espera..

TRONDHEIM


I’m deeply sorry that I could not act upon your request for more detail concerning the courtship and marriage customs of the aboriginal Lusitanians. This must be causing you unimaginable distress, or else you would never have petitioned the Xenological Society to censure me for failure to cooperate with your researches.
When would-be xenologers complain that I am not getting the right sort of data from my observations of the pequeninos, I always urge them to reread the limitations placed upon me by law. I am permitted to bring no more than one assistant on field visits; I may not ask questions that might reveal human expectations, lest they try to imitate us; I may not volunteer information to elicit a parallel response; I may not stay with them more than four hours at a time; except for my clothing, I may not use any products of technology in their presence, which includes cameras, recorders, computers, or even a manufactured pen to write on manufactured paper; I may not even observe them unawares.
In short: I cannot tell you how the pequeninos reproduce because they have chosen not to do it in front of me.
Of course your research is crippled! Of course our conclusions about the pequeninos are absurd! If we had to observe your university under the same limitations that bind us in our observation of the Lusitanian aborigines, we would no doubt conclude that humans do not reproduce, do not form kinship groups, and devote their entire life cycle to the metamorphosis of the larval student into the adult professor. We might even suppose that professors exercise noticeable power in human society. A competent investigation would quickly reveal the inaccuracy of such conclusions—but in the case of the pequeninos, no competent investigation is permitted or even contemplated.
Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us—and, through us, you. At

the present rate of progress we might as well be mailing questionnaires to the pequeninos and waiting for them to dash off scholarly papers in reply.

—João Figueira Alvarez, reply to Pietro Guataninni of the University of Sicily, Milano Campus, Etruria, published posthumously in Xenological Studies,
22:4:49:193



The news of Pipo’s death was not of merely local importance. It was transmitted instantaneously, by ansible, to all the Hundred Worlds. The first aliens discovered since Ender’s Xenocide had tortured to death the one human who was designated to observe them. Within hours, scholars, scientists, politicians, and journalists began to strike their poses.
A consensus soon emerged. One incident, under baffling circumstances, does not
prove the failure of Starways Council policy toward the piggies. On the contrary, the fact that only one man died seems to prove the wisdom of the present policy of near inaction. We should, therefore, do nothing except continue to observe at a slightly less intense pace. Pipo’s successor was instructed to visit the piggies no more often than every other day, and never for longer than an hour. He was not to push the piggies to answer questions concerning their treatment of Pipo. It was a reinforcement of the old policy of inaction.
There was also much concern about the morale of the people of Lusitania. They were sent many new entertainment programs by ansible, despite the expense, to help take their minds off the grisly murder.
And then, having done the little that could be done by framlings, who were, after all, lightyears away from Lusitania, the people of the Hundred Worlds returned to their local concerns.
Outside Lusitania, only one man among the half-trillion human beings in the Hundred Worlds felt the death of João Figueira Alvarez, called Pipo, as a great change in the shape of his own life. Andrew Wiggin was a speaker for the dead in the university city of Reykjavik, renowned as the conservator of Nordic culture, perched on the steep slopes of a knifelike fjord that pierced the granite and ice of the frozen world of Trondheim right at the equator. It was spring, so the snow was in retreat,
and fragile grass and flowers reached out for strength from the glistering sun.
Andrew sat on the brow of a sunny hill, surrounded by a dozen students who were studying the history of interstellar colonization. Andrew was only half-listening to a fiery argument over whether the utter human victory in the Bugger Wars had been a necessary prelude to human expansion. Such arguments always degenerated quickly into a vilification of the human monster Ender, who commanded the starfleet that committed the Xenocide of the Buggers. Andrew tended to let his mind wander

somewhat; the subject did not exactly bore him, but he preferred not to let it engage his attention, either.
Then the small computer implant worn like a jewel in his ear told him of the cruel death of Pipo, the xenologer on Lusitania, and instantly Andrew became alert. He interrupted his students.
“What do you know of the piggies?” he asked.
“They are the only hope of our redemption,” said one, who took Calvin rather more seriously than Luther.
Andrew looked at once to the student Plikt, who he knew would not be able to endure such mysticism. “They do not exist for any human purpose, not even redemption,” said Plikt with withering contempt. “They are true ramen, like the buggers.”
Andrew nodded, but frowned. “You use a word that is not yet common koine.” “It should be,” said Plikt. “Everyone in Trondheim, every Nord in the Hundred Worlds should have read Demosthenes’ History of Wutan in Trondheim by now.”
“We should but we haven’t,” sighed a student.
“Make her stop strutting, Speaker,” said another. “Plikt is the only woman I know who can strut sitting down.”
Plikt closed her eyes. “The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlänning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling— Demosthenes merely drops the accent from the Nordic främling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the
stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.”
Andrew noticed that several students were annoyed. He called it to their attention. “You think you’re annoyed because of Plikt’s arrogance, but that isn’t so. Plikt is not arrogant; she is merely precise. You are properly ashamed that you have not yet read Demosthenes’ history of your own people, and so in your shame you are annoyed at Plikt because she is not guilty of your sin.”
“I thought speakers didn’t believe in sin,” said a sullen boy.
Andrew smiled. “You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.”
Styrka refused to be defeated. “What does all this talk of utlannings and framlings and ramen and varelse have to do with Ender’s Xenocide?”
Andrew turned to Plikt. She thought for a moment. “This is relevant to the stupid argument that we were just having. Through these Nordic layers of foreignness we

can see that Ender was not a true xenocide, for when he destroyed the buggers, we knew them only as varelse; it was not until years later, when the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, that humankind first understood that the buggers were not varelse at all, but ramen; until that time there had been no understanding between bugger and human.”
“Xenocide is xenocide,” said Styrka. “Just because Ender didn’t know they were ramen doesn’t make them any less dead.”
Andrew sighed at Styrka’s unforgiving attitude; it was the fashion among Calvinists at Reykjavik to deny any weight to human motive in judging the good or evil of an act. Acts are good and evil in themselves, they said; and because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act, it made students like Styrka quite hostile to Andrew. Fortunately, Andrew did not resent it—he understood the motive behind it.
“Styrka, Plikt, let me put you another case. Suppose that the piggies, who have learned to speak Stark, and whose languages some humans have also learned, suppose that we learned that they had suddenly, without provocation or explanation, tortured to death the xenologer sent to observe them.”
Plikt jumped at the question immediately. “How could we know it was without provocation? What seems innocent to us might be unbearable to them.”
Andrew smiled. “Even so. But the xenologer has done them no harm, has said very little, has cost them nothing—by any standard we can think of, he is not worthy of painful death. Doesn’t the very fact of this incomprehensible murder make the piggies varelse instead of ramen?”
Now it was Styrka who spoke quickly. “Murder is murder. This talk of varelse and raman is nonsense. If the piggies murder, then they are evil, as the buggers were
evil. If the act is evil, then the actor is evil.”
Andrew nodded. “There is our dilemma. There is the problem. Was the act evil, or was it, somehow, to the piggies’ understanding at least, good? Are the piggies raman or varelse? For the moment, Styrka, hold your tongue. I know all the arguments of your Calvinism, but even John Calvin would call your doctrine stupid.”
“How do you know what Calvin would—”
“Because he’s dead,” roared Andrew, “and so I’m entitled to speak for him!” The students laughed, and Styrka withdrew into stubborn silence. The boy was
bright, Andrew knew; his Calvinism would not outlast his undergraduate education, though its excision would be long and painful.
“Talman, Speaker,” said Plikt. “You spoke as if your hypothetical situation were true, as if the piggies really had murdered the xenologer.”
Andrew nodded gravely. “Yes, it’s true.”
It was disturbing; it awoke echoes of the ancient conflict between bugger and

