiling.
Bean held up the message and scanned it again. The only part of the message that he hadn't fully interpreted for her was the last word. He didn't think "ptr" meant Peter. That would have been redundant. "Wiggin" was enough to identify him. No, the "ptr" at the end was a signature. This message was from Petra. She could have tried to write directly to Peter Wiggin. But she had written to Bean, coding it in a way that Peter would never have understood.