espera..

VALENTINE


Today I let slip that Libo is my son. Only Bark heard me say it, but within an hour it was apparently common knowledge. They gathered around me and made Selvagem ask me if it was true, was I really a father “already.” Selvagem then put Libo’s and my hands together; on impulse I gave Libo a hug, and they made the clicking noises of astonishment and, I think, awe. I could see from that moment on that my prestige among them had risen considerably.
The conclusion is inescapable. The pequeninos that we’ve known so far are not a whole community, or even typical males. They are either juveniles or old bachelors. Not a one of them has ever sired any children. Not a one has even mated, as nearly as we can figure.
There isn’t a primate society I’ve heard of where bachelor groups like this are anything but outcasts, without power or prestige. No wonder they speak of the females with that odd mixtures of worship and contempt, one minute not daring to make a decision without their consent, the next minute telling us that the women are too stupid to understand anything, they are varelse. Until now I was taking these statements at face value, which led to a mental picture of the females as nonsentients, a herd of sows, down on all fours. I thought the males might be consulting them the way they consult trees, using their grunting as a means of divining answers, like casting bones or reading entrails.
Now, though, I realize the females are probably every bit as intelligent as the
males, and not varelse at all. The males’ negative statements arise from their resentment as bachelors, excluded from the reproductive process and the power structures of the tribe. The pequeninos have been just as careful with us as we have been with them—they haven’t let us meet their females or the males who have any real power. We thought we were exploring the heart of pequenino society. Instead, figuratively speaking we must be in the genetic sewer; among the males whose genes have not been judged fit to contribute to the tribe.
And yet I don’t believe it. The pequeninos I’ve known have all been bright,

clever, quick to learn. So quick that I’ve taught them more about human society, accidently, than I’ve learned about them after years of trying. If these are their castoffs, then I hope someday they’ll judge me worthy to meet the “wives” and the “fathers.”
In the meantime I can’t report any of this because, whether I meant to or not, I’ve clearly violated the rules. Never mind that nobody could possibly have kept the pequeninos from learning anything about us. Never mind that the rules are stupid and counterproductive. I broke them, and if they find out they’ll cut off my contact with the pequeninos, which will be even worse than the severely limited contact we now have. So I’m forced into deception and silly subterfuges, like putting these notes in Libo’s locked personal files, where even my dear wife wouldn’t think to look for them. Here’s the information, absolutely vital, that
the pequeninos we’ve studied are all bachelors, and because of the regulations I dare not let the framling xenologers know anything about it. Olha bem, gente, aqui esta: A ciência, o bicho que se devora a si mesma! (Watch closely, folks, here it is: Science, the ugly little beast that devours itself!)

—João Figueira Alvarez, Secret Notes, published in Demosthenes, “The Integrity of
Treason: The Xenologers of Lusitania,” Reykjavik Historical Perspectives, 1990:4:1



Her belly was tight and swollen, and still a month remained before Valentine’s daughter was due to be born. It was a constant nuisance, being so large and unbalanced. Always before when she had been preparing to take a history class into söndring, she had been able to do much of the loading of the boat herself. Now she had to rely on her husband’s sailors to do it all, and she couldn’t even scramble back and forth from wharf to hold—the captain was ordering the stowage to keep the ship in balance. He was doing it well, of course—hadn’t Captain Räv taught her, when
she first arrived?—but Valentine did not like being forced into a sedentary role.
It was her fifth söndring; the first had been the occasion of meeting Jakt. She had no thought of marriage. Trondheim was a world like any of the other score that she had visited with her peripatetic younger brother. She would teach, she would study, and after four or five months she would write an extended historical essay, publish it pseudonymously under the name Demosthenes, and then enjoy herself until Ender accepted a call to go speak somewhere else. Usually their work meshed perfectly— he would be called to speak the death of some major person, whose life story would then become the focus of her essay. It was a game they played, pretending to be itinerant professors of this and that, while in actuality they created or transformed
the world’s identity, for Demosthenes’ essay was always seen as definitive.
She had thought, for a time, that surely someone would realize that Demosthenes

wrote essays that suspiciously followed her itinerary, and find her out. But soon she realized that, like the speakers but to a lesser degree, a mythology had grown up about Demosthenes. People believed that Demosthenes was not one individual. Rather, each Demosthenes essay was thought to be the work of a genius writing independently, who then attempted to publish under the Demosthenes rubric; some imagined that the computer automatically submitted the work to an unknown committee of brilliant historians of the age, who decided whether it was worthy of the name. Never mind that no one ever met a scholar to whom such a work had been submitted. Hundreds of “Demosthenes” essays every year were attempted; the computer automatically rejected any that were not written by the real Demosthenes; and still the belief firmly persisted that such a person as Valentine could not possibly exist. After all, Demosthenes had begun as a demagogue on the computer nets back when Earth was fighting the Bugger Wars, three thousand years ago. It could not be the same person now.
And it’s true, thought Valentine. I’m not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.
She had disliked the pervasiveness of Lutheran thought, especially the so-called Calvinist faction, who seemed to have an answer to every question before it had even been asked. So she conceived the idea of taking a select group of graduate students away from Reykjavik, off to one of the Summer Islands, the equatorial chain where, in the spring, skrika came to spawn and flocks of halkig went crazy with
reproductive energy. Her idea was to break the patterns of intellectual rot that were inevitable at every university. The students would eat nothing but the havregrin that grew wild in the sheltered valleys and whatever halkig they had the nerve and wit to kill. When their daily food depended on their own exertion, their attitudes about what mattered and did not matter in history were bound to change.
The university gave permission, grudgingly; she used her own funds to charter a boat from Jakt, who had just become head of one of the many skrika-catching families. He had a seaman’s contempt for university people, calling them skräddare to their faces and worse things behind their backs. He told Valentine that he would have to come back to rescue her starving students within a week. Instead she and her castaways, as they dubbed themselves, lasted the whole time, and thrived, building something of a village and enjoying a burst of creative, unfettered thought that resulted in a noticeable surge of excellent and insightful publications upon their return.
The most obvious result in Reykjavik was that Valentine always had hundreds of applicants for the twenty places in each of three söndrings of the summer. Far more important to her, however, was Jakt. He was not particularly educated, but he was

intimately familiar with the lore of Trondheim itself. He could pilot halfway around the equatorial sea without a chart. He knew the drifts of icebergs and where the floes would be thick. He seemed to know where the skrika would be gathered to dance,
and how to deploy his hunters to catch them unawares as they flopped ashore from the sea. Weather never seemed to take him by surprise, and Valentine concluded that there was no situation he was not prepared for.
Except for her. And when the Lutheran minister—not a Calvinist—married them, they both seemed more surprised than happy. Yet they were happy. And for the first time since she left Earth she felt whole, at peace, at home. That’s why the baby grew within her. The wandering was over. And she was so grateful to Ender that he had understood this, that without their having to discuss it he had realized that
Trondheim was the end of their three-thousand-mile Odyssey, the end of Demosthenes’ career; like the ishäxa, she had found a way to root in the ice of this world and draw nourishment that the soil of other lands had not provided.
The baby kicked hard, taking her from her reverie; she looked around to see Ender coming toward her, walking along the wharf with his duffel slung over his shoulder. She understood at once why he had brought his bag: He meant to go along on the söndring. She wondered whether she was glad of it. Ender was quiet and unobtrusive, but he could not possibly conceal his brilliant understanding of human nature. The average students would overlook him, but the best of them, the ones she hoped
would come up with original thought, would inevitably follow the subtle but powerful clues he would inevitably drop. The result would be impressive, she was sure—after all, she owed a great debt to his insights over the years—but it would be Ender’s brilliance, not the students’. It would defeat somewhat the purpose of the söndring.
But she wouldn’t tell him no when he asked to come. Truth to tell, she would love to have him along. Much as she loved Jakt, she missed the constant closeness that
she and Ender used to have before she married. It would be years before she and Jakt could possibly be as tightly bound together as she and her brother were. Jakt knew it, too, and it caused him some pain; a husband shouldn’t have to compete with his brother-in-law for the devotion of his wife.
“Ho, Val,” said Ender.
“Ho, Ender.” Alone on the dock, where no one else could hear, she was free to call him by the childhood name, ignoring the fact that the rest of humanity had turned it into an epithet.
“What’ll you do if the rabbit decides to bounce out during the söndring?”
She smiled. “Her papa would wrap her in a skrika skin, I would sing her silly Nordic songs, and the students would suddenly have great insights about the impact of reproductive imperatives on history.”

They laughed together for a moment, and suddenly Valentine knew, without noticing why she knew, that Ender did not want to go on the söndring, that he had packed his bag to leave Trondheim, and that he had come, not to invite her along, but to say good-bye. Tears came unbidden to her eyes, and a terrible devastation wrenched at her. He reached out and held her, as he had so many times in the past; this time, though, her belly was between them, and the embrace was awkward and tentative.
“I thought you meant to stay,” she whispered. “You turned down the calls that came.”
“One came that I couldn’t turn down.”
“I can have this baby on söndring, but not on another world.”
As she guessed, Ender hadn’t meant her to come. “The baby’s going to be shockingly blond,” said Ender. “She’d look hopelessly out of place on Lusitania. Mostly black Brazilians there.”
So it would be Lusitania. Valentine understood at once why he was going—the piggies’ murder of the xenologer was public knowledge now, having been broadcast during the supper hour in Reykjavik. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Not really.”
“Do you know what would happen if people realized that the Ender is going to the piggies’ world? They’d crucify you!”
“They’d crucify me here, actually, except that no one but you knows who I am. Promise not to tell.”
“What good can you do there? He’ll have been dead for decades before you arrive.”
“My subjects are usually quite cold before I arrive to speak for them. It’s the main disadvantage of being itinerant.”
“I never thought to lose you again.”
“But I knew we had lost each other on the day you first loved Jakt.” “Then you should have told me! I wouldn’t have done it!”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. But it isn’t true, Val. You would have done it
anyway. And I wanted you to. You’ve never been happier.” He put his hands astride her waist. “The Wiggin genes were crying out for continuation. I hope you have a dozen more.”
“It’s considered impolite to have more than four, greedy to go past five, and barbaric to have more than six.” Even though she joked, she was deciding how best to handle the söndring—let the graduate assistants take it without her, cancel it altogether, or postpone it until Ender left?
But Ender made the question moot. “Do you think your husband would let one of his boats take me out to the mareld overnight, so I can shuttle to my starship in the