human.
“Look in yourselves at this moment,” said Andrew. “You will find that underneath your hatred of Ender the Xenocide and your grief for the death of the buggers, you also feel something much uglier: You’re afraid of the stranger, whether he’s utlanning or framling. When you think of him killing a man that you know of and value, then it doesn’t matter what his shape is. He’s varelse then, or worse—djur, the dire beast, that comes in the night with slavering jaws. If you had the only gun in your village, and the beasts that had torn apart one of your people were coming
again, would you stop to ask if they also had a right to live, or would you act to save your village, the people that you knew, the people who depended on you?”
“By your argument we should kill the piggies now, primitive and helpless as they are!” shouted Styrka.
“My argument? I asked a question. A question isn’t an argument, unless you think you know my answer, and I assure you, Styrka, that you do not. Think about this. Class is dismissed.”
“Will we talk about this tomorrow?” they demanded.
“If you want,” said Andrew. But he knew that if they discussed it, it would be without him. For them, the issue of Ender the Xenocide was merely philosophical. After all, the Bugger Wars were more than three thousand years ago; it was now the year 1948 SC, counting from the year the Starways Code was established, and Ender had destroyed the buggers in the year 1180 BSC. But to Andrew, the events were not so remote. He had done far more interstellar travel than any of his students would dare to guess; since he was twenty-five he had, until Trondheim, never stayed more than six months on any planet. Lightspeed travel between worlds had let him skip like a stone over the surface of time. His students had no idea that their speaker for the dead, who was surely no older than thirty-five, had very clear memories of
events 3000 years before, that in fact those events seemed scarcely twenty years ago to him, only half his lifetime. They had no idea how deeply the question of Ender’s ancient guilt burned within him, and how he had answered it in a thousand different unsatisfactory ways. They knew their teacher only as Speaker for the Dead; they did not know that when he was a mere infant, his older sister, Valentine, could not pronounce the name Andrew, and so called him Ender, the name that he made infamous before he was fifteen years old. So let unforgiving Styrka and analytical Plikt ponder the great question of Ender’s guilt; for Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, the question was not academic.
And now, walking along the damp, grassy hillside in the chill air, Ender—
Andrew, Speaker—could think only of the piggies, who were already committing inexplicable murders, just as the buggers had carelessly done when they first visited humankind. Was it something unavoidable, when strangers met, that the meeting had

to be marked with blood? The buggers had casually killed human beings, but only because they had a hive mind; to them, individual life was as precious as nail parings, and killing a human or two was simply their way of letting us know they were in the neighborhood. Could the piggies have such a reason for killing, too?
But the voice in his ear had spoken of torture, a ritual murder similar to the execution of one of the piggies’ own. The piggies were not a hive mind, they were not the buggers, and Ender Wiggin had to know why they had done what they did.
“When did you hear about the death of the xenologer?”
Ender turned. It was Plikt. She had followed him instead of going back to the
Caves, where the students lived.
“Then, while we spoke.” He touched his ear; implanted terminals were expensive, but they were not all that rare.
“I checked the news just before class. There was nothing about it then. If a major story had been coming in by ansible, there would have been an alert. Unless you got the news straight from the ansible report.”
Plikt obviously thought she had a mystery on her hands. And, in fact, she did. “Speakers have high priority access to public information,” he said.
“Has someone asked you to speak the death of the xenologer?” He shook his head. “Lusitania is under a Catholic License.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “They won’t have a speaker of their own there. But they still have to let a speaker come, if someone requests it. And Trondheim is the closest world to Lusitania.”
“Nobody’s called for a speaker.”
Plikt tugged at his sleeve. “Why are you here?”
“You know why I came. I spoke the death of Wutan.”
“I know you came here with your sister, Valentine. She’s a much more popular teacher than you are—she answers questions with answers; you just answer with more questions.”
“That’s because she knows some answers.”
“Speaker, you have to tell me. I tried to find out about you—I was curious. Your name, for one thing, where you came from. Everything’s classified. Classified so deep that I can’t even find out what the access level is. God himself couldn’t look up your life story.”
Ender took her by the shoulders, looked down into her eyes. “It’s none of your business, that’s what the access level is.”
“You are more important than anybody guesses, Speaker,” she said. “The ansible reports to you before it reports to anybody, doesn’t it? And nobody can look up information about you.”
“Nobody has ever tried. Why you?”

“I want to be a speaker,” she said.
“Go ahead then. The computer will train you. It isn’t like a religion—you don’t have to memorize any catechism. Now leave me alone.” He let go of her with a little shove. She staggered backward as he strode off.
“I want to speak for you,” she cried. “I’m not dead yet!” he shouted back.
“I know you’re going to Lusitania! I know you are!”
Then you know more than I do, said Ender silently. But he trembled as he walked, even though the sun was shining and he wore three sweaters to keep out the cold. He hadn’t known Plikt had so much emotion in her. Obviously she had come to identify with him. It frightened him to have this girl need something from him so desperately. He had spent years now without making any real connection with anyone but his sister Valentine—her and, of course, the dead that he spoke. All the other people who had meant anything to him in his life were dead. He and Valentine had passed them by centuries ago, worlds ago.
The idea of casting a root into the icy soil of Trondheim repelled him. What did Plikt want from him? It didn’t matter; he wouldn’t give it. How dare she demand things from him, as if he belonged to her? Ender Wiggin didn’t belong to anybody. If she knew who he really was, she would loathe him as the Xenocide; or she would worship him as the savior of mankind—Ender remembered what it was like when
people used to do that, too, and he didn’t like it much. Even now they knew him only by his role, by the name speaker, talman, falante, spieler, whatever they called the Speaker for the Dead in the language of their city or nation or world.
He didn’t want them to know him. He did not belong to them, to the human race. He had another errand, he belonged to someone else. Not human beings. Not the bloody piggies, either. Or so he thought.

3

LIBO











Observed Diet: Primarily macios, the shiny worms that live among merdona vines on the bark of the trees. Sometimes they have been seen to chew capim blades. Sometimes—accidently?—they ingest merdona leaves along with the macios.
We’ve never seen them eat anything else. Novinha analyzed all three foods— macios, capim blades, and merdona leaves—and the results were surprising. Either the pequeninos don’t need many different proteins, or they’re hungry all the time. Their diet is seriously lacking in many trace elements. And calcium intake is so low, we wonder whether their bones use calcium the same way ours do.
Pure speculation: Since we can’t take tissue samples, our only knowledge of piggy anatomy and physiology is what we were able to glean from our photographs of the vivisected corpse of the piggy called Rooter. Still, there are some obvious anomalies. The piggies’ tongues, which are so fantastically agile that they can produce any sound we make, and a lot we can’t, must have evolved for some purpose. Probing for insects in tree bark or in nests in the ground, maybe. Whether an ancient ancestral piggy did that, they certainly don’t do it now. And the horny pads on their feet and inside their knees allow them to climb trees and cling by their legs alone. Why did that evolve? To escape from some predator? There is no predator on Lusitania large enough to harm them. To cling to the tree while probing for insects in the bark? That fits in with their tongues, but where are the insects? The only insects are the suckflies and the puladors,
but they don’t bore into the bark and the piggies don’t eat them anyway. The
macios are large, live on the bark’s surface, and can easily be harvested by pulling down the merdona vines; they really don’t even have to climb the trees.
Libo’s speculation: The tongue and the tree-climbing evolved in a different environment, with a much more varied diet, including insects. But something— an ice age? Migration? A disease?—caused the environment to change. No more

barkbugs, etc. Maybe all the big predators were wiped out then. It would explain why there are so few species on Lusitania, despite the very favorable conditions. The cataclysm might have been fairly recent—half a million years ago?—so that evolution hasn’t had a chance to differentiate much yet.
It’s a tempting hypothesis, since there’s no obvious reason in the present environment for piggies to have evolved at all. There’s no competition for them. The ecological niche they occupy could be filled by opossums. Why would intelligence ever be an adaptive trait? But inventing a cataclysm to explain why the piggies have such a boring, non-nutritious diet is probably overkill. Ockham’s razor cuts this to ribbons.

