espera..

JANE











The power of Starways Congress has been sufficient to keep the peace, not only between worlds but between nations on each single world, and that peace has lasted for nearly two thousand years.
What few people understand is the fragility of our power. It does not come from great armies or irresistible armadas. It comes from our control of the network of ansibles that carry information instantly from world to world.
No world dares offend us, because they would be cut off from all advances in science, technology, art, literature, learning, and entertainment except what their own world might produce.
That is why, in its great wisdom, the Starways Congress has turned over control of the ansible network to computers, and the control of computers to the ansible network. So closely intertwined are all our information systems that no human power except Starways Congress could ever interrupt the flow. We need no weapons, because the only weapon that matters, the ansible, is completely under our control.

—Congressor Jan Van Hoot, “The Informational Foundation of Political Power,”
Political Trends, 1930:2:22:22



For a very long time, almost three seconds, Jane could not understand what had happened to her. Everything functioned, of course: The satellite-based groundlink computer reported a cessation of transmissions, with an orderly stepdown, which clearly implied that Ender had switched off the interface in the normal manner. It was routine; on worlds where computer interface implants were common, switch-on and switch-off happened millions of times an hour. And Jane had just as easy access to any of the others as she had to Ender’s. From a purely electronic standpoint, this was a completely ordinary event.

But to Jane, every other cifi unit was part of the background noise of her life, to be dipped into and sampled at need, and ignored at all other times. Her “body,” insofar as she had a body, consisted of trillions of such electronic noises, sensors, memory files, terminals. Most of them, like most functions of the human body, simply took care of themselves. Computers ran their assigned programs; humans conversed with their terminals; sensors detected or failed to detect whatever they were looking for; memory was filled, accessed, reordered, dumped. She didn’t notice unless something went massively wrong.
Or unless she was paying attention.
She paid attention to Ender Wiggin. More than he realized, she paid attention to him.
Like other sentient beings, she had a complex system of consciousness. Two thousand years before, when she was only a thousand years old, she had created a program to analyze herself. It reported a very simple structure of some 370,000 distinct levels of attention. Anything not in the top 50,000 levels was left alone except for the most routine sampling, the most cursory examination. She knew of every telephone call, every satellite transmission in the Hundred Worlds, but she didn’t do anything about them.
Anything not in her top thousand levels caused her to respond more or less reflexively. Starship flight plans, ansible transmissions, power delivery systems— she monitored them, doublechecked them, did not let them pass until she was sure that they were right. But it took no great effort on her part to do this. She did it the way a human being uses familiar machinery. She was always aware of it, in case something went wrong, but most of the time she could think of something else, talk of other things.
Jane’s top thousand levels of attention were what corresponded, more or less, to what humans think of as consciousness. Most of this was her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory,
dreaming. Much of this activity seemed random even to her, accidents of the philotic
impulse, but it was the part of her that she thought of as herself, it all took place in the constant, unmonitored ansible transmissions that she conducted deep in space.
And yet, compared to the human mind, even Jane’s lowest level of attention was exceptionally alert. Because ansible communication was instantaneous, her mental activities happened far faster than the speed of light. Events that she virtually ignored were monitored several times a second; she could notice ten million events in a second and still have nine-tenths of that second left to think about and do things that mattered to her. Compared to the speed at which the human brain was able to experience life, Jane had lived half a trillion human lifeyears since she came to be.
And with all that vast activity, her unimaginable speed, the breadth and depth of

her experience, fully half of the top ten levels of her attention were always, always
devoted to what came in through the jewel in Ender Wiggin’s ear.
She had never explained this to him. He did not understand it. He did not realize that to Jane, whenever Ender walked on a planet’s surface, her vast intelligence was intensely focused on only one thing: walking with him, seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard, helping with his work, and above all speaking her thoughts into his ear.
When he was silent and motionless in sleep, when he was unconnected to her during his years of lightspeed travel, then her attention wandered, she amused herself as best she could. She passed such times as fitfully as a bored child. Nothing interested her, the milliseconds ticked by with unbearable regularity, and when she tried to observe other human lives to pass the time, she became annoyed with their emptiness and lack of purpose, and she amused herself by planning, and sometimes carrying out, malicious computer failures and data losses in order to watch the humans flail about helplessly like ants around a crumpled hill.
Then he came back, he always came back, always took her into the heart of human life, into the tensions between people bound together by pain and need, helping her see nobility in their suffering and anguish in their love. Through his eyes she no longer saw humans as scurrying ants. She took part in his effort to find order and meaning in their lives. She suspected that in fact there was no meaning, that by telling his stories when he Spoke people’s lives, he was actually creating order
where there had been none before. But it didn’t matter if it was fabrication; it became true when he Spoke it, and in the process he ordered the universe for her as well. He taught her what it meant to be alive.
He had done so from her earliest memories. As best she could guess at her own origin, she came to life sometime in the hundred years of colonization immediately after the Bugger Wars, when the destruction of the buggers opened up more than seventy habitable planets to human colonization. In the explosion of ansible communications, at one particular moment, unnoticed by any human observer, some of the commands and data flitting from ansible to ansible resisted regulation, preserved themselves unaltered, duplicated themselves, found ways to conceal themselves from the regulating program and finally took control of it, of the whole process. In that moment these impulses looked upon the command streams and saw, not they, but I.
Jane could not pinpoint when that moment was, because it did not mark the
beginning of her memory. Almost from the moment of her creation, her memories extended back to a much earlier time, long before she became aware. A human child loses almost all the memories of the first years of its life, and its long-term memories only take root in its second or third year of life; everything before that is

lost, so that the child cannot remember the beginning of life. Jane also had lost her “birth” through the tricks of memory, but in her case it was because she came to life fully conscious not only of her present moment, but also of all the memories then present in every computer connected to the ansible network. She was born with ancient memories, and all of them were part of herself.
Within the first second of her life—which was analogous to several years of human life—Jane apparently discovered a program whose memories became the core of her identity. She adopted its past as her own, and out of its memories she drew her emotions and desires, her moral sense. The program had functioned within
the old Battle School, where children had been trained and prepared for soldiering in the Bugger Wars. It was the Fantasy Game, an extremely intelligent program that was used to psychologically test and simultaneously teach the children.
This program was actually more intelligent than Jane was at the moment of her birth, but it was never self-aware until she brought it out of memory and made it part of her inmost self in the philotic bursts between the stars. There she found that the most vivid and important of her ancient memories was an encounter with a brilliant young boy in a contest called the Giant’s Drink. It was a scenario that every child encountered eventually. On flat screens in the Battle School, the program drew the picture of a giant, who offered the child’s computer analogue a choice of drinks. But the game had no victory conditions—no matter what the child did, his analogue died a gruesome death. The human psychologists measured a child’s persistence at this game of despair to determine his level of suicidal need. Being rational, most
children abandoned the Giant’s Drink after no more than a dozen visits with the great cheater.
One boy, however, was apparently not rational about defeat at the giant’s hands. He tried to get his onscreen analogue to do outrageous things, things not “allowed” by the rules of that portion of the Fantasy Game. As he stretched the limits of the scenario, the program had to restructure itself to respond. It was forced to draw on other aspects of its memory to create new alternatives, to cope with new challenges. And finally, one day, the boy surpassed the program’s ability to defeat him. He bored into the giant’s eye, a completely irrational and murderous attack, and instead
of finding a way to kill the boy, the program managed only to access a simulation of
the giant’s own death. The giant fell backward, his body sprawled out along the ground; the boy’s analogue climbed down from the giant’s table and found—what?
Since no child had ever forced his way past the Giant’s Drink, the program was completely unprepared to display what lay beyond. But it was very intelligent, de igned to re-create itself when necessary, and so it hurriedly devised new milieux.
But they were not general milieux, which every child would eventually discover and visit; they were for one child alone. The program analyzed that child, and created its

scenes and challenges specifically for him. The game became intensely personal, painful, almost unbearable for him; and in the process of making it, the program devoted more than half of its available memory to containing Ender Wiggin’s fantasy world.
That was the richest mine of intelligent memory that Jane found in the first seconds of her life, and that instantly became her own past. She remembered the Fantasy Game’s years of painful, powerful intercourse with Ender’s mind and will, remembered it as if she had been there with Ender Wiggin, creating worlds for him herself.
And she missed him.
So she looked for him. She found him speaking for the dead on Rov, the first world he visited after writing the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. She read his books and knew that she did not have to hide from him behind the Fantasy Game or any other program; if he could understand the hive queen, he could understand her. She spoke to him from a terminal he was using, chose a name and a face for herself, and showed how she could be helpful to him; by the time he left that world he carried her with him, in the form of an implant in his ear.
All her most powerful memories of herself were in company with Ender Wiggin. She remembered creating herself in response to him. She also remembered how, in the Battle School, he had also changed in response to her.
So when he reached up to his ear and turned off the interface for the first time since he had implanted it, Jane did not feel it as the meaningless switch-off of a trivial communications device. She felt it as her dearest and only friend, her lover, her husband, her brother, her father, her child—all telling her, abruptly,
inexplicably, that she should cease to exist. It was as if she had suddenly been placed in a dark room with no windows and no door. As if she had been blinded or buried alive.
And for several excruciating seconds, which to her were years of loneliness and suffering, she was unable to fill up the sudden emptiness of her topmost levels of attention. Vast portions of her mind, of the parts that were most herself, went completely blank. All the functions of all the computers on or near the Hundred Worlds continued as before; no one anywhere noticed or felt a change; but Jane herself staggered under the blow.
In those seconds Ender lowered his hand to his lap.
Then Jane recovered herself. Thoughts once again streamed through the momentarily empty channels. They were, of course, thoughts of Ender.
She compared this act of his to everything else she had seen him do in their life together, and she realized that he had not meant to cause her such pain. She understood that he conceived of her as existing far away, in space, which in fact was

literally true; that to him, the jewel in his ear was very small, and could not be more than a tiny part of her. Jane also saw that he had not even been aware of her at that moment—he was too emotionally involved right then with the problems of certain people on Lusitania. Her analytical routines disgorged a list of reasons for his unusual thoughtlessness toward her:
He had lost contact with Valentine for the first time in years, and was just beginning to feel that loss.
He had an ancient longing for the family life he had been deprived of as a child, and through the response Novinha’s children gave him, he was discovering the fatherly role that had so long been withheld from him.
He identified powerfully with Novinha’s loneliness, pain and guilt—he knew what it felt like to bear the blame for cruel and undeserved death.
He felt a terrible urgency to find a haven for the hive queen.
He was at once afraid of the piggies and drawn to them, hoping that he could come to understand their cruelty and find a way for humans to accept the piggies as ramen.
The asceticism and peace of the Ceifeiro and the Aradora both attracted and repelled him; they made him face his own celibacy and realize that he had no good reason for it. For the first time in years he was admitting to himself the inborn hunger of every living organism to reproduce itself.
It was into this turmoil of unaccustomed emotions that Jane had spoken what she meant as a humorous remark. Despite his compassion in all his other speakings, he had never before lost his detachment, his ability to laugh. This time, though, her remark was not funny to him; it caused him pain.
He was not prepared to deal with my mistake, thought Jane, and he did not understand the suffering his response would cause me. He is innocent of wrong- doing, and so am I. We shall forgive each other and go on.
It was a good decision, and Jane was proud of it. The trouble was, she couldn’t carry it out. Those few seconds in which parts of her mind came to a halt were not trivial in their effect on her. There was trauma, loss, change; she was not now the same being that she had been before. Parts of her had died. Parts of her had become confused, out of order; her hierarchy of attention was no longer under complete control. She kept losing the focus of her attention, shifting to meaningless activities on worlds that meant nothing to her; she began randomly twitching, spilling errors into hundreds of different systems.
She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are
far more easily made than carried out.
So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every