morning?”
His haste was cruel. “If you hadn’t needed a ship from Jakt, would you have left me a note on the computer?”
“I made the decision five minutes ago, and came straight to you.” “But you already booked passage—that takes planning!”
“Not if you buy the starship.”
“Why are you in such a hurry? The voyage takes decades—” “Twenty-two years.”
“Twenty-two years! What difference would a couple of days make? Couldn’t you wait a month to see my baby born?”
“In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you.”
“Then don’t! What are the piggies to you? The buggers are ramen enough for one man’s life. Stay, marry as I’ve married. You opened the stars to colonization, Ender, now stay here and taste the good fruits of your labor!”
“You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to
Calvinism. My labor isn’t done yet, and Trondheim isn’t my home.”
Valentine felt his words like an accusation: You rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it’s not my fault, she wanted to answer—you’re the one who’s leaving, not me. “Remember how it was,” she said, “when we left Peter on Earth and took a decades-long voyage to our first colony, to the world you governed? It was as if he had died. By the time we got there he was old, and we were still young; when we talked by ansible he had become an ancient uncle, the power-ripened Hegemon, the legendary Locke, anyone but our brother.”
“It was an improvement, as I recall.” Ender was trying to make things lighter. But Valentine took his words perversely. “Do you think I’ll improve, too, in
twenty years?”
“I think I’ll grieve for you more than if you had died.”
“No, Ender, it will be exactly as if I died, and you’ll know that you’re the one who killed me.”
He winced. “You don’t mean that.”
“I won’t write to you. Why should I? To you it’ll be only a week or two. You’d arrive on Lusitania, and the computer would have twenty years of letters for you from a person you left only the week before. The first five years would be grief, the pain of losing you, the loneliness of not having you to talk to—”
“Jakt is your husband, not me.”
“And then what would I write? Clever, newsy little letters about the baby? She’d be five years old, six, ten, twenty and married, and you wouldn’t even know her, wouldn’t even care.”
“I’ll care.”

“You won’t have the chance. I won’t write to you until I’m very old, Ender. Until you’ve gone to Lusitania and then to another place, swallowing the decades in vast gulps. Then I’ll send you my memoir. I’ll dedicate it to you. To Andrew, my beloved brother. I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn’t stay even two weeks when I asked you.”
“Listen to yourself, Val, and then see why I have to leave now, before you tear me to pieces.”
“That’s a sophistry you wouldn’t tolerate in your students, Ender! I wouldn’t have said these things if you weren’t leaving like a burglar who was caught in the act! Don’t turn the cause around and blame it on me!”
He answered breathlessly, his words tumbling over each other in his hurry; he was racing to finish his speech before emotion stopped him. “No, you’re right, I wanted to hurry because I have a work to do there, and every day here is marking time, and because it hurts me every time I see you and Jakt growing closer and you and me growing more distant, even though I know that it’s exactly as it should be, so when I decided to go, I thought that going quickly was better, and I was right; you know I’m right. I never thought you’d hate me for it.”
Now emotion stopped him, and he wept; so did she. “I don’t hate you, I love you, you’re part of myself, you’re my heart and when you go it’s my heart torn out and carried away—”
And that was the end of speech.
Räv’s first mate took Ender out to the mareld, the great platform on the equatorial sea, where shuttles were launched into space to rendezvous with orbiting starships. They agreed silently that Valentine wouldn’t go with him. Instead, she went home with her husband and clung to him through the night. The next day she went on söndring with her students, and cried for Ender only in darkness, when she thought no one could see.
But her students saw, and the stories circulated about Professor Wiggin’s great grief for the departure of her brother, the itinerant speaker. They made of this what students always do—both more and less than reality. But one student, a girl named Plikt, became obsessed with the idea that there was more to the story of Valentine and Andrew Wiggin than anyone had guessed.
So she began to try to research their story, to trace backward their voyages together among the stars. When Valentine’s daughter Syfte was four years old, and her son Ren was two, Plikt came to her. She was a young professor at the university by then, and she showed Valentine her published story. She had cast it as fiction, but Valentine recognized at once the story of the brother and sister who were the oldest people in the universe, born on Earth before any colonies had been planted on other worlds, and who then wandered from world to world, rootless, searching.

To Valentine’s relief—and, strangely, disappointment—Plikt had not uncovered the fact that Ender was the original Speaker for the Dead, and Valentine was Demosthenes. But she knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on. The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it had really been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.
“Why did you write this?” Valentine asked her.
“Isn’t it good enough to be its own reason for writing?”
The twisted answer amused Valentine, but it did not put her off. “What was my brother Andrew to you, that you’ve done the research to create this?”
“That’s still the wrong question,” said Plikt.
“I seem to be failing some kind of test. Can you give me a hint what question I
should ask?”
“Don’t be angry. You should be asking me why I wrote it as fiction instead of biography.”
“Why, then?”
“Because I discovered that Andrew Wiggin, speaker for the dead, is Ender
Wiggin, the Xenocide.”
Even though Ender was four years gone, he was still eighteen years from his destination. Valentine felt sick with dread, thinking of what his life would be like if he was welcomed on Lusitania as the most loathed man in human history.
“You don’t need to be afraid, Professor Wiggin. If I meant to tell, I could have. When I found it out, I realized that he had repented what he did. And such a magnificent penance. It was the original Speaker for the Dead who revealed his act as an unspeakable crime—and so he took the role of speaker, like so many hundreds of others, and acted out the role of his own accuser on twenty worlds.”
“You have found so much, Plikt, and understood so little.”
“I understand everything! Read what I wrote—that was understanding!” Valentine told herself that since Plikt knew so much, she might as well know
more. But it was rage, not reason, that drove Valentine to tell what she had never
told anyone before. “Plikt, my brother didn’t imitate the original Speaker for the
Dead. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon.”
When Plikt realized that Valentine was telling the truth, it overwhelmed her. For all these years she had regarded Andrew Wiggin as her subject matter, and the original Speaker for the Dead as her inspiration. To find that they were the same person struck her dumb for half an hour.
Then she and Valentine talked and confided and came to trust each other until Valentine invited Plikt to be the tutor of her children and her collaborator in writing and teaching. Jakt was surprised at the new addition to the household, but in time

Valentine told him the secrets Plikt had uncovered through research or provoked out of her. It became the family legend, and as soon as the children were old enough to be discreet, they were told the marvelous stories of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr.
The years passed, the family prospered, and Valentine’s pain at Ender’s loss became pride in him and finally a powerful anticipation. She was eager for him to arrive on Lusitania, to solve the dilemma of the piggies, to fulfil his apparent destiny as the apostle to the ramen. It was Plikt, the good Lutheran, who taught Valentine to conceive of Ender’s life in religious terms; the powerful stability of her family life and the miracle of each of her five children combined to instill in her the emotions,
if not the doctrines, of faith.
It was bound to affect the children, too. The tale of Uncle Ender, because they could never mention it to outsiders, took on supernatural overtones. Syfte, the eldest daughter, was particularly intrigued, and even when she turned twenty, and rationality overpowered the primitive, childish adoration of Uncle Ender, she was still obsessed with him. He was a creature out of legend, and yet he still lived, and
on a world not impossibly far away.
She did not tell her mother and father, but she did confide in her former tutor. “Someday, Plikt, I’ll meet him. I’ll meet him and help him in his work.”
“What makes you think he’ll need help? Your help, anyway?” Plikt was always a skeptic until her student had earned her belief.
“He didn’t do it alone the first time, either, did he?” And Syfte’s dreams turned outward, away from the ice of Trondheim, to the distant planet where Ender Wiggin had not yet set foot. People of Lusitania, you little know what a great man will walk on your earth and take up your burden. And I will join him, in due time, even though it will be a generation late. Be ready for me, too, Lusitania.
On his starship, Ender Wiggin had no notion of the freight of other people’s dreams he carried with him. It had been only days since he left Valentine weeping on the dock. To him, Syfte had no name; she was a swelling in Valentine’s belly, and nothing more. He was only beginning to feel the pain of losing Valentine—a pain
she had long since got over. And his thoughts were far from his unknown nieces and
nephews on a world of ice.
It was a lonely, tortured young girl named Novinha that he thought of, wondering what the twenty-two years of his voyage were doing to her, and whom she would have become by the time they met. For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

6

OLHADO











Their only intercourse with other tribes seems to be warfare. When they tell stories to each other (usually during rainy weather), it almost always deals with battles and heroes. The ending is always death, for heroes and cowards alike. If the stories are any guideline, piggies don’t expect to live through war. And they never, ever, give the slightest hint of interest in the enemy females, either for rape, murder, or slavery, the traditional human treatment of the wives of fallen soldiers.
Does this mean that there is no genetic exchange between tribes? Not at all. The genetic exchanges may be conducted by the females, who may have some system of trading genetic favors. Given the apparent utter subservience of the males to the females in piggy society, this could easily be going on without the males having any idea; or it might cause them such shame that they just won’t tell us about it.
What they want to tell us about is battle. A typical description, from my daughter Ouanda’s notes of 2:21 last year, during a session of storytelling inside the log house:
PIGGY (speaking Stark): He killed three of the brothers without taking a wound. I have never seen such a strong and fearless warrior. Blood was high on his arms, and the stick in his hand was splintered and covered with the brains of my brothers. He knew he was honorable, even though the rest of the battle went against his feeble tribe. Dei honra! Eu Ihe dei! (I gave honor! I gave it to him!)
(Other piggies click their tongues and squeak.)
PIGGY: I hooked him to the ground. He was powerful in his struggles until I showed him the grass in my hand. Then he opened his mouth and hummed the strange songs of the far country. Nunca será pau no mão da gente! (He will never be a stick in our hands!) (At this point they joined in singing a song in the
Wives’ Language, one of the longest passages yet heard.)
(Note that this is a common pattern among them, to speak primarily in Stark,

then switch into Portuguese at the moment of climax and conclusion. On reflection, we have realized that we do the same thing, falling into our native Portuguese at the most emotional moments.)
This account of battle may not seem so unusual until you hear enough stories to realize that they always end with the hero’s death. Apparently they have no taste for light comedy.