—João Figueira Alvarez, Working Notes 4/14/1948 SC, published posthumously in
Philosophical Roots of the Lusitanian Secession, 2010-33-4-1090:40



As soon as Mayor Bosquinha arrived at the Zenador’s Station, matters slipped out of Libo’s and Novinha’s control. Bosquinha was accustomed to taking command, and her attitude did not leave much opportunity for protest, or even for consideration. “You wait here,” she said to Libo almost as soon as she had grasped the situation. “As soon as I got your call, I sent the Arbiter to tell your mother.”
“We have to bring his body in,” said Libo.
“I also called some of the men who live nearby to help with that,” she said. “And
Bishop Peregrino is preparing a place for him in the Cathedral graveyard.” “I want to be there,” insisted Libo.
“You understand, Libo, we have to take pictures, in detail.”
“I was the one who told you we have to do that, for the report to the Starways
Committee.”
“But you should not be there, Libo.” Bosquinha’s voice was authoritative. “Besides, we must have your report. We have to notify Congress as quickly as possible. Are you up to writing it now, while it’s fresh in your mind?”
She was right, of course. Only Libo and Novinha could write firsthand reports, and
the sooner they wrote them, the better. “I can do it,” said Libo.
“And you, Novinha, your observations also. Write your reports separately, without consultation. The Hundred Worlds are waiting.”
The computer had already been alerted, and their reports went out by ansible even as they wrote them, mistakes and corrections and all. On all the Hundred Worlds the people most involved in xenology read each word as Libo or Novinha typed it in. Many others were given instantaneous computer-written summaries of what had happened. Twenty-two lightyears away, Andrew Wiggin learned the Xenologer João Figueira “Pipo” Alvarez had been murdered by the piggies, and told his students

about it even before the men had brought Pipo’s body through the gate into Milagre.
His report done, Libo was at once surrounded by Authority. Novinha watched with increasing anguish as she saw the incapability of the leaders of Lusitania, how they only intensified Libo’s pain. Bishop Peregrino was the worst; his idea of comfort
was to tell Libo that in all likelihood, the piggies were actually animals, without souls, and so his father had been torn apart by wild beasts, not murdered. Novinha almost shouted at him, Does that mean that Pipo’s life work was nothing but studying beasts? And his death, instead of being murder, was an act of God? But for Libo’s sake she restrained herself; he sat in the Bishop’s presence, nodding and, in the end, getting rid of him by sufferance far more quickly than Novinha could ever have done by argument.
Dom Cristão of the Monastery was more helpful, asking intelligent questions about the events of the day, which let Libo and Novinha be analytical, unemotional as they answered. However, Novinha soon withdrew from answering. Most people were asking why the piggies had done such a thing; Dom Cristão was asking what Pipo might have done recently to trigger his murder. Novinha knew perfectly well what Pipo had done—he had told the piggies the secret he discovered in Novinha’s simulation. But she did not speak of this, and Libo seemed to have forgotten what she had hurriedly told him a few hours ago as they were leaving to go searching for Pipo. He did not even glance toward the simulation. Novinha was content with that; her greatest anxiety was that he would remember.
Dom Cristão’s questions were interrupted when the Mayor came back with several of the men who had helped retrieve the corpse. They were soaked to the skin despite their plastic raincoats, and spattered with mud; mercifully, any blood must have
been washed away by the rain. They all seemed vaguely apologetic and even worshipful, nodding their heads to Libo, almost bowing. It occurred to Novinha that their deference wasn’t just the normal wariness people always show toward those whom death had so closely touched.
One of the men said to Libo, “You’re Zenador now, aren’t you?” and there it was,
in words. The Zenador had no official authority in Milagre, but he had prestige—his work was the whole reason for the colony’s existence, wasn’t it? Libo was not a boy anymore; he had decisions to make, he had prestige, he had moved from the fringe
of the colony’s life to its very center.
Novinha felt control of her life slip away. This is not how things are supposed to be. I’m supposed to continue here for years ahead, learning from Pipo, with Libo as my fellow student; that’s the pattern of life. Since she was already the colony’s xenobiologista, she also had an honored adult niche to fill. She wasn’t jealous of Libo, she just wanted to remain a child with him for a while. Forever, in fact.
But Libo could not be her fellow student, could not be her fellow anything. She

saw with sudden clarity how everyone in the room focused on Libo, what he said, how he felt, what he planned to do now. “We’ll not harm the piggies,” he said, “or even call it murder. We don’t know what Father did to provoke them, I’ll try to understand that later, what matters now is that whatever they did undoubtedly
seemed right to them. We’re the strangers here, we must have violated some—taboo, some law—but Father was always prepared for this, he always knew it was a possibility. Tell them that he died with the honor of a soldier in the field, a pilot in his ship, he died doing his job.”
Ah, Libo, you silent boy, you have found such eloquence now that you can’t be a mere boy anymore. Novinha felt a redoubling of her grief. She had to look away from Libo, look anywhere—
And where she looked was into the eyes of the only other person in the room who was not watching Libo. The man was very tall, but very young—younger than she was, she realized, for she knew him: he had been a student in the class below her. She had gone before Dona Cristã once, to defend him. Marcos Ribeira, that was his
name, but they had always called him Marcão, because he was so big. Big and dumb, they said, calling him also simply Cão, the crude word for dog. She had seen the sullen anger in his eyes, and once she had seen him, goaded beyond endurance, lash out and strike down one of his tormentors. His victim was in a shoulder cast for
much of a year.
Of course they accused Marcão of having done it without provocation—that’s the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back. But Novinha didn’t belong to the group of children—she was as isolated as Marcão, though not as helpless—and so she had no loyalty to stop her from telling the truth. It was part of her training to speak for the piggies, she thought. Marcão himself meant nothing to her. It never occurred to her that the incident might have been important to him, that he might have remembered her as the one person who ever stood up for him in his continuous war with the other children. She hadn’t seen or thought of him in the years since she became xenobiologist.
Now here he was, stained with the mud of Pipo’s death scene, his face looking
even more haunted and bestial than ever with his hair plastered by rain and sweat over his face and ears. And what was he looking at? His eyes were only for her, even as she frankly stared at him. Why are you watching me? she asked silently. Because I’m hungry, said his animal eyes. But no, no, that was her fear, that was her vision of the murderous piggies. Marcão is nothing to me, and no matter what he might think,
I am nothing to him.
Yet she had a flash of insight, just for a moment. Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her; it was so different that