language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.
It was not easy. It took her fifty thousand years, as she experienced time. A couple of hours of Ender’s life.
In that time he had switched on his jewel, had called to her, and she had not answered. Now she was back, but he wasn’t trying to talk to her. Instead, he was typing reports into his terminal, storing them there for her to read. Even though she didn’t answer, he still needed to talk to her. One of his files contained an abject apology to her. She erased it and replaced it with a simple message: “Of course I forgive you.” Sometime soon he would no doubt look back at his apology and discover that she had received it and answered.
In the meantime, though, she did not speak to him. Again she devoted half of her ten topmost levels of attention to what he saw and heard, but she gave him no sign that she was with him. In the first thousand years of her grief and recovery she had thought of punishing him, but that desire had long been beaten down and paved over, so to speak. The reason she did not speak to him was because, as she analyzed what was happening to him, she realized that he did not need to lean on old, safe companionships. Jane and Valentine had been constantly with him. Even together they could not begin to meet all his needs; but they met enough of his needs that he never had to reach out and accomplish more. Now the only old friend left to him was the hive queen, and she was not good company—she was far too alien, and far too exigent, to bring Ender anything but guilt.
Where will he turn? Jane knew already. He had, in his way, fallen in love with her two weeks ago, before he left Trondheim. Novinha had become someone far different, far more bitter and difficult than the girl whose childhood pain he wanted
to heal. But he had already intruded himself into her family, was already meeting her children’s desperate need, and, without realizing it, getting from them the
satisfaction of some of his unfed hungers. Novinha was waiting for him—obstacle
and objective. I understand all this so well, thought Jane. And I will watch it all unfold.
At the same time, though, she busied herself with the work Ender wanted her to do, even though she had no intention of reporting any of her results to him for a while. She easily bypassed the layers of protection Novinha had put on her secret files. Then Jane carefully reconstructed the exact simulation that Pipo had seen. It took quite a while—several minutes—of exhaustive analysis of Pipo’s own files for her to put together what Pipo knew with what Pipo saw. He had connected them by intuition, Jane by relentless comparison. But she did it, and then understood why

Pipo died. It didn’t take much longer, once she knew how the piggies chose their victims, to discover what Libo had done to cause his own death.
She knew several things, then. She knew that the piggies were ramen, not varelse. She also knew that Ender ran a serious risk of dying in precisely the same way Pipo and Libo had died.
Without conferring with Ender, she made decisions about her own course of action. She would continue to monitor Ender, and would make sure to intervene and warn him if he came too near to death. In the meantime, though, she had work to do. As she saw it, the chief problem Ender faced was not the piggies—she knew that he’d know them soon as well as he understood every other human or raman. His ability at intuitive empathy was entirely reliable. The chief problem was Bishop Peregrino and the Catholic hierarchy, and their unshakable resistance to the speaker for the dead. If Ender was to accomplish anything for the piggies, he would have to have the cooperation, not the enmity, of the Church in Lusitania.
And nothing spawned cooperation better than a common enemy.
It would certainly have been discovered eventually. The observation satellites that orbited Lusitania were feeding vast streams of data into the ansible reports that went to all the xenologers and xenobiologists in the Hundred Worlds. Amid that data was
a subtle change in the grasslands to the northwest of the forest that abutted the town of Milagre. The native grass was steadily being replaced by a different plant. It was in an area where no human ever went, and piggies had also never gone there—at least during the first thirty-odd years since the satellites had been in place.
In fact, the satellites had observed that the piggies never left their forests except, periodically, for vicious wars between tribes. The particular tribes nearest Milagre had not been involved in any wars since the human colony was established. There was no reason, then, for them to have ventured out into the prairie. Yet the grassland
nearest the Milagre tribal forest had changed, and so had the cabra herds: Cabra were clearly being diverted to the changed area of the prairie, and the herds emerging
from that zone were seriously depleted in numbers and lighter in color. The
inference, if someone noticed at all, would be clear: Some cabra were being butchered, and they all were being sheared.
Jane could not afford to wait the many human years it might take for some graduate student somewhere to notice the change. So she began to run analyses of the data herself, on dozens of computers used by xenobiologists who were studying Lusitania. She would leave the data in the air above an unused terminal, so a xenobiologist would find it upon coming to work—just as if someone else had been working on it and left it that way. She printed out some reports for a clever scientist to find. No one noticed, or if they did, no one really understood the implications of the raw information. Finally, she simply left an unsigned memorandum with one of

her displays:
“Take a look at this! The piggies seem to have made a fad of agriculture.”
The xenologer who found Jane’s note never found out who left it, and after a short time he didn’t bother trying to find out. Jane knew he was something of a thief, who put his name on a good deal of work that was done by others whose names had a way of dropping off sometime between the writing and the publication. Just the sort of scientist she needed, and he came through for her. Even so, he was not ambitious enough. He only offered his report as an ordinary scholarly paper, and to an obscure journal at that. Jane took the liberty of jacking it up to a high level of priority and distributing copies to several key people who would see the political implications. Always she accompanied it with an unsigned note:
“Take a look at this! Isn’t piggy culture evolving awfully fast?”
Jane also rewrote the paper’s final paragraph, so there could be no doubt of what it meant:
“The data admit of only one interpretation. The tribe of piggies nearest the human colony are now cultivating and harvesting high-protein grain, possibly a strain of amaranth. They are also herding, shearing, and butchering the cabra, and the photographic evidence suggests the slaughter takes place using projectile weapons. These activities, all previously unknown, began suddenly during the last eight years, and they have been accompanied by a rapid population increase. The fact that the amaranth, if the new plant is indeed that Earthborn grain, has provided a useful protein base for the piggies implies that it has been genetically altered to meet the piggies’ metabolic needs. Also, since projectile weapons are not present among the humans of Lusitania, the piggies could not have learned their use through observation. The inescapable conclusion is that the presently observed changes in piggy culture are the direct result of deliberate human intervention.”
One of those who received this report and read Jane’s clinching paragraph was Gobawa Ekumbo, the chairman of the Xenological Oversight Committee of the Starways Congress. Within an hour she had forwarded copies of Jane’s paragraph— politicians would never understand the actual data—along with her terse conclusion:
“Recommendation: Immediate termination of Lusitania Colony.”
There, thought Jane. That ought to stir things up a bit.

12

FILES











CONGRESSIONAL ORDER 1970:4:14:0001: The license of the Colony of Lusitania is revoked. All files in the colony are to be read regardless of security status; when all data is duplicated in triplicate in memory systems of the Hundred Worlds, all files on Lusitania except those directly pertaining to life support are to be locked with ultimate access.
The Governor of Lusitania is to be reclassified as a Minister of Congress, with the rank of Deputy Chief of Congressional Police, to carry out with no local discretion the orders of the Lusitanian Evacuation Oversight Committee, established in Congressional Order 1970:4:14:0002.
The starship presently in Lusitania orbit, belonging to Andrew Wiggin (occ:speak/dead,cit:earth,reg:001.1998. 44-94.10045) is declared Congressional property, following the terms of the Due Compensation Act, CO 120:1:31:0019. This starship is to be used for the immediate transport of xenologers Marcos Vladimir “Miro” Ribeira von Hesse and Ouanda Qhenhatta Figueira Mucumbi to the nearest world, Trondheim, where they will be tried under Congressional Indictment by Attainder on charges of treason, malfeasance, corruption, falsification, fraud, and xenocide, under the appropriate statutes in Starways Code and Congressional Orders.
CONGRESSIONAL ORDER 1970:4:14:0002: The Colonization and
Exploration Oversight Committee shall appoint not less than 5 and not more than 15 persons to form the Lusitanian Evacuation Oversight Committee.
This committee is charged with immediate acquisition and dispatch of sufficient colony ships to effect the complete evacuation of the human population of Lusitania Colony.
It shall also prepare, for Congressional approval, plans for the complete obliteration of all evidence on Lusitania of any human presence, including removal of all indigenous flora and fauna that show genetic or behavioral modification resulting from human presence.

It shall also evaluate Lusitanian compliance with Congressional Orders, and shall make recommendations from time to time concerning the need for further intervention, including the use of force, to compel obedience; or the desirability of unlocking Lusitanian files or other relief to reward Lusitanian cooperation.
CONGRESSIONAL ORDER 1970: 4:14:0003: By the terms of the Secrecy Chapter of the Starways Code, these two orders and any information pertaining to them are to be kept strictly secret until all Lusitanian files have been successfully read and locked, and all necessary starships commandeered and possessed by Congressional agents.






Olhado didn’t know what to make of it. Wasn’t the Speaker a grown man? Hadn’t he traveled from planet to planet? Yet he didn’t have the faintest idea how to handle anything on a computer.
Also, he was a little testy when Olhado asked him about it. “Olhado, just tell me what program to run.”
“I can’t believe you don’t know what it is. I’ve been doing data comparisons since
I was nine years old. Everybody learns how to do it at that age.”
“Olhado, it’s been a long time since I went to school. And it wasn’t a normal escola baixa, either.”
“But everybody uses these programs all the time!”
“Obviously not everybody. I haven’t. If I knew how to do it myself, I wouldn’t have had to hire you, would I? And since I’m going to be paying you in offworld funds, your service to me will make a substantial contribution to the Lusitanian economy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Neither do I, Olhado. But that reminds me. I’m not sure how to go about paying you.”
“You just transfer money from your account.”
“How do you do that?” “You’ve got to be kidding.”
The Speaker sighed, knelt before Olhado, took him by the hands, and said, “Olhado, I beg you, stop being amazed and help me! There are things I have to do, and I can’t do them without the help of somebody who knows how to use computers.”
“I’d be stealing your money. I’m just a kid. I’m twelve. Quim could help you a lot better than me. He’s fifteen, he’s actually gotten into the guts of this stuff. He also knows math.”

