First Meetings (18 page)

Yet here it was: Top Financial Software! The Answer You’re Looking For!

It was like horoscopes—enough blind stabs and some of them are bound to strike a target. Andrew certainly needed financial help, and he certainly hadn’t found an answer yet. So instead of deleting the ad, he opened it and let it create its little 3-D presentation on his computer.

He had watched some of the ads that popped up on Valentine’s computer—her correspondence was so voluminous that there was no chance for her of avoiding it, at least not under her public Demosthenes identity. There were plenty of fireworks and theatrical pieces, dazzling special effects or heart-wrenching dramas used to sell whatever was being sold.

This one, though, was simple. A woman’s head appeared in the display space, but facing away from him. She glanced around, finally looking far enough over her shoulder to “see” Andrew.

“Oh, there you are,” she said.

Andrew said nothing, waiting for her to go on.

“Well, aren’t you going to answer me?” she asked.

Good software, he thought. But pretty chancy, to assume that all the recipients would refrain from answering.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “You think I’m just a program unspooling on your computer. But I’m not. I’m the friend and financial adviser you’ve been wishing for, but I don’t work for money, I work for
you
. You have to talk to me so I
can understand what you want to do with your money, what you want it to accomplish. I have to hear your voice.”

But Andrew didn’t like playing along with computer programs. He didn’t like participatory theatre, either. Valentine had dragged him to a couple of shows where the actors tried to engage the audience. Once a magician had tried to use Andrew in his act, finding objects hidden in his ears and hair and jacket. But Andrew kept his face blank and made no movement, gave no sign that he even understood what was happening, till the magician finally got the idea and moved on. What Andrew wouldn’t do for a live human being he certainly wouldn’t do for a computer program. He pressed the Page key to get past this talking-head intro.

“Ouch,” said the woman. “What are you trying to do, get rid of me?”

“Yes,” said Andrew. Then he cursed himself for having succumbed to the trick. This simulation was so cleverly real that it had finally got him to answer by reflex.

“Lucky for you that
you
don’t have a Page button. Do you have any idea how painful that is? Not to mention humiliating.”

Having once spoken, there was no reason not to go ahead and use the preferred interface for this program. “Come on, how do I get you off my display so I can get back to the salt mines?” Andrew asked. He deliberately spoke in a fluid, slurring manner, knowing that even the most elaborate speech-recognition software fell apart when it came to accented, slurred, and idiomatic speech.

“You have holdings in two salt mines,” said the woman. “But they’re both loser investments. You need to get rid of them.”

This irritated Andrew. “I didn’t assign you any files to
read,” he said. “I didn’t even buy this software yet. I don’t want you reading my files. How do I shut you down?”

“But if you liquidate the salt mines, you can use the proceeds to pay your taxes. It almost exactly covers the year’s fee.”

“You’re telling me you already figured out my taxes?”

“You just landed on the planet Sorelledolce, where the tax rates are unconscionably high. But using every exemption left to you, including veterans’ benefit laws that apply to only a handful of living participants in the War of Xenocide, I was able to keep the total fee under five million.”

Andrew laughed. “Oh, brilliant, even my most pessimistic figure didn’t go over a million five.”

It was the woman’s turn to laugh. “Your figure was a million and a half starcounts. My figure was under five million firenzette.”

Andrew calculated the difference in local currency and his smile faded. “That’s seven thousand starcounts.”

“Seven thousand four hundred and ten,” said the woman. “Am I hired?”

“There is no legal way you can get me out of paying that much of my taxes.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don’t have such good connections and haven’t yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts. I, however, know all the tricks.”

“A great come-on,” said Andrew. “Very convincing. Except the part where the police come and arrest me.”

“You think so, Mr. Wiggin?”

“If you’re going to force me to use a verbal interface,” said Andrew, “at least call me something other than Mister.”

“How about Andrew?” she said.

“Fine.”

“And you must call me Jane.”

“Must I?”

“Or I could call you Ender,” she said.

Andrew froze. There was nothing in his files to indicate that childhood nickname.

“Terminate this program and get off my computer at once,” he said.

“As you wish,” she answered.

Her head disappeared from the screen.

Good riddance, thought Andrew. If he gave a tax form
showing that low an amount to Benedetto, there wasn’t a chance he could avoid a full audit, and from the way Andrew sized up the tax man, Benedetto would come away with a large part of Andrew’s estate for himself. Not that Andrew minded a little enterprise in a man, but he had a feeling Benedetto didn’t know when to say when. No need to wave a red flag in front of his face.

But as he worked on, he began to wish he hadn’t been so hasty. This Jane software might have pulled the name “Ender” out of its database as a nickname for Andrew. Though it was odd that she should try that name before more obvious choices like “Drew” or “Andy,” it was paranoid of him to imagine that a piece of software that got emailed into his computer—no doubt a trial-size version of a much larger program—could have known so quickly that he really was
the
Andrew Wiggin. It just said and did what it was programmed to say and do. Maybe choosing the least-likely nickname was a strategy to get the potential customer to give the correct nickname, which would mean tacit approval to use it—another step closer to the decision to buy.

