espera..

DONA IVANOVA











It means a life of constant deception. You will go out and discover something, something vital, and then when you get back to the station you’ll write up a completely innocuous report, one which mentions nothing that we learned through cultural contamination.
You’re too young to understand what torture this is. Father and I began doing this because we couldn’t bear to withhold knowledge from the piggies. You will discover, as I have, that it is no less painful to withhold knowledge from your fellow scientists. When you watch them struggle with a question, knowing that you have the information that could easily resolve their dilemma; when you see them come very near the truth and then for lack of your information retreat from their correct conclusions and return to error—you would not be human if it
didn’t cause you great anguish.
You must remind yourselves, always: It is their law, their choice. They are the ones who built the wall between themselves and the truth, and they would only punish us if we let them know how easily and thoroughly that wall has been breached. And for every framling scientist who is longing for the truth, there are ten petty-minded descabeçados [headless ones] who despise knowledge, who never think of an original hypothesis, whose only labor is to prey on the writings of the true scientists in order to catch tiny errors or contradictions or lapses in method. These suckflies will pore over every report you make, and if you are careless even once they will catch you.
That means you can’t even mention a piggy whose name is derived from
cultural contamination: “Cups” would tell them that we have taught them rudimentary pottery-making. “Calendar” and “Reaper” are obvious. And God himself couldn’t save us if they learned Arrow’s name.

—Memo from Liberdade Figueira de Medici to Ouanda Figueira Mucumbi and 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



Novinha lingered in the Biologista’s Station even though her meaningful work was finished more than an hour ago. The cloned potato plants were all thriving in nutrient solution; now it would be a matter of making daily observations to see which of her genetic alterations would produce the hardiest plant with the most useful root.
If I have nothing to do, why don’t I go home? She had no answer for the question. Her children needed her, that was certain; she did them no kindness by leaving early each morning and coming home only after the little ones were asleep. And yet even now, knowing she should go back, she sat staring at the laboratory, seeing nothing, doing nothing, being nothing.
She thought of going home, and could not imagine why she felt no joy at the prospect. After all, she reminded herself, Marcão is dead. He died three weeks ago. Not a moment too soon. He did all that I ever needed him for, and I did all that he wanted, but all our reasons expired four years before he finally rotted away. In all that time we never shared a moment of love, but I never thought of leaving him. Divorce would have been impossible, but desquite would have been enough. To stop the beatings. Even yet her hip was stiff and sometimes painful from the last time he had thrown her to the concrete floor. What lovely memorabilia you left behind, Cão, my dog of a husband.
The pain in her hip flared even as she thought of it. She nodded in satisfaction. It’s no more than I deserve, and I’ll be sorry when it heals.
She stood up and walked, not limping at all even though the pain was more than enough to make her favor the hip. I’ll not coddle myself, not in anything. It’s no worse than I deserve.
She walked to the door, closed it behind her. The computer turned off the lights as
soon as she was gone, except those needed for the various plants in forced photosynthetic phase. She loved her plants, her little beasts, with surprising intensity. Grow, she cried out to them day and night, grow and thrive. She would grieve for the ones that failed and pinch them dead only when it was plain they had no future. Now as she walked away from the station, she could still hear their subliminal music, the cries of the infinitesimal cells as they grew and split and formed themselves into ever more elaborate patterns. She was going from light into darkness, from life into death, and the emotional pain grew worse in perfect synchronicity with the inflammation of her joints.
As she approached her house from over the hill, she could see the patches of light

thrown through the windows and out onto the hill below. Quara’s and Grego’s room was dark; she would not have to bear their unbearable accusations—Quara’s in silence, Grego’s in sullen and vicious crimes. But there were too many other lights on, including her own room and the front room. Something unusual was going on, and she didn’t like unusual things.
Olhado sat in the living room, earphones on as usual; tonight, though, he also had the interface jack attached to his eye. Apparently he was retrieving old visual memories from the computer, or perhaps dumping out some he had been carrying with him. As so many times before, she wished she could also dump out her visual memories and wipe them clean, replace them with more pleasant ones. Pipo’s corpse, that would be one she’d gladly be rid of, to be replaced by some of the golden glorious days with the three of them together in the Zenador’s Station. And Libo’s body wrapped in its cloth, that sweet flesh held together only by the winding fabric; she would like to have instead other memories of his body, the touch of his lips, the expressiveness of his delicate hands. But the good memories fled, buried too deep under the pain. I stole them all, those good days, and so they were taken back and replaced by what I deserved.
Olhado turned to face her, the jack emerging obscenely from his eye. She could not control her shudder, her shame. I’m sorry, she said silently. If you had had another mother, you would doubtless still have your eye. You were born to be the best, the healthiest, the wholest of my children, Lauro, but of course nothing from my womb could be left intact for long.
She said nothing of this, of course, just as Olhado said nothing to her. She turned to go back to her room and find out why the light was on.
“Mother,” said Olhado.
He had taken the earphones off, and was twisting the jack out of his eye. “Yes?”
“We have a visitor,” he said. “The Speaker.”
She felt herself go cold inside. Not tonight, she screamed silently. But she also knew that she would not want to see him tomorrow, either, or the next day, or ever.
“His pants are clean now, and he’s in your room changing back into them. I hope you don’t mind.”
Ela emerged from the kitchen. “You’re home,” she said. “I poured some cafezinhos, one for you, too.”
“I’ll wait outside until he’s gone,” said Novinha.
Ela and Olhado looked at each other. Novinha understood at once that they regarded her as a problem to be solved; that apparently they subscribed to whatever the Speaker wanted to do here. Well, I’m a dilemma that’s not going to be solved by you.

“Mother,” said Olhado, “he’s not what the Bishop said. He’s good.”
Novinha answered him with her most withering sarcasm. “Since when are you an expert on good and evil?”
Again Ela and Olhado looked at each other. She knew what they were thinking. How can we explain to her? How can we persuade her? Well, dear children, you
can’t. I am unpersuadable, as Libo found out every week of his life. He never had the secret from me. It’s not my fault he died.
But they had succeeded in turning her from her decision. Instead of leaving the house, she retreated into the kitchen, passing Ela in the doorway but not touching
her. The tiny coffee cups were arranged in a neat circle on the table, the steaming pot in the center. She sat down and rested her forearms on the table. So the Speaker was here, and had come to her first. Where else would he go? It’s my fault he’s here,
isn’t it? He’s one more person whose life I have destroyed, like my children’s lives, like Marcão’s, and Libo’s, and Pipo’s, and my own.
A strong yet surprisingly smooth masculine hand reached out over her shoulder, took up the pot, and began to pour through the tiny, delicate spout, the thin stream of hot coffee swirling into the tiny cafezinho cups.
“Posso derramar?” he asked. What a stupid question, since he was already pouring. But his voice was gentle, his Portuguese tinged with the graceful accents of Castilian. A Spaniard, then?
“Desculpa-me,” she whispered. Forgive me. “Trouxe o senhor tantos quilômetros
—”
“We don’t measure starflight in kilometers, Dona Ivanova. We measure it in years.” His words were an accusation, but his voice spoke of wistfulness, even forgiveness, even consolation. I could be seduced by that voice. That voice is a liar.
“If I could undo your voyage and return you twenty-two years, I’d do it. Calling for you was a mistake. I’m sorry.” Her own voice sounded flat. Since her whole life was a lie, even this apology sounded rote.
“I don’t feel the time yet,” said the Speaker. Still he stood behind her, so she had
not yet seen his face. “For me it was only a week ago that I left my sister. She was
the only kin of mine left alive. Her daughter wasn’t born yet, and now she’s probably through with college, married, perhaps with children of her own. I’ll never know her. But I know your children, Dona Ivanova.”
She lifted the cafezinho and drank it down in a single swallow, though it burned her tongue and throat and made her stomach hurt. “In only a few hours you think you know them?”
“Better than you do, Dona Ivanova.”
Novinha heard Ela gasp at the Speaker’s audacity. And, even though she thought his words might be true, it still enraged her to have a stranger say them. She turned

to look at him, to snap at him, but he had moved, he was not behind her. She turned farther, finally standing up to look for him, but he wasn’t in the room. Ela stood in the doorway, wide-eyed.
“Come back!” said Novinha. “You can’t say that and walk out on me like that!” But he didn’t answer. Instead, she heard low laughter from the back of the house.
Novinha followed the sound. She walked through the rooms to the very end of the house. Miro sat on Novinha’s own bed, and the Speaker stood near the doorway, laughing with him. Miro saw his mother and the smile left his face. It caused a stab of anguish within her. She had not seen him smile in years, had forgotten how beautiful his face became, just like his father’s face; and her coming had erased that smile.
“We came here to talk because Quim was so angry,” Miro explained. “Ela made the bed.”
“I don’t think the Speaker cares whether the bed was made or not,” said Novinha coldly. “Do you, Speaker?”
“Order and disorder,” said the Speaker, “they each have their beauty.” Still he did not turn to face her, and she was glad of that, for it meant she did not have to see his eyes as she delivered her bitter message.
“I tell you, Speaker, that you’ve come on a fool’s errand,” she said. “Hate me for it if you will, but you have no death to speak. I was a foolish girl. In my naivete I thought that when I called, the author of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon would come. I had lost a man who was like a father to me, and I wanted consolation.”
Now he turned to her. He was a youngish man, younger than her, at least, but his eyes were seductive with understanding. Perigoso, she thought. He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.
“Dona Ivanova,” he said, “how could you read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagine that its author could bring comfort?”
It was Miro who answered—silent, slow-talking Miro, who leapt into the conversation with a vigor she had not seen in him since he was little. “I’ve read it,” he said, “and the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the tale of the hive queen with deep compassion.”
The Speaker smiled sadly. “But he wasn’t writing to the buggers, was he? He was
writing to humankind, who still celebrated the destruction of the buggers as a great victory. He wrote cruelly, to turn their pride to regret, their joy to grief. And now human beings have completely forgotten that once they hated the buggers, that once they honored and celebrated a name that is now unspeakable—”
“I can say anything,” said Ivanova. “His name was Ender, and he destroyed everything he touched.” Like me, she did not say.
“Oh? And what do you know of him?” His voice whipped out like a grass-saw,