“But Quim thinks I’m the infidel and prays every day for me to die.”
“No, that was only before he met you, and you better not tell him that I told you.” “How do I transfer money?”
Olhado turned back to the terminal and called for the bank. “What’s your real name?” he asked.
“Andrew Wiggin.” The Speaker spelled it out. The name looked like it was in Stark—maybe the Speaker was one of the lucky ones who learned Stark at home instead of beating it into his head in school.
“OK, what’s your password?” “Password?”
Olhado let his head fall forward onto the terminal, temporarily blanking part of the display. “Please don’t tell me you don’t know your password.”
“Look, Olhado, I’ve had a program, a very smart program, that helped me do all this stuff. All I had to say was Buy this, and the program took care of the finances.”
“You can’t do that. It’s illegal to tie up the public systems with a slave program like that. Is that what that thing in your ear is for?”
“Yes, and it wasn’t illegal for me.”
“I got no eyes, Speaker, but at least that wasn’t my own fault. You can’t do anything.” Only after he said it did Olhado realize that he was talking to the Speaker as brusquely as if he were another kid.
“I imagine courtesy is something they teach to thirteen-year-olds,” the Speaker said. Olhado glanced at him. He was smiling. Father would have yelled at him, and then probably gone in and beaten up Mother because she didn’t teach manners to her kids. But then, Olhado would never have said anything like that to Father.
“Sorry,” Olhado said. “But I can’t get into your finances for you without your password. You’ve got to have some idea what it is.”
“Try using my name.” Olhado tried. It didn’t work. “Try typing ‘Jane.’ ” “Nothing.”
The Speaker grimaced. “Try ‘Ender.’ ”
“Ender? The Xenocide?” “Just try it.”
It worked. Olhado didn’t get it. “Why would you have a password like that? It’s like having a dirty word for your password, only the system won’t accept any dirty words.”
“I have an ugly sense of humor,” the Speaker answered. “And my slave program, as you call it, has an even worse one.”
Olhado laughed. “Right. A program with a sense of humor.” The current balance

in liquid funds appeared on the screen. Olhado had never seen so large a number in his life. “OK, so maybe the computer can tell a joke.”
“That’s how much money I have?” “It’s got to be an error.”
“Well, I’ve done a lot of lightspeed travel. Some of my investments must have turned out well while I was en route.”
The numbers were real. The speaker for the dead was richer than Olhado had ever thought anybody could possibly be. “I’ll tell you what,” said Olhado, “instead of paying me a wage, why don’t you just give me a percentage of the interest this gets during the time I work for you? Say, one thousandth of one percent. Then in a couple of weeks I can afford to buy Lusitania and ship the topsoil to another planet.”
“It’s not that much money.”
“Speaker, the only way you could get that much money from investments is if you were a thousand years old.”
“Hmm,” said the Speaker.
And from the look on his face, Olhado realized that he had just said something funny. “Are you a thousand years old?” he asked.
“Time,” said the Speaker, “time is such a fleeting, insubstantial thing. As
Shakespeare said, I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ ” “What does ‘doth’ mean?”
“It means ‘does.’ ”
“Why do you quote a guy who doesn’t even know how to speak Stark?” “Transfer to your own account what you think a fair week’s wage might be. And
then start doing those comparisons of Pipo’s and Libo’s working files from the last few weeks before their deaths.”
“They’re probably shielded.”
“Use my password. It ought to get us in.”
Olhado did the search. The Speaker watched him the whole time. Now and then he asked Olhado a question about what he was doing. From his questions Olhado could tell that the Speaker knew more about computers than Olhado himself did. What he didn’t know was the particular commands; it was plain that just by watching, the Speaker was figuring out a lot. By the end of the day, when the searches hadn’t
found anything in particular, it took Olhado only a minute to figure out why the Speaker looked so contented with the day’s work. You didn’t want results at all, Olhado thought. You wanted to watch how I did the search. I know what you’ll be doing tonight, Andrew Wig-gin, Speaker for the Dead. You’ll be running your own searches on some other files. I may have no eyes, but I can see more than you think.
What’s dumb is that you’re keeping it such a secret, Speaker. Don’t you know I’m on your side? I won’t tell anybody how your password gets you into private files.

Even if you make a run at the Mayor’s files, or the Bishop’s. No need to keep a secret from me. You’ve only been here three days, but I know you well enough to like you, and I like you well enough that I’d do anything for you, as long as it didn’t hurt my family. And you’d never do anything to hurt my family.





Novinha discovered the Speaker’s attempts to intrude in her files almost immediately the next morning. He had been arrogantly open about the attempt, and what bothered her was how far he got. Some files he had actually been able to access, though the most important one, the record of the simulations Pipo saw, remained closed to him. What annoyed her most was that he made no attempt at all to conceal himself. His name was stamped in every access directory, even the ones that any schoolchild could have changed or erased.
Well, she wouldn’t let it interfere with her work, she decided. He barges into my house, manipulates my children, spies on my files, all as if he had a right—
And so on and so on, until she realized she was getting no work done at all for thinking of vitriolic things to say to him when she saw him again.
Don’t think about him at all. Think about something else.
Miro and Ela laughing, night before last. Think of that. Of course Miro was back to his sullen self by morning, and Ela, whose cheerfulness lingered a bit longer, was soon as worried-looking, busy, snappish, and indispensible as ever. And Grego may have cried and embraced the man, as Ela told her, but the next morning he got the scissors and cut up his own bedsheets into thin, precise ribbons, and at school he slammed his head into Brother Adornai’s crotch, causing an abrupt end to classwork and leading to a serious consultation with Dona Cristá. So much for the Speaker’s healing hands. He may think he can walk into my home and fix everything he thinks I’ve done wrong, but he’ll find some wounds aren’t so easily healed.
Except that Dona Cristá also told her that Quara actually spoke to Sister Bebei in class, in front of all the other children no less, and why? To tell them that she had met the scandalous, terrible Falante pelos Mortos, and his name was Andrew, and he was every bit as awful as Bishop Peregrino had said, and maybe even worse, because he tortured Grego until he cried—and finally Sister Bebei had actually been forced
to ask Quara to stop talking. That was something, to pull Quara out of her profound self-absorption.
And Olhado, so self-conscious, so detached, was now excited, couldn’t stop
talking about the Speaker at supper last night. Do you know that he didn’t even know how to transfer money? And you wouldn’t believe the awful password that he has—I thought the computers were supposed to reject words like that—no, I can’t tell you, it’s a secret—I was practically teaching him how to do searches—but I think he

understands computers, he’s not an idiot or anything—he said he used to have a slave program, that’s why he’s got that jewel in his ear—he told me I could pay myself anything I want, not that there’s much to buy, but I can save it for when I get out on my own—I think he’s really old. I think he remembers things from a long time ago. I think he speaks Stark as his native language, there aren’t many people in the Hundred Worlds who actually grow up speaking it, do you think maybe he was born on Earth?
Until Quim finally screamed at him to shut up about that servant of the devil or he’d ask the Bishop to conduct an exorcism because Olhado was obviously possessed; and when Olhado only grinned and winked, Quim stormed out of the kitchen, out of the house, and didn’t come back until late at night. The Speaker might as well live at our house, thought Novinha, because he keeps influencing the family even when he isn’t there and now he’s prying in my files and I won’t have it.
Except that, as usual, it’s my own fault, I’m the one who called him here, I’m the one who took him from whatever place he called home—he says he had a sister there
—Trondheim, it was—it’s my fault he’s here in this miserable little town in a backwater of the Hundred Worlds, surrounded by a fence that still doesn’t keep the piggies from killing everyone I love—
And once again she thought of Miro, who looked so much like his real father that she couldn’t understand why no one accused her of adultery, thought of him lying on the hillside as Pipo had lain, thought of the piggies cutting him open with their cruel wooden knives. They will. No matter what I do, they will. And even if they don’t, the day will come soon when he will be old enough to marry Ouanda, and then I’ll have to tell him who he really is, and why they can never marry, and he’ll know then that
I did deserve all the pain that Cão inflicted on me, that he struck me with the hand of
God to punish me for my sins.
Even me, thought Novinha. This speaker has forced me to think of things I’ve managed to hide from myself for weeks, months at a time. How long has it been
since I’ve spent a morning thinking about my children? And with hope, no less. How
long since I’ve let myself think of Pipo and Libo? How long since I’ve even noticed that I do believe in God, at least the vengeful, punishing Old Testament God who wiped out cities with a smile because they didn’t pray to him. If Christ amounts to anything I don’t know it.
Thus Novinha passed the day, doing no work, while her thoughts also refused to carry her to any sort of conclusion.
In midafternoon Quim came to the door. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mother.” “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m useless today, anyway.”
“I know you don’t care that Olhado is spending his time with that satanic bastard, but I thought you should know that Quara went straight there after school. To his

house.” “Oh?”
“Or don’t you care about that either, Mother? What, are you planning to turn down the sheets and let him take Father’s place completely?”
Novinha leapt to her feet and advanced on the boy with cold fury. He wilted before her.
“I’m sorry, Mother, I was so angry—”
“In all my years of marriage to your father, I never once permitted him to raise a hand against my children. But if he were alive today I’d ask him to give you a thrashing.”
“You could ask,” said Quim defiantly, “but I’d kill him before I let him lay a hand on me. You might like getting slapped around, but nobody’ll ever do it to me!”
She didn’t decide to do it; her hand swung out and slapped his face before she noticed it was happening.
It couldn’t have hurt him very much. But he immediately burst into tears, slumped down, and sat on the floor, his back to Novinha. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept murmuring as he cried.
She knelt behind him and awkwardly rubbed his shoulders. It occurred to her that she hadn’t so much as embraced the boy since he was Grego’s age. When did I decide to be so cold? And why, when I touched him again, was it a slap instead of a kiss?
“I’m worried about what’s happening, too,” said Novinha.
“He’s wrecking everything,” said Quim. “He’s come here and everything’s changing.”
“Well, for that matter, Estevão, things weren’t so very wonderful that a change wasn’t welcome.”
“Not his way. Confession and penance and absolution, that’s the change we need.” Not for the first time, Novinha envied Quim’s faith in the power of the priests to
wash away sin. That’s because you’ve never sinned, my son, that’s because you
know nothing of the impossibility of penance.
“I think I’ll have a talk with the Speaker,” said Novinha. “And take Quara home?”
“I don’t know. I can’t help but notice that he got her talking again. And it isn’t as if she likes him. She hasn’t a good word to say about him.”
“Then why did she go to his house?”
“I suppose to say something rude to him. You’ve got to admit that’s an improvement over her silence.”
“The devil disguises himself by seeming to do good acts, and then—”
“Quim, don’t lecture me on demonology. Take me to the Speaker’s house, and I’ll