—Liberdade Figueira de Medici, “Report on Intertribal Patterns of Lusitanian
Aborigines” in Cross-Cultural Transactions, 1964:12:40



There wasn’t much to do during interstellar flight. Once the course was charted and the ship had made the Park shift, the only task was to calculate how near to lightspeed the ship was traveling. The shipboard computer figured the exact velocity and then determined how long, in subjective time, the voyage should continue before making the Park shift back to a manageable sublight speed. Like a stopwatch,
thought Ender. Click it on, click it off, and the race is over.
The ship’s computers were bright enough to help him get the hang of the switch from his fluent Spanish to Portuguese. It was easy enough to speak, but so many consonants were left out that understanding it was hard.
Speaking Portuguese with the slow-witted ship’s computer became maddening after an hour or two each day. On every other voyage, Val had been there. Not that they had always talked—Val and Ender knew each other so well that there was often nothing to say. But without her there, Ender grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to.
Even the hive queen was no help. Her thoughts were instantaneous; bound, not to synapses, but to philotes that were untouched by the relativistic effects of lightspeed. She passed sixteen hours for every minute of Ender’s time—the differential was too great for him to receive any kind of communication from her. If she were not in a cocoon, she would have thousands of individual buggers, each doing its own task and passing to her vast memory its experiences. But now all she had were her memories, and in his eight days of captivity, Ender began to understand her eagerness to be delivered.
By the time the eight days passed, he was doing fairly well at speaking Portuguese
directly instead of translating from Spanish whenever he wanted to say anything. He was also desperate for human company—he would have been glad to discuss
religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship’s computer to talk to.
The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest of the universe. Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact

the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while the starship remained truly motionless. No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe the phenomenon. It was anybody’s guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway; the ansible had been developed half by accident, and along with it the Park Instantaneity Principle. It may not be comprehensible, but it worked.
The windows of the starship instantly filled with stars as light became visible again in all directions. Someday a scientist would discover why the Park shift took almost no energy. Somewhere, Ender was certain, a terrible price was being paid for human starflight. He had dreamed once of a star winking out every time a starship made the Park shift. Jane assured him that it wasn’t so, but he knew that most stars were invisible to us; a trillion of them could disappear and we’d not know it. For thousands of years we would continue to see the photons that had already been launched before the star disappeared. By the time we could see the galaxy go blank, it would be far too late to amend our course.
“Sitting there in paranoid fantasy,” said Jane. “You can’t read minds,” said Ender.
“You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It’s your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness.”
“Have you alerted Lusitanian authorities that I’m coming?”
“It’s a very small colony. There’s no Landing Authority because hardly anybody goes there. There’s an orbiting shuttle that automatically takes people up and down to a laughable little shuttleport.”
“No clearance from Immigration?”
“You’re a speaker. They can’t turn you away. Besides, Immigration consists of the Governor, who is also the Mayor, since the city and the colony are identical. Her name is Faria Lima Maria do Bosque, called Bosquinha, and she sends you greetings and wishes you would go away, since they’ve got trouble enough without a prophet
of agnosticism going around annoying good Catholics.”
“She said that?”
“Actually, not to you—Bishop Peregrino said it to her, and she agreed. But it’s her job to agree. If you tell her that Catholics are all idolatrous, superstitious fools,
she’ll probably sigh and say, I hope you can keep those opinions to yourself.” “You’re stalling,” said Ender. “What is it you think I don’t want to hear?” “Novinha canceled her call for a speaker. Five days after she sent it.”
Of course, the Starways Code said that once Ender had begun his voyage in response to her call, the call could not legally be canceled; still, it changed everything, because instead of eagerly awaiting his arrival for twenty-two years, she would be dreading it, resenting him for coming when she had changed her mind. He

had expected to be received by her as a welcome friend. Now she would be even more hostile than the Catholic establishment. “Anything to simplify my work,” he said.
“Well, it’s not all bad, Andrew. You see, in the intervening years, a couple of other people have called for a speaker, and they haven’t canceled.”
“Who?”
“By the most fascinating coincidence, they are Novinha’s son Miro and Novinha’s daughter Ela.”
“They couldn’t possibly have known Pipo. Why would they call me to speak his death?”
“Oh, no, not Pipo’s death. Ela called for a Speaker only six weeks ago, to speak the death of her father, Novinha’s husband, Marcos Maria Ribeira, called Marcão. He keeled over in a bar. Not from alcohol—he had a disease. He died of terminal rot.”
“I worry about you, Jane, consumed with compassion the way you are.” “Compassion is what you’re good at. I’m better at complex searches through
organized data structures.”
“And the boy—what’s his name?”
“Miro. He called for a Speaker four years ago. For the death of Pipo’s son, Libo.” “Libo couldn’t be older than forty—”
“He was helped along to an early death. He was xenologer, you see—or Zenador, as they say in Portuguese.”
“The piggies—”
“Exactly like his father’s death. The organs placed exactly the same. Three piggies have been executed the same way while you were en route, though farther from the gate. But they plant trees in the middle of the piggy corpses—no such honor for the dead humans.”
Both xenologers murdered by the piggies, a generation apart. “What has the
Starways Council decided?”
“It’s very tricky. They keep vacillating. They haven’t certified either of Libo’s apprentices as xenologer. One is Libo’s daughter, Ouanda. And the other is Miro, the one who called for a speaker.”
“Do they maintain contact with the piggies?”
“Officially, no. There’s some controversy about this. After Libo died, the Council forbade contact more frequently than once a month. But Libo’s daughter categorically refused to obey the order.”
“And they didn’t remove her?”
“The majority for cutting back on contact with the piggies was paper thin. There
was no majority for censuring her. At the same time, they worry that Miro and

Ouanda are so young. Two years ago a party of scientists was dispatched from Calicut. They should be here to take over supervision of piggy affairs in only thirty- three more years.”
“Do they have any idea this time why the piggies killed the xenologer?” “None at all. But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
The answer would have been easy, except that the hive queen nudged him gently
in the back of his mind. Ender could feel her like wind through the leaves of a tree, a rustling, a gentle movement, and sunlight. Yes, he was here to speak for the dead. But he was also here to bring the dead back to life.
<This is a good place.>
The hive queen was making the enormous effort to speak to him during near lightspeed flight.
<There’s a mind here. Much clearer than any human mind we’ve known.> The piggies? They think the way you do?
<It knows of the piggies. A little time; it’s afraid of us.>
The hive queen withdrew, and Ender was left to ponder the thought that with
Lusitania he may have bitten off more than he could chew.





Bishop Peregrino delivered the homily himself. That was always a bad sign. Never an exciting speaker, he had become so convoluted and parenthetical that half the
time Ela couldn’t even understand what he was talking about. Quim pretended he could understand, of course, because as far as he was concerned the bishop could do no wrong. But little Grego made no attempt to seem interested. Even when Sister Esquecimento was roving the aisle, with her needle-sharp nails and cruel grip, Grego fearlessly performed whatever mischief entered his head.
Today he was prying the rivets out of the back of the plastic bench in front of them. It bothered Ela how strong he was—a six-year-old shouldn’t be able to work a screwdriver under the lip of a heat-sealed rivet. Ela wasn’t sure she could do it.
If Father were here, of course, his long arm would snake out and gently, oh so
gently, take the screwdriver out of Grego’s hand. He would whisper, “Where did you get this?” and Grego would look at him with wide and innocent eyes. Later, when the family got home from mass, Father would rage at Miro for leaving tools around, calling him terrible names and blaming him for all the troubles of the family. Miro would bear it in silence. Ela would busy herself with preparation for the evening meal. Quim would sit uselessly in the corner, massaging the rosary and murmuring his useless little prayers. Olhado was the lucky one, with his electronic eyes—he simply turned them off or played back some favorite scene from the past and paid no attention. Quara went off and cowered in the corner. And little Grego stood there

triumphantly, his hand clutching Father’s pantleg, watching as the blame for everything he did was poured out on Miro’s head.
Ela shuddered as the scene played itself out in her memory. If it had ended there, it would have been bearable. But then Miro would leave, and they would eat, and then—
Sister Esquecimento’s spidery fingers leapt out; her fingernails dug into Grego’s arm. Instantly, Grego dropped the screwdriver. Of course it was supposed to clatter on the floor, but Sister Esquecimento was no fool. She bent quickly and caught it in her other hand. Grego grinned. Her face was only inches from his knee. Ela saw what he had in mind, reached out to try to stop him, but too late—he brought his knee up sharply into Sister Esquecimento’s mouth.
She gasped from the pain and let go of Grego’s arm. He snatched the screwdriver out of her slackened hand. Holding a hand to her bleeding mouth, she fled down the aisle. Grego resumed his demolition work.
Father is dead, Ela reminded herself. The words sounded like music in her mind. Father is dead, but he’s still here, because he left his monstrous little legacy behind. The poison he put in us all is still ripening, and eventually it will kill us all. When he died his liver was only two inches long, and his spleen could not be found. Strange fatty organs had grown in their places. There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even
now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we’re even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father’s soul.
Maybe it would be different if Mother tried to make it better. But she cared about nothing but microscopes and genetically enhanced cereals, or whatever she was working on now.
“. . . so-called Speaker for the Dead! But there is only One who can speak for the dead, and that is Sagrado Cristo . . .”
Bishop Peregrino’s words caught her attention. What was he saying about a
speaker for the dead? He couldn’t possibly know she had called for one—
“. . . the law requires us to treat him with courtesy, but not with belief! The truth is not to be found in the speculations and hypotheses of unspiritual men, but in the teachings and traditions of Mother Church. So when he walks among you, give him your smiles, but hold back your hearts!”
Why was he giving this warning? The nearest planet was Trondheim, twenty-two lightyears away, and it wasn’t likely there’d be a speaker there. It would be decades till a speaker arrived, if one came at all. She leaned over Quara to ask Quim—he would have been listening. “What’s this about a Speaker for the Dead?” she