ragged and cruel. “How do you know there wasn’t something that he touched kindly? Someone who loved him, who was blessed by his love? Destroyed everything he touched—that’s a lie that can’t truthfully be said of any human being who ever lived.”
“Is that your doctrine, Speaker? Then you don’t know much.” She was defiant, but still his anger frightened her. She had thought his gentleness was as imperturbable as a confessor’s.
And almost immediately the anger faded from his face.
“You can ease your conscience,” he said. “Your call started my journey here, but others called for a speaker while I was on the way.”
“Oh?” Who else in this benighted city was familiar enough with the Hive Queen and the Hegemon to want a speaker, and independent enough of Bishop Peregrino to dare to call for one? “If that’s so, then why are you here in my house?”
“Because I was called to speak the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira, your late husband.”
It was an appalling thought. “Him! Who would want to think of him again, now that he’s dead!”
The Speaker did not answer. Instead Miro spoke sharply from her bed. “Grego would, for one. The Speaker showed us what we should have known—that the boy is grieving for his father and thinks we all hate him—”
“Cheap psychology,” she snapped. “We have therapists of our own, and they aren’t worth much either.”
Ela’s voice came from behind her. “I called for him to speak Father’s death, Mother. I thought it would be decades before he came, but I’m glad he’s here now, when he can do us some good.”
“What good can he do us!”
“He already has, Mother. Grego fell asleep embracing him, and Quara spoke to him.”
“Actually,” said Miro, “she told him that he stinks.”
“Which was probably true,” said Ela, “since Greguinho peed all over him.”
Miro and Ela burst into laughter at the memory, and the Speaker also smiled. This more than anything else discomposed Novinha—such good cheer had been virtually unfelt in this house since Marcão brought her here a year after Pipo’s death. Against her will Novinha remembered her joy when Miro was newly born, and when Ela was little, the first few years of their lives, how Miro babbled about everything, how Ela toddled madly after him through the house, how the children played together and romped in the grass within sight of the piggies’ forest just beyond the fence; it was Novinha’s delight in the children that poisoned Marcão, that made him hate them both, because he knew that none of it belonged to him. By the time Quim was born,

the house was thick with anger, and he never learned how to laugh freely where his parents might notice. Hearing Miro and Ela laugh together was like the abrupt opening of a thick black curtain; suddenly it was daylight again, when Novinha had forgotten there was any season of the day but night.
How dared this stranger invade her house and tear open all the curtains she had closed!
“I won’t have it,” she said. “You have no right to pry into my husband’s life.” He raised an eyebrow. She knew Starways Code as well as anyone, and so she
knew perfectly well that he not only had a right, the law protected him in the pursuit of the true story of the dead.
“Marcão was a miserable man,” she persisted, “and telling the truth about him will cause nothing but pain.”
“You’re quite right that the truth about him will cause nothing but pain, but not because he was a miserable man,” said the Speaker. “If I told nothing but what everyone already knows—that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar until the constables sent him home—then I would not cause pain, would I? I’d cause a great deal of satisfaction, because then everyone would be reassured that their view of him was correct all along. He was scum, and so it was all right that they treated him like scum.”
“And you think he wasn’t?”
“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
“If you believe that, then you’re younger than you look,” said Novinha.
“Am I?” said the Speaker. “It was less than two weeks ago that I first heard your call. I studied you then, and even if you don’t remember, Novinha, I remember that as a young girl you were sweet and beautiful and good. You had been lonely before, but Pipo and Libo both knew you and found you worthy of love.”
“Pipo was dead.”
“But he loved you.”
“You don’t know anything, Speaker! You were twenty-two lightyears away! Besides, it wasn’t me I was calling worthless, it was Marcão!”
“But you don’t believe that, Novinha. Because you know the one act of kindness and generosity that redeems that poor man’s life.”
Novinha did not understand her own terror, but she had to silence him before he named it, even though she had no idea what kindness of Cão’s he thought he had discovered. “How dare you call me Novinha!” she shouted. “No one has called me that in four years!”
In answer, he raised his hand and brushed his fingers across the back of her cheek.

It was a timid gesture, almost an adolescent one; it reminded her of Libo, and it was more than she could bear. She took his hand, hurled it away, then shoved past him into the room. “Get out!” she shouted at Miro. Her son got up quickly and backed to the door. She could see from his face that after all Miro had seen in this house, she still had managed to surprise him with her rage.
“You’ll have nothing from me!” she shouted at the Speaker. “I didn’t come to take anything from you,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want anything you have to give, either! You’re worthless to me, do you hear that? You’re the one who’s worthless! Lixo, ruina, estrago—vai fora d’aqui, não tens direito estar em minha casa!” You have no right to be in my house.
“Não es estrago,” he whispered, “es solo fecundo, e vou plantar jardim aí.” Then, before she could answer, he closed the door and was gone.
In truth she had no answer to give him, his words were so outrageous. She had called him estrago, but he answered as if she had called herself a desolation. And she had spoken to him derisively, using the insultingly familiar tu for “you” instead of o Senhor or even the informal você. It was the way one spoke to a child or a dog. And yet when he answered in the same voice, with the same familiarity, it was entirely different. “Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee.” It was the sort
of thing a poet says to his mistress, or even a husband to his wife, and the tu was intimate, not arrogant. How dare he, she whispered to herself, touching the cheek that he had touched. He is far crueler than I ever imagined a speaker might be. Bishop Peregrino was right. He is dangerous, the infidel, the anti-Christ, he walks brazenly into places in my heart that I had kept as holy ground, where no one else was ever permitted to stand. He treads on the few small shoots that cling to life in that stony soil, how dare he, I wish I had died before seeing him, he will surely undo me before he’s through.
She was vaguely aware of someone crying. Quara. Of course the shouting had wakened her; she never slept soundly. Novinha almost opened the door and went out to comfort her, but then she heard the crying stop, and a soft male voice singing to her. The song was in another language. German, it sounded to Novinha, or Nordic; she did not understand it, whatever it was. But she knew who sang it, and knew that Quara was comforted.
Novinha had not felt such fear since she first realized that Miro was determined to
become a Zenador and follow in the footsteps of the two men that the piggies had murdered. This man is unknotting the nets of my family, and stringing us together whole again; but in the process he will find my secrets. If he finds out how Pipo died, and speaks the truth, then Miro will learn that same secret, and it will kill him. I will make no more sacrifices to the piggies; they are too cruel a god for me to worship anymore.

Still later, as she lay in bed behind her closed door, trying to go to sleep, she heard more laughter from the front of the house, and this time she could hear Quim and Olhado both laughing along with Miro and Ela. She imagined she could see them,
the room bright with mirth. But as sleep took her, and the imagination became a dream, it was not the Speaker who sat among her children, teaching them to laugh; it was Libo, alive again, and known to everyone as her true husband, the man she had married in her heart even though she refused to marry him in the Church. Even in
her sleep it was more joy than she could bear, and tears soaked the sheet of her bed.

9

CONGENITAL DEFECT











CIDA: The Descolada body isn’t bacterial. It seems to enter the cells of the body and take up permanent residence, just like mitochondria, reproducing when the cell reproduces. The fact that it spread to a new species within only a few years
of our arrival here suggests that it is wildly adaptable. It must surely have spread through the entire biosphere of Lusitania long ago, so that it may now be
endemic here, a permanent infection.
GUSTO: If it’s permanent and everywhere, it isn’t an infection, Cida, it’s part of normal life.
CIDA: But it isn’t necessarily inborn—it has the ability to spread. But yes, if it’s endemic then all the indigenous species must have found ways to fight it off
—
GUSTO: Or adapt to it and include it in their normal life cycle. Maybe they
NEED it.
CIDA: They NEED something that takes apart their genetic molecules and puts them back together at random?
GUSTO: Maybe that’s why there are so few different species in Lusitania. The Descolada may be fairly recent—only half a million years old—and most species couldn’t adapt.
CIDA: I wish we weren’t dying, Gusto. The next xenobiologist will probably
work with standard genetic adaptations and won’t follow this up.
GUSTO: That’s the only reason you can think of for regretting our death?
—Vladimir Tiago Gussman and Ekaterina Maria Aparecida do Norte von Hesse- Gussman, unpublished dialogue embedded in working notes, two days before their deaths; first quoted in “Lost Threads of Understanding,”

Meta-Science, the Journal of Methodology, 2001: 12:12:144-45

Ender did not get home from the Ribeira house until late that night, and he spent more than an hour trying to make sense of all that happened, especially after
Novinha came home. Despite this, Ender awoke early the next morning, his thoughts already full of questions he had to answer. It was always this way when he was preparing to speak a death; he could hardly rest from trying to piece together the story of the dead man as he saw himself, the life the dead woman meant to live, however badly it had turned out. This time, though, there was an added anxiety. He cared more for the living this time than he ever had before.
“Of course you’re more involved,” said Jane, after he tried to explain his confusion to her. “You fell in love with Novinha before you left Trondheim.”
“Maybe I loved the young girl, but this woman is nasty and selfish. Look what she let happen to her children.”
“This is the Speaker for the Dead? Judging someone by appearances?” “Maybe I’ve fallen in love with Grego.”
“You’ve always been a sucker for people who pee on you.” “And Quara. All of them—even Miro, I like the boy.”
“And they love you, Ender.”
He laughed. “People always think they love me, until I speak. Novinha’s more perceptive than most—she already hates me before I tell the truth.”
“You’re as blind about yourself as anyone else, Speaker,” said Jane. “Promise me that when you die, you’ll let me speak your death. Have I got things to say.”
“Keep them to yourself,” said Ender wearily. “You’re even worse at this business than I am.”
He began his list of questions to be resolved.
1. Why did Novinha marry Marcão in the first place?
2. Why did Marcão hate his children?
3. Why does Novinha hate herself?
4. Why did Miro call me to speak Libo’s death?
5. Why did Ela call me to speak her father’s death?
6. Why did Novinha change her mind about my speaking Pipo’s death?
7. What was the immediate cause of Marcão’s death?
He stopped with the seventh question. It would be easy to answer it; a merely clinical matter. So that was where he would begin.