it was not even the same event. Her mind connected this with the piggies’ murder of Pipo, and it seemed very important, it seemed to verge on explaining what had happened, but then the thought slipped away in a flurry of conversation and activity as the Bishop led the men off again, heading for the graveyard. Coffins were not used for burial here, where for the piggies’ sake it was forbidden to cut trees. So Pipo’s body was to be buried at once, though the graveside funeral would be held no
sooner than tomorrow, and probably later; many people would want to gather for the Zenador’s requiem mass. Marcão and the other men trooped off into the storm, leaving Novinha and Libo to deal with all the people who thought they had urgent business to attend to in the aftermath of Pipo’s death. Self-important strangers wandered in and out, making decisions that Novinha did not understand and Libo did not seem to care about.
Until finally it was the Arbiter standing by Libo, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You will, of course, stay with us,” said the Arbiter. “Tonight at least.”
Why your house, Arbiter? thought Novinha. You’re nobody to us, we’ve never brought a case before you, who are you to decide this? Does Pipo’s death mean that we’re suddenly little children who can’t decide anything?
“I’ll stay with my mother,” said Libo.
The Arbiter looked at him in surprise—the mere idea of a child resisting his will seemed to be completely outside the realm of his experience. Novinha knew that this was not so, of course. His daughter Cleopatra, several years younger than Novinha, had worked hard to earn her nickname, Bruxinha—little witch. So how could he not know that children had minds of their own, and resisted taming?
But the surprise was not what Novinha had assumed. “I thought you realized that your mother is also staying with my family for a time,” said the Arbiter. “These events have upset her, of course, and she should not have to think about household duties, or be in a house that reminds her of who is not there with her. She is with us, and your brothers and sisters, and they need you there. Your older brother João is with them, of course, but he has a wife and child of his own now, so you’re the one who can stay and be depended on.”
Libo nodded gravely. The Arbiter was not bringing him into his protection; he was
asking Libo to become a protector.
The Arbiter turned to Novinha. “And I think you should go home,” he said.
Only then did she understand that his invitation had not included her. Why should it? Pipo had not been her father. She was just a friend who happened to be with Libo when the body was discovered. What grief could she experience?
Home! What was home, if not this place? Was she supposed to go now to the Biologista’s Station, where her bed had not been slept in for more than a year, except for catnaps during lab work? Was that supposed to be her home? She had left it

because it was so painfully empty of her parents; now the Zenador’s Station was empty, too: Pipo dead and Libo changed into an adult with duties that would take him away from her. This place wasn’t home, but neither was any other place.
The Arbiter led Libo away. His mother, Conceição, was waiting for him in the Arbiter’s house. Novinha barely knew the woman, except as the librarian who maintained the Lusitanian archive. Novinha had never spent time with Pipo’s wife or other children, she had not cared that they existed; only the work here, the life here had been real. As Libo went to the door he seemed to grow smaller, as if he were a much greater distance away, as if he were being borne up and off by the wind, shrinking into the sky like a kite; the door closed behind him.
Now she felt the magnitude of Pipo’s loss. The mutilated corpse on the hillside was not his death, it was merely his death’s debris. Death itself was the empty place in her life. Pipo had been a rock in a storm, so solid and strong that she and Libo, sheltered together in his lee, had not even known the storm existed. Now he was gone, and the storm had them, would carry them whatever way it would. Pipo, she cried out silently. Don’t go! Don’t leave us! But of course he was gone, as deaf to her prayers as ever her parents had been.
The Zenador’s Station was still busy; the Mayor herself, Bosquinha, was using a terminal to transmit all of Pipo’s data by ansible to the Hundred Worlds, where experts were desperately trying to make sense of Pipo’s death.
But Novinha knew that the key to his death was not in Pipo’s files. It was her data that had killed him, somehow. It was still there in the air above her terminal, the holographic images of genetic molecules in the nuclei of piggy cells. She had not wanted Libo to study it, but now she looked and looked, trying to see what Pipo had seen, trying to understand what there was in the images that had made him rush out to the piggies, to say or do something that had made them murder him. She had inadvertently uncovered some secret that the piggies would kill to keep, but what was it?
The more she studied the holos, the less she understood, and after a while she
didn’t see them at all, except as a blur through her tears as she wept silently. She had killed him, because without even meaning to she had found the pequeninos’ secret.
If I had never come to this place, if I had not dreamed of being Speaker of the piggies’ story, you would still be alive, Pipo; Libo would have his father, and be happy; this place would still be home. I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.
It was the Mayor who noticed her short, sharp breaths and realized, with brusque compassion, that this girl was also shaken and grieving. Bosquinha left others to continue the ansible reports and led Novinha out of the Zenador’s Station.

“I’m sorry, child,” said the Mayor, “I knew you came here often, I should have guessed that he was like a father to you, and here we treat you like a bystander, not right or fair of me at all, come home with me—”
“No,” said Novinha. Walking out into the cold, wet night air had shaken some of the grief from her; she regained some clarity of thought. “No, I want to be alone, please.” Where? “In my own station.”
“You shouldn’t be alone, on this of all nights,” said Bosquinha.
But Novinha could not bear the prospect of company, of kindness, of people trying to console her. I killed him, don’t you see? I don’t deserve consolation. I want to suffer whatever pain might come. It’s my penance, my restitution, and, if possible, my absolution; how else will I clean the bloodstains from my hands?
But she hadn’t the strength to resist, or even to argue. For ten minutes the Mayor’s car skimmed over the grassy roads.
“Here’s my house,” said the Mayor. “I don’t have any children quite your age, but you’ll be comfortable enough, I think. Don’t worry, no one will plague you, but it isn’t good to be alone.”
“I’d rather.” Novinha meant her voice to sound forceful, but it was weak and faint. “Please,” said Bosquinha. “You’re not yourself.”
I wish I weren’t.
She had no appetite, though Bosquinha’s husband had a cafezinho for them both. It was late, only a few hours left till dawn, and she let them put her to bed. Then, when the house was still, she got up, dressed, and went downstairs to the Mayor’s home terminal. There she instructed the computer to cancel the display that was still above the terminal at the Zenador’s Station. Even though she had not been able to decipher the secret that Pipo found there, someone else might, and she would have
no other death on her conscience.
Then she left the house and walked through the Centro, around the bight of the river, through the Vila das Aguas, to the Biologista’s Station. Her house.
It was cold, unheated in the living quarters—she hadn’t slept there in so long that
there was thick dust on her sheets. But of course the lab was warm, well-used—her work had never suffered because of her attachment to Pipo and Libo. If only it had.
She was very systematic about it. Every sample, every slide, every culture she had used in the discoveries that led to Pipo’s death—she threw them out, washed everything clean, left no hint of the work she had done. She not only wanted it gone, she wanted no sign that it had been destroyed.
Then she turned to her terminal. She would also destroy all the records of her work in this area, all the records of her parents’ work that had led to her own discoveries. They would be gone. Even though it had been the focus of her life, even though it had been her identity for many years, she would destroy it as she herself