whispered.
“If you’d listen, you’d know for yourself.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll deviate your septum.”
Quim smirked, to show her he wasn’t afraid of her threats. But, since in fact he was afraid of her, he then told her. “Some faithless wretch apparently requested a speaker back when the first xenologer died, and he arrives this afternoon—he’s already on the shuttle and the Mayor is on her way out to meet him when he lands.”
She hadn’t bargained for this. The computer hadn’t told her a speaker was already on the way. He was supposed to come years from now, to speak the truth about the monstrosity called Father who had finally blessed his family by dropping dead; the truth would come like light to illuminate and purify their past. But Father was too recently dead for him to be spoken now. His tentacles still reached out from the grave and sucked at their hearts.
The homily ended, and eventually so did the mass. She held tightly to Grego’s hand, trying to keep him from snatching someone’s book or bag as they threaded through the crowd. Quim was good for something, at least—he carried Quara, who always froze up when she was supposed to make her way among strangers. Olhado switched his eyes back on and took care of himself, winking metallically at whatever fifteen-year-old semi-virgin he was hoping to horrify today. Ela genuflected at the statues of Os Venerados, her long-dead, half-sainted grandparents. Aren’t you proud to have such lovely grandchildren as us?
Grego was smirking; sure enough, he had a baby’s shoe in his hand. Ela silently prayed that the infant had come out of the encounter unbloodied. She took the shoe from Grego and laid it on the little altar where candles burned in perpetual witness of the miracle of the Descolada. Whoever owned the shoe, they’d find it there.





Mayor Bosquinha was cheerful enough as the car skimmed over the grassland between the shuttleport and the settlement of Milagre. She pointed out herds of
semi-domestic cabra, a native species that provided fibers for cloth, but whose meat
was nutritionally useless to human beings. “Do the piggies eat them?” asked Ender.
She raised an eyebrow. “We don’t know much about the piggies.”
“We know they live in the forest. Do they ever come out on the plain?” She shrugged. “That’s for the framlings to decide.”
Ender was startled for a moment to hear her use that word; but of course Demosthenes’ latest book had been published twenty-two years ago, and distributed through the Hundred Worlds by ansible. Utlanning, framling, raman, varelse—the terms were part of Stark now, and probably did not even seem particularly novel to

Bosquinha.
It was her lack of curiosity about the piggies that left him feeling uncomfortable. The people of Lusitania couldn’t possibly be unconcerned about the piggies—they were the reason for the high, impassable fence that none but the Zenadors could cross. No, she wasn’t incurious, she was avoiding the subject. Whether it was because the murderous piggies were a painful subject or because she didn’t trust a speaker for the dead, he couldn’t guess.
They crested a hill and she stopped the car. Gently it settled onto its skids. Below them a broad river wound its way among grassy hills; beyond the river, the farther hills were completely covered with forest. Along the far bank of the river, brick and plaster houses with tile roofs made a picturesque town. Farmhouses perched on the near bank, their long narrow fields reaching toward the hill where Ender and Bosquinha sat.
“Milagre,” said Bosquinha. “On the highest hill, the Cathedral. Bishop Peregrino has asked the people to be polite and helpful to you.”
From her tone, Ender gathered that he had also let them know that he was a dangerous agent of agnosticism. “Until God strikes me dead?” he asked.
Bosquinha smiled. “God is setting an example of Christian tolerance, and we expect everyone in town will follow.”
“Do they know who called me?”
“Whoever called you has been—discreet.”
“You’re the Governor, besides being Mayor. You have some privileges of information.”
“I know that your original call was canceled, but too late. I also know that two others have requested speakers in recent years. But you must realize that most people are content to receive their doctrine and their consolation from the priests.”
“They’ll be relieved to know that I don’t deal in doctrine or consolation.”
“Your kind offer to let us have your cargo of skrika will make you popular enough in the bars, and you can be sure you’ll see plenty of vain women wearing the pelts in the months to come. It’s coming on to autumn.”
“I happened to acquire the skrika with the starship—it was of no use to me, and I
don’t expect any special gratitude for it.” He looked at the rough, furry-looking grass around him. “This grass—it’s native?”
“And useless. We can’t even use it for thatch—if you cut it, it crumbles, and then dissolves into dust in the next rain. But down there, in the fields, the most common crop is a special breed of amaranth that our xenobiologist developed for us. Rice and wheat were feeble and undependable crops here, but the amaranth is so hardy that we have to use herbicides around the fields to keep it from spreading.”
“Why?”

“This is a quarantined world, Speaker. The amaranth is so well-suited to this environment that it would soon choke out the native grasses. The idea is not to terraform Lusitania. The idea is to have as little impact on this world as possible.”
“That must be hard on the people.”
“Within our enclave, Speaker, we are free and our lives are full. And outside the fence—no one wants to go there, anyway.”
The tone of her voice was heavy with concealed emotion. Ender knew, then, that the fear of the piggies ran deep.
“Speaker, I know you’re thinking that we’re afraid of the piggies. And perhaps some of us are. But the feeling most of us have, most of the time, isn’t fear at all. It’s hatred. Loathing.”
“You’ve never seen them.”
“You must know of the two Zenadors who were killed—I suspect you were originally called to speak the death of Pipo. But both of them, Pipo and Libo alike, were beloved here. Especially Libo. He was a kind and generous man, and the grief at his death was widespread and genuine. It is hard to conceive of how the piggies could do to him what they did. Dom Cristão, the abbot of the Filhos da Mente de Cristo—he says that they must lack the moral sense. He says this may mean that they are beasts. Or it may mean that they are unfallen, having not yet eaten of the
fruit of the forbidden tree.” She smiled tightly. “But that’s theology, and so it means nothing to you.”
He did not answer. He was used to the way religious people assumed that their sacred stories must sound absurd to unbelievers. But Ender did not consider himself an unbeliever, and he had a keen sense of the sacredness of many tales. But he could not explain this to Bosquinha. She would have to change her assumptions about him over time. She was suspicious of him, but he believed she could be won; to be a good Mayor, she had to be skilled at seeing people for what they are, not for what they seem.
He turned the subject. “The Filhos da Mente de Cristo—my Portuguese isn’t
strong, but does that mean ‘Sons of the Mind of Christ’?”
“They’re a new order, relatively speaking, formed only four hundred years ago under a special dispensation of the Pope—”
“Oh, I know the Children of the Mind of Christ, Mayor. I Spoke the death of San
Angelo on Moctezuma, in the city of Córdoba.” Her eyes widened. “Then the story is true!”
“I’ve heard many versions of the story, Mayor Bosquinha. One tale has it that the devil possessed San Angelo on his deathbed, so he cried out for the unspeakable rites of the pagan Hablador de los Muertos.”
Bosquinha smiled. “That is something like the tale that is whispered. Dom Cristão

says it’s nonsense, of course.”
“It happens that San Angelo, back before he was sainted, attended my speaking for a woman that he knew. The fungus in his blood was already killing him. He came to me and said, ‘Andrew, they’re already telling the most terrible lies about me, saying that I’ve done miracles and should be sainted. You must help me. You must tell the truth at my death.’ ”
“But the miracles have been certified, and he was canonized only ninety years after his death.”
“Yes. Well, that’s partly my fault. When I spoke his death, I attested several of the miracles myself.”
Now she laughed aloud. “A speaker for the dead, believing in miracles?”
“Look at your cathedral hill. How many of those buildings are for the priests, and now many are for the school?”
Bosquinha understood at once, and glared at him. “The Filhos da Mente de Cristo are obedient to the Bishop.”
“Except that they preserve and teach all knowledge, whether the Bishop approves of it or not.”
“San Angelo may have allowed you to meddle in affairs of the Church. I assure you that Bishop Peregrino will not.”
“I’ve come to speak a simple death, and I’ll abide by the law. I think you’ll find I
do less harm than you expect, and perhaps more good.”
“If you’ve come to speak Pipo’s death, Speaker pelos Mortos, then you will do nothing but harm. Leave the piggies behind the wall. If I had my way, no human being would pass through that fence again.”
“I hope there’s a room I can rent.”
“We’re an unchanging town here, Speaker. Everyone has a house here and there’s nowhere else to go—why would anyone maintain an inn? We can only offer you one of the small plastic dwellings the first colonists put up. It’s small, but it has all the amenities.”
“Since I don’t need many amenities or much space, I’m sure it will be fine. And I
look forward to meeting Dom Cristão. Where the followers of San Angelo are, the truth has friends.”
Bosquinha sniffed and started the car again. As Ender intended, her preconceived notions of a speaker for the dead were now shattered. To think he had actually known San Angelo, and admired the Filhos. It was not what Bishop Peregrino had led them to expect.