The physician who autopsied Marcão was called Navio, which meant “ship.” “Not for my size,” he said, laughing. “Or because I’m much of a swimmer. My
full name is Enrique o Navigador Caronada. You can bet I’m glad they took my nickname from ‘shipmaster’ rather than from ‘little cannon.’ Too many obscene

possibilities in that one.”
Ender was not deceived by his joviality. Navio was a good Catholic and he obeyed his bishop as well as anyone. He was determined to keep Ender from learning anything, though he’d not be uncheerful about it.
“There are two ways I can get the answers to my questions,” Ender said quietly. “I
can ask you, and you can tell me truthfully. Or I can submit a petition to the
Starways Congress for your records to be opened to me. The ansible charges are very high, and since the petition is a routine one, and your resistance to it is contrary to law, the cost will be deducted from your colony’s already straitened funds, along
with a double-the-cost penalty and a reprimand for you.”
Navio’s smile gradually disappeared as Ender spoke. He answered coldly. “Of course I’ll answer your questions,” he said.
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said Ender. “Your bishop counseled the people of Milagre to carry out an unprovoked and unjustified boycott of a legally called-for minister. You would do everyone a favor if you would inform them that if this cheerful noncooperation continues, I will petition for my status to be changed from minister to inquisitor. I assure you that I have a very good reputation with the Starways Congress, and my petition will be successful.”
Navio knew exactly what that meant. As an inquisitor, Ender would have congressional authority to revoke the colony’s Catholic license on the grounds of religious persecution. It would cause a terrible upheaval among the Lusitanians, not least because the Bishop would be summarily dismissed from his position and sent to the Vatican for discipline.
“Why would you do such a thing when you know we don’t want you here?” said
Navio.
“Someone wanted me here or I wouldn’t have come,” said Ender. “You may not like the law when it annoys you, but it protects many a Catholic on worlds where another creed is licensed.”
Navio drummed his fingers on his desk. “What are your questions, Speaker,” he
said. “Let’s get this done.”
“It’s simple enough, to start with, at least. What was the proximate cause of the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira?”
“Marcão!” said Navio. “You couldn’t possibly have been summoned to speak his
death, he only passed away a few weeks ago—”
“I have been asked to speak several deaths, Dom Navio, and I choose to begin with Marcão’s.”
Navio grimaced. “What if I ask for proof of your authority?”
Jane whispered in Ender’s ear. “Let’s dazzle the dear boy.” Immediately, Navio’s terminal came alive with official documents, while one of Jane’s most authoritative

voices declared, “Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, has accepted the call for an explanation of the life and death of Marcos Maria Ribeira, of the city of Milagre, Lusitania Colony.”
It was not the document that impressed Navio, however. It was the fact that he had not actually made the request, or even logged on to his terminal. Navio knew at once that the computer had been activated through the jewel in the Speaker’s ear, but it meant that a very high-level logic routine was shadowing the Speaker and enforcing compliance with his requests. No one on Lusitania, not even Bosquinha herself, had ever had authority to do that. Whatever this speaker was, Navio concluded, he’s a bigger fish than even Bishop Peregrino can hope to fry.
“All right,” Navio said, forcing a laugh. Now, apparently, he remembered how to be jovial again. “I meant to help you anyway—the Bishop’s paranoia doesn’t afflict everyone in Milagre, you know.”
Ender smiled back at him, taking his hypocrisy at face value.
“Marcos Ribeira died of a congenital defect.” He rattled off a long pseudo-Latin name. “You’ve never heard of it because it’s quite rare, and is passed on only through the genes. Beginning at the onset of puberty, in most cases, it involves the gradual replacement of exocrine and endocrine glandular tissues with lipidous cells. What that means is that bit by bit over the years, the adrenal glands, the pituitary, the liver, the testes, the thyroid, and so on, are all replaced by large agglomerations of fat cells.”
“Always fatal? Irreversible?”
“Oh, yes. Actually, Marcão survived ten years longer than usual. His case was remarkable in several ways. In every other recorded case—and admittedly there aren’t that many—the disease attacks the testicles first, rendering the victim sterile and, in most cases, impotent. With six healthy children, it’s obvious that Marcos Ribeira’s testes were the last of his glands to be affected. Once they were attacked, however, progress must have been unusually fast—the testes were completely replaced with fat cells, even though much of his liver and thyroid were still functioning.”
“What killed him in the end?”
“The pituitary and the adrenals weren’t functioning. He was a walking dead man. He just fell down in one of the bars, in the middle of some ribald song, as I heard.”
As always, Ender’s mind automatically found seeming contradictions. “How does a hereditary disease get passed on if it makes its victims sterile?”
“It’s usually passed through collateral lines. One child will die of it; his brothers and sisters won’t manifest the disease at all, but they’ll pass on the tendency to their children. Naturally, though, we were afraid that Marcão, having children, would pass on the defective gene to all of them.”

“You tested them?”
“Not a one had any of the genetic deformations. You can bet that Dona Ivanova was looking over my shoulder the whole time. We zeroed in immediately on the problem genes and cleared each of the children, bim bim bim, just like that.”
“None of them had it? Not even a recessive tendency?”
“Graças a Deus,” said the doctor. “Who would ever have married them if they had had the poisoned genes? As it was, I can’t understand how Marcão’s own genetic defect went undiscovered.”
“Are genetic scans routine here?”
“Oh, no, not at all. But we had a great plague some thirty years ago. Dona Ivanova’s own parents, the Venerado Gusto and the Venerada Cida, they conducted a detailed genetic scan of every man, woman, and child in the colony. It’s how they found the cure. And their computer comparisons would definitely have turned up
this particular defect—that’s how I found out what it was when Marcão died. I’d never heard of the disease, but the computer had it on file,”
“And Os Venerados didn’t find it?”
“Apparently not, or they would surely have told Marcos. And even if they hadn’t told him, Ivanova herself should have found it.”
“Maybe she did,” said Ender.
Navio laughed aloud. “Impossible. No woman in her right mind would deliberately bear the children of a man with a genetic defect like that. Marcão was surely in constant agony for many years. You don’t wish that on your own children. No, Ivanova may be eccentric, but she’s not insane.”





Jane was quite amused. When Ender got home, she made her image appear above his terminal just so she could laugh uproariously.
“He can’t help it,” said Ender. “In a devout Catholic colony like this, dealing with the Biologista, one of the most respected people here, of course he doesn’t think to question his basic premises.”
“Don’t apologize for him,” said Jane. “I don’t expect wetware to work as logically
as software. But you can’t ask me not to be amused.”
“In a way it’s rather sweet of him,” said Ender. “He’d rather believe that Marcão’s disease was different from every other recorded case. He’d rather believe that somehow Ivanova’s parents didn’t notice that Marcos had the disease, and so she married him in ignorance, even though Ockham’s razor decrees that we believe the simplest explanation: Marcão’s decay progressed like every other, testes first, and
all of Novinha’s children were sired by someone else. No wonder Marcão was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping

with another man. It was probably part of their bargain in the beginning that she would not be faithful to him. But six children is rather rubbing his nose in it.”
“The delicious contradictions of religious life,” said Jane. “She deliberately set out to commit adultery—but she would never dream of using a contraceptive.”
“Have you scanned the children’s genetic pattern to find the most likely father?” “You mean you haven’t guessed?”
“I’ve guessed, but I want to make sure the clinical evidence doesn’t disprove the obvious answer.”
“It was Libo, of course. What a dog! He sired six children on Novinha, and four more on his own wife.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Ender, “is why Novinha didn’t marry Libo in the first place. It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then to go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning.”
“Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.”