And what if that low, low tax figure was accurate? Or what if he could force it to come up with a more reasonable figure? If the software was competently written, it might be just the financial adviser and investment counselor he needed. Certainly it had found the two salt mines quickly enough, triggered by a figure of speech from his childhood on Earth. And their sale value, when he went ahead and liquidated them, was exactly what she had predicted.

What
it
had predicted. That human-looking face in the display certainly was a good ploy, to personalize the software and get him to start thinking of it as a person. You
could junk a piece of software, but it would be rude to send a person away.

Well, it hadn’t worked on him. He
did
send it away. And would do it again, if he felt the need to. But right now, with only two weeks left before the tax deadline, he thought it might be worth putting up with the annoyance of an intrusive virtual woman. Maybe he could reconfigure the software to communicate with him in text only, as he preferred.

He went to his email and called up the ad. This time, though, all that appeared was the standard message: “File no longer available.”

He cursed himself. He had no idea of the planet of origin. Maintaining a link across the ansible was expensive. Once he shut down the demo program, the link would be allowed to die—no point in wasting precious interstellar link time on a customer who didn’t instantly buy. Oh, well. Nothing to be done about it now.

Benedetto found the project taking him almost more time than it was worth, tracing this fellow back to find out whom he was working with. It wasn’t that easy, tracking him from voyage to voyage. All his flights were special issue, classified—again, proof that he worked with some branch of some government—and he only found the voyage before this one by accident. Soon enough, though, Benedetto realized that if he tracked his mistress or sister or secretary or whatever this Valentine woman was, he would have a much easier time of it.

What surprised him was how briefly they stayed in any one place. With only a few voyages, Benedetto had traced them
back three hundred years, to the very dawn of the colonizing age, and for the first time it occurred to him that it wasn’t inconceivable that this Andrew Wiggin might be the very…

No, no. He could not let himself believe it yet. But if it were true, if this were really the war criminal who…

The blackmail possibilities were astounding.

How was it possible that no one else had done this obvious research on Andrew and Valentine Wiggin? Or were they already paying blackmailers on several worlds?

Or were the blackmailers all dead? Benedetto would have to be careful. People with this much money invariably had powerful friends. Benedetto would have to find friends of his own to protect him as he moved forward with his new plan.

Valentine showed it to Andrew as an oddity. “I’ve heard of this before, but this is the first time we’ve ever been close enough to attend one.” It was a local newsnet announcement of a “speaking” for a dead man.

Andrew had never been comfortable with the way his pseudonym, “Speaker for the Dead,” had been picked up by others and turned into the title of a quasi-clergyman of a new truth-speaking ur-religion. There was no doctrine, so people of almost any faith could invite a speaker for the dead to take part in the regular funeral services, or to hold a separate speaking after—sometimes long after—the body was buried or burned.

These speakings for the dead did not arise from his book
The Hive Queen
, however. It was Andrew’s second book,
The Hegemon
, that brought this new funerary custom into being. Andrew’s and Valentine’s brother, Peter, had become
Hegemon after the civil wars and by a mix of deft diplomacy and brutal force had united all of Earth under a single powerful government. He proved to be an enlightened despot, and set up institutions that would share authority in the future; and it was under Peter’s rule that the serious business of colonization of other planets got under way. Yet from childhood on, Peter had been cruel and uncompassionate, and Andrew and Valentine feared him. Indeed, it was Peter who arranged things so Andrew could not return to Earth after his victory in the Third Bugger War. So it was hard for Andrew not to hate him.

That was why he researched and wrote
The Hegemon—
to try to find the truth of the man behind the manipulations and the massacres and the awful childhood memories. The result was a relentlessly fair biography that measured the man and hid nothing. Since the book was signed with the same name as
The Hive Queen
, which had already transformed attitudes toward the Buggers, it earned a great deal of attention and eventually gave rise to these speakers for the dead, going about trying to bring the same level of truthfulness to the funerals of other dead people, some prominent, some obscure. They spoke the deaths of heroes and powerful people, clearly showing the price that they and others paid for their success; of alcoholics or abusers who had ruined their families’ lives, trying to show the human being behind the addiction, but never sparing the truth of the damage that weakness caused. Andrew had got used to the idea that these things were done in the name of the Speaker for the Dead, but he had never attended one, and as Valentine expected, he jumped at the chance to do so now, even though he did not have time.

They knew nothing about the dead man, though the fact that the speaking received only small public notice suggested he was not well known. Sure enough, the venue for the speaking was a smallish public room in a hotel, and only a couple of dozen people were in attendance. There was no body present—the deceased had apparently already been disposed of. Andrew tried to guess at the identities of the other people in the room. Was this one the widow? That one a daughter? Or was the older one the mother, the younger the widow? Were those sons? Friends? Business partners?