The room was only thinly furnished, and if Ender had owned much he would have

had trouble finding anywhere to put it. As always before, however, he was able to unpack from interstellar flight in only a few minutes. Only the bundled cocoon of
the hive queen remained in his bag; he had long since given up feeling odd about the incongruity of stowing the future of a magnificent race in a duffel under his bed.
“Maybe this will be the place,” he murmured. The cocoon felt cool, almost cold, even through the towels it was wrapped in.
<It is the place.>
It was unnerving to have her so certain of it. There was no hint of pleading or impatience or any of the other feelings she had given him in the past, desiring to emerge. Just absolute certainty.
“I wish we could decide just like that,” he said. “It might be the place, but it all depends on whether the piggies can cope with having you here.”
<The question is whether they can cope with you humans without us.> “It takes time. Give me a few months here.”
<Take all the time you need. We’re in no hurry now.>
“Who is it that you’ve found? I thought you told me that you couldn’t communicate with anybody but me.”
<The part of our mind that holds our thought, what you call the philotic impulse, the power of the ansibles, it is very cold and hard to find in human beings. But this one, the one we’ve found here, one of many that we’ll find here, his philotic impulse is much stronger, much clearer, easier to find, he hears us more easily, and so
forgive us, dear friend, forgive us if we leave the hard work of talking to your mind and go back to him and talk to him because he doesn’t make us search so hard to make words and pictures that are clear enough for your analytical mind because we feel him like sunshine, like the warmth of sunshine on his face on our face and the feel of cool water deep in our abdomen and movement as gentle and thorough as soft wind which we haven’t felt for three thousand years forgive us we’ll be with him until you wake us until you take us out to dwell here because you will do it you will find out in your own way in your own time that this is the place here it is this is home—>
And then he lost the thread of her thought, felt it seep away like a dream that is
forgotten upon waking, even as you try to remember it and keep it alive. Ender wasn’t sure what the hive queen had found, but whatever it was, he would have to deal with the reality of Starways Code, the Catholic Church, young xenologers who might not even let him meet the piggies, a xenobiologist who had changed her mind about inviting him here, and something more, perhaps the most difficult thing of all: that if the hive queen stayed here, he would have to stay here. I’ve been disconnected from humanity for so many years, he thought, coming in to meddle and pry and hurt and heal, then going away again, myself untouched. How will I ever become a part

of this place, if this is where I’ll stay? The only things I’ve ever been a part of were an army of little boys in the Battle School, and Valentine, and both are gone now, both part of the past—
“What, wallowing in loneliness?” asked Jane. “I can hear your heartrate falling and your breathing getting heavy. In a moment you’ll either be asleep, dead, or lachrymose.”
“I’m much more complex than that,” said Ender cheerfully. “Anticipated self-pity is what I’m feeling, about pains that haven’t even arrived.”
“Very good, Ender. Get an early start. That way you can wallow so much longer.” The terminal came alive, showing Jane as a piggy in a chorus line of leggy women, high-kicking with exuberance. “Get a little exercise, you’ll feel so much better. After all, you’ve unpacked. What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t even know where I am, Jane.”
“They really don’t keep a map of the city,” Jane explained. “Everybody knows where everything is. But they do have a map of the sewer system, divided into boroughs. I can extrapolate where all the buildings are.”
“Show me, then.”
A three-dimensional model of the town appeared over the terminal. Ender might not be particularly welcome there, and his room might be sparse, but they had shown courtesy in the terminal they provided for him. It wasn’t a standard home installation, but rather an elaborate simulator. It was able to project holos into a space sixteen times larger than most terminals, with a resolution four times greater. The illusion was so real that Ender felt for a vertiginous moment that he was Gulliver, leaning over a Lilliput that had not yet come to fear him, that did not yet recognize his power to destroy.
The names of the different boroughs hung in the air over each sewer district. “You’re here,” said Jane. “Vila Velha, the old town. The praça is just through the block from you. That’s where public meetings are held.”
“Do you have any map of the piggy lands?”
The village map slid rapidly toward Ender, the near features disappearing as new ones came into view on the far side. It was as if he were flying over it. Like a witch, he thought. The boundary of the town was marked by a fence.
“That barrier is the only thing standing between us and the piggies,” mused Ender. “It generates an electric field that stimulates any pain-sensitive nerves that come
within it,” said Jane. “Just touching it makes all your wetware go screwy—it makes you feel as though somebody were cutting off your fingers with a file.”
“Pleasant thought. Are we in a concentration camp? Or a zoo?”
“It all depends on how you look at it,” said Jane. “It’s the human side of the fence that’s connected to the rest of the universe, and the piggy side that’s trapped on its

home world.”
“The difference is that they don’t know what they’re missing.”
“I know,” said Jane. “It’s the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn’t have the good fortune to be born homo sapiens.” Beyond the fence was a hillside, and along the top of the hill a thick forest began. “The xenologers have never gone deep into piggy lands. The piggy community that they deal with is less than a kilometer inside this wood. The piggies live in a log house, all the males together. We don’t know about any other settlements except that the satellites have been able to confirm that every forest like this one carries just about all the population that a hunter-gatherer culture can sustain.”
“They hunt?”
“Mostly they gather.”
“Where did Pipo and Libo die?”
Jane brightened a patch of grassy ground on the hillside leading up to the trees. A
large tree grew in isolation nearby, with two smaller ones not far off.
“Those trees,” said Ender. “I don’t remember any being so close in the holos I saw on Trondheim.”
“It’s been twenty-two years. The big one is the tree the piggies planted in the corpse of the rebel called Rooter, who was executed before Pipo was murdered. The other two are more recent piggy executions.”
“I wish I knew why they plant trees for piggies, and not for humans.”
“The trees are sacred,” said Jane. “Pipo recorded that many of the trees in the forest are named. Libo speculated that they might be named for the dead.”
“And humans simply aren’t part of the pattern of tree-worship. Well, that’s likely enough. Except that I’ve found that rituals and myths don’t come from nowhere. There’s usually some reason for it that’s tied to the survival of the community.”
“Andrew Wiggin, anthropologist?” “The proper study of mankind is man.”
“Go study some men, then, Ender. Novinha’s family, for instance. By the way, the
computer network has officially been barred from showing you where anybody lives.”
Ender grinned. “So Bosquinha isn’t as friendly as she seems.”
“If you have to ask where people live, they’ll know where you’re going. If they don’t want you to go there, no one will know where they live.”
“You can override their restriction, can’t you?”
“I already have.” A light was blinking near the fence line, behind the observatory hill. It was as isolated a spot as was possible to find in Milagre. Few other houses had been built where the fence would be visible all the time. Ender wondered

whether Novinha had chosen to live there to be near the fence or to be far from neighbors. Perhaps it had been Marcão’s choice.
The nearest borough was Vila Atrás, and then the borough called As Fábricas stretched down to the river. As the name implied, it consisted mostly of small factories that worked the metals and plastics and processed the foods and fibers that Milagre used. A nice, tight, self-contained economy. And Novinha had chosen to
live back behind everything, out of sight, invisible. It was Novinha who chose it, too, Ender was sure of that now. Wasn’t it the pattern of her life? She had never belonged to Milagre. It was no accident that all three calls for a speaker had come from her
and her children. The very act of calling a speaker was defiant, a sign that they did not think they belonged among the devout Catholics of Lusitania.
“Still,” said Ender, “I have to ask someone to lead me there. I shouldn’t let them know right away that they can’t hide any of their information from me.”
The map disappeared, and Jane’s face appeared above the terminal. She had neglected to adjust for the greater size of this terminal, so that her head was many times human size. She was quite imposing. And her simulation was accurate right down to the pores on her face. “Actually, Andrew, it’s me they can’t hide anything from.”
Ender sighed. “You have a vested interest in this, Jane.” “I know.” She winked. “But you don’t.”
“Are you telling me you don’t trust me?”
“You reek of impartiality and a sense of justice. But I’m human enough to want preferential treatment, Andrew.”
“Will you promise me one thing, at least?” “Anything, my corpuscular friend.”
“When you decide to hide something from me, will you at least tell me that you aren’t going to tell me?”
“This is getting way too deep for little old me.” She was a caricature of an overfeminine woman.
“Nothing is too deep for you, Jane. Do us both a favor. Don’t cut me off at the
knees.”
“While you’re off with the Ribeira family, is there anything you’d like me to be doing?”
“Yes. Find every way in which the Ribeiras are significantly different from the rest of the people of Lusitania. And any points of conflict between them and the authorities.”
“You speak, and I obey.” She started to do her genie disappearing act. “You maneuvered me here, Jane. Why are you trying to unnerve me?” “I’m not. And I didn’t.”

“I have a shortage of friends in this town.” “You can trust me with your life.”
“It isn’t my life I’m worried about.”





The praça was filled with children playing football. Most of them were stunting, showing how long they could keep the ball in the air using only their feet and heads. Two of them, though, had a vicious duel going. The boy would kick the ball as hard as he could toward the girl, who stood not three meters away. She would stand and take the impact of the ball, not flinching no matter how hard it struck her. Then she would kick the ball back at him, and he would try not to flinch. A little girl was tending the ball, fetching it each time it rebounded from a victim.
Ender tried asking some of the boys if they knew where the Ribeira family’s house was. Their answer was invariably a shrug; when he persisted some of them began moving away, and soon most of the children had retreated from the praça. Ender wondered what the Bishop had told everybody about speakers.
The duel, however, continued unabated. And now that the praça was not so crowded, Ender saw that another child was involved, a boy of about twelve. He was not extraordinary from behind, but as Ender moved toward the middle of the praça, he could see that there was something wrong with the boy’s eyes. It took a moment, but then he understood. The boy had artificial eyes. Both looked shiny and metallic, but Ender knew how they worked. Only one eye was used for sight, but it took four separate visual scans and then separated the signals to feed simulated binocular vision to the brain. The other eye contained the power supply, the computer control, and the external interface. When he wanted to, he could record short sequences of vision in a limited photo memory, probably less than a trillion bits. The duelists were using him as their judge; if they disputed a point, he could replay the scene in slow motion and tell them what had happened.
The ball went straight for the boy’s crotch. He winced elaborately, but the girl was
not impressed. “He swiveled away, I saw his hips move!” “Did not! You hurt me, I didn’t dodge at all!”
“Reveja! Reveja!” They had been speaking Stark, but the girl now switched into
Portuguese.
The boy with metal eyes showed no expression, but raised a hand to silence them. “Mudou,” he said with finality. He moved, Ender translated.
“Sabia!” I knew it! “You liar, Olhado!”
The boy with metal eyes looked at him with disdain. “I never lie. I’ll send you a dump of the scene if you want. In fact, I think I’ll post it on the net so everybody can