Miro carefully picked his way through the forest. He recognized trees now and then, or thought he did—no human could ever have the piggies’ knack for naming every single tree in the woods. But then, humans didn’t worship the trees as totems of their ancestors, either.
Miro had deliberately chosen a longer way to reach the piggies’ log house. Ever since Libo accepted Miro as a second apprentice, to work with him alongside Libo’s daughter, Ouanda, he had taught them that they must never form a path leading from Milagre to the piggies’ home. Someday, Libo warned them, there may be trouble between human and piggy; we will make no path to guide a pogrom to its
destination. So today Miro walked the far side of the creek, along the top of the high
bank.
Sure enough, a piggy soon appeared in the near distance, watching him. That was how Libo reasoned out, years ago, that the females must live somewhere in that direction; the males always kept a watch on the Zenadors when they went too near. And, as Libo had insisted, Miro made no effort to move any farther in the forbidden direction. His curiosity dampened whenever he remembered what Libo’s body looked like when he and Ouanda found it. Libo had not been quite dead yet; his eyes
were open and moving. He only died when both Miro and Ouanda knelt at either side of him, each holding a blood-covered hand. Ah, Libo, your blood still pumped when your heart lay naked in your open chest. If only you could have spoken to us, one

word to tell us why they killed you.
The bank became low again, and Libo crossed the brook by running lightly on the moss-covered stones. In a few more minutes he was there, coming into the small clearing from the east.
Ouanda was already there, teaching them how to churn the cream of cabra milk to make a sort of butter. She had been experimenting with the process for the past several weeks before she got it right. It would have been easier if she could have had some help from Mother, or even Ela, since they knew so much more about the chemical properties of cabra milk, but cooperating with the Biologista was out of the question. Os Venerados had discovered thirty years ago that cabra milk was nutritionally useless to humans. Therefore any investigation of how to process it for storage could only be for the piggies’ benefit. Miro and Ouanda could not risk anything that might let it be known they were breaking the law and actively intervening in the piggies’ way of life.
The younger piggies took to butter-churning with delight—they had made a dance out of kneading the cabra bladders and were singing now, a nonsensical song that mixed Stark, Portuguese, and two of the piggies’ own languages into a hopeless but hilarious muddle. Miro tried to sort out the languages. He recognized Males’ Language, of course, and also a few fragments of Tree Language, the language they used to speak to their totem trees; Miro recognized it only by its sound; even Libo hadn’t been able to translate a single word. It all sounded like ms and bs and gs, with no detectable difference among the vowels.
The piggy who had been shadowing Miro in the woods now emerged and greeted the others with a loud hooting sound. The dancing went on, but the song stopped immediately. Mandachuva detached himself from the group around Ouanda and came to meet Miro at the clearing’s edge.
“Welcome, I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire.”  That was, of course, an extravagantly precise translation of Miro’s name into Stark. Mandachuva loved translating names back and forth between Portuguese and Stark, even though Miro and Ouanda had both explained that their names didn’t really mean anything at all, and it was only coincidence if they sounded like words. But Mandachuva enjoyed his language games, as so many piggies did, and so Miro answered to I-Look-Upon-
You-With-Desire, just as Ouanda patiently answered to Vaga, which was Portugese
for “wander,” the Stark word that most sounded like “Ouanda.”
Mandachuva was a puzzling case. He was the oldest of the piggies. Pipo had known him, and wrote of him as though he were the most prestigious of the piggies. Libo, too, seemed to think of him as a leader. Wasn’t his name a slangy Portugese term for “boss”? Yet to Miro and Ouanda, it seemed as though Mandachuva was the least powerful and prestigious of the piggies. No one seemed to consult him on

anything; he was the one piggy who always had free time to converse with the
Zenadors, because he was almost never engaged in an important task.
Still, he was the piggy who gave the most information to the Zenadors. Miro couldn’t begin to guess whether he had lost his prestige because of his information- sharing, or shared information with the humans to make up for his low prestige among the piggies. It didn’t even matter. The fact was that Miro liked Mandachuva. He thought of the old piggy as his friend.
“Has the woman forced you to eat that foul-smelling paste?” asked Miro.
“Pure garbage, she says. Even the baby cabras cry when they have to suck a teat,” Mandachuva giggled.
“If you leave that as a gift for the ladyfolk, they’ll never speak to you again.” “Still, we must, we must,” said Mandachuva, sighing. “They have to see
everything, the prying macios!”
Ah, yes, the bafflement of the females. Sometimes the piggies spoke of them with sincere, elaborate respect, almost awe, as if they were gods. Then a piggy would say something as crude as to call them “macios,” the worms that slithered on the bark of trees. The Zenadors couldn’t even ask about them—the piggies would never answer questions about the females. There had been a time—a long time—when the piggies didn’t even mention the existence of females at all. Libo always hinted darkly that the change had something to do with Pipo’s death. Before he died, the mention of females was tabu, except with reverence at rare moments of great holiness; afterward, the piggies also showed this wistful, melancholy way of joking about “the wives.” But the Zenadors could never get an answer to a question about the females. The piggies made it plain that the females were none of their business.
A whistle came from the group around Ouanda. Mandachuva immediately began pulling Miro toward the group. “Arrow wants to talk to you.”
Miro came and sat beside Ouanda. She did not look at him—they had learned long ago that it made the piggies very uncomfortable when they had to watch male and female humans in direct conversation, or even having eye contact with each other. They would talk with Ouanda alone, but whenever Miro was present they would not speak to her or endure it if she spoke to them. Sometimes it drove Miro crazy that
she couldn’t so much as wink at him in front of the piggies. He could feel her body
as if she were giving off heat like a small star.
“My friend,” said Arrow. “I have a great gift to ask of you.”
Miro could hear Ouanda tensing slightly beside him. The piggies did not often ask for anything, and it always caused difficulty when they did.
“Will you hear me?”
Miro nodded slowly. “But remember that among humans I am nothing, with no power.” Libo had discovered that the piggies were not at all insulted to think that the

humans sent powerless delegates among them, while the image of impotence helped them explain the strict limitations on what the Zenadors could do.
“This is not a request that comes from us, in our silly and stupid conversations around the night fire.”
“I only wish I could hear the wisdom that you call silliness,” said Miro, as he always did.
“It was Rooter, speaking out of his tree, who said this.”
Miro sighed silently. He liked dealing with piggy religion as little as he liked his own people’s Catholicism. In both cases he had to pretend to take the most outrageous beliefs seriously. Whenever anything particularly daring or importunate was said, the piggies always ascribed it to one ancestor or another, whose spirit dwelt in one of the ubiquitous trees. It was only in the last few years, beginning not long before Libo’s death, that they started singling out Rooter as the source of most of the troublesome ideas. It was ironic that a piggy they had executed as a rebel was now treated with such respect in their ancestor-worship.
Still, Miro responded as Libo had always responded. “We have nothing but honor and affection for Rooter, if you honor him.”
“We must have metal.”
Miro closed his eyes. So much for the Zenadors’ long-standing policy of never using metal tools in front of the piggies. Obviously, the piggies had observers of their own, watching humans at work from some vantage point near the fence. “What do you need metal for?” he asked quietly.
“When the shuttle came down with the Speaker for the Dead, it gave off a terrible heat, hotter than any fire we can make. And yet the shuttle didn’t burn, and it didn’t melt.”
“That wasn’t the metal, it was a heat-absorbent plastic shield.”
“Perhaps that helps, but metal is in the heart of that machine. In all your machines, wherever you use fire and heat to make things move, there is metal. We will never be able to make fires like yours until we have metal of our own.”
“I can’t,” said Miro.
“Do you tell us that we are condemned always to be varelse, and never ramen?”
I wish, Ouanda, that you had not explained Demosthenes’ Hierarchy of Exclusion to them. “You are not condemned to anything. What we have given you so far, we have made out of things that grow in your natural world, like cabras. Even that, if we were discovered, would cause us to be exiled from this world, forbidden ever to see you again.”
“The metal you humans use also comes out of our natural world. We’ve seen your miners digging it out of the ground far to the south of here.”
Miro stored that bit of information for future reference. There was no vantage

point outside the fence where the mines would be visible. Therefore the piggies must be crossing the fence somehow and observing humans from within the enclave. “It comes out of the ground, but only in certain places, which I don’t know how to find. And even when they dig it up, it’s mixed with other kinds of rock. They have to purify it and transform it in very difficult processes. Every speck of metal dug out of the ground is accounted for. If we gave you so much as a single tool—a screwdriver or a masonry saw—it would be missed, it would be searched for. No one searches for cabra milk.”
Arrow looked at him steadily for some time; Miro met his gaze. “We will think about this,” Arrow said. He reached out his hand toward Calendar, who put three arrows in his hand. “Look. Are these good?”
They were as perfect as Arrow’s fletchery usually was, well-feathered and true. The innovation was in the tip. It was not made of obsidian.
“Cabra bone,” said Miro.
“We use the cabra to kill the cabra.” He handed the arrows back to Calendar. Then he got up and walked away.
Calendar held the slender wooden arrows out in front of him and sang something to them in Fathers’ Language. Miro recognized the song, though he did not understand the words. Mandachuva had once explained to him that it was a prayer, asking the dead tree to forgive them for using tools that were not made of wood. Otherwise, he said, the trees would think the Little Ones hated them. Religion. Miro sighed.
Calendar carried the arrows away. Then the young piggy named Human took his place, squatting on the ground in front of Miro. He was carrying a leaf-wrapped bundle, which he laid on the dirt and opened carefully.
It was the printout of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon that Miro had given them four years ago. It had been part of a minor quarrel between Miro and Ouanda. Ouanda began it, in a conversation with the piggies about religion. It was not really her fault. It began with Mandachuva asking her, “How can you humans live without trees?” She understood the question, of course—he was not speaking of woody plants, but of gods. “We have a God, too—a man who died and yet still lived,” she
explained. Just one? Then where does he live now? “No one knows.” Then what good
is he? How can you talk to him? “He dwells in our hearts.”
They were baffled by this; Libo would later laugh and say, “You see? To them our sophisticated theology sounds like superstition. Dwells in our hearts indeed! What kind of religion is that, compared to one with gods you can see and feel—”
“And climb and pick macios from, not to mention the fact that they cut some of them down to make their log house,” said Ouanda.
“Cut? Cut them down? Without stone or metal tools? No, Ouanda, they pray them