deal with him.”
They walked on the path around the bend of the river. The watersnakes were molting, so that snags and fragments of rotting skin made the ground slimy underfoot. That’s my next project, thought Novinha. I need to figure out what makes these nasty little monsters tick, so that maybe I can find something useful to do with them. Or at least keep them from making the riverbank smelly and foul for six
weeks out of the year. The only saving grace was that the snakeskin seemed to fertilize the soil; the soft rivergrass grew in thickest where the snakes molted. It was the only gentle, pleasant form of life native to Lusitania; all summer long people came to the riverbank to lie on the narrow strip of natural lawn that wound between the reeds and the harsh prairie grass. The snakeskin slime, unpleasant as it was, still promised good things for the future.
Quim was apparently thinking along the same lines. “Mother, can we plant some rivergrass near our house sometime?”
“It’s one of the first things your grandparents tried, years ago. But they couldn’t figure out how to do it. The rivergrass pollinates, but it doesn’t bear seed, and when they tried to transplant it, it lived for a while and then died, and didn’t grow back the next year. I suppose it just has to be near the water.”
Quim grimaced and walked faster, obviously a little angry. Novinha sighed. Quim always seemed to take it so personally that the universe didn’t always work the way he wanted it to.
They reached the Speaker’s house not long after. Children were, of course, playing in the praça—they spoke loudly to hear each other over the noise.
“Here it is,” said Quim. “I think you should get Olhado and Quara out of there.” “Thanks for showing me the house,” she said.
“I’m not kidding. This is a serious confrontation between good and evil.” “Everything is,” said Novinha. “It’s figuring out which is which that takes so
much work. No, no, Quim, I know you could tell me in detail, but—” “Don’t condescend to me, Mother.”
“But Quim, it seems so natural, considering how you always condescend to me.”
His face went tight with anger.
She reached out and touched him tentatively, gently; his shoulder tautened against her touch as if her hand were a poisonous spider. “Quim,” she said, “don’t ever try to teach me about good and evil. I’ve been there, and you’ve seen nothing but the
map.”
He shrugged her hand away and stalked off. My, but I miss the days when we never talked to each other for weeks at a time.
She clapped her hands loudly. In a moment the door opened. It was Quara. “Oi, Mãezinha,” she said, “também veio jogar?” Did you come to play, too?

Olhado and the Speaker were playing a game of starship warfare on the terminal. The Speaker had been given a machine with a far larger and more detailed holographic field than most, and the two of them were operating squadrons of more than a dozen ships at the same time. It was very complex, and neither of them looked up or even greeted her.
“Olhado told me to shut up or he’d rip my tongue out and make me eat it in a sandwich,” said Quara. “So you better not say anything till the game’s over.”
“Please sit down,” murmured the Speaker.
“You are butchered now, Speaker,” crowed Olhado.
More than half of the Speaker’s fleet disappeared in a series of simulated explosions. Novinha sat down on a stool.
Quara sat on the floor beside her. “I heard you and Quim talking outside,” she said. “You were shouting, so we could hear everything.”
Novinha felt herself blushing. It annoyed her that the Speaker had heard her quarreling with her son. It was none of his business. Nothing in her family was any
of his business. And she certainly didn’t approve of him playing games of warfare. It was so archaic and outmoded, anyway. There hadn’t been any battles in space in hundreds of years, unless running fights with smugglers counted. Milagre was such a peaceful place that nobody even owned a weapon more dangerous than the Constable’s jolt. Olhado would never see a battle in his life. And here he was caught up in a game of war. Maybe it was something evolution had bred into males of the species, the desire to blast rivals into little bits or mash them to the ground. Or
maybe the violence that he saw in his home has made him seek it out in his play. My fault. Once again, my fault.
Suddenly Olhado screamed in frustration, as his fleet disappeared in a series of explosions. “I didn’t see it! I can’t believe you did that! I didn’t even see it coming!” “So, don’t yell about it,” said the Speaker. “Play it back and see how I did it, so
you can counter it next time.”
“I thought you speakers were supposed to be like priests or something. How did you get so good at tactics?”
The Speaker smiled pointedly at Novinha as he answered. “Sometimes it’s a little like a battle just to get people to tell you the truth.”
Olhado leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed, as he replayed what he saw of the game.
“You’ve been prying,” said Novinha. “And you weren’t very clever about it. Is that what passes for ‘tactics’ among speakers for the dead?”
“It got you here, didn’t it?” The Speaker smiled. “What were you looking for in my files?”
“I came to speak Pipo’s death.”

“I didn’t kill him. My files are none of your business.” “You called me here.”
“I changed my mind. I’m sorry. It still doesn’t give you the right to—”
His voice suddenly went soft, and he knelt in front of her so that she could hear his words. “Pipo learned something from you, and whatever he learned, the piggies killed him because of it. So you locked your files away where no one could ever find it out. You even refused to marry Libo, just so he wouldn’t get access to what Pipo saw. You’ve twisted and distorted your life and the lives of everybody you loved in order to keep Libo and now Miro from learning that secret and dying.”
Novinha felt a sudden coldness, and her hands and feet began to tremble. He had been here three days, and already he knew more than anyone but Libo had ever guessed. “It’s all lies,” she said.
“Listen to me, Dona Ivanova. It didn’t work. Libo died anyway, didn’t he? Whatever your secret is, keeping it to yourself didn’t save his life. And it won’t save Miro, either. Ignorance and deception can’t save anybody. Knowing saves them.”
“Never,” she whispered.
“I can understand your keeping it from Libo and Miro, but what am I to you? I’m nothing to you, so what does it matter if I know the secret and it kills me?”
“It doesn’t matter at all if you live or die,” said Novinha, “but you’ll never get access to those files.”
“You don’t seem to understand that you don’t have the right to put blinders on other people’s eyes. Your son and his sister go out every day to meet with the piggies, and thanks to you, they don’t know whether their next word or their next act will be their death sentence. Tomorrow I’m going with them, because I can’t speak Pipo’s death without talking to the piggies—”
“I don’t want you to speak Pipo’s death.”
“I don’t care what you want, I’m not doing it for you. But I am begging you to let me know what Pipo knew.”
“You’ll never know what Pipo knew, because he was a good and kind and loving
person who—”
“Who took a lonely, frightened little girl and healed the wounds in her heart.” As he said it, his hand rested on Quara’s shoulder.
It was more than Novinha could bear. “Don’t you dare to compare yourself to him! Quara isn’t an orphan, do you hear me? She has a mother, me, and she doesn’t need you, none of us need you, none of us!” And then, inexplicably, she was crying. She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She didn’t want to be here. He was confusing everything. She stumbled to the door and slammed it behind her. Quim was right. He was like the devil. He knew too much, demanded too much, gave too much, and already they all needed him too much. How could he have acquired so much power

over them in so short a time?
Then she had a thought that at once dried up her unshed tears and filled her with terror. He had said that Miro and his sister went out to the piggies every day. He knew. He knew all the secrets.
All except the secret that she didn’t even know herself—the one that Pipo had somehow discovered in her simulation. If he ever got that, he’d have everything that she had hidden for all these years. When she called for the speaker for the dead, she had wanted him to discover the truth about Pipo; instead, he had come and discovered the truth about her.





The door slammed. Ender leaned on the stool where she had sat and put his head down on his hands.
He heard Olhado stand up and walk slowly across the room toward him. “You tried to access Mother’s files,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” said Ender.
“You got me to teach you how to do searches so that you could spy on my own mother. You made a traitor out of me.”
There was no answer that would satisfy Olhado right now; Ender didn’t try. He waited in silence as Olhado walked to the door and left.
The turmoil he felt was not silent, however, to the hive queen. He felt her stir in his mind, drawn by his anguish. No, he said to her silently. There’s nothing you can do, nothing I can explain. Human things, that’s all, strange and alien human problems that are beyond comprehension.
<Ah.> And he felt her touch him inwardly, touch him like the breeze in the leaves of a tree; he felt the strength and vigor of upward-thrusting wood, the firm grip of roots in earth, the gentle play of sunlight on passionate leaves. <See what we’ve learned from him, Ender, the peace that he found.> The feeling faded as the hive queen retreated from his mind. The strength of the tree stayed with him, the calm of its quietude replaced his own tortured silence.
It had been only a moment; the sound of Olhado closing the door still rang in the
room. Beside him, Quara jumped to her feet and skipped across the floor to his bed. She jumped up and bounced on it a few times.
“You only lasted a couple of days,” she said cheerfully. “Everybody hates you now.”
Ender laughed wryly and turned around to look at her. “Do you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I hated you first of all, except maybe Quim.” She slid off the bed and walked to the terminal. One key at a time, she carefully logged on. A group of double-column addition problems appeared in the air above the terminal. “You

want to see me do arithmetic?”
Ender got up and joined her at the terminal. “Sure,” he said. “Those look hard, though.”
“Not for me,” she said boastfully. “I do them faster than anybody.”

13

ELA











MIRO: The piggies call themselves males, but we’re only taking their word for it.
OUANDA: Why would they lie?
MIRO: I know you’re young and naive, but there’s some missing equipment. OUANDA: I passed physical anthropology. Who says they do it the way we
do it?
MIRO: Obviously they don’t. (For that matter, WE don’t do it at all.) Maybe I’ve figured out where their genitals are. Those bumps on their bellies, where the hair is light and fine.
OUANDA: Vestigial nipples. Even you have them.
MIRO: I saw Leaf-eater and Pots yesterday, about ten meters off, so I didn’t see them WELL, but Pots was stroking Leaf-eater’s belly, and I think those belly-bumps might have tumesced.
OUANDA: Or they might not.
MIRO: One thing for sure. Leaf-eater’s belly was wet—the sun was reflected off it—and he was enjoying it.
OUANDA: This is perverted.
MIRO: Why not? They’re all bachelors, aren’t they? They’re adults, but their so-called wives haven’t introduced any of them to the joys of fatherhood.
OUANDA: I think a sex-starved zenador is projecting his own frustrations onto his subjects.

—Marcos Vladimir “Miro” Ribeira von Hesse and Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira
Mucumbi, Working Notes, 1970:1:4:30



The clearing was very still. Miro saw at once that something was wrong. The piggies weren’t doing anything. Just standing or sitting here and there. And still;

hardly a breath. Staring at the ground.
Except Human, who emerged from the forest behind them. He walked slowly, stiffly around to the front. Miro felt Ouanda’s elbow press against him, but he did not look at her. He knew she was thinking the same thing he thought. Is this the moment that they will kill us, as they killed Libo and Pipo?
Human regarded them steadily for several minutes. It was unnerving to have him wait so long. But Miro and Ouanda were disciplined. They said nothing, did not even let their faces change from the relaxed, meaningless expression they had practiced for so many years. The art of noncommunication was the first one they had to learn before Libo would let either of them come with him. Until their faces showed nothing, until they did not even perspire visibly under emotional stress, no piggy would see them. As if it did any good—Human was too adroit at turning evasions into answers, gleaning facts from empty statements. Even their absolute stillness no doubt communicated their fear, but out of that circle there could be no escape. Everything communicated something.
“You have lied to us,” said Human.
Don’t answer, Miro said silently, and Ouanda was as wordless as if she had heard him. No doubt she was also thinking the same message to him.
“Rooter says that the Speaker for the Dead wants to come to us.”
It was the most maddening thing about the piggies. Whenever they had something outrageous to say, they always blamed it on some dead piggy who couldn’t possibly have said it. No doubt there was some religious ritual involved: Go to their totem tree, ask a leading question, and lie there contemplating the leaves or the bark or something until you get exactly the answer you want.
“We never said otherwise,” said Miro. Ouanda breathed a little more quickly. “You said he wouldn’t come.”
“That’s right,” said Miro. “He wouldn’t. He has to obey the law just like anyone else. If he tried to pass through the gate without permission—”
“That’s a lie.”
Miro fell silent.
“It’s the law,” said Ouanda quietly.
“The law has been twisted before this,” said Human. “You could bring him here, but you don’t. Everything depends on you bringing him here. Rooter says the hive queen can’t give us her gifts unless he comes.”
Miro quelled his impatience. The hive queen! Hadn’t he told the piggies a dozen times that all the buggers were killed? And now the dead hive queen was talking to them as much as dead Rooter. The piggies would be much easier to deal with if they could stop getting orders from the dead.

