"They feed me too much."
"I've got to study." Nikolai jumped across to his bunk.
Bean felt bad sometimes about having put Nikolai in this situation. But when they started winning, a lot of kids outside of Dragon Army would be wishing they could trade places with him. In fact, it was kind of surprising Nikolai realized he wasn't as qualified as the others. After all, the differences weren't that pronounced. Probably there were a lot of kids who felt just like Nikolai. But Bean hadn't really reassured him. In fact, he had probably reaffirmed Nikolai's feelings of inferiority.
What a sensitive friend I am.
There was no point in interviewing Volescu again, not after getting such lies from him the first time. All that talk of copies, and him the original--there was no mitigation now. He was a murderer, a servant of the Father of Lies. He would do nothing to help Sister Carlotta. And the need to find out what might be expected of the one child who evaded Volescu's little holocaust was too great to rely again on the word of such a man.
Besides, Volescu had made contact with his half-brother or double cousin--how else could he have obtained a fertilized egg containing his DNA? So Sister Carlotta should be able either to follow Volescu's trail or duplicate his research.
She learned quickly that Volescu was the illegitimate child of a Romanian woman in Budapest, Hungary. A little checking--and the judicious use of her security clearance--got her the name of the father, a Greek-born official in the League who had recently been promoted to service on the Hegemon's staff. That might have been a roadblock, but Sister Carlotta did not need to speak to the grandfather. She only needed to know who he was in order to find out the names of his three legitimate children. The daughter was eliminated because the shared parent was a male. And in checking the two sons, she decided to go first to visit the married one.
They lived on the island of Crete, where Julian ran a software company whose only client was the International Defense League. Obviously this was not a coincidence, but nepotism was almost honorable compared to some of the outright graft and favor-trading that was endemic in the League. In the long run such corruption was basically harmless, since the International Fleet had seized control of its own budget early on and never let the League touch it again. Thus the Polemarch and the Strategos had far more money at their disposal than the Hegemon, which made him, though first in title, weakest in actual power and independence of movement.
And just because Julian Delphiki owed his career to his father's political connections did not necessarily mean that his company's product was not adequate and that he himself was not an honest man. By the standards of honesty that prevailed in the world of business, anyway.
Sister Carlotta found that she did not need her security clearance to get a meeting with Julian and his wife, Elena. She called and said she would like to see them on a matter concerning the I.F., and they immediately opened their calendar to her. She arrived in Knossos and was immediately driven to their home on a bluff overlooking the Aegean. They looked nervous--indeed, Elena was almost frantic, wringing a handkerchief.
"Please," she said, after accepting their offer of fruit and cheese. "Please tell me why you are so upset. There's nothing about my business that should alarm you."
The two of them glanced at each other, and Elena became flustered. "Then there's nothing wrong with our boy?"
For a moment, Sister Carlotta wondered if they already knew about Bean--but how could they?
"Your son?"
"Then he's all right!" Elena burst into tears of relief and when her husband knelt beside her, she clung to him and sobbed.
"You see, it was very hard for us to let him go into service," said Julian. "So when a religious person calls to tell us she needs to see us on business pertaining to the I.F., we thought--we leapt to the conclusion--"
"Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't know you had a son in the military, or I would have been careful to assure you from the start that . . . but now I fear I am here under false pretenses. The matter I need to speak to you about is personal, so personal you may be reluctant to answer. Yet it is about a matter that is of some importance to the I.F. Truthful answers cannot possibly expose you to any personal risk, I promise."
Elena got control of herself. Julian seated himself again, and now they looked at Sister Carlotta almost with cheerfulness. "Oh, ask whatever you want," said Julian. "We're just happy that--whatever you want to ask."
"We'll answer if we can," said Elena.
"You say you have a son. This raises the possibility that--there is reason to wonder if you might not at some point have . . . was your son conceived under circumstances that would have allowed a clone of his fertilized egg to be made?"
"Oh yes," said Elena. "That is no secret. A defect in one fallopian tube and an ectopic pregnancy in the other made it impossible for me to conceive in utero. We wanted a child, so they drew out several of my eggs, fertilized them with my husband's sperm, and then cloned the ones we chose. There were four that we cloned, six copies of each. Two girls and two boys. So far, we have implanted only the one. He was such a--such a special boy, we did not want to dilute our attention. Now that his education is out of our hands, however, we have been thinking of bearing one of the girls. It's time." She reached over and took Julian's hand and smiled. He smiled back.
Such a contrast to Volescu. Hard to believe there was any genetic material in common.
"You said six copies of each of the four fertilized eggs," said Sister Carlotta.
"Six including the original," said Julian. "That way we have the best chance of implanting each of the four and carrying them through a full pregnancy."
"A total of twenty-four fertilized eggs. And only one of them was implanted?"
"Yes, we were very fortunate, the first one worked perfectly."
"Leaving twenty-three."
"Yes. Exactly."
"Mr. Delphiki, all twenty-three of those fertilized eggs remain in storage, waiting for implantation?"
"Of course."