watch you dodge and then lie about it.” “Mentiroso! Filho de puta! Fode-bode!”
Ender was pretty sure what the epithets meant, but the boy with metal eyes took it calmly.
“Dá,” said the girl. “Dá-me.” Give it here.
The boy furiously took off his ring and threw it on the ground at her feet. “Viada!”
he said in a hoarse whisper. Then he took off running. “Poltrão!” shouted the girl after him. Coward!
“Cão!” shouted the boy, not even looking over his shoulder.
It was not the girl he was shouting at this time. She turned at once to look at the boy with metal eyes, who stiffened at the name. Almost at once the girl looked at the ground. The little one, who had been doing the ball-fetching, walked to the boy with metal eyes and whispered something. He looked up, noticing Ender for the first time.
The older girl was apologizing. “Desculpa, Olhado, não queria que—” “Não há problema, Michi.” He did not look at her.
The girl started to go on, but then she, too, noticed Ender and fell silent. “Porque está olhando-nos?” asked the boy. Why are you looking at us?
Ender answered with a question. “Você é árbitro?” You’re the arbiter here? The word could mean “umpire,” but it could also mean “magistrate.”
“De vez em quando.” Sometimes.
Ender switched to Stark—he wasn’t sure he knew how to say anything complex in Portuguese. “Then tell me, arbiter, is it fair to leave a stranger to find his way around without help?”
“Stranger? You mean utlanning, framling, or raman?” “No, I think I mean infidel.”
“O Senhor é descrente?” You’re an unbeliever?
“Só descredo no incrível.” I only disbelieve the unbelievable. The boy grinned. “Where do you want to go, Speaker?”
“The house of the Ribeira family.”
The little girl edged closer to the boy with metal eyes. “Which Ribeira family?” “The widow Ivanova.”
“I think I can find it,” said the boy.
“Everybody in town can find it,” said Ender. “The point is, will you take me there?”
“Why do you want to go there?”
“I ask people questions and try to find out true stories.” “Nobody at the Ribeira house knows any true stories.” “I’d settle for lies.”
“Come on then.” He started toward the low-mown grass of the main road. The

little girl was whispering in his ear. He stopped and turned to Ender, who was following close behind.
“Quara wants to know. What’s your name?” “Andrew. Andrew Wiggin.”
“She’s Quara.” “And you?”
“Everybody calls me Olhado. Because of my eyes.” He picked up the little girl and put her on his shoulders. “But my real name’s Lauro. Lauro Suleimão Ribeira.” He grinned, then turned around and strode off.
Ender followed. Ribeira. Of course.
Jane had been listening, too, and spoke from the jewel in his ear. “Lauro Suleimão Ribeira is Novinha’s fourth child. He lost his eyes in a laser accident. He’s twelve years old. Oh, and I found one difference between the Ribeira family and the rest of the town. The Ribeiras are willing to defy the Bishop and lead you where you want
to go.”
I noticed something, too, Jane, he answered silently. This boy enjoyed deceiving me, and then enjoyed even more letting me see how I’d been fooled. I just hope you don’t take lessons from him.





Miro sat on the hillside. The shade of the trees made him invisible to anyone who might be watching from Milagre, but he could see much of the town from here— certainly the cathedral and the monastery on the highest hill, and then the observatory on the next hill to the north. And under the observatory, in a depression in the hillside, the house where he lived, not very far from the fence.
“Miro,” whispered Leaf-eater. “Are you a tree?”
It was a translation from the pequeninos’ idiom. Sometimes they meditated, holding themselves motionless for hours. They called this “being a tree.”
“More like a blade of grass,” Miro answered.
Leaf-eater giggled in the high, wheezy way he had. It never sounded natural—the pequeninos had learned laughter by rote, as if it were simply another word in Stark. It didn’t arise out of amusement, or at least Miro didn’t think it did.
“Is it going to rain?” asked Miro. To a piggy this meant: are you interrupting me for my own sake, or for yours?
“It rained fire today,” said Leaf-eater. “Out in the prairie.” “Yes. We have a visitor from another world.”
“Is it the Speaker?” Miro didn’t answer.
“You must bring him to see us.”

Miro didn’t answer.
“I root my face in the ground for you, Miro, my limbs are lumber for your house.” Miro hated it when they begged for something. It was as if they thought of him as
someone particularly wise or strong, a parent from whom favors must be wheedled. Well, if they felt that way, it was his own fault. His and Libo’s. Playing God out here among the piggies.
“I promised, didn’t I, Leaf-eater?” “When when when?”
“It’ll take time. I have to find out whether he can be trusted.”
Leaf-eater looked baffled. Miro had tried to explain that not all humans knew each other, and some weren’t nice, but they never seemed to understand.
“As soon as I can,” Miro said.
Suddenly Leaf-eater began to rock back and forth on the ground, shifting his hips from side to side as if he were trying to relieve an itch in his anus. Libo had speculated once that this was what performed the same function that laughter did for humans. “Talk to me in piddle-geese!” wheezed Leaf-eater. Leaf-eater always seemed to be greatly amused that Miro and the other Zenadors spoke two languages interchangeably. This despite the fact that at least four different piggy languages had been recorded or at least hinted at over the years, all spoken by this same tribe of piggies.
But if he wanted to hear Portuguese, he’d get Portuguese. “Vai comer folhas.” Go eat leaves.
Leaf-eater looked puzzled. “Why is that clever?” “Because that’s your name. Come-folhas.”
Leaf-eater pulled a large insect out of his nostril and flipped it away, buzzing. “Don’t be crude,” he said. Then he walked away.
Miro watched him go. Leaf-eater was always so difficult. Miro much preferred the company of the piggy called Human. Even though Human was smarter, and Miro
had to watch himself more carefully with him, at least he didn’t seem hostile the
way Leaf-eater often did.
With the piggy out of sight, Miro turned back toward the city. Somebody was moving down the path along the face of the hill, toward his house. The one in front was very tall—no, it was Olhado with Quara on his shoulders. Quara was much too old for that. Miro worried about her. She seemed not to be coming out of the shock of Father’s death. Miro felt a moment’s bitterness. And to think he and Ela had expected Father’s death would solve all their problems.
Then he stood up and tried to get a better view of the man behind Olhado and Quara. No one he’d seen before. The Speaker. Already! He couldn’t have been in town for more than an hour, and he was already going to the house. That’s great, all I

need is for Mother to find out that I was the one who called him here. Somehow I thought that a speaker for the dead would be discreet about it, not just come straight home to the person who called. What a fool. Bad enough that he’s coming years before I expected a speaker to get here. Quim’s bound to report this to the Bishop, even if nobody else does. Now I’m going to have to deal with Mother and, probably, the whole city.
Miro moved back into the trees and jogged along a path that led, eventually, to the gate back into the city.

7

THE RIBEIRA HOUSE











Miro, this time you should have been there, because even though I have a better memory for dialogue than you, I sure don’t know what this means. You saw the new piggy, the one they call Human—I thought I saw you talking to him for a minute before you took off for the Questionable Activity. Mandachuva told me they named him Human because he was very smart as a child. OK, it’s very flattering that “smart” and “human” are linked in their minds, or perhaps patronizing that they think we’ll be flattered by that, but that’s not what matters.
Mandachuva then said: “He could already talk when he started walking around by himself.” And he made a gesture with his hand about ten centimeters off the ground. To me it looked like he was telling how tall Human was when he learned how to talk and walk. Ten centimeters! But I could be completely
wrong. You should have been there, to see for yourself.
If I’m right, and that’s what Mandachuva meant, then for the first time we have an idea of piggy childhood. If they actually start walking at ten centimeters in height—and talking, no less!—then they must have less development time during gestation than humans, and do a lot more developing after they’re born.
But now it gets absolutely crazy, even by your standards. He then leaned in close and told me—as if he weren’t supposed to—who Human’s father was: “Your grandfather Pipo knew Human’s father. His tree is near your gate.”
Is he kidding? Rooter died twenty-four years ago, didn’t he? OK, maybe this
is just a religious thing, sort of adopt-a-tree or something. But the way Mandachuva was so secretive about it, I keep thinking it’s somehow true. Is it possible that they have a 24-year gestation period? Or maybe it took a couple of decades for Human to develop from a 10-centimeter toddler into the fine specimen of piggihood we now see. Or maybe Rooter’s sperm was saved in a jar somewhere.
But this matters. This is the first time a piggy personally known to human observers has ever been named as a father. And Rooter, no less, the very one that

got murdered. In other words, the male with the lowest prestige—an executed criminal, even—has been named as a father! That means that our males aren’t cast-off bachelors at all, even though some of them are so old they knew Pipo. They are potential fathers.
What’s more, if Human was so remarkably smart, then why was he dumped here if this is really a group of miserable bachelors? I think we’ve had it wrong for quite a while. This isn’t a low-prestige group of bachelors, this is a high- prestige group of juveniles, and some of them are really going to amount to something.
So when you told me you felt sorry for me because you got to go out on the Questionable Activity and I had to stay home and work up some Official Fabrications for the ansible report, you were full of Unpleasant Excretions! (If you get home after I’m asleep, wake me up for a kiss, OK? I earned it today.)