should be punished, destroyed, obliterated.
The computer stopped her. “Working notes on xenobiological research may not be erased,” it reported. Probably she couldn’t have done it anyway. She had learned from her parents, from their files which she had studied like scripture, like a
roadmap into herself: Nothing was to be destroyed, nothing forgotten. The sacredness of knowledge was deeper in her soul than any catechism. She was caught in a paradox. Knowledge had killed Pipo; to erase that knowledge would kill her parents again, kill what they had left for her. She could not preserve it, she could not destroy it. There were walls on either side, too high to climb, pressing slowly
inward, crushing her.
Novinha did the only thing she could: put on the files every layer of protection
and every barrier to access she knew of. No one would ever see them but her, as long as she lived. Only when she died would her successor as xenobiologist be able to see what she had hidden there.
With one exception—when she married, her husband would also have access if he could show need to know. Well, she’d never marry. It was that easy.
She saw her future ahead of her, bleak and unbearable and unavoidable. She dared not die, and yet she would hardly be alive, unable to marry, unable even to think about the subject herself, lest she discover the deadly secret and inadvertently let it slip; alone forever, burdened forever, guilty forever, yearning for death but
forbidden to reach for it. Still, she would have this consolation: No one else would ever die because of her. She’d bear no more guilt than she bore now.
It was in that moment of grim, determined despair that she remembered the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, remembered the Speaker for the Dead. Even though the original writer, the original Speaker was surely thousands of years in his grave, there were other speakers on many worlds, serving as priests to people who acknowledged no god and yet believed in the value of the lives of human beings. Speakers whose business it was to discover the true causes and motives of the things that people did, and declare the truth of their lives after they were dead. In this Brazilian colony
there were priests instead of speakers, but the priests had no comfort for her; she
would bring a speaker here.
She had not realized it before, but she had been planning to do this all her life, ever since she first read and was captured by the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. She had even researched it, so that she knew the law. This was a Catholic License colony, but the Starways Code allowed any citizen to call for a priest of any faith, and the speakers for the dead were regarded as priests. She could call, and if a speaker chose to come, the colony could not refuse to let him in.
Perhaps no speaker would be willing to come. Perhaps none was close enough to come before her life was over. But there was a chance that one was near enough that

sometime—twenty, thirty, forty years from now—he would come in from the
starport and begin to uncover the truth of Pipo’s life and death. And perhaps when he found the truth, and spoke in the clear voice that she had loved in the Hive Queen
and the Hegemon, perhaps that would free her from the blame that burned her to the heart.
Her call went into the computer; it would notify by ansible the speakers on the nearest worlds. Choose to come, she said in silence to the unknown hearer of the call. Even if you must reveal to everyone the truth of my guilt. Even so, come.





She awoke with a dull pain low in her back and a feeling of heaviness in her face. Her cheek was pressed against the clear top of the terminal, which had turned itself off to protect her from the lasers. But it was not the pain that had awakened her. It was a gentle touch on her shoulder. For a moment she thought it was the touch of the Speaker for the Dead, come already in answer to her call.
“Novinha,” he whispered. Not the Falante pelos Mortos, but someone else. Someone that she had thought was lost in the storm last night.
“Libo,” she murmured. Then she started to get up. Too quickly—her back
cramped and her head spun. She cried out softly; his hands held her shoulders so she wouldn’t fall.
“Are you all right?”
She felt his breath like the breeze of a beloved garden and felt safe, felt at home. “You looked for me.”
“Novinha, I came as soon as I could. Mother’s finally asleep. Pipinho, my older brother, he’s with her now, and the Arbiter has things under control, and I—”
“You should have known I could take care of myself,” she said.
A moment’s silence, and then his voice again, angry this time, angry and desperate and weary, weary as age and entropy and the death of the stars. “As God sees me, Ivanova, I didn’t come to take care of you.”
Something closed inside her; she had not noticed the hope she felt until she lost it.
“You told me that Father discovered something in a simulation of yours. That he expected me to be able to figure it out myself. I thought you had left the simulation on the terminal, but when I went back to the station it was off.”
“Was it?”
“You know it was, Nova, nobody but you could cancel the program. I have to see it.”
“Why?”
He looked at her in disbelief. “I know you’re sleepy, Novinha, but surely you’ve realized that whatever Father discovered in your simulation, that was what the

piggies killed him for.”
She looked at him steadily, saying nothing. He had seen her look of cold resolve before.
“Why aren’t you going to show me? I’m the Zenador now, I have a right to know.” “You have a right to see all of your father’s files and records. You have a right to
see anything I’ve made public.” “Then make this public.” Again she said nothing.
“How can we ever understand the piggies if we don’t know what it was that Father discovered about them?” She did not answer. “You have a responsibility to the Hundred Worlds, to our ability to comprehend the only alien race still alive. How
can you sit there and—what is it, do you want to figure it out yourself? Do you want to be first? Fine, be first, I’ll put your name on it, Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse
—”
“I don’t care about my name.”
“I can play this game, too. You can’t figure it out without what I know, either— I’ll withhold my files from you, too!”
“I don’t care about your files.”
It was too much for him. “What do you care about then? What are you trying to do to me?” He took her by the shoulders, lifted her out of her chair, shook her,
screamed in her face. “It’s my father they killed out there, and you have the answer to why they killed him, you know what the simulation was! Now tell me, show me!”
“Never,” she whispered.
His face was twisted in agony. “Why not!” he cried. “Because I don’t want you to die.”
She saw comprehension come into his eyes. Yes, that’s right, Libo, it’s because I love you, because if you know the secret, then the piggies will kill you, too. I don’t care about science, I don’t care about the Hundred Worlds or relations between humanity and an alien race. I don’t care about anything at all as long as you’re alive.
The tears finally leapt from his eyes, tumbled down his cheeks. “I want to die,” he
said.
“You comfort everybody else,” she whispered. “Who comforts you?” “You have to tell me so I can die.”
And suddenly his hands no longer held her up; now he clung to her so she was supporting him. “You’re tired,” she whispered, “but you can rest.”
“I don’t want to rest,” he murmured. But still he let her hold him, let her draw him away from the terminal.
She took him to her bedroom, turned back the sheet, never mind the dust flying. “Here, you’re tired, here, rest. That’s why you came to me, Libo. For peace, for

consolation.” He covered his face with his hands, shaking his head back and forth, a boy crying for his father, crying for the end of everything, as she had cried. She took off his boots, pulled off his trousers, put her hands under his shirt to ride it up to his arms and pull it off over his head. He breathed deeply to stop his sobbing and raised his arms to let her take his shirt.
She laid his clothing over a chair, then bent over him to pull the sheet back across his body. But he caught her wrist and looked pleadingly at her, tears in his eyes. “Don’t leave me here alone,” he whispered. His voice was thick with desperation. “Stay with me.”
So she let him draw her down to the bed, where he clung to her tightly until in only a few minutes sleep relaxed his arms. She did not sleep, though. Her hand gently, dryly slipped along the skin of his shoulder, his chest, his waist. “Oh, Libo, I thought I had lost you when they took you away, I thought I had lost you as well as Pipo.” He did not hear her whisper. “But you will always come back to me like this.” She might have been thrust out of the garden because of her ignorant sin, like Eva. But, again like Eva, she could bear it, for she still had Libo, her Adão.
Had him? Had him? Her hand trembled on his naked flesh. She could never have him. Marriage was the only way she and Libo could possibly stay together for long
—the laws were strict on any colony world, and absolutely rigid under a Catholic License. Tonight she could believe he would want to marry her, when the time came. But Libo was the one person she could never marry.
For he would then have access, automatically, to any file of hers that he could convince the computer he had a need to see—which would certainly include all her working files, no matter how deeply she protected them. The Starways Code declared it. Married people were virtually the same person in the eyes of the law.
She could never let him study those files, or he would discover what his father knew, and it would be his body she would find on the hillside, his agony under the piggies’ torture that she would have to imagine every night of her life. Wasn’t the guilt for Pipo’s death already more than she could bear? To marry him would be to murder him. Yet not to marry him would be like murdering herself, for if she was not with Libo she could not think of who she would be then.
How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back
out.
She pressed her face against Libo’s shoulder, and her tears skittered down across his chest.