down.” But Ouanda was not amused by jokes about religion.
At the piggies’ request Ouanda later brought them a printout of the Gospel of St. John from the simplified Stark paraphrase of the Douai Bible. But Miro had insisted on giving them, along with it, a printout of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. “St. John says nothing about beings who live on other worlds,” Miro pointed out. “But the Speaker for the Dead explains buggers to humans—and humans to buggers.” Ouanda had been outraged at his blasphemy. But not a year later they found the piggies lighting fires using pages of St. John as kindling, while the Hive Queen and the Hegemon was tenderly wrapped in leaves. It caused Ouanda a great deal of grief for a while, and Miro learned that it was wiser not to goad her about it.
Now Human opened the printout to the last page. Miro noticed that from the moment he opened the book, all the piggies quietly gathered around. The butter- churning dance ended. Human touched the last words of the printout. “The Speaker for the Dead,” he murmured.
“Yes, I met him last night.”
“He is the true Speaker. Rooter says so.” Miro had warned them that there were many speakers, and the writer of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon was surely dead. Apparently they still couldn’t get rid of the hope that the one who had come here was the real one, who had written the holy book.
“I believe he’s a good speaker,” said Miro. “He was kind to my family, and I think he might be trusted.”
“When will he come and speak to us?”
“I didn’t ask him yet. It’s not something that I can say right out. It will take time.” Human tipped his head back and howled.
Is this my death? thought Miro.
No. The others touched Human gently and then helped him wrap the printout
again and carry it away. Miro stood up to leave. None of the piggies watched him go. Without being ostentatious about it, they were all busy doing something. He might
as well have been invisible.
Ouanda caught up with him just within the forest’s edge, where the underbrush made them invisible to any possible observers from Milagre—though no one ever bothered to look toward the forest. “Miro,” she called softly. He turned just in time to take her in his arms; she had such momentum that he had to stagger backward to keep from falling down. “Are you trying to kill me?” he asked, or tried to—she kept kissing him, which made it difficult to speak in complete sentences. Finally he gave up on speech and kissed her back, once, long and deep. Then she abruptly pulled away.
“You’re getting libidinous,” she said.
“It happens whenever women attack me and kiss me in the forest.”

“Cool your shorts, Miro, it’s still a long way off.” She took him by the belt, pulled him close, kissed him again. “Two more years until we can marry without your mother’s consent.”
Miro did not even try to argue. He did not care much about the priestly proscription of fornication, but he did understand how vital it was in a fragile community like Milagre for marriage customs to be strictly adhered to. Large and stable communities could absorb a reasonable amount of unsanctioned coupling; Milagre was far too small. What Ouanda did from faith, Miro did from rational thought—despite a thousand opportunities, they were as celibate as monks. Though if Miro thought for one moment that they would ever have to live the same vows of chastity in marriage that were required in the Filhos’ monastery, Ouanda’s virginity would be in grave and immediate danger.
“This speaker,” said Ouanda. “You know how I feel about bringing him out here.” “That’s your Catholicism speaking, not rational inquiry.” He tried to kiss her, but
she lowered her face at the last moment and he got a mouthful of nose. He kissed it passionately until she laughed and pushed him away.
“You are messy and offensive, Miro.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “We already shot the scientific method all to hell when we started helping them raise their standard of living. We have ten or twenty years before the satellites start showing obvious results. By then maybe we’ll have been able to make a permanent difference. But we’ve got no chance if we let a stranger in on the project. He’ll tell somebody.”
“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. I was a stranger once, you know.” “Strange, but never a stranger.”
“You had to see him last night, Ouanda. With Grego first, and then when Quara woke up crying—”
“Desperate, lonely children—what does that prove?”
“And Ela. Laughing. And Olhado, actually taking part in the family.” “Quim?”
“At least he stopped yelling for the infidel to go home.”
“I’m glad for your family, Miro. I hope he can heal them permanently, I really do
—I can see the difference in you, too, you’re more hopeful than I’ve seen you in a long time. But don’t bring him out here.”
Miro chewed on the side of his cheek for a moment, then walked away. Ouanda ran after him, caught him by the arm. They were in the open, but Rooter’s tree was between them and the gate. “Don’t leave me like that!” she said fiercely. “Don’t just walk away from me!”
“I know you’re right,” Miro said. “But I can’t help how I feel. When he was in our house, it was like—it was as if Libo had come there.”

“Father hated your mother, Miro—he would never have gone there.”
“But if he had. In our house this speaker was the way Libo always was in the
Station. Do you see?”
“Do you? He comes in and acts the way your father should have but never did, and every single one of you rolls over belly-up like a puppy dog.”
The contempt on her face was infuriating. Miro wanted to hit her. Instead he walked over and slapped his hand against Rooter’s tree. In only a quarter of a century it had grown to almost eighty centimeters in diameter, and the bark was rough and painful on his hand.
She came up behind him. “I’m sorry, Miro, I didn’t mean—” “You meant it, but it was stupid and selfish—”
“Yes, it was, I—”
“Just because my father was scum doesn’t mean I go belly-up for the first nice man who pats my head—”
Her hand stroked his hair, his shoulder, his waist. “I know, I know, I know—” “Because I know what a good man is—not just a father, a good man. I knew Libo,
didn’t I? And when I tell you that this speaker, this Andrew Wiggin is like Libo, then you listen to me and don’t dismiss it like the whimpering of a cão!”
“I do listen. I want to meet him, Miro.”
Miro surprised himself. He was crying. It was all part of what this speaker could do, even when he wasn’t present. He had loosened all the tight places in Miro’s heart, and now Miro couldn’t stop anything from coming out.
“You’re right, too,” said Miro softly, his voice distorted with emotion. “I saw him come in with his healing touch and I thought, If only he had been my father.” He turned to face Ouanda, not caring if she saw his eyes red and his face streaked with tears. “Just the way I used to say that every day when I went home from the Zenador’s Station. If only Libo were my father, if only I were his son.”
She smiled and held him; her hair took the tears from his face. “Ah, Miro, I’m
glad he wasn’t your father. Because then I’d be your sister, and I could never hope to have you for myself.”

10

CHILDREN OF THE MIND











Rule 1 : All Children of the Mind of Christ must be married, or they may not be in the order; but they must be chaste.
Question 1 : Why is marriage necessary for anyone?
Fools say, Why should we marry? Love is the only bond my lover and I need. To them I say, Marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman; even the beasts cleave together and produce their young. Marriage is a covenant between
a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other. To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outlaw, a slave, or a traitor. The one constant in every society of humankind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults.
Question 2: Why then is celibacy ordained for priests and nuns?
To separate them from the community. The priests and nuns are servants, not citizens. They minister to the Church, but they are not the Church. Mother Church is the bride, and Christ is the bridegroom; the priests and nuns are merely guests at the wedding, for they have rejected citizenship in the community of Christ in order to serve it.
Question 3: Why then do the Children of the Mind of Christ marry? Do
we not also serve the Church?
We do not serve the Church, except as all women and men serve it through their marriages. The difference is that where they pass on their genes to the next generation, we pass on our knowledge; their legacy is found in the genetic molecules of generations to come, while we live on in their minds. Memories
are the offspring of our marriages, and they are neither more or less worthy than the flesh-and-blood children conceived in sacramental love.

—San Angelo, The Rule and Catechism of the Order of the Children of the Mind of
Christ, 1511:11:11:1

The Dean of the Cathedral carried the silence of dark chapels and massive, soaring walls wherever he went: When he entered the classroom, a heavy peace fell upon the students, and even their breathing was guarded as he noiselessly drifted to the front
of the room.
“Dom Cristão,” murmured the Dean. “The Bishop has need of consultation with you.”
The students, most of them in their teens, were not so young that they didn’t know of the strained relations between the hierarchy of the Church and the rather freewheeling monastics who ran most of the Catholic schools in the Hundred
Worlds. Dom Cristão, besides being an excellent teacher of history, geology, archaeology, and anthropology, was also abbot of the monastery of the Filhos da Mente de Cristo—the Children of the Mind of Christ. His position made him the Bishop’s primary rival for spiritual supremacy in Lusitania. In some ways he could even be considered the Bishop’s superior; on most worlds there was only one abbot of the Filhos for each archbishop, while for each bishop there was a principal of a school system.
But Dom Cristão, like all Filhos, made it a point to be completely deferent to the Church hierarchy. At the Bishop’s summons he immediately switched off the lectern and dismissed the class without so much as completing the point under discussion. The students were not surprised; they knew he would do the same if any ordained priest had interrupted his class. It was, of course, immensely flattering to the priesthood to see how important they were in the eyes of the Filhos; but it also made it plain to them that any time they visited the school during teaching hours,
classwork would be completely disrupted wherever they went. As a result, the priests rarely visited the school, and the Filhos, through extreme deference, maintained almost complete independence.
Dom Cristão had a pretty good idea why the Bishop had summoned him. Dr. Navio was an indiscreet man, and rumors had been flying all morning about some dreadful threat by the speaker for the dead. It was hard for Dom Cristão to bear the groundless fears of the hierarchy whenever they were confronted with infidels and heretics. The Bishop would be in a fury, which meant that he would demand some action from somebody, even though the best course, as usual, was inaction, patience, cooperation. Besides, word had spread that this particular speaker claimed to be the very one who spoke the death of San Angelo. If that was the case, he was probably not an enemy at all, but a friend of the Church. Or at least a friend of the Filhos, which in Dom Cristão’s mind amounted to the same thing.
As he followed the silent Dean among the buildings of the faculdade and through
the garden of the Cathedral, he cleared his heart of the anger and annoyance he felt. Over and over he repeated his monastic name: Amai a Tudomundo Para Que Deus