—Memo from Ouanda Figueira Mucumbi to Miro Ribeira von Hesse, retrieved from Lusitanian files by Congressional order and introduced as evidence in the Trial In Absentia of the Xenologers of Lusitania on Charges of Treason and Malfeasance



There was no construction industry in Lusitania. When a couple got married, their friends and family built them a house. The Ribeira house expressed the history of the family. At the front, the old part of the house was made of plastic sheets rooted to a concrete foundation. Rooms had been built on as the family grew, each addition abutting the one before, so that five distinct one-story structures fronted the hillside. The later ones were all brick, decently plumbed, roofed with tile, but with no attempt whatever at aesthetic appeal. The family had built exactly what was needed and nothing more.
It was not poverty, Ender knew—there was no poverty in a community where the economy was completely controlled. The lack of decoration, of individuality, showed the family’s contempt for their own house; to Ender this bespoke contempt for themselves as well. Certainly Olhado and Quara showed none of the relaxation,
the letting-down that most people feel when they come home. If anything, they grew
warier, less jaunty; the house might have been a subtle source of gravity, making them heavier the nearer they approached.
Olhado and Quara went right in. Ender waited at the door for someone to invite him to enter. Olhado left the door ajar, but walked on out of the room without speaking to him. Ender could see Quara sitting on a bed in the front room, leaning against a bare wall. There was nothing whatsoever on any of the walls. They were stark white. Quara’s face matched the blankness of the walls. Though her eyes regarded Ender unwaveringly, she showed no sign of recognizing that he was there;

certainly she did nothing to indicate he might come in.
There was a disease in this house. Ender tried to understand what it was in Novinha’s character that he had missed before, that would let her live in a place like this. Had Pipo’s death so long before emptied Novinha’s heart as thoroughly as this?
“Is your mother home?” Ender asked. Quara said nothing.
“Oh,” he said. “Excuse me. I thought you were a little girl, but I see now that you’re a statue.”
She showed no sign of hearing him. So much for trying to jolly her out of her somberness.
Shoes slapped rapidly against a concrete floor. A little boy ran into the room, stopped in the middle, and whirled to face the doorway where Ender stood. He couldn’t be more than a year younger than Quara, six or seven years old, probably. Unlike Quara, his face showed plenty of understanding. Along with a feral hunger.
“Is your mother home?” asked Ender.
The boy bent over and carefully rolled up his pantleg. He had taped a long kitchen knife to his leg. Slowly he untaped it. Then, holding it in front of him with both hands, he aimed himself at Ender and launched himself full speed. Ender noted that the knife was well-aimed at his crotch. The boy was not subtle in his approach to strangers.
A moment later Ender had the boy tucked under his arm and the knife jammed into the ceiling. The boy was kicking and screaming. Ender had to use both hands to control his limbs; the boy ended up dangling in front of him by his hands and feet, for all the world like a calf roped for branding.
Ender looked steadily at Quara. “If you don’t go right now and get whoever is in charge in this house, I’m going to take this animal home and serve it for supper.”
Quara thought about this for a moment, then got up and ran out of the room.
A moment later a tired-looking girl with tousled hair and sleepy eyes came into
the front room. “Desculpe, por favor,” she murmured, “o menino não se restabeleceu desde a morte do pai—”
Then she seemed suddenly to come awake.
“O Senhor é o Falante pelos Mortos!” You’re the Speaker for the Dead! “Sou,” answered Ender. I am.
“Não aqui,” she said. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, do you speak Portuguese? Of course you do, you just answered me—oh, please, not here, not now. Go away.”
“Fine,” said Ender. “Should I keep the boy or the knife?”
He glanced up at the ceiling; her gaze followed his. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, we looked for it all day yesterday, we knew he had it but we didn’t know where.”
“It was taped to his leg.”

“It wasn’t yesterday. We always look there. Please, let go of him.” “Are you sure? I think he’s been sharpening his teeth.”
“Grego,” she said to the boy, “it’s wrong to poke at people with the knife.” Grego growled in his throat.
“His father dying, you see.” “They were that close?”
A look of bitter amusement passed across her face. “Hardly. He’s always been a thief, Grego has, ever since he was old enough to hold something and walk at the same time. But this thing for hurting people, that’s new. Please let him down.”
“No,” said Ender.
Her eyes narrowed and she looked defiant. “Are you kidnapping him? To take him where? For what ransom?”
“Perhaps you don’t understand,” said Ender. “He assaulted me. You’ve offered me no guarantee that he won’t do it again. You’ve made no provision for disciplining him when I set him down.”
As he had hoped, fury came into her eyes. “Who do you think you are? This is his
house, not yours!”
“Actually,” Ender said, “I’ve just had a rather long walk from the praça to your house, and Olhado set a brisk pace. I’d like to sit down.”
She nodded toward a chair. Grego wriggled and twisted against Ender’s grip. Ender lifted him high enough that their faces weren’t too far apart. “You know, Grego, if you actually break free, you will certainly fall on your head on a concrete floor. If there were carpet, I’d give you an even chance of staying conscious. But there isn’t. And frankly, I wouldn’t mind hearing the sound of your head smacking against cement.”
“He doesn’t really understand Stark that well,” said the girl.
Ender knew that Grego understood just fine. He also saw motion at the edges of the room. Olhado had come back and stood in the doorway leading to the kitchen. Quara was beside him. Ender smiled cheerfully at them, then stepped to the chair the girl had indicated. In the process, he swung Grego up into the air, letting go of his hands and feet in such a way that he spun madly for a moment, shooting out his arms and legs in panic, squealing in fear at the pain that would certainly come when he hit the floor. Ender smoothly slid onto the chair and caught the boy on his lap, instantly pinioning his arms. Grego managed to smack his heels into Ender’s shins, but since the boy wasn’t wearing shoes, it was an ineffective maneuver. In a moment Ender
had him completely helpless again.
“It feels very good to be sitting down,” Ender said. “Thank you for your hospitality. My name is Andrew Wiggin. I’ve met Olhado and Quara, and obviously Grego and I are good friends.”

The older girl wiped her hand on her apron as if she planned to offer it to him to shake, but she did not offer it. “My name is Ela Ribeira. Ela is short for Elanora.”
“A pleasure to meet you. I see you’re busy preparing supper.” “Yes, very busy. I think you should come back tomorrow.” “Oh, go right ahead. I don’t mind waiting.”
Another boy, older than Olhado but younger than Ela, shoved his way into the room. “Didn’t you hear my sister? You aren’t wanted here!”
“You show me too much kindness,” Ender said. “But I came to see your mother, and I’ll wait here until she comes home from work.”
The mention of their mother silenced them.
“I assume she’s at work. If she were here, I would expect these exciting events would have flushed her out into the open.”
Olhado smiled a bit at that, but the older boy darkened, and Ela got a nasty, painful expression on her face. “Why do you want to see her?” asked Ela.
“Actually, I want to see all of you.” He smiled at the older boy. “You must be Estevão Rei Ribeira. Named for St. Stephen the Martyr, who saw Jesus sitting at the right hand of God.”
“What do you know of such things, atheist!”
“As I recall, St. Paul stood by and held the coats of the men who were stoning him. Apparently he wasn’t a believer at the time. In fact, I think he was regarded as the most terrible enemy of the Church. And yet he later repented, didn’t he? So I suggest you think of me, not as the enemy of God, but as an apostle who has not yet been stopped on the road to Damascus.” Ender smiled.
The boy stared at him, tight-lipped. “You’re no St. Paul.”
“On the contrary,” said Ender. “I’m the apostle to the piggies.” “You’ll never see them. Miro will never let you.”
“Maybe I will,” said a voice from the door. The others turned at once to watch him walk in. Miro was young—surely not yet twenty. But his face and bearing carried the weight of responsibility and suffering far beyond his years. Ender saw how all of them made space for him. It was not that they backed away from him the way they might retreat from someone they feared. Rather, they oriented themselves to him, walking in parabolas around him, as if he were the center of gravity in the room and everything else was moved by the force of his presence.
Miro walked to the center of the room and faced Ender. He looked, however, at
Ender’s prisoner. “Let him go,” said Miro. There was ice in his voice.
Ela touched him softly on the arm. “Grego tried to stab him, Miro.” But her voice also said, Be calm, it’s all right, Grego’s in no danger and this man is not our enemy. Ender heard all this; so, it seemed, did Miro.
“Grego,” said Miro. “I told you that someday you’d take on somebody who wasn’t

afraid of you.”
Grego, seeing an ally suddenly turn to an enemy, began to cry. “He’s killing me, he’s killing me.”
Miro looked coldly at Ender. Ela might trust the Speaker for the Dead, but Miro didn’t, not yet.
“I am hurting him,” said Ender. He had found that the best way to earn trust was to tell the truth. “Every time he struggles to get free, it causes him quite a bit of discomfort. And he hasn’t stopped struggling yet.”
Ender met Miro’s gaze steadily, and Miro understood his unspoken request. He did not insist on Grego’s release. “I can’t get you out of this one, Greguinho.”
“You’re going to let him do this?” asked Estevão.
Miro gestured toward Estevão and spoke apologetically to Ender. “Everyone calls him Quim.” The nickname was pronounced like the word king in Stark. “It began because his middle name is Rei. But now it’s because he thinks he rules by divine right.”
“Bastard,” said Quim. He stalked out of the room.
At the same time, the others settled in for conversation. Miro had decided to accept the stranger, at least temporarily; therefore they could let down their guard a little. Olhado sat down on the floor; Quara returned to her previous perch on the bed. Ela leaned back against the wall. Miro pulled up another chair and sat facing Ender.
“Why did you come to this house?” asked Miro. Ender saw from the way he asked that he, like Ela, had not told anyone that he had summoned a speaker. So neither of them knew that the other expected him. And, in fact, they almost undoubtedly had not expected him to come so soon.
“To see your mother,” Ender said.
Miro’s relief was almost palpable, though he made no obvious gesture. “She’s at work,” he said. “She works late. She’s trying to develop a strain of potato that can compete with the grass here.”
“Like the amaranth?”
He grinned. “You already heard about that? No, we don’t want it to be as good a competitor as that. But the diet here is limited, and potatoes would be a nice addition. Besides, amaranth doesn’t ferment into a very good beverage. The miners and farmers have already created a mythology of vodka that makes it the queen of distilled intoxicants.”
Miro’s smile came to this house like sunlight through a crevice in a cave. Ender could feel the loosening of tensions. Quara wiggled her leg back and forth like an ordinary little girl. Olhado had a stupidly happy expression on his face, his eyes half-closed so that the metallic sheen was not so monstrously obvious. Ela’s smile was broader than Miro’s good humor should have earned. Even Grego had relaxed,