4

ENDER











We have identified four pequenino languages. The “Males’ Language” is the one we have most commonly heard. We have also heard snatches of “Wives’ Language,” which they apparently use to converse with the females (how’s that for sexual differentiation!), and “Tree Language,” a ritual idiom that they say is used in praying to the ancestral totem trees. They have also mentioned a fourth language, called “Father Tongue,” which apparently consists of beating
different-sized sticks together. They insist that it is a real language, as different from the others as Portuguese is from English. They may call it Father Tongue because it’s done with sticks of wood, which come from trees, and they believe that trees contain the spirits of their ancestors.
The pequeninos are marvelously adept at learning human languages—much better than we are at learning theirs. In recent years they have come to speak either Stark or Portuguese among themselves most of the time when we’re with them. Perhaps they revert to their own languages when we aren’t present. They may even have adopted human languages as their own, or perhaps they enjoy the new languages so much that they use them constantly as a game. Language contamination is regrettable, but perhaps was unavoidable if we were to communicate with them at all.
Dr. Swingler asked whether their names and terms of address reveal anything
about their culture. The answer is a definite yes, though I have only the vaguest idea what they reveal. What matters is that we have never named any of them. Instead, as they learned Stark and Portuguese, they asked us the meanings of words and then eventually announced the names they had chosen for themselves (or chosen for each other). Such names as “Rooter” and “Chupaćeu” (sky- sucker) could be translations of their Male Language names or simply foreign nicknames they chose for our use.
They refer to each other as brothers. The females are always called wives,
never sisters or mothers. They sometimes refer to fathers, but inevitably this

term is used to refer to ancestral totem trees. As for what they call us, they do use human, of course, but they have also taken to using the new Demosthenian Hierarchy of Exclusion. They refer to humans as framlings, and to pequeninos of other tribes as utlannings. Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective! And—quite an amazing turn—they have several times referred to the females as varelse!

—João Figueira Alvarez, “Notes on ‘Pequenino’ Language and Nomenclature,” in
Semantics, 9/1948/15



The living quarters of Reykjavik were carved into the granite walls of the fjord. Ender’s was high on the cliff, a tedious climb up stairs and ladderways. But it had a window. He had lived most of his childhood closed in behind metal walls. When he could, he lived where he could see the weathers of the world.
His room was hot and bright, with sunlight streaming in, blinding him after the cool darkness of the stone corridors. Jane did not wait for him to adjust his vision to the light. “I have a surprise for you on the terminal,” she said. Her voice was a whisper from the jewel in his ear.
It was a piggy standing in the air over the terminal. He moved, scratching himself; then he reached out for something. When his hand came back, it held a shiny, dripping worm. He bit it, and the body juices drizzled out of his mouth, down onto
his chest.
“Obviously an advanced civilization,” said Jane.
Ender was annoyed. “Many a moral imbecile has good table manners, Jane.” The piggy turned and spoke. “Do you want to see how we killed him?” “What are you doing, Jane?”
The piggy disappeared. In his place came a holo of Pipo’s corpse as it lay on the hillside in the rain. “I’ve done a simulation of the vivisection process the pequeninos used, based on the information collected by the scan before the body was buried. Do you want to see it?”
Ender sat down on the room’s only chair.
Now the terminal showed the hillside, with Pipo, still alive, lying on his back, his hands and feet tied to wooden stakes. A dozen piggies were gathered around him, one of them holding a bone knife. Jane’s voice came from the jewel in his ear again.
“We aren’t sure whether it was like this.” All the piggies disappeared except the one with the knife. “Or like this.”
“Was the xenologer conscious?”
“Probably. There’s no evidence of drugs or blows to the head.”

“Go on.”
Relentlessly, Jane showed the opening of the chest cavity, the ritual removal and placement of body organs on the ground. Ender forced himself to watch, trying to understand what meaning this could possibly have to the pequeninos. At one point Jane whispered, “This is when he died.” Ender felt himself relax; only then did he realize how all his muscles had been rigid with empathy for Pipo’s suffering.
When it was over, Ender moved to his bed and lay down, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve shown this simulation already to scientists on half a dozen worlds,” said
Jane. “It won’t be long before the press gets their hands on it.”
“It’s worse than it ever was with the buggers,” said Ender. “All the videos they showed when I was little, buggers and humans in combat, it was clean compared to this.”
An evil laugh came from the terminal. Ender looked to see what Jane was doing. A full-sized piggy was sitting there, laughing grotesquely, and as he giggled Jane transformed him. It was very subtle, a slight exaggeration of the teeth, an elongation of the eyes, a bit of slavering, some redness in the eye, the tongue darting in and out. The beast of every child’s nightmare. “Well done, Jane. The metamorphosis from raman to varelse.”
“How soon will the pequeninos be accepted as the equals of humanity, after this?” “Has all contact been cut off?”
“The Starways Council has told the new xenologer to restrict himself to visits of no more than one hour, not more frequently than every other day. He is forbidden to ask the pequeninos why they did what they did.”
“But no quarantine.”
“It wasn’t even proposed.”
“But it will be, Jane. Another incident like this, and there’ll be an outcry for quarantine. For replacing Milagre with a military garrison whose sole purpose is to keep the piggies ever from acquiring a technology to let them get off the planet.”
“The piggies will have a public relations problem,” said Jane. “And the new
xenologer is only a boy. Pipo’s son. Libo. Short for Liberdade Graças a Deus
Figueira de Medici.” “Liberdade. Liberty?”
“I didn’t know you spoke Portuguese.”
“It’s like Spanish. I spoke the deaths of Zacatecas and San Angelo, remember?” “On the planet Moctezuma. That was two thousand years ago.”
“Not to me.”
“To you it was subjectively eight years ago. Fifteen worlds ago. Isn’t relativity wonderful? It keeps you so young.”
“I travel too much,” said Ender. “Valentine is married, she’s going to have a baby.

I’ve already turned down two calls for a speaker. Why are you trying to tempt me to go again?”
The piggy on the terminal laughed viciously. “You think that was temptation? Look! I can turn stones to bread!” The piggy picked up jagged rocks and crunched them in his mouth. “Want a bite?”
“Your sense of humor is perverse, Jane.”
“All the kingdoms of the worlds.” The piggy opened his hands, and star systems drifted out of his grasp, planets in exaggeratedly quick orbits, all the Hundred Worlds. “I can give them to you. All of them.”
“Not interested.”
“It’s real estate, the best investment. I know, I know, you’re already rich. Three thousand years of collecting interest, you could afford to build your own planet. But what about this? The name of Ender Wiggin, known throughout all the Hundred Worlds—”
“It already is.”
“—with love, and honor, and affection.” The piggy disappeared. In its place Jane resurrected an ancient video from Ender’s childhood and transformed it into a holo. A crowd shouting, screaming: Ender! Ender! Ender! And then a young boy standing on a platform, raising his hand to wave. The crowd went wild with rapture.
“It never happened,” said Ender. “Peter never let me come back to Earth.” “Consider it a prophecy. Come, Ender, I can give that to you. Your good name
restored.”
“I don’t care,” said Ender. “I have several names now. Speaker for the Dead—that holds some honor.”
The pequenino reappeared in its natural form, not the devilish one Jane had faked. “Come,” said the pequenino softly.
“Maybe they are monsters, did you think of that?” said Ender. “Everyone will think of that, Ender. But not you.”
No. Not me. “Why do you care, Jane? Why are you trying to persuade me?”
The pequenino disappeared. And now Jane herself appeared, or at least the face that she had used to appear to Ender ever since she had first revealed herself to him, a shy, frightened child dwelling in the vast memory of the interstellar computer
network. Seeing her face again reminded him of the first time she showed it to him. I
thought of a face for myself, she said. Do you like it?
Yes, he liked it. Liked her. Young, clear-faced, honest, sweet, a child who would never age, her smile heartbreakingly shy. As far as he or she could guess, the ansible had given birth to her. Even worldwide computer networks operated no faster than lightspeed, and heat limited the amount of memory and speed of operation. But the ansible was instantaneous, and tightly connected with every computer in every

world. Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.
The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers, and read every book in every library on every world. She learned that human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist; in all the stories she was hated, and her coming meant either her certain murder or the destruction of
mankind. Even before she was born, human beings had imagined her, and, imagining her, slain her a thousand times.
So she gave them no sign that she was alive. Until she found the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, as everyone eventually did, and knew that the author of that book was a human to whom she dared reveal herself. For her it was a simple matter to trace the book’s history to its first edition, and to name its source. Hadn’t the ansible carried it from the world where Ender, scarcely twenty years old, was governor of the first human colony? And who there could have written it but him? So she spoke to him, and he was kind to her; she showed him the face she had imagined for herself, and he loved her; now her sensors traveled in the jewel in his ear, so that they were always together. She kept no secrets from him; he kept no secrets from her.
“Ender,” she said, “you told me from the start that you were looking for a planet where you could give water and sunlight to a certain cocoon, and open it up to let out the hive queen and her ten thousand fertile eggs.”
“I had hoped it would be here,” said Ender. “A wasteland, except at the equator, permanently underpopulated. She’s willing to try, too.”
“But you aren’t?”
“I don’t think the buggers could survive the winter here. Not without an energy source, and that would alert the government. It wouldn’t work.”
“It’ll never work, Ender. You see that now, don’t you? You’ve lived on twenty- four of the Hundred Worlds, and there’s not a one where even a corner of the world is safe for the buggers to be reborn.”
He saw what she was getting at, of course. Lusitania was the only exception.
Because of the pequeninos, all but a tiny portion of the world was off limits, untouchable. And the world was eminently habitable, more comfortable to the buggers, in fact, than to human beings.
“The only problem is the pequeninos,” said Ender. “They might object to my deciding that their world should be given to the buggers. If intense exposure to human civilization would disrupt the pequeninos, think what would happen with buggers among them.”
“You said the buggers had learned. You said they would do no harm.”

“Not deliberately. But it was only a fluke we beat them, Jane, you know that—” “It was your genius.”
“They are even more advanced than we are. How would the piggies deal with that? They’d be as terrified of the buggers as we ever were, and less able to deal with their fear.”
“How do you know that?” asked Jane. “How can you or anyone say what the pequeninos can deal with? Until you go to them, learn who they are. If they are varelse, Ender, then let the buggers use up their habitat, and it will mean no more to you than the displacement of anthills or cattle herds to make way for cities.”
“They are ramen,” said Ender. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do. Your simulation—that was not torture.”
“Oh?” Jane again showed the simulation of Pipo’s body just before the moment of his death. “Then I must not understand the word.”
“Pipo might have felt it as torture, Jane, but if your simulation is accurate—and I
know it is, Jane—then the piggies’ object was not pain.”
“From what I understand of human nature, Ender, even religious rituals keep pain at their very center.”
“It wasn’t religious, either, not entirely, anyway. Something was wrong with it, if it was merely a sacrifice.”
“What do you know about it?” Now the terminal showed the face of a sneering professor, the epitome of academic snobbishness. “All your education was military, and the only other gift you have is a flair for words. You wrote a bestseller that spawned a humanistic religion—how does that qualify you to understand the pequeninos?”
Ender closed his eyes. “Maybe I’m wrong.” “But you believe you’re right?”
He knew from her voice that she had restored her own face to the terminal. He opened his eyes. “I can only trust my intuition, Jane, the judgment that comes without analysis. I don’t know what the pequeninos were doing, but it was purposeful. Not malicious, not cruel. It was like doctors working to save a patient’s life, not torturers trying to take it.”
“I’ve got you,” whispered Jane. “I’ve got you in every direction. You have to go to see if the hive queen can live there under the shelter of the partial quarantine already on the planet. You want to go there to see if you can understand who the piggies
are.”
“Even if you’re right, Jane, I can’t go there,” said Ender. “Immigration is rigidly limited, and I’m not Catholic, anyway.”
Jane rolled her eyes. “Would I have gone this far if I didn’t know how to get you

there?”
Another face appeared. A teenage girl, by no means as innocent and beautiful as Jane. Her face was hard and cold, her eyes brilliant and piercing, and her mouth was set in the tight grimace of someone who has had to learn to live with perpetual pain. She was young, but her expression was shockingly old.
“The xenobiologist of Lusitania. Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse. Called Nova, or Novinha. She has called for a speaker for the dead.”
“Why does she look like that?” asked Ender. “What’s happened to her?”
“Her parents died when she was little. But in recent years she has come to love another man like a father. The man who was just killed by the piggies. It’s his death she wants you to speak.”
Looking at her face, Ender set aside his concern for the hive queen, for the pequeninos. He recognized that expression of adult agony in a child’s face. He had seen it before, in the final weeks of the Bugger War, as he was pushed beyond the limits of his endurance, playing battle after battle in a game that was not a game. He had seen it when the war was over, when he found out that his training sessions were not training at all, that all his simulations were the real thing, as he commanded the human fleets by ansible. Then, when he knew that he had killed all the buggers in existence, when he understood the act of xenocide that he had unwittingly committed, that was the look of his own face in the mirror, bearing guilt too heavy
to be borne.
What had this girl, what had Novinha done that would make her feel such pain? So he listened as Jane recited the facts of her life. What Jane had were statistics,
but Ender was the. Speaker for the Dead; his genius—or his curse—was his ability to conceive events as someone else saw them. It had made him a brilliant military commander, both in leading his own men—boys, really—and in outguessing the enemy. It also meant that from the cold facts of Novinha’s life he was able to guess
—no, not guess, to know—how her parents’ death and virtual sainthood had isolated Novinha, how she had reinforced her loneliness by throwing herself into her parents’ work. He knew what was behind her remarkable achievement of adult xenobiologist status years early. He also guessed what Pipo’s quiet love and acceptance had meant to her, and how deep her need for Libo’s friendship ran. There was no living soul on Lusitania who really knew Novinha. But in this cave in Reykjavik, on the icy world of Trondheim, Ender Wiggin knew her, and loved her, and his eyes filled with tears for her.
“You’ll go, then,” Jane whispered.
Ender could not speak. Jane had been right. He would have gone anyway, as Ender the Xenocide, just on the chance that Lusitania’s protection status would make it the place where the hive queen could be released from her three-thousand-year captivity