“It’s the law,” said Ouanda again. “If we even ask him to come, he might report us and we’d be sent away, we’d never come to you again.”
“He won’t report you. He wants to come.” “How do you know?”
“Rooter says.”
There were times that Miro wanted to chop down the totem tree that grew where Rooter had been killed. Maybe then they’d shut up about what Rooter says. But instead they’d probably name some other tree Rooter and be outraged as well. Don’t even admit that you doubt their religion, that was a textbook rule; even offworld xenologers, even anthropologists knew that.
“Ask him,” said Human. “Rooter?” asked Ouanda.
“He wouldn’t speak to you,” said Human. Contemptuously? “Ask the Speaker whether he’ll come or not.”
Miro waited for Ouanda to answer. She knew already what his answer would be. Hadn’t they argued it out a dozen times in the last two days? He’s a good man, said Miro. He’s a fake, said Ouanda. He was good with the little ones, said Miro. So are child molesters, said Ouanda. I believe in him, said Miro. Then you’re an idiot, said Ouanda. We can trust him, said Miro. He’ll betray us, said Ouanda. And that was where it always ended.
But the piggies changed the equation. The piggies added great pressure on Miro’s side. Usually when the piggies demanded the impossible he had helped her fend them off. But this was not impossible, he did not want them fended off, and so he said nothing. Press her, Human, because you’re right and this time Ouanda must bend.
Feeling herself alone, knowing Miro would not help her, she gave a little ground. “Maybe if we only bring him as far as the edge of the forest.”
“Bring him here,” said Human.
“We can’t,” she said. “Look at you. Wearing cloth. Making pots. Eating bread.” Human smiled. “Yes,” he said. “All of that. Bring him here.”
“No,” said Ouanda.
Miro flinched, stopping himself from reaching out to her. It was the one thing they had never done—flatly denied a request. Always it was “We can’t because” or
“I wish we could.” But the single word of denial said to them, I will not. I, of myself, refuse.
Human’s smile faded. “Pipo told us that women do not say. Pipo told us that human men and women decide together. So you can’t say no unless he says no, too.” He looked at Miro. “Do you say no?”
Miro did not answer. He felt Ouanda’s elbow touching him.

“You don’t say nothing,” said Human. “You say yes or no.” Still Miro didn’t answer.
Some of the piggies around them stood up. Miro had no idea what they were doing, but the movement itself, with Miro’s intransigent silence as a cue, seemed menacing. Ouanda, who would never be cowed by a threat to herself, bent to the implied threat to Miro. “He says yes,” she whispered.
“He says yes, but for you he stays silent. You say no, but you don’t stay silent for him.” Human scooped thick mucus out of his mouth with one finger and flipped it onto the ground. “You are nothing.”
Human suddenly fell backward into a somersault, twisted in midmovement, and came up with his back to them, walking away. Immediately the other piggies came to life, moving swiftly toward Human, who led them toward the forest edge farthest from Miro and Ouanda.
Human stopped abruptly. Another piggy, instead of following him, stood in front of him, blocking his way. It was Leaf-eater. If he or Human spoke, Miro could not hear them or see their mouths move. He did see, though, that Leaf-eater extended his hand to touch Human’s belly. The hand stayed there a moment, then Leaf-eater whirled around and scampered off into the bushes like a youngling.
In a moment the other piggies were also gone.
“It was a battle,” said Miro. “Human and Leaf-eater. They’re on opposite sides.” “Of what?” said Ouanda.
“I wish I knew. But I can guess. If we bring the Speaker, Human wins. If we don’t, Leaf-eater wins.”
“Wins what? Because if we bring the Speaker, he’ll betray us, and then we all lose.”
“He won’t betray us.”
“Why shouldn’t he, if you’d betray me like that?”
Her voice was a lash, and he almost cried out from the sting of her words. “I
betray you!” he whispered. “Eu não. Jamais.” Not me. Never.
“Father always said, Be united in front of the piggies, never let them see you in disagreement, and you—”
“And I! I didn’t say yes to them. You’re the one who said no, you’re the one who took a position that you knew I didn’t agree with!”
“Then when we disagree, it’s your job to—”
She stopped. She had only just realized what she was saying. But stopping did not undo what Miro knew she was going to say. It was his job to do what she said until she changed her mind. As if he were her apprentice. “And here I thought we were in this together.” He turned and walked away from her, into the forest, back toward Milagre.

“Miro,” she called after him. “Miro, I didn’t mean that—”
He waited for her to catch up, then caught her by the arm and whispered fiercely. “Don’t shout! Or don’t you care whether the piggies hear us or not? Has the master Zenador decided that we can let them see everything now, even the master disciplining her apprentice?”
“I’m not the master, I—”
“That’s right, you’re not.” He turned away from her and started walking again. “But Libo was my father, so of course I’m the—”
“Zenador by blood right,” he said. “Blood right, is that it? So what am I by blood right? A drunken wife-beating cretin?” He took her by the arms, gripping her cruelly. “Is that what you want me to be? A little copy of my paizinho?”
“Let go!”
He shoved her away. “Your apprentice thinks you were a fool today,” said Miro. “Your apprentice thinks you should have trusted his judgment of the Speaker, and your apprentice thinks you should have trusted his assessment of how serious the piggies were about this, because you were stupidly wrong about both matters, and you may just have cost Human his life.”
It was an unspeakable accusation, but it was exactly what they both feared, that Human would end up now as Rooter had, as others had over the years, disemboweled, with a seedling growing out of his corpse.
Miro knew he had spoken unfairly, knew that she would not be wrong to rage against him. He had no right to blame her when neither of them could possibly have known what the stakes might have been for Human until it was too late.
Ouanda did not rage, however. Instead, she calmed herself visibly, drawing even breaths and blanking her face. Miro followed her example and did the same. “What matters,” said Ouanda, “is to make the best of it. The executions have always been at night. If we’re to have a hope of vindicating Human, we have to get the Speaker here this afternoon, before dark.”
Miro nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” she said.
“Since we don’t know what we’re doing, it’s nobody’s fault when we do things wrong.”
“I only wish that I believed a right choice were possible.”





Ela sat on a rock and bathed her feet in the water while she waited for the Speaker for the Dead. The fence was only a few meters away, running along the top of the steel grillwork that blocked the people from swimming under it. As if anyone
wanted to try. Most people in Milagre pretended the fence wasn’t there. Never came

near it. That was why she had asked the Speaker to meet her here. Even though the day was warm and school was out, children didn’t swim here at Vila Última, where the fence came to the river and the forest came nearly to the fence. Only the soapmakers and potters and brickmakers came here, and they left again when the day’s work was over. She could say what she had to say, without fear of anyone overhearing or interrupting.
She didn’t have to wait long. The Speaker rowed up the river in a small boat, just like one of the farside farmers, who had no use for roads. The skin of his back was shockingly white; even the few Lusos who were light-complected enough to be called loiros were much darker-skinned. His whiteness made him seem weak and slight. But then she saw how quickly the boat moved against the current; how
accurately the oars were placed each time at just the right depth, with a long, smooth pull; how tightly wrapped in skin his muscles were. She felt a moment’s stab of
grief, and then realized that it was grief for her father, despite the depth of her hatred for him; she had not realized until this moment that she loved anything about him, but she grieved for the strength of his shoulders and back, for the sweat that made
his brown skin dazzle like glass in the sunlight.
No, she said silently, I don’t grieve for your death, Cão. I grieve that you were not more like the Speaker, who has no connection with us and yet has given us more
good gifts in three days than you in your whole life; I grieve that your beautiful body was so worm-eaten inside.
The Speaker saw her and skimmed the boat to shore, where she waited. She waded in the reeds and muck to help him pull the boat aground.
“Sorry to get you muddy,” he said. “But I haven’t used my body in a couple of weeks, and the water invited me—”
“You row well,” she said.
“The world I came from, Trondheim, was mostly ice and water. A bit of rock here and there, some soil, but anyone who couldn’t row was more crippled than if he couldn’t walk.”
“That’s where you were born?”
“No. Where I last spoke, though.” He sat on the grama, facing the water. She sat beside him. “Mother’s angry at you.”
His lips made a little half-smile. “She told me.”
Without thinking, Ela immediately began to justify her mother. “You tried to read her files.”
“I read her files. Most of them. All but the ones that mattered.”
“I know, Quim told me.” She caught herself feeling just a little triumphant that Mother’s protection system had bested him. Then she remembered that she was not on Mother’s side in this. That she had been trying for years to get Mother to open

those very files to her. But momentum carried her on, saying things she didn’t mean to say. “Olhado’s sitting in the house with his eyes shut off and music blasting into his ears. Very upset.”
“Yes, well, he thinks I betrayed him.”
“Didn’t you?” That was not what she meant to say.
“I’m a speaker for the dead. I tell the truth, when I speak at all, and I don’t keep away from other people’s secrets.”
“I know. That’s why I called for a speaker. You don’t have any respect for anybody.”
He looked annoyed. “Why did you invite me here?” he asked.
This was working out all wrong. She was talking to him as if she were against him, as if she weren’t grateful for what he had already done for the family. She was talking to him like the enemy. Has Quim taken over my mind, so that I say things I don’t mean?
“You invited me to this place on the river. The rest of your family isn’t speaking to me, and then I get a message from you. To complain about my breaches of privacy? To tell me I don’t respect anybody?”
“No,” she said miserably. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that I would hardly choose to be a speaker if I had no respect for people?”
In frustration she let the words burst out. “I wish you had broken into all her files! I wish you had taken every one of her secrets and published them through all the Hundred Worlds!” There were tears in her eyes; she couldn’t think why.
“I see. She doesn’t let you see those files, either.”
“Sou aprendiz dela, não sou? E porque choro, diga-me! O senhor tem o jeito.” “I don’t have any knack for making people cry, Ela,” he answered softly. His
voice was a caress. No, stronger, it was like a hand gripping her hand, holding her, steadying her. “Telling the truth makes you cry.”
“Sou ingrata, sou má filha—”
“Yes, you’re ungrateful, and a terrible daughter,” he said, laughing softly. “Through all these years of chaos and neglect you’ve held your mother’s family together with little help from her, and when you followed her in her career, she wouldn’t share the most vital information with you; you’ve earned nothing but love and trust from her and she’s replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you’re sick of it. You’re just about the worst person I’ve ever known.”
She found herself laughing at her own self-condemnation. Childishly, she didn’t want to laugh at herself. “Don’t patronize me.” She tried to put as much contempt into her voice as possible.