had stopped straining against Ender’s grip.
Then a sudden warmth on Ender’s lap told him that Grego, at least, was far from surrender. Ender had trained himself not to respond reflexively to an enemy’s actions until he had consciously decided to let his reflexes rule. So Grego’s flood of urine did not cause him to so much as flinch. He knew what Grego had been expecting—a shout of anger, and Ender flinging him away, casting him from his lap in disgust. Then Grego would be free—it would be a triumph. Ender yielded him no victory.
Ela, however, apparently knew the expressions of Grego’s face. Her eyes went wide, and then she took an angry step toward the boy. “Grego, you impossible little
—”
But Ender winked at her and smiled, freezing her in place. “Grego has given me a little gift. It’s the only thing he has to give me, and he made it himself, so it means all the more. I like him so much that I think I’ll never let him go.”
Grego snarled and struggled again, madly, to break free. “Why are you doing this!” said Ela.
“He’s expecting Grego to act like a human being,” said Miro. “It needs doing, and nobody else has bothered to try.”
“I’ve tried,” said Ela.
Olhado spoke up from his place on the floor. “Ela’s the only one here who keeps us civilized.”
Quim shouted from the other room. “Don’t you tell that bastard anything about our family!”
Ender nodded gravely, as if Quim had offered a brilliant intellectual proposition. Miro chuckled and Ela rolled her eyes and sat down on the bed beside Quara.
“We’re not a very happy home,” said Miro.
“I understand,” said Ender. “With your father so recently dead.”
Miro smiled sardonically. Olhado spoke up again. “With Father so recently alive, you mean.”
Ela and Miro were in obvious agreement with this sentiment. But Quim shouted
again. “Don’t tell him anything!”
“Did he hurt you?” Ender asked quietly. He did not move, even though Grego’s urine was getting cold and rank.
Ela answered. “He didn’t hit us, if that’s what you mean.”
But for Miro, things had gone too far. “Quim’s right,” said Miro. “It’s nobody’s business but ours.”
“No,” said Ela. “It’s his business.” “How is it his business?” asked Miro.
“Because he’s here to speak Father’s death,” said Ela.

“Father’s death!” said Olhado. “Chupa pedras! Father only died three weeks ago!” “I was already on my way to speak another death,” said Ender. “But someone did
call for a speaker for your father’s death, and so I’ll speak for him.” “Against him,” said Ela.
“For him,” said Ender.
“I brought you here to tell the truth,” she said bitterly, “and all the truth about
Father is against him.”
Silence pressed to the corners of the room, holding them all still, until Quim walked slowly through the doorway. He looked only at Ela. “You called him,” he said softly. “You.”
“To tell the truth!” she answered. His accusation obviously stung her; he did not have to say how she had betrayed her family and her church to bring this infidel to lay bare what had been so long concealed. “Everybody in Milagre is so kind and understanding,” she said. “Our teachers overlook little things like Grego’s thievery and Quara’s silence. Never mind that she hasn’t said a word in school, ever! Everybody pretends that we’re just ordinary children—the grandchildren of Os Venerados, and so brilliant, aren’t we, with a zenador and both biologistas in the family! Such prestige. They just look the other way when Father gets himself raging drunk and comes home and beats Mother until she can’t walk!”
“Shut up!” shouted Quim. “Ela,” said Miro.
“And you, Miro, Father shouting at you, saying terrible things until you run out of the house, you run, stumbling because you can hardly see—”
“You have no right to tell him!” said Quim.
Olhado leapt to his feet and stood in the middle of the room, turned around to look at them all with his unhuman eyes. “Why do you still want to hide it?” he asked softly.
“What’s it to you” asked Quim. “He never did anything to you. You just turned off your eyes and sat there with the headphones on, listening to batuque or Bach or something—”
“Turn off my eyes?” said Olhado. “I never turned off my eyes.”
He whirled and walked to the terminal, which was in the corner of the room farthest from the front door. In a few quick movements he had the terminal on, then picked up an interface cable and jammed it in the socket in his right eye. It was only a simple computer linkup, but to Ender it brought back a hideous memory of the eye of a giant, torn open and oozing, as Ender bored deep, penetrated to the brain, and sent it toppling backward to its death. He froze up for a moment before he remembered that his memory was not real, it was of a computer game he had played in the Battle School. Three thousand years ago, but to him a mere twenty-five years,

not such a great distance that the memory had lost its power. It was his memories and dreams of the giant’s death that the buggers had taken out of his mind and
turned into the signal they left for him; eventually it had led him to the hive queen’s cocoon.
It was Jane’s voice that brought him back to the present moment. She whispered from the jewel, “If it’s all the same to you, while he’s got that eye linked up I’m going to get a dump of everything else he’s got stored away in there.”
Then a scene began in the air over the terminal. It was not holographic. Instead the image was like bas-relief, as it would have appeared to a single observer. It was this very room, seen from the spot on the floor where a moment ago Olhado had been sitting—apparently it was his regular spot. In the middle of the floor stood a large man, strong and violent, flinging his arms about as he shouted abuse at Miro, who stood quietly, his head bent, regarding his father without any sign of anger. There
was no sound—it was a visual image only. “Have you forgotten?” whispered Olhado. “Have you forgotten what it was like?”
In the scene on the terminal Miro finally turned and left; Marcão following him to the door, shouting after him. Then he turned back into the room and stood there, panting like an animal exhausted from the chase. In the picture Grego ran to his father and clung to his leg, shouting out the door, his face making it plain that he
was echoing his father’s cruel words to Miro. Marcão pried the child from his leg and walked with determined purpose into the back room.
“There’s no sound,” said Olhado. “But you can hear it, can’t you?” Ender felt Grego’s body trembling on his lap.
“There it is, a blow, a crash—she’s falling to the floor, can you feel it in your flesh, the way her body hits the concrete?”
“Shut up, Olhado,” said Miro.
The computer-generated scene ended. “I can’t believe you saved that,” said Ela. Quim was weeping, making no effort to hide it. “I killed him,” he said. “I killed
him I killed him I killed him.”
“What are you talking about?” said Miro in exasperation. “He had a rotten
disease, it was congenital!”
“I prayed for him to die!” screamed Quim. His face was mottled with passion, tears and mucus and spittle mingling around his lips. “I prayed to the Virgin, I prayed to Jesus, I prayed to Grandpa and Grandma, I said I’d go to hell for it if only he’d die, and they did it, and now I’ll go to hell and I’m not sorry for it! God forgive me but I’m glad!” Sobbing, he stumbled back out of the room. A door slammed in the distance.
“Well, another certified miracle to the credit of Os Venerados,” said Miro. “Sainthood is assured.”

“Shut up,” said Olhado.
“And he’s the one who kept telling us that Christ wanted us to forgive the old fart,” said Miro.
On Ender’s lap, Grego now trembled so violently that Ender grew concerned. He realized that Grego was whispering a word. Ela, too, saw Grego’s distress and knelt in front of the boy.
“He’s crying, I’ve never seen him cry like this—”
“Papa, papa, papa,” whispered Grego. His trembling had given way to great shudders, almost convulsive in their violence.
“Is he afraid of Father?” asked Olhado. His face showed deep concern for Grego. To Ender’s relief, all their faces were full of worry. There was love in this family, and not just the solidarity of living under the rule of the same tyrant for all these years.
“Papa’s gone now,” said Miro comfortingly. “You don’t have to worry now.” Ender shook his head. “Miro,” he said, “didn’t you watch Olhado’s memory?
Little boys don’t judge their fathers, they love them. Grego was trying as hard as he could to be just like Marcos Ribeira. The rest of you might have been glad to see him gone, but for Grego it was the end of the world.”
It had not occurred to any of them. Even now it was a sickening idea; Ender could see them recoil from it. And yet they knew it was true. Now that Ender had pointed it out, it was obvious.
“Deus nos perdoa,” murmured Ela. God forgive us. “The things we’ve said,” whispered Miro.
Ela reached out for Grego. He refused to go to her. Instead he did exactly what Ender expected, what he had prepared for. Grego turned in Ender’s relaxed grip, flung his arms around the neck of the speaker for the dead, and wept bitterly, hysterically.
Ender spoke gently to the others, who watched helplessly. “How could he show his grief to you, when he thought you hated him?”
“We never hated Grego,” said Olhado.
“I should have known,” said Miro. “I knew he was suffering the worst pain of any of us, but it never occurred to me . . .”
“Don’t blame yourself,” said Ender. “It’s the kind of thing that only a stranger can see.”
He heard Jane whispering in his ear. “You never cease to amaze me, Andrew, the way you turn people into plasma.”
Ender couldn’t answer her, and she wouldn’t believe him anyway. He hadn’t planned this, he had played it by ear. How could he have guessed that Olhado would have a recording of Marcão’s viciousness to his family? His only real insight was

with Grego, and even that was instinctive, a sense that Grego was desperately hungry for someone to have authority over him, for someone to act like a father to him.
Since his own father had been cruel, Grego would believe only cruelty as a proof of love and strength. Now his tears washed Ender’s neck as hotly as, a moment before, his urine had soaked Ender’s thighs.
He had guessed what Grego would do, but Quara managed to take him by surprise. As the others watched Grego’s weeping in silence, she got off the bed and walked directly to Ender. Her eyes were narrow and angry. “You stink!” she said firmly. Then she marched out of the room toward the back of the house.
Miro barely suppressed his laughter, and Ela smiled. Ender raised his eyebrows as if to say, You win some, you lose some.
Olhado seemed to hear his unspoken words. From his chair by the terminal, the metal-eyed boy said softly, “You win with her, too. It’s the most she’s said to anyone outside the family in months.”
But I’m not outside the family, Ender said silently. Didn’t you notice? I’m in the family now, whether you like it or not. Whether I like it or not.
After a while Grego’s sobbing stopped. He was asleep. Ender carried him to his bed; Quara was already asleep on the other side of the small room. Ela helped Ender strip off Grego’s urine-soaked pants and put looser underwear on him—her touch was gentle and deft, and Grego did not waken.
Back in the front room Miro eyed Ender clinically. “Well, Speaker, you have a choice. My pants will be tight on you and too short in the crotch, but Father’s would fall right off.”
It took Ender a moment to remember. Grego’s urine had long since dried. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I can change when I get home.”
“Mother won’t be home for another hour. You came to see her, didn’t you? We can have your pants clean by then.”
“Your pants, then,” said Ender. “I’ll take my chances with the crotch.”