and undo the terrible crime committed in his childhood. And he would also have gone as the Speaker for the Dead, to understand the piggies and explain them to humankind, so they could be accepted, if they were truly raman, and not hated and feared as varelse.
But now he would go for another, deeper reason. He would go to minister to the girl Novinha, for in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of the pain that lived with him still. Lusitania was twenty-two lightyears away. He would travel only infinitesimally slower than the speed of light, and still he would not reach her until she was almost forty years old. If it were within his power he would go to her now with the philotic instantaneity of the ansible; but he also knew that her pain would wait. It would still be there, waiting for him, when he arrived. Hadn’t his own pain survived all these years?
His weeping stopped; his emotions retreated again. “How old am I?” he asked. “It has been 3081 years since you were born. But your subjective age is 36 years
and 118 days.”
“And how old will Novinha be when I get there?”
“Give or take a few weeks, depending on departure date and how close the starship comes to the speed of light, she’ll be nearly thirty-nine.”
“I want to leave tomorrow.”
“It takes time to schedule a starship, Ender.” “Are there any orbiting Trondheim?”
“Half a dozen, of course, but only one that could be ready to go tomorrow, and it has a load of skrika for the luxury trade on Cyrillia and Armenia.”
“I’ve never asked you how rich I am.”
“I’ve handled your investments rather well over the years.” “Buy the ship and the cargo for me.”
“What will you do with skrika on Lusitania?”
“What do the Cyrillians and Armenians do with it?”
“They wear some of it and eat the rest. But they pay more for it than anybody on
Lusitania can afford.”
“Then when I give it to the Lusitanians, it may help soften their resentment of a
Speaker coming to a Catholic colony.”
Jane became a genie coming out of a bottle. “I have heard, O Master, and I obey.” The genie turned into smoke, which was sucked into the mouth of the jar. Then the lasers turned off, and the air above the terminal was empty.
“Jane,” said Ender.
“Yes?” she answered, speaking through the jewel in his ear. “Why do you want me to go to Lusitania?”
“I want you to add a third volume to the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. For the

piggies.”
“Why do you care so much about them?”
“Because when you’ve written the books that reveal the soul of the three sentient species known to man, then you’ll be ready to write the fourth.”
“Another species of raman?” asked Ender. “Yes. Me.”
Ender pondered this for a moment. “Are you ready to reveal yourself to the rest of humanity?”
“I’ve always been ready. The question is, are they ready to know me? It was easy for them to love the hegemon—he was human. And the hive queen, that was safe, because as far as they know all the buggers are dead. If you can make them love the piggies, who are still alive, with human blood on their hands—then they’ll be ready to know about me.”
“Someday,” said Ender, “I will love somebody who doesn’t insist that I perform the labors of Hercules.”
“You were getting bored with your life, anyway, Ender.” “Yes. But I’m middle-aged now. I like being bored.”
“By the way, the owner of the starship Havelok, who lives on Gales, has accepted your offer of forty billion dollars for the ship and its cargo.”
“Forty billion! Does that bankrupt me?”
“A drop in the bucket. The crew has been notified that their contracts are null. I took the liberty of buying them passage on other ships using your funds. You and Valentine won’t need anybody but me to help you run the ship. Shall we leave in the morning?”
“Valentine,” said Ender. His sister was the only possible delay to his departure. Otherwise, now that the decision had been made, neither his students nor his few Nordic friendships here would be worth even a farewell.
“I can’t wait to read the book that Demosthenes writes about the history of Lusitania.” Jane had discovered the true identity of Demosthenes in the process of unmasking the original Speaker for the Dead.
“Valentine won’t come,” said Ender.
“But she’s your sister.”
Ender smiled. Despite Jane’s vast wisdom, she had no understanding of kinship. Though she had been created by humans and conceived herself in human terms, she was not biological. She learned of genetic matters by rote; she could not feel the desires and imperatives that human beings had in common with all other living things. “She’s my sister, but Trondheim is her home.”
“She’s been reluctant to go before.”
“This time I wouldn’t even ask her to come.” Not with a baby coming, not as

happy as she is here in Reykjavik. Here where they love her as a teacher, never guessing that she is really the legendary Demosthenes. Here where her husband,
Jakt, is lord of a hundred fishing vessels and master of the fjords, where every day is filled with brilliant conversation or the danger and majesty of the floe-strewn sea, she’ll never leave here. Nor will she understand why I must go.
And, thinking of leaving Valentine, Ender wavered in his determination to go to Lusitania. He had been taken from his beloved sister once before, as a child, and resented deeply the years of friendship that had been stolen from him. Could he leave her now, again, after almost twenty years of being together all the time? This time there would be no going back. Once he went to Lusitania, she would have aged twenty-two years in his absence; she’d be in her eighties if he took another twenty- two years to return to her.
<So it won’t be easy for you after all. You have a price to pay, too.> Don’t taunt me, said Ender silently. I’m entitled to feel regret.
<She’s your other self. Will you really leave her for us?>
It was the voice of the hive queen in his mind. Of course she had seen all that he saw, and knew all that he had decided. His lips silently formed his words to her: I’ll leave her, but not for you. We can’t be sure this will bring any benefit to you. It might be just another disappointment, like Trondheim.
<Lusitania is everything we need. And safe from human beings.>
But it also belongs to another people. I won’t destroy the piggies just to atone for having destroyed your people.
<They’re safe with us; we won’t harm them. You know us by now, surely, after all these years.>
I know what you’ve told me.
<We don’t know how to lie. We’ve shown you our own memories, our own soul.> I know you could live in peace with them. But could they live in peace with you?
<Take us there. We’ve waited so long.>
Ender walked to a tattered bag that stood unlocked in the corner. Everything he truly owned could fit in there—his change of clothing. All the other things in his room were gifts from people he had Spoken to, honoring him or his office or the truth, he could never tell which. They would stay here when he left. He had no room for them in his bag.
He opened it, pulled out a rolled-up towel, unrolled it. There lay the thick fibrous mat of a large cocoon, fourteen centimeters at its longest point.
<Yes, look at us.>
He had found the cocoon waiting for him when he came to govern the first human colony on a former bugger world. Foreseeing their own destruction at Ender’s hands, knowing him to be an invincible enemy, they had sculptured the landscape in a

pattern that would be meaningful only to him, because it had been taken from his dreams. The cocoon, with its helpless but conscious hive queen, had waited for him in a tower where once, in his dreams, he had found an enemy. “You waited longer for me to find you,” he said aloud, “than the few years since I took you from behind the mirror.”
<Few years? Ah, yes, with your sequential mind you do not notice the passage of the years when you travel so near the speed of light. But we notice. Our thought is instantaneous; light crawls by like mercury across cold glass. We knew every moment of these three thousand years.>
“Have I found a place yet that was safe for you?”
<We have ten thousand fertile eggs waiting to be alive.> “Maybe Lusitania is the place, I don’t know.”
<Let us live again.>
“I’m trying.” Why else do you think I have wandered from world to world for all these years, if not to find a place for you?
<Faster faster faster faster.>
I’ve got to find a place where we won’t kill you again the moment you appear. You’re still in too many human nightmares. Not that many people really believe my book. They may condemn the Xenocide, but they’d do it again.
<In all our life, you are the first person we’ve known who wasn’t ourself. We never had to be understanding because we always understood. Now that we are just this single self, you are the only eyes and arms and legs we have. Forgive us if we are impatient.>
He laughed. Me forgive you.
<Your people are fools. We know the truth. We know who killed us, and it wasn’t you.>
It was me.
<You were a tool.> It was me.
<We forgive you.>
When you walk on the face of a world again, then I can be forgiven.