Peter and John Paul both made the same gesture-hands to the forehead, covering the eyes. They understood at once, of course.

Keystrokes came in and got processed by Ferreira's snoopware or by John Paul's-but never by both. So both keystroke logs would show nothing but random letters, none of which would amount to anything meaningful. None of which would ever look like a log-on- even though there were log-ons all over the system all the time.

"Can we combine the logs?" asked John Paul. "We have all the keystrokes, after all."

"We have the alphabet, too," said Ferreira, "and if we just find the right order to arrange them in, those letters will spell out everything that was ever written."

"It's not as bad as that," said Peter At least the letters are in order. It shouldn't be that hard to meld them together in a way that makes sense."

"But we have to meld all of them in order to find Achilles's logons.

"Write a program," said Peter "One that will find everything that might be a log-on by him, and then you can work on the material immediately following those possibles."

"Write a program," murmured Ferreira.

"Or I will," said Peter. "I don't have anything else to do."

That sarcasm doesn't make people love you, Peter, said John Paul silently.

Then again, there was no chancc. given Peter's parents, that such sarcasm would not come readily to his lips.

"I'll sort it out," said Ferreira.

"I'm sorry," said John Paul.

Ferreira only sighed. "Didn't it at least cross your mind that we would have software already in place to do the same job?"

"You mean you had snoopware that would give me regular reports on what Achilles was writing?" asked John Paul. Oops. Peter's not the only sarcastic one. But then, I'm not trying to unite the world.

"There's no reason for you to know," said Peter.

Time to bite the bullet. "I think Achilles is planning to kill your mother."

"Father," said Peter impatiently. "He doesn't even know her."

"Do you think there's any chance that he didn't hear that she tried to get into his room?"

"But ... kill her?" asked Ferreira.

"Achilles doesn't do things by half-measures," said John Paul. "And nobody is more loyal to Peter than she is."

"Not even you, Father?" asked Peter sweetly.

"She doesn't see your faults," lied John Paul. "Her motherly instincts blind her."

"But you have no such handicap."

"Not being your mother," said John Paul.

"My snoopware should have caught this anyway," said Ferreira. "I blame only myself. The system shouldn't have had that kind of back door"

"Systems always do," said John Paul.

After Ferreira left, Peter said a few cold words. "I know how to keep Mother completely safe," he said. "Take her away from here. Go to a colony world. Go somewhere and do something, but stop trying to protect me.

"Protect you?"

"Do you think I'm so stupid that I'll believe this cockamamy story about Achilles wanting to kill Mother?"

"Ah. You're the only person here worth killing."

"I'm the only one whose death would remove a major obstacle from Achilles's path."

John Paul could only shake his head.

"Who else, then?" Peter demanded.

"Nobody else, Peter," said John Paul. "Not a soul. Everybody's safe, because, after all, Achilles has shown himself to be a perfectly rational boy who would never, ever kill somebody without a perfectly rational purpose in view."

"Well, yes, of course, he's psychotic," said Peter "I didn't mean he wasn't psychotic."

"So many psychotics, so few really effective drugs," said John Paul as he left the room. That night when he told Theresa, she groaned.

"So he's been getting a free ride."

"We'll put it all together soon enough, I'm sure," said John Paul.

"No, Johnny P. We aren't sure that it will be soon enough. For all we know, it's already too late."

CONCEPTION

To: Stone%Cold@IComeAnon.org

From: Third%Party@MysteriousEast.org

Re: Definitely not vichyssoise

I don't know who you are, don't know what this message means, He is in China. I was a tourist there, walking along

a public sidewalk. He gave me a folded slip of paper and asked me to post a message to this remailing site, with the subject shown above. So here it is:

"He thinks I told him where Caligulo would be but I did not."

I hope this means something to you and that you get it, because be seemed very intense about this. As for me, you don't know who am, neither does he, and that's the way I like it.

"It's not the same city," said Bean.

"Well, of course not," said Petra. "You're taller"

It was Bean's first return to Rotterdam since he left as a very young child to go into space and learn to be a soldier. In all his wanderings with Sister Carlotta after the war, she never once suggested coming here, and he never thought of it himself.

But this was where Volescu was-he had had the chutzpah[?] to reestablish himself in the city where he had been arrested. Now, of course, he was not calling his work research-even though it had been illegal for many years. other scientists had pursued it quietly and when, after the war, they were able to publish again, they left all of Volescu's achievements in the dust.

So his offices, in an old but lovely building in the heart of the city, were modestly labeled, in Common, REPRODUCTIVE SAFETY SERVICE S.

"Safety," said Petra. "An odd name, considering how many babies he killed."

"Not babies," said Bean mildly. "Illegal experiments were terminated, but no actual legal babies were ever involved."

"That really stops your hogs, doesn't it," she said.

"You watch too many vids. You're beginning to pick up American slang."

"What else can I do, with you spending all your time online, saving the world?"

"I'm about to meet my maker," said Bean. "And you're complaining to me about my spending too much time on pure altruism."

"He's not your maker," said Petra.

"Who is, then? My biological parents? They made Nikolai. I was leftovers in the fridge."

"I was referring to God," said Petra.

"I know you were," said Bean, smiling. "Me, I can't help but think that I exist because God blinked. If he'd been paying attention, I could never have happened."

"Don't goad me about religion," said Petra. "I won't play."

"You started it," said Bean.

"I'm not Sister Carlotta."

"I couldn't have married you if you were. Was that your choice? Me or the nunnery?"

Petra laughed and gave him a little shove. But it wasn't much of a shove. Mostly it was just an excuse to touch him. To prove to herself that he was hers, that she could touch him when she liked, and it was all right. Even with God, since they were legally married now. A necessity before in vitro fertilization, so that there could be no question about paternity or joint ownership of the embryos.

A necessity, but also what she wanted.

When had she started wanting this? In Battle School, if anyone had asked her whom she would eventually marry, she would have said, "A fool, since no one smarter would have me," but if pressed, and if she trusted her inquisitor not to blab, she would have said, "Dink Meeker." He was her closest friend in Battle School.

Dink was even Dutch. He wasn't in the Netherlands these days, however The Netherlands had no military. Dink had been lent to England, rather like a prize football player, and he was cooperating in joint Anglo-American planning, which was such a waste of his talent, since on neither side of the Atlantic was there the slightest desire to get involved in the turmoil that was rocking the rest of the world.