Vos Ame. Ye Must Love Everyone So That God Will Love You. He had chosen the name carefully when he and his fiancée joined the order, for he knew that his greatest weakness was anger and impatience with stupidity. Like all Filhos, he named himself with the invocation against his most potent sin. It was one of the ways they made themselves spiritually naked before the world. We will not clothe ourselves in hypocrisy, taught San Angelo. Christ will clothe us in virtue like the lilies of the field, but we will make no effort to appear virtuous ourselves. Dom Cristão felt his virtue wearing thin in places today; the cold wind of impatience might freeze him to the bone. So he silently chanted his name, thinking: Bishop Peregrino is a damned fool, but Amai a Tudomundo Para Que Deus Vos Ame.
“Brother Amai,” said Bishop Peregrino. He never used the honorific Dom Cristão, even though cardinals had been known to give that much courtesy. “It was good of you to come.”
Navio was already sitting in the softest chair, but Dom Cristão did not begrudge him that. Indolence had made Navio fat, and his fat now made him indolent; it was such a circular disease, feeding always on itself, and Dom Cristão was grateful not to be so afflicted. He chose for himself a tall stool with no back at all. It would keep his body from relaxing, and that would help his mind to stay alert.
Navio almost at once launched into an account of his painful meeting with the Speaker for the Dead, complete with elaborate explanations of what the Speaker had threatened to do if noncooperation continued. “An inquisitor, if you can imagine that! An infidel daring to supplant the authority of Mother Church!” Oh, how the lay
member gets the crusading spirit when Mother Church is threatened—but ask him to go to mass once a week, and the crusading spirit curls up and goes to sleep.
Navio’s words did have some effect: Bishop Peregrino grew more and more angry, his face getting a pinkish tinge under the deep brown of his skin. When Navio’s recitation finally ended, Peregrino turned to Dom Cristão, his face a mask of fury, and said, “Now what do you say, Brother Amai!”
I would say, if I were less discreet, that you were a fool to interfere with this
speaker when you knew the law was on his side and when he had done nothing to harm us. Now he is provoked, and is far more dangerous than he would ever have been if you had simply ignored his coming.
Dom Cristão smiled thinly and inclined his head. “I think that we should strike first to remove his power to harm us.”
Those militant words took Bishop Peregrino by surprise. “Exactly,” he said. “But I
never expected you to understand that.”
“The Filhos are as ardent as any unordained Christian could hope to be,” said Dom Cristão. “But since we have no priesthood, we have to make do with reason and logic as poor substitutes for authority.”

Bishop Peregrino suspected irony from time to time, but was never quite able to pin it down. He grunted, and his eyes narrowed. “So, then, Brother Amai, how do you propose to strike him?”
“Well, Father Peregrino, the law is quite explicit. He has power over us only if we interfere with his performance of his ministerial duties. If we wish to strip him of
the power to harm us, we have merely to cooperate with him.”
The Bishop roared and struck the table before him with his fist. “Just the sort of sophistry I should have expected from you, Amai!”
Dom Cristão smiled. “There’s really no alternative—either we answer his questions, or he petitions with complete justice for inquisitorial status, and you board a starship for the Vatican to answer charges of religious persecution. We are all too fond of you, Bishop Peregrino, to do anything that would cause your removal from office.”
“Oh, yes, I know all about your fondness.”
“The speakers for the dead are really quite innocuous—they set up no rival organization, they perform no sacraments, they don’t even claim that the Hive Queen and the Hegemon is a work of scripture. They only thing they do is try to discover the truth about the lives of the dead, and then tell everyone who will listen the story of a dead person’s life as the dead one meant to live it.”
“And you pretend to find that harmless?”
“On the contrary. San Angelo founded our order precisely because the telling of truth is such a powerful act. But I think it is far less harmful then, say, the Protestant Reformation. And the revocation of our Catholic License on the grounds of religious persecution would guarantee the immediate authorization of enough non-Catholic immigration to make us represent no more than a third of the population.”
Bishop Peregrino fondled his ring. “But would the Starways Congress actually authorize that? They have a fixed limit on the size of this colony—bringing in that many infidels would far exceed that limit.”
“But you must know that they’ve already made provisions for that. Since a
Catholic License guarantees unrestricted population growth, Starways Congress will send starships when it’s necessary to carry off our excess population in forced emigration. They expect to do it in a generation or two—what’s to stop them from beginning now?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“Starways Congress was formed to stop the jihads and pogroms that were going on in half a dozen places all the time. An invocation of the religious persecution laws is a serious matter.”
“It is entirely out of proportion! One Speaker for the Dead is called for by some half-crazed heretic, and suddenly we’re confronted with forced emigration!”

“My beloved father, this has always been the way of things between the secular authority and the religious. We must be patient, if for no other reason than this: They have all the guns.”
Navio chuckled at that.
“They may have the guns, but we hold the keys of heaven and hell,” said the
Bishop.
“And I’m sure that half of Starways Congress already writhes in anticipation. In the meantime, though, perhaps I can help ease the pain of this awkward time. Instead of your having to publicly retract your earlier remarks—” (your stupid, destructive, bigoted remarks) “—let it be known that you have instructed the Filhos da Mente de Cristo to bear the onerous burden of answering the questions of this infidel.”
“You may not know all the answers that he wants,” said Navio.
“But we can find out the answers for him, can’t we? Perhaps this way the people of Milagre will never have to answer to the Speaker directly; instead they will speak only to harmless brothers and sisters of our order.”
“In other words,” said Peregrino dryly, “the monks of your order will become servants of the infidel.”
Dom Cristão silently chanted his name three times.





Not since he was a child in the military had Ender felt so clearly that he was in enemy territory. The path up the hill from the praça was worn from the steps of many worshipers’ feet, and the cathedral dome was so tall that except for a few moments on the steepest slope, it was visible all the way up the hill. The primary school was on his left hand, built in terraces up the slope; to the right was the Vila dos Professores, named for the teachers but in fact inhabited mostly by the groundskeepers, janitors, clerks, counselors, and other menials. The teachers that Ender saw all wore the grey robes of the Filhos, and they eyed him curiously as he passed.
The enmity began when he reached the top of the hill, a wide, almost flat expanse
of lawn and garden immaculately tended, with crushed ores from the smelter making neat paths. Here is the world of the Church, thought Ender, everything in its place
and no weeds allowed. He was aware of the many watching him, but now the robes were black or orange, priests and deacons, their eyes malevolent with authority under threat. What do I steal from you by coming here? Ender asked them silently.
But he knew that their hatred was not undeserved. He was a wild herb growing in the well-tended garden; wherever he stepped, disorder threatened, and many lovely flowers would die if he took root and sucked the life from their soil.
Jane chatted amiably with him, trying to provoke him into answering her, but

Ender refused to be caught by her game. The priests would not see his lips move; there was a considerable faction in the Church that regarded implants like the jewel in his ear as a sacrilege, trying to improve on a body that God had created perfect.
“How many priests can this community support, Ender?” she said, pretending to marvel.
Ender would have liked to retort that she already had the exact number of them in her files. One of her pleasures was to say annoying things when he was not in a position to answer, or even to publicly acknowledge that she was speaking in his ear.
“Drones that don’t even reproduce. If they don’t copulate, doesn’t evolution demand that they expire?” Of course she knew that the priests did most of the administrative and public service work of the community. Ender composed his answers to her as if he could speak them aloud. If the priests weren’t there, then government or business or guilds or some other group would expand to take up the burden. Some sort of rigid hierarchy always emerged as the conservative force in a community, maintaining its identity despite the constant variations and changes that beset it. If there were no powerful advocate of orthodoxy, the community would inevitably disintegrate. A powerful orthodoxy is annoying, but essential to the community. Hadn’t Valentine written about this in her book on Zanzibar? She compared the priestly class to the skeleton of vertebrates—
Just to show him that she could anticipate his arguments even when he couldn’t say them aloud, Jane supplied the quotation; teasingly, she spoke it in Valentine’s own voice, which she had obviously stored away in order to torment him. “The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling themselves against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life.”
The sound of Valentine’s voice hurt him more than he expected, certainly more than Jane would have intended. His step slowed. He realized that it was her absence that made him so sensitive to the priests’ hostility. He had bearded the Calvinist lion in its den, he had walked philosophically naked among the burning coals of Islam, and Shinto fanatics had sung death threats outside his window in Kyoto. But always Valentine had been close—in the same city, breathing the same air, afflicted by the same weather. She would speak courage to him as he set out; he would return from confrontation and her conversation would make sense even of his failures, giving
him small shreds of triumph even in defeat. I left her a mere ten days ago, and now,
already, I feel the lack of her.
“To the left, I think,” said Jane. Mercifully, she was using her own voice now. “The monastery is at the western edge of the hill, overlooking the Zenador’s Station.”
He passed alongside the faculdade, where students from the age of twelve studied