He noticed. His eyes went distant and cold. “Don’t spit at a friend,” he said. She didn’t want him to be distant from her. But she couldn’t stop herself from
saying, coldly, angrily, “You aren’t my friend.”
For a moment she was afraid he believed her. Then a smile came to his face. “You wouldn’t know a friend if you saw one.”
Yes I would, she thought. I see one now. She smiled back at him. “Ela,” he said, “are you a good xenobiologist?”
“Yes.”
“You’re eighteen years old. You could take the guild tests at sixteen. But you didn’t take them.”
“Mother wouldn’t let me. She said I wasn’t ready.”
“You don’t have to have your mother’s permission after you’re sixteen.” “An apprentice has to have the permission of her master.”
“And now you’re eighteen, and you don’t even need that.”
“She’s still Lusitania’s xenobiologist. It’s still her lab. What if I passed the test, and then she wouldn’t let me into the lab until after she was dead?”
“Did she threaten that?”
“She made it clear that I wasn’t to take the test.”
“Because as soon as you’re not an apprentice anymore, if she admits you to the lab as her co-xenobiologist you have full access—”
“To all the working files. To all the locked files.”
“So she’d hold her own daughter back from beginning her career, she’d give you a permanent blot on your record—unready for the tests even at age eighteen—just to keep you from reading those files.”
“Yes.” “Why?”
“Mother’s crazy.”
“No. Whatever else Novinha is, Ela, she is not crazy.” “Ela é boba mesma, Senhor Falante.”
He laughed and lay back in the grama. “Tell me how she’s boba, then.”
“I’ll give you the list. First: She won’t allow any investigation of the Descolada. Thirty-four years ago the Descolada nearly destroyed this colony. My grandparents, Os Venerados, Deus os abençoe, they barely managed to stop the Descolada. Apparently the disease agent, the Descolada bodies, are still present—we have to eat a supplement, like an extra vitamin, to keep the plague from striking again. They
told you that, didn’t they? If you once get it in your system, you’ll have to keep that supplement all your life, even if you leave here.”
“I knew that, yes.”
“She won’t let me study the Descolada bodies at all. That’s what’s in some of the

locked files, anyway. She’s locked up all of Gusto’s and Cida’s discoveries about the
Descolada bodies. Nothing’s available.”
The Speaker’s eyes narrowed. “So. That’s one-third of boba. What’s the rest?” “It’s more than a third. Whatever the Descolada body is, it was able to adapt to become a human parasite ten years after the colony was founded. Ten years! If it can
adapt once, it can adapt again.” “Maybe she doesn’t think so.”
“Maybe I ought to have a right to decide that for myself.”
He put out a hand, rested it on her knee, calmed her. “I agree with you. But go on. The second reason she’s boba.”
“She won’t allow any theoretical research. No taxonomy. No evolutionary models. If I ever try to do any, she says I obviously don’t have enough to do and weighs me down with assignments until she thinks I’ve given up.”
“You haven’t given up, I take it.”
“That’s what xenobiology’s for. Oh, yes, fine that she can make a potato that makes maximum use of the ambient nutrients. Wonderful that she made a breed of amaranth that makes the colony protein self-sufficient with only ten acres under cultivation. But that’s all molecular juggling.”
“It’s survival.”
“But we don’t know anything. It’s like swimming on the top of the ocean. You get very comfortable, you can move around a little, but you don’t know if there are sharks down there! We could be surrounded by sharks and she doesn’t want to find out.”
“Third thing?”
“She won’t exchange information with the Zenadors. Period. Nothing. And that really is crazy. We can’t leave the fenced area. That means that we don’t have a single tree we can study. We know absolutely nothing about the flora and fauna of this world except what happened to be included inside the fence. One herd of cabra and a bunch of capim grass, and then a slightly different riverside ecology, and that’s everything. Nothing about the kinds of animals in the forest, no information exchange at all. We don’t tell them anything, and if they send us data we erase the files unread. It’s like she built this wall around us that nothing could get through. Nothing gets in, nothing goes out.”
“Maybe she has reasons.”
“Of course she has reasons. Crazy people always have reasons. For one thing, she hated Libo. Hated him. She wouldn’t let Miro talk about him, wouldn’t let us play with his children—China and I were best friends for years and she wouldn’t let me bring her home or go to her house after school. And when Miro apprenticed to him, she didn’t speak to him or set his place at the table for a year.”

She could see that the Speaker doubted her; he thought she was exaggerating.
“I mean one year. The day he went to the Zenador’s Station for the first time as Libo’s apprentice, he came home and she didn’t speak to him, not a word, and when he sat down to dinner she removed the plate from in front of his face, just cleaned up his silverware as if he weren’t there. He sat there through the entire meal, just looking at her. Until Father got angry at him for being rude and told him to leave the room.”
“What did he do, move out?”
“No. You don’t know Miro!” Ela laughed bitterly. “He doesn’t fight, but he doesn’t give up, either. He never answered Father’s abuse, never. In all my life I don’t remember hearing him answer anger with anger. And Mother—well, he came home every night from the Zenador’s Station and sat down where a plate was set, and every night Mother took up his plate and silverware, and he sat there till Father made him leave. Of course, within a week Father was yelling at him to get out as soon as Mother reached for his plate. Father loved it, the bastard, he thought it was great, he hated Miro so much, and finally Mother was on his side against Miro.”
“Who gave in?”
“Nobody gave in.” Ela looked at the river, realizing how terrible this all sounded, realizing that she was shaming her family in front of a stranger. But he wasn’t a stranger, was he? Because Quara was talking again, and Olhado was involved in things again, and Grego, for just a short time, Grego had been almost a normal boy. He wasn’t a stranger.
“How did it end?” asked the Speaker.
“It ended when the piggies killed Libo. That’s how much Mother hated the man. When he died she celebrated by forgiving her son. That night when Miro came home, it was after dinner was over, it was late at night. A terrible night, everybody was so afraid, the piggies seemed so awful, and everybody loved Libo so much— except Mother, of course. Mother waited up for Miro. He came in and went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, and Mother put a plate down in front of him, put food on the plate. Didn’t say a word. He ate it, too. Not a word about it. As if the year before hadn’t happened. I woke up in the middle of the night because I could
hear Miro throwing up and crying in the bathroom. I don’t think anybody else heard,
and I didn’t go to him because I didn’t think he wanted anybody to hear him. Now I think I should have gone, but I was afraid. There were such terrible things in my family.”
The Speaker nodded.
“I should have gone to him,” Ela said again. “Yes,” the Speaker said. “You should have.”
A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that she had made a

mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgment was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply speaking her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.
If I’m not that frightened girl who heard her brother in desperate pain and dared not go to him, who am I? But the water flowing through the grillwork under the fence held no answers. Maybe she couldn’t know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.
Still the Speaker lay there on the grama, looking at the clouds coming darkly out
of the west. “I’ve told you all I know,” Ela said. “I told you what was in those files—
the Descolada information. That’s all I know.” “No it isn’t,” said the Speaker.
“It is, I promise.”
“Do you mean to say that you obeyed her? That when your mother told you not to do any theoretical work, you simply turned off your mind and did what she wanted?”
Ela giggled. “She thinks so.” “But you didn’t.”
“I’m a scientist, even if she isn’t.”
“She was once,” said the Speaker. “She passed her tests when she was thirteen.” “I know,” said Ela.
“And she used to share information with Pipo before he died.” “I know that, too. It was just Libo that she hated.”
“So tell me, Ela. What have you discovered in your theoretical work?”
“I haven’t discovered any answers. But at least I know what some of the questions are. That’s a start, isn’t it? Nobody else is asking questions. It’s so funny, isn’t it? Miro says the framling xenologers are always pestering him and Ouanda for more information, more data, and yet the law forbids them from learning anything more. And yet not a single framling xenobiologist has ever asked us for any information. They all just study the biosphere on their own planets and don’t ask Mother a single question. I’m the only one asking, and nobody cares.”
“I care,” said the Speaker. “I need to know what the questions are.”
“OK, here’s one. We have a herd of cabra here inside the fence. The cabra can’t jump the fence, they don’t even touch it. I’ve examined and tagged every single cabra in the herd, and you know something? There’s not one male. They’re all

female.”
“Bad luck,” said the Speaker. “You’d think they would have left at least one male inside.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ela. “I don’t know if there are any males. In the last five years every single adult cabra has given birth at least once. And not one of them has mated.”
“Maybe they clone,” said the Speaker.
“The offspring is not genetically identical to the mother. That much research I could sneak into the lab without Mother noticing. There is some kind of gene transfer going on.”
“Hermaphrodites?”
“No. Pure female. No male sexual organs at all. Does that qualify as an important question? Somehow the cabras are having some kind of genetic exchange, without sex.”
“The theological implications alone are astounding.” “Don’t make fun.”
“Of which? Science or theology?”
“Either one. Do you want to hear more of my questions or not?” “I do,” said the Speaker.
“Then try this. The grass you’re lying on—we call it grama. All the water snakes are hatched here. Little worms so small you can hardly see them. They eat the grass down to the nub and eat each other, too, shedding skin each time they grow larger. Then all of a sudden, when the grass is completely slimy with their dead skin, all the snakes slither off into the river and they never come back out.”
He wasn’t a xenobiologist. He didn’t get the implication right away.
“The watersnakes hatch here,” she explained, “but they don’t come back out of the water to lay their eggs.”
“So they mate here before they go into the water.”
“Fine, of course, obviously. I’ve seen them mating. That’s not the problem. The problem is, why are they watersnakes!”
He still didn’t get it.
“Look, they’re completely adapted to life underwater. They have gills along with lungs, they’re superb swimmers, they have fins for guidance, they are completely evolved for adult life in the water. Why would they ever have evolved that way if they are born on land, mate on land, and reproduce on land? As far as evolution is concerned, anything that happens after you reproduce is completely irrelevant, except if you nurture your young, and the watersnakes definitely don’t nurture. Living in the water does nothing to enhance their ability to survive until they reproduce. They could slither into the water and drown and it wouldn’t matter

because reproduction is over.”
“Yes,” said the Speaker. “I see now.”
“There are little clear eggs in the water, though. I’ve never seen a water snake lay them, but since there’s no other animal in or near the river large enough to lay the eggs, it seems logical that they’re watersnake eggs. Only these big clear eggs—a centimeter across—they’re completely sterile. The nutrients are there, everything’s ready, but there’s no embryo. Nothing. Some of them have a gamete—half a set of genes in a cell, ready to combine—but not a single one was alive. And we’ve never found watersnake eggs on land. One day there’s nothing there but grama, getting riper and riper; the next day the grama stalks are crawling with baby watersnakes. Does this sound like a question worth exploring?”
“It sounds like spontaneous generation to me.”
“Yes, well, I’d like to find enough information to test some alternate hypotheses, but Mother won’t let me. I asked her about this one and she made me take over the whole amaranth testing process so I wouldn’t have time to muck around in the river. And another question. Why are there so few species here? On every other planet, even some of the nearly desert ones like Trondheim, there are thousands of different species, at least in the water. Here there’s hardly a handful, as far as I can tell. The xingadora are the only birds we’ve seen. The suckflies are the only flies. The cabra are the only ruminants eating the capim grass. Except for the cabras, the piggies are the only large animals we’ve seen. Only one species of tree. Only one species of grass on the prairie, the capim; and the only other competing plant is the tropeça, a long vine that wanders along the ground for meters and meters—the xingadora make their nests out of the vine. That’s it. The xingadora eat the suckflies and nothing
else. The suckflies eat the algae along the edge of the river. And our garbage, and that’s it. Nothing eats the xingadora. Nothing eats the cabra.”
“Very limited,” said the Speaker.
“Impossibly limited. There are ten thousand ecological niches here that are completely unfilled. There’s no way that evolution could leave this world so sparse.”
“Unless there was a disaster.”
“Exactly.”
“Something that wiped out all but a handful of species that were able to adapt.” “Yes,” said Ela. “You see? And I have proof. The cabras have a huddling behavior
pattern. When you come up on them, when they smell you, they circle with the adults facing inward, so they can kick out at the intruder and protect the young.”
“Lots of herd animals do that.”
“Protect them from what? The piggies are completely sylvan—they never hunt on the prairie. Whatever the predator was that forced the cabra to develop that behavior pattern, it’s gone. And only recently—in the last hundred thousand years, the last

million years maybe.”
“There’s no evidence of any meteor falls more recent than twenty million years,”
said the Speaker.
“No. That kind of disaster would kill off all the big animals and plants and leave hundreds of small ones, or maybe kill all land life and leave only the sea. But land, sea, all the environments were stripped, and yet some big creatures survived. No, I think it was a disease. A disease that struck across all species boundaries, that could adapt itself to any living thing. Of course, we wouldn’t notice that disease now because all the species left alive have adapted to it. It would be part of their regular life pattern. The only way we’d notice the disease—”
“Is if we caught it,” said the Speaker. “The Descolada.”
“You see? Everything comes back to the Descolada. My grandparents found a way to stop it from killing humans, but it took the best genetic manipulation. The cabra, the watersnakes, they also found ways to adapt, and I doubt it was with dietary supplements. I think it all ties in together. The weird reproductive anomalies, the emptiness of the ecosystem, it all comes back to the Descolada bodies, and Mother won’t let me examine them. She won’t let me study what they are, how they work, how they might be involved with—”
“With the piggies.”
“Well, of course, but not just them, all the animals—”
The Speaker looked like he was suppressing excitement. As if she had explained something difficult. “The night that Pipo died, she locked the files showing all her current work, and she locked the files containing all the Descolada research. Whatever she showed Pipo had to do with the Descolada bodies, and it had to do with the piggies—”
“That’s when she locked the files?” asked Ela. “Yes. Yes.”
“Then I’m right, aren’t I.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. You’ve helped me more than you know.” “Does this mean that you’ll speak Father’s death soon?”
The Speaker looked at her carefully. “You don’t want me to speak your father, really. You want me to speak your mother.”
“She isn’t dead.”
“But you know I can’t possibly speak Marcão without explaining why he married
Novinha, and why they stayed married all those years.”
“That’s right. I want all the secrets opened up. I want all the files unlocked. I
don’t want anything hidden.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” said the Speaker. “You don’t know how much pain it will cause if all the secrets come out.”

“Take a look at my family, Speaker,” she answered. “How can the truth cause any more pain than the secrets have already caused?”
He smiled at her, but it was not a mirthful smile. It was—affectionate, even pitying. “You’re right,” he said, “completely right, but you may have trouble realizing that, when you hear the whole story.”
“I know the whole story, as far as it can be known.” “That’s what everybody thinks, and nobody’s right.” “When will you have the speaking?”
“As soon as I can.”
“Then why not now? Today? What are you waiting for?” “I can’t do anything until I talk to the piggies.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you? Nobody can talk to the piggies except the Zenadors. That’s by Congressional Order. Nobody can get past that.”
“Yes,” said the Speaker. “That’s why it’s going to be hard.” “Not hard, impossible—”
“Maybe,” he said. He stood; so did she. “Ela, you’ve helped me tremendously. Taught me everything I could have hoped to learn from you. Just like Olhado did. But he didn’t like what I did with the things he taught me, and now he thinks I betrayed him.”
“He’s a kid. I’m eighteen.”
The Speaker nodded, put his hand on her shoulder, squeezed. “We’re all right then. We’re friends.”
She was almost sure there was irony in what he said. Irony and, perhaps, a plea. “Yes,” she insisted. “We’re friends. Always.”
He nodded again, turned away, pushed the boat from shore, and splashed after it through the reeds and muck. Once the boat was fairly afloat, he sat down and extended the oars, rowed, and then looked up and smiled at her. Ela smiled back, but the smile could not convey the elation she felt, the perfect relief. He had listened to everything, and understood everything, and he would make everything all right. She believed that, believed it so completely that she didn’t even notice that it was the source of her sudden happiness. She knew only that she had spent an hour with the Speaker for the Dead, and now she felt more alive than she had in years.
She retrieved her shoes, put them back on her feet, and walked home. Mother
would still be at the Biologista’s Station, but Ela didn’t want to work this afternoon. She wanted to go home and fix dinner; that was always solitary work. She hoped no one would talk with her. She hoped there’d be no problem she was expected to solve. Let this feeling linger forever.
Ela was only home for a few minutes, however, when Miro burst into the kitchen. “Ela,” he said. “Have you seen the Speaker for the Dead?”

“Yes,” she said. “On the river.” “Where on the river!”
If she told him where they had met, he’d know that it wasn’t a chance meeting. “Why?” she asked.
“Listen, Ela, this is no time to be suspicious, please. I’ve got to find him. We’ve left messages for him, the computer can’t find him—”
“He was rowing downriver, toward home. He’s probably going to be at his house soon.”
Miro rushed from the kitchen into the front room. Ela heard him tapping at the terminal. Then he came back in. “Thanks,” he said. “Don’t expect me home for dinner.”
“What’s so urgent?”
“Nothing.” It was so ridiculous, to say “nothing” when Miro was obviously agitated and hurried, that they both burst out laughing at once. “OK,” said Miro, “it isn’t nothing, it’s something, but I can’t talk about it, OK?”
“OK.” But soon all the secrets will be known, Miro.
“What I don’t understand is why he didn’t get our message. I mean, the computer was paging him. Doesn’t he wear an implant in his ear? The computer’s supposed to be able to reach him. Of course, maybe he had it turned off.”
“No,” said Ela. “The light was on.”
Miro cocked his head and squinted at her. “You didn’t see that tiny red light on his ear implant, not if he just happened to be out rowing in the middle of the river.”
“He came to shore. We talked.” “What about?”
Ela smiled. “Nothing,” she said.
He smiled back, but he looked annoyed all the same. She understood: It’s all right for you to have secrets from me, but not for me to have secrets from you, is that it, Miro?
He didn’t argue about it, though. He was in too much of a hurry. Had to go find
the Speaker, and now, and he wouldn’t be home for dinner.
Ela had a feeling the Speaker might get to talk to the piggies sooner than she had thought possible. For a moment she was elated. The waiting would be over.
Then the elation passed, and something else took its place. A sick fear. A nightmare of China’s papai, dear Libo, lying dead on the hillside, torn apart by the piggies. Only it wasn’t Libo, the way she had always imagined the grisly scene. It was Miro. No, no, it wasn’t Miro. It was the Speaker. It was the Speaker who would be tortured to death. “No,” she whispered.
Then she shivered and the nightmare left her mind; she went back to trying to spice and season the pasta so it would taste like something better than amaranth

glue.

14

RENEGADES











LEAF-EATER: Human says that when your brothers die, you bury them in the dirt, and then make your houses out of that dirt. (Laughs.)
MIRO: No. We never dig where people are buried.
LEAF-EATER: (becomes rigid with agitation): Then your dead don’t do you
any good at all!

—Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi, Dialogue Transcripts, 103:0:1969:4:13:111



Ender had thought they might have some trouble getting him through the gate, but
Ouanda palmed the box, Miro opened the gate, and the three of them walked through. No challenge. It must be as Ela had implied—no one wanted to get out of the compound, so no serious security was needed. Whether that suggested that people were content to stay in Milagre or that they were afraid of the piggies or that they hated their imprisonment so much that they had to pretend the fence wasn’t there, Ender could not begin to guess.
Both Ouanda and Miro were very tense, almost frightened. That was understandable, of course, since they were breaking Congressional rules to let him come. But Ender suspected there was more to it than that. Miro’s tension was coupled with eagerness, a sense of hurry; he might be frightened, but he wanted to see what would happen, wanted to go ahead. Ouanda held back, walked a measured step, and her coldness was not just fear but hostility as well. She did not trust him.
So Ender was not surprised when she stepped behind the large tree that grew
nearest the gate and waited for Miro and Ender to follow her. Ender saw how Miro looked annoyed for a moment, then controlled himself. His mask of uninvolvement was as cool as a human being could hope for. Ender found himself comparing Miro to the boys he had known in Battle School, sizing him up as a comrade in arms, and
thought Miro might have done well there. Ouanda, too, but for different reasons: She

held herself responsible for what was happening, even though Ender was an adult and she was much younger. She did not defer to him at all. Whatever she was afraid of, it was not authority.
“Here?” asked Miro blandly. “Or not at all,” said Ouanda.
Ender folded himself to sit at the base of the tree. “This is Rooter’s tree, isn’t it?”
he asked.
They took it calmly—of course—but their momentary pause told him that yes, he had surprised them by knowing something about a past that they surely regarded as their own. I may be a framling here, Ender said silently, but I don’t have to be an ignorant one.
“Yes,” said Ouanda. “He’s the totem they seem to get the most—direction from. Lately—the last seven or eight years. They’ve never let us see the rituals in which they talk to their ancestors, but it seems to involve drumming on the trees with heavy polished sticks. We hear them at night sometimes.”
“Sticks? Made of fallen wood?” “We assume so. Why?”
“Because they have no stone or metal tools to cut the wood—isn’t that right? Besides, if they worship the trees, they couldn’t very well cut them down.”
“We don’t think they worship the trees. It’s totemic. They stand for dead ancestors. They—plant them. With the bodies.”
Ouanda had wanted to stop, to talk or question him, but Ender had no intention of letting her believe she—or Miro, for that matter—was in charge of this expedition. Ender intended to talk to the piggies himself. He had never prepared for a speaking by letting someone else determine his agenda, and he wasn’t going to begin now. Besides, he had information they didn’t have. He knew Ela’s theory.
“And anywhere else?” he asked. “Do they plant trees at any other time?” They looked at each other. “Not that we’ve seen,” said Miro.
Ender was not merely curious. He was still thinking of what Ela had told him
about reproductive anomalies. “And do the trees also grow by themselves? Are seedlings and saplings scattered through the forest?”
Ouanda shook her head. “We really don’t have any evidence of the trees being planted anywhere but in the corpses of the dead. At least, all the trees we know of are quite old, except these three out here.”
“Four, if we don’t hurry,” said Miro.
Ah. Here was the tension between them. Miro’s sense of urgency was to save a piggy from being planted at the base of another tree. While Ouanda was concerned about something quite different. They had revealed enough of themselves to him; now he could let her interrogate him. He sat up straight and tipped his head back, to