the higher sciences. And there, low to the ground, the monastery lay waiting. He smiled at the contrast between the cathedral and the monastery. The Filhos were almost offensive in their rejection of magnificence. No wonder the hierarchy resented them wherever they went. Even the monastery garden made a rebellious statement—everything that wasn’t a vegetable garden was abandoned to weeds and unmown grass.
The abbot was called Dom Cristão, of course; it would have been Dona Cristã had the abbot been a woman. In this place, because there was only one escola baixa and one faculdade, there was only one principal; with elegant simplicity, the husband headed the monastery and his wife the schools, enmeshing all the affairs of the order in a single marriage. Ender had told San Angelo right at the beginning that it was the height of pretension, not humility at all, for the leaders of the monasteries and schools to be called “Sir Christian” or “Lady Christian,” arrogating to themselves a title that should belong to every follower of Christ impartially. San Angelo had only smiled—because, of course, that was precisely what he had in mind. Arrogant in his humility, that’s what he was, and that was one of the reasons that I loved him.
Dom Cristão came out into the courtyard to greet him instead of waiting for him in his escritorio—part of the discipline of the order was to inconvenience yourself deliberately in favor of those you serve. “Speaker Andrew!” he cried. “Dom Ceifeiro!” Ender called in return. Ceifeiro—reaper—was the order’s own title for the office of abbot; school principals were called Aradores, plowmen, and teaching monks were Semeadores, sowers.
The Ceifeiro smiled at the Speaker’s rejection of his common title, Dom Cristão. He knew how manipulative it was to require other people to call the Filhos by their titles and made-up names. As San Angelo said, “When they call you by your title, they admit you are a Christian; when they call you by your name, a sermon comes from their own lips.” He took Ender by the shoulders, smiled, and said, “Yes, I’m the Ceifeiro. And what are you to us—our infestation of weeds?”
“I try to be a blight wherever I go.”
“Beware, then, or the Lord of the Harvest will burn you with the tares.”
“I know—damnation is only a breath away, and there’s no hope of getting me to repent.”
“The priests do repentance. Our job is teaching the mind. It was good of you to come.”
“It was good of you to invite me here. I had been reduced to the crudest sort of bludgeoning in order to get anyone to converse with me at all.”
The Ceifeiro understood, of course, that the Speaker knew the invitation had come only because of his inquisitorial threat. But Brother Amai preferred to keep the discussion cheerful. “Come, now, is it true you knew San Angelo? Are you the very

one who spoke his death?”
Ender gestured toward the tall weeds peering over the top of the courtyard wall. “He would have approved of the disarray of your garden. He loved provoking Cardinal Aquila, and no doubt your Bishop Peregrino also curls his nose in disgust at your shoddy groundskeeping.”
Dom Cristão winked. “You know too many of our secrets. If we help you find answers to your questions, will you go away?”
“There’s hope. The longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I began serving as a speaker was the year and a half I lived in Reykjavik, on Trondheim.”
“I wish you’d promise us a similar brevity here. I ask, not for myself, but for the peace of mind of those who wear much heavier robes than mine.”
Ender gave the only sincere answer that might help set the Bishop’s mind at ease. “I promise that if I ever find a place to settle down, I’ll shed my title of speaker and become a productive citizen.”
“In a place like this, that would include conversion to Catholicism.”
“San Angelo made me promise years ago that if I ever got religion, it would be his.”
“Somehow that does not sound like a sincere protestation of faith.” “That’s because I haven’t any.”
The Ceifeiro laughed as if he knew better, and insisted on showing Ender around the monastery and the schools before getting to Ender’s questions. Ender didn’t mind—he wanted to see how far San Angelo’s ideas had come in the centuries since his death. The schools seemed pleasant enough, and the quality of education was high; but it was dark before the Ceifeiro led him back to the monastery and into the small cell that he and his wife, the Aradora, shared.
Dona Cristã was already there, creating a series of grammatical exercises on the terminal between the beds. They waited until she found a stopping place before addressing her.
The Ceifeiro introduced him as Speaker Andrew. “But he seems to find it hard to
call me Dom Cristão.”
“So does the Bishop,” said his wife. “My true name is Detestai o Pecado e Fazei o Direito.” Hate Sin and Do the Right, Ender translated. “My husband’s name lends itself to a lovely shortening—Amai, love ye. But mine? Can you imagine shouting to a friend, Oi! Detestai!” They all laughed. “Love and Loathing, that’s who we are, husband and wife. What will you call me, if the name Christian is too good for me?”
Ender looked at her face, beginning to wrinkle enough that someone more critical than he might call her old. Still, there was laughter in her smile and a vigor in her eyes that made her seem much younger, even younger than Ender. “I would call you Beleza, but your husband would accuse me of flirting with you.”

“No, he would call me Beladona—from beauty to poison in one nasty little joke. Wouldn’t you, Dom Cristão?”
“It’s my job to keep you humble.”
“Just as it’s my job to keep you chaste,” she answered.
At that, Ender couldn’t help looking from one bed to the other.
“Ah, another one who’s curious about our celibate marriage,” said the Ceifeiro. “No,” said Ender. “But I remember San Angelo urging husband and wife to share
a single bed.”
“The only way we could do that,” said the Aradora, “is if one of us slept at night and the other in the day.”
“The rules must be adapted to the strength of the Filhos da Mente,” the Ceifeiro explained. “No doubt there are some that can share a bed and remain celibate, but my wife is still too beautiful, and the lusts of my flesh too insistent.”
“That was what San Angelo intended. He said that the marriage bed should be the constant test of your love of knowledge. He hoped that every man and woman in the order would, after a time, choose to reproduce themselves in the flesh as well as in the mind.”
“But the moment we do that,” said the Ceifeiro, “then we must leave the Filhos.” “It’s the thing our dear San Angelo did not understand, because there was never a
true monastery of the order during his life,” said the Aradora. “The monastery becomes our family, and to leave it would be as painful as divorce. Once the roots go down, the plant can’t come up again without great pain and tearing. So we sleep in separate beds, and we have just enough strength to remain in our beloved order.”
She spoke with such contentment that quite against his will, Ender’s eyes welled with tears. She saw it, blushed, looked away. “Don’t weep for us, Speaker Andrew. We have far more joy than suffering.”
“You misunderstand,” said Ender. “My tears weren’t for pity, but for beauty.” “No,” said the Ceifeiro, “even the celibate priests think that our chastity in
marriage is, at best, eccentric.”
“But I don’t,” said Ender. For a moment he wanted to tell them of his long companionship with Valentine, as close and loving as a wife, and yet chaste as a sister. But the thought of her took words away from him. He sat on the Ceifeiro’s bed and put his face in his hands.
“Is something wrong?” asked the Aradora. At the same time, the Ceifeiro’s hand rested gently on his head.
Ender lifted his head, trying to shake off the sudden attack of love and longing for
Valentine. “I’m afraid that this voyage has cost me more than any other. I left behind my sister, who traveled with me for many years. She married in Reykjavik. To me, it seems only a week or so since I left her, but I find that I miss her more

than I expected. The two of you—”
“Are you telling us that you are also celibate?” asked the Ceifeiro. “And widowed now as well,” whispered the Aradora.
It did not seem at all incongruous to Ender to have his loss of Valentine put in those terms.
Jane murmured in his ear. “If this is part of some master plan of yours, Ender, I
admit it’s much too deep for me.”
But of course it wasn’t part of a plan at all. It frightened Ender to feel himself losing control like this. Last night in the Ribeira house he was the master of the situation; now he felt himself surrendering to these married monks with as much abandonment as either Quara or Grego had shown.
“I think,” said the Ceifeiro, “that you came here seeking answers to more questions than you knew.”
“You must be so lonely,” said the Aradora. “Your sister has found her resting place. Are you looking for one, too?”
“I don’t think so,” said Ender. “I’m afraid I’ve imposed on your hospitality too much. Unordained monks aren’t supposed to hear confessions.”
The Aradora laughed aloud. “Oh, any Catholic can hear the confession of an infidel.”
The Ceifeiro did not laugh, however. “Speaker Andrew, you have obviously given us more trust than you ever planned, but I can assure you that we deserve that trust. And in the process, my friend, I have come to believe that I can trust you. The Bishop is afraid of you, and I admit I had my own misgivings, but not anymore. I’ll help you if I can, because I believe you will not knowingly cause harm to our little village.”
“Ah,” whispered Jane, “I see it now. A very clever maneuver on your part, Ender. You’re much better at playacting than I ever knew.”
Her gibing made Ender feel cynical and cheap, and he did what he had never done before. He reached up to the jewel, found the small disengaging pin, and with his fingernail pried it to the side, then down. The jewel went dead. Jane could no longer speak into his ear, no longer see and hear from his vantage point. “Let’s go outside,” Ender said.
They understood perfectly what he had just done, since the function of such an implant was well known; they saw it as proof of his desire for private and earnest conversation, and so they willingly agreed to go. Ender had meant switching off the jewel to be temporary, a response to Jane’s insensitivity; he had thought to switch on the interface in only a few minutes. But the way the Aradora and the Ceifeiro
seemed to relax as soon as the jewel was inactive made it impossible to switch it back on, for a while at least.

Out on the nighttime hillside, in conversation with the Aradora and the Ceifeiro,
he forgot that Jane was not listening. They told him of Novinha’s childhood solitude, and how they remembered seeing her come alive through Pipo’s fatherly care, and Libo’s friendship. “But from the night of his death, she became dead to us all.”
Novinha never knew of the discussions that took place concerning her. The sorrows of most children might not have warranted meetings in the Bishop’s chambers, conversations in the monastery among her teachers, endless speculations in the Mayor’s office. Most children, after all, were not the daughter of Os Venerados; most were not their planet’s only xenobiologist.
“She became very bland and businesslike. She made reports on her work with adapting native plant life for human use, and Earthborn plants for survival on Lusitania. She always answered every question easily and cheerfully and innocuously. But she was dead to us, she had no friends. We even asked Libo, God rest his soul, and he told us that he, who had been her friend, he did not even get the cheerful emptiness she showed to everyone else. Instead she raged at him and forbade him to ask her any questions.” The Ceifeiro peeled a blade of native grass and licked the liquid of its inner surface. “You might try this, Speaker Andrew—it has an interesting flavor, and since your body can’t metabolize a bit of it, it’s quite harmless.”
“You might warn him, husband, that the edges of the grass can slice his lips and tongue like razor blades.”
“I was about to.”
Ender laughed, peeled a blade, and tasted it. Sour cinnamon, a hint of citrus, the heaviness of stale breath—the taste was redolent of many things, few of them pleasant, but it was also strong. “This could be addictive.”
“My husband is about to make an allegorical point, Speaker Andrew. Be warned.” The Ceifeiro laughed shyly. “Didn’t San Angelo say that Christ taught the correct
way, by likening new things to old?”
“The taste of the grass,” said Ender. “What does it have to do with Novinha?”
“It’s very oblique. But I think Novinha tasted something not at all pleasant, but so strong it overcame her, and she could never let go of the flavor.”
“What was it?”
“In theological terms? The pride of universal guilt. It’s a form of vanity and egomania. She holds herself responsible for things that could not possibly be her fault. As if she controlled everything, as if other people’s suffering came about as punishment for her sins.”
“She blames herself,” said the Aradora, “for Pipo’s death.”
“She’s not a fool,” said Ender. “She knows it was the piggies, and she knows that
Pipo went to them alone. How could it be her fault?”

“When this thought first occurred to me, I had the same objection. But then I looked over the transcripts and the recordings of the events of the night of Pipo’s death. There was only one hint of anything—a remark that Libo made, asking Novinha to show him what she and Pipo had been working on just before Pipo went to see the piggies. She said no. That was all—someone else interrupted and they never came back to the subject, not in the Zenador’s Station, anyway, not where the recordings could pick it up.
“It made us both wonder what went on just before Pipo’s death, Speaker Andrew,” said the Aradora. “Why did Pipo rush out like that? Had they quarreled over something? Was he angry? When someone dies, a loved one, and your last contact with them was angry or spiteful, then you begin to blame yourself. If only I hadn’t said this, if only I hadn’t said that.”
“We tried to reconstruct what might have happened that night. We went to the computer logs, the ones that automatically retain working notes, a record of everything done by each person logged on. And everything pertaining to her was completely sealed up. Not just the files she was actually working on. We couldn’t even get to the logs of her connect time. We couldn’t even find out what files they were that she was hiding from us. We simply couldn’t get in. Neither could the Mayor, not with her ordinary overrides.”
The Aradora nodded. “It was the first time anyone had ever locked up public files like that—working files, part of the labor of the colony.”
“It was an outrageous thing for her to do. Of course the Mayor could have used emergency override powers, but what was the emergency? We’d have to hold a public hearing, and we didn’t have any legal justification. Just concern for her, and the law has no respect for people who pry for someone else’s good. Someday perhaps we’ll see what’s in those files, what it was that passed between them just before Pipo died. She can’t erase them because they’re public business.”
It didn’t occur to Ender that Jane was not listening, that he had shut her out. He assumed that as soon as she heard this, she was overriding every protection Novinha had set up and discovering what was in her files.
“And her marriage to Marcos,” said the Aradora. “Everyone knew it was insane.
Libo wanted to marry her, he made no secret of that. But she said no.”
“It’s as if she were saying, I don’t deserve to marry the man who could make me happy. I’ll marry the man who’ll be vicious and brutal, who’ll give me the punishment that I deserve.” The Ceifeiro sighed. “Her desire for self-punishment kept them apart forever.” He reached out and touched his wife’s hand.
Ender waited for Jane to make a smirking comment about how there were six children to prove that Libo and Novinha didn’t stay completely apart. When she
didn’t say it, Ender finally remembered that he had turned off the interface. But now,

with the Ceifeiro and the Aradora watching him, he couldn’t very well turn it back on.
Because he knew that Libo and Novinha had been lovers for years, he also knew that the Ceifeiro and the Aradora were wrong. Oh, Novinha might well feel guilty— that would explain why she endured Marcos, why she cut herself off from most other people. But it wasn’t why she didn’t marry Libo; no matter how guilty she felt, she certainly thought she deserved the pleasures of Libo’s bed.
It was marriage with Libo, not Libo himself that she rejected. And that was not an easy choice in so small a colony, especially a Catholic one. So what was it that came along with marriage, but not with adultery? What was it she was avoiding?
“So you see, it’s still a mystery to us. If you really intend to speak Marcos Ribeira’s death, somehow you’ll have to answer that question—why did she marry him? And to answer that, you have to figure out why Pipo died. And ten thousand of the finest minds in the Hundred Worlds have been working on that for more than twenty years.”
“But I have an advantage over all those finest minds,” said Ender. “And what is that?” asked the Ceifeiro.
“I have the help of people who love Novinha.”
“We haven’t been able to help ourselves,” said the Aradora. “We haven’t been able to help her, either.”
“Maybe we can help each other,” said Ender.
The Ceifeiro looked at him, put a hand on his shoulder. “If you mean that, Speaker Andrew, then you’ll be as honest with us as we have been with you. You’ll tell us the idea that just occurred to you not ten seconds ago.”
Ender paused a moment, then nodded gravely. “I don’t think Novinha refused to marry Libo out of guilt. I think she refused to marry him to keep him from getting access to those hidden files.”
“Why?” asked the Ceifeiro. “Was she afraid he’d find out that she had quarreled with Pipo?”
“I don’t think she quarreled with Pipo,” said Ender. “I think she and Pipo
discovered something, and the knowledge of it led to Pipo’s death. That’s why she locked the files. Somehow the information in them is fatal.”
The Ceifeiro shook his head. “No, Speaker Andrew. You don’t understand the power of guilt. People don’t ruin their whole lives for a few bits of information—but they’ll do it for an even smaller amount of self-blame. You see, she did marry Marcos Riberia. And that was self-punishment.”
Ender didn’t bother to argue. They were right about Novinha’s guilt; why else would she let Marcos Ribeira beat her and never complain about it? The guilt was there. But there was another reason for marrying Marcão. He was sterile and

ashamed of it; to hide his lack of manhood from the town, he would endure a marriage of systematic cuckoldry. Novinha was willing to suffer, but not willing to live without Libo’s body and Libo’s children. No, the reason she wouldn’t marry Libo was to keep him from the secrets in her files, because whatever was in there would make the piggies kill him.
How ironic, then. How ironic that they killed him anyway.





Back in his little house, Ender sat at the terminal and summoned Jane, again and again. She hadn’t spoken to him at all on the way home, though as soon as he turned the jewel back on he apologized profusely. She didn’t answer at the terminal, either.
Only now did he realize that the jewel meant far more to her than it did to him. He had merely been dismissing an annoying interruption, like a troublesome child. But for her, the jewel was her constant contact with the only human being who knew her. They had been interrupted before, many times, by space travel, by sleep; but this was the first time he had switched her off. It was as if the one person who knew her now refused to admit that she existed.
He pictured her like Quara, crying in her bed, longing to be picked up and held, reassured. Only she was not a flesh-and-blood child. He couldn’t go looking for her. He could only wait and hope that she returned.
What did he know about her? He had no way of guessing how deep her emotions ran. It was even remotely possible that to her the jewel was herself, and by switching it off he had killed her.
No, he told himself. She’s there, somewhere in the philotic connections between the hundreds of ansibles spread among the star systems of the Hundred Worlds.
“Forgive me,” he typed into the terminal. “I need you.”
But the jewel in his ear was silent, the terminal stayed still and cold. He had not realized how dependent he was on her constant presence with him. He had thought that he valued his solitude; now, though, with solitude forced upon him, he felt an urgent need to talk, to be heard by someone, as if he could not be sure he even existed without someone’s conversation as evidence.
He even took the hive queen from her hiding place, though what passed between
them could hardly be thought of as conversation. Even that was not possible now, however. Her thoughts came to him diffusely, weakly, and without the words that were so difficult for her; just a feeling of questioning and an image of her cocoon being laid within a cool damp place, like a cave or the hollow of a living tree.
<Now?> she seemed to be asking. No, he had to answer, not yet, I’m sorry—but she didn’t linger for his apology, just slipped away, went back to whatever or whomever she had found for conversation of her own sort, and there was nothing for Ender but

to sleep.
And then, when he awoke again late at night, gnawed by guilt at what he had unfeelingly done to Jane, he sat again at the terminal and typed. “Come back to me, Jane,” he wrote. “I love you.” And then he sent the message by ansible, out to where she could not possibly ignore it. Someone in the Mayor’s office would read it, as all open ansible messages were read; no doubt the Mayor, the Bishop, and Dom Cristão would all know about it by morning. Let them wonder who Jane was, and why the Speaker cried out to her across the lightyears in the middle of the night. Ender didn’t care. For now he had lost both Valentine and Jane, and for the first time in twenty years he was utterly alone.