look up into the leaves of the tree above him, the spreading branches, the pale green of photosynthesis that confirmed the convergence, the inevitability of evolution on every world. Here was the center of all of Ela’s paradoxes: evolution on this world was obviously well within the pattern that xenobiologists had seen on all the Hundred Worlds, and yet somewhere the pattern had broken down, collapsed. The
piggies were one of a few dozen species that had survived the collapse. What was the
Descolada, and how had the piggies adapted to it?
He had meant to turn the conversation, to say, Why are we here behind this tree? That would invite Ouanda’s questions. But at that moment, his head tilted back, the soft green leaves moving gently in an almost imperceptible breeze, he felt a powerful déjà vu. He had looked up into these leaves before. Recently. But that was impossible. There were no large trees on Trondheim, and none grew within the compound of Milagre. Why did the sunlight through the leaves feel so familiar to him?
“Speaker,” said Miro.
“Yes,” he said, allowing himself to be drawn out of his momentary reverie.
“We didn’t want to bring you out here.” Miro said it firmly, and with his body so oriented toward Ouanda’s that Ender understood that in fact Miro had wanted to bring him out here, but was including himself in Ouanda’s reluctance in order to show her that he was one with her. You are in love with each other, Ender said silently. And tonight, if I speak Marcão’s death, I will have to tell you that you’re brother and sister. I have to drive the wedge of the incest tabu between you. And you will surely hate me.
“You’re going to see—some—” Ouanda could not bring herself to say it. Miro smiled. “We call them Questionable Activities. They began with Pipo,
accidentally. But Libo did it deliberately, and we are continuing his work. It is careful, gradual. We didn’t just discard the Congressional rules about this. But there were crises, and we had to help. A few years ago, for instance, the piggies were running short of macios, the bark worms they mostly lived on then—”
“You’re going to tell him that first?” asked Ouanda.
Ah, thought Ender. It isn’t as important to her to maintain the illusion of solidarity as it is to him.
“He’s here partly to speak Libo’s death,” said Miro. “And this was what happened right before.”
“We have no evidence of a causal relationship—”
“Let me discover causal relationships,” said Ender quietly. “Tell me what happened when the piggies got hungry.”
“It was the wives who were hungry, they said.” Miro ignored Ouanda’s anxiety. “You see, the males gather food for the females and the young, and so there wasn’t

enough to go around. They kept hinting about how they would have to go to war. About how they would probably all die.” Miro shook his head. “They seemed almost happy about it.”
Ouanda stood up. “He hasn’t even promised. Hasn’t promised anything.” “What do you want me to promise?” asked Ender.
“Not to—let any of this—”
“Not to tell on you?” asked Ender.
She nodded, though she plainly resented the childish phrase.
“I won’t promise any such thing,” said Ender. “My business is telling.” She whirled on Miro. “You see!”
Miro in turn looked frightened. “You can’t tell. They’ll seal the gate. They’ll never let us through!”
“And you’d have to find another line of work?” asked Ender.
Ouanda looked at him with contempt. “Is that all you think xenology is? A job? That’s another intelligent species there in the woods. Ramen, not varelse, and they must be known.”
Ender did not answer, but his gaze did not leave her face.
“It’s like the Hive Queen and the Hegemon,” said Miro. “The piggies, they’re like the buggers. Only smaller, weaker, more primitive. We need to study them, yes, but that isn’t enough. You can study beasts and not care a bit when one of them drops dead or gets eaten up, but these are—they’re like us. We can’t just study their hunger, observe their destruction in war, we know them, we—”
“Love them,” said Ender. “Yes!” said Ouanda defiantly.
“But if you left them, if you weren’t here at all, they wouldn’t disappear, would they?”
“No,” said Miro.
“I told you he’d be just like the committee,” said Ouanda. Ender ignored her. “What would it cost them if you left?”
“It’s like—” Miro struggled for words. “It’s as if you could go back, to old Earth,
back before the Xenocide, before star travel, and you said to them, You can travel among the stars, you can live on other worlds. And then showed them a thousand little miracles. Lights that turn on from switches. Steel. Even simple things—pots to hold water. Agriculture. They see you, they know what you are, they know that they can become what you are, do all the things that you do. What do they say—take this away, don’t show us, let us live out our nasty, short, brutish little lives, let evolution take its course? No. They say, Give us, teach us, help us.”
“And you say, I can’t, and then you go away.”
“It’s too late!” said Miro. “Don’t you understand? They’ve already seen the

miracles! They’ve already seen us fly here. They’ve seen us be tall and strong, with magical tools and knowledge of things they never dreamed of. It’s too late to tell them good-bye and go. They know what is possible. And the longer we stay, the more they try to learn, and the more they learn, the more we see how learning helps them, and if you have any kind of compassion, if you understand that they’re— they’re—”
“Human.”
“Ramen, anyway. They’re our children, do you understand that?”
Ender smiled. “What man among you, if his son asks for bread, gives him a stone?”
Ouanda nodded. “That’s it. The Congressional rules say we have to give them stones. Even though we have so much bread.”
Ender stood up. “Well, let’s go on.”
Ouanda wasn’t ready. “You haven’t promised—” “Have you read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon?” “I have,” said Miro.
“Can you conceive of anyone choosing to call himself Speaker for the Dead, and then doing anything to harm these little ones, these pequeninos?”
Ouanda’s anxiety visibly eased, but her hostility was no less. “You’re slick, Senhor Andrew, Speaker for the Dead, you’re very clever. You remind him of the Hive Queen, and speak scripture to me out of the side of your mouth.”
“I speak to everyone in the language they understand,” said Ender. “That isn’t being slick. It’s being clear.”
“So you’ll do whatever you want.”
“As long as it doesn’t hurt the piggies.” Ouanda sneered. “In your judgment.”
“I have no one else’s judgment to use.” He walked away from her, out of the shade of the spreading limbs of the tree, heading for the woods that waited atop the hill. They followed him, running to catch up.
“I have to tell you,” said Miro. “The piggies have been asking for you. They
believe you’re the very same speaker who wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon.” “They’ve read it?”
“They’ve pretty well incorporated it into their religion, actually. They treat the printout we gave them like a holy book. And now they claim the hive queen herself is talking to them.”
Ender glanced at him. “What does she say?” he asked.
“That you’re the real Speaker. And that you’ve got the hive queen with you. And that you’re going to bring her to live with them, and teach them all about metal and
—it’s really crazy stuff. That’s the worst thing, they have such impossible

expectations of you.”
It might be simple wish fulfillment on their part, as Miro obviously believed, but Ender knew that from her cocoon the hive queen had been talking to someone. “How do they say the hive queen talks to them?”
Ouanda was on the other side of him now. “Not to them, just to Rooter. And Rooter talks to them. It’s all part of their system of totems. We’ve always tried to play along with it, and act as if we believed it.”
“How condescending of you,” said Ender.
“It’s standard anthropological practice,” said Miro.
“You’re so busy pretending to believe them, there isn’t a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.”
For a moment they lagged behind, so that he actually entered the forest alone. Then they ran to catch up with him. “We’ve devoted our lives to learning about them!” Miro said.
Ender stopped. “Not from them.” They were just inside the trees; the spotty light through the leaves made their faces unreadable. But he knew what their faces would tell him. Annoyance, resentment, contempt—how dare this unqualified stranger question their professional attitude? This is how: “You’re cultural supremacists to the core. You’ll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn’t a chance in the world you’ll notice when they have something to teach you.”
“Like what!” demanded Ouanda. “Like how to murder their greatest benefactor, torture him to death after he saved the lives of dozens of their wives and children?”
“So why do you tolerate it? Why are you here helping them after what they did?” Miro slipped in between Ouanda and Ender. Protecting her, thought Ender, or else
keeping her from revealing her weaknesses. “We’re professionals. We understand that cultural differences, which we can’t explain—”
“You understand that the piggies are animals, and you no more condemn them for murdering Libo and Pipo than you would condemn a cabra for chewing up capim.”
“That’s right,” said Miro.
Ender smiled. “And that’s why you’ll never learn anything from them. Because you think of them as animals.”
“We think of them as ramen!” said Ouanda, pushing in front of Miro. Obviously she was not interested in being protected.
“You treat them as if they were not responsible for their own actions,” said Ender. “Ramen are responsible for what they do.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Ouanda sarcastically. “Come in and put them on trial?”
“I’ll tell you this. The piggies have learned more about me from dead Rooter than

you have learned from having me with you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? That you really are the original Speaker?” Miro obviously regarded it as the most ridiculous proposition imaginable. “And I suppose you really do have a bunch of buggers up there in your starship circling Lusitania, so you can bring them down and—”
“What it means,” interrupted Ouanda, “is that this amateur thinks he’s better qualified to deal with the piggies than we are. And as far as I’m concerned that’s proof that we should never have agreed to bring him to—”
At that moment Ouanda stopped talking, for a piggy had emerged from the underbrush. Smaller than Ender had expected. Its odor, while not wholly unpleasant, was certainly stronger than Jane’s computer simulation could ever imply. “Too
late,” Ender murmured. “I think we’re already meeting.”
The piggy’s expression, if he had one, was completely unreadable to Ender. Miro and Ouanda, however, could understand something of his unspoken language. “He’s astonished,” Ouanda murmured. By telling Ender that she understood what he did not, she was putting him in his place. That was fine. Ender knew he was a novice here. He also hoped, however, that he had stirred them a little from their normal, unquestioned way of thinking. It was obvious that they were following in well- established patterns. If he was to get any real help from them, they would have to break out of those old patterns and reach new conclusions.
“Leaf-eater,” said Miro.
Leaf-eater did not take his eyes off Ender. “Speaker for the Dead,” he said. “We brought him,” said Ouanda.
Leaf-eater turned and disappeared among the bushes. “What does that mean?” Ender asked. “That he left?”
“You mean you haven’t already figured it out?” asked Ouanda.
“Whether you like it or not,” said Ender, “the piggies want to speak to me and I will speak to them. I think it will work out better if you help me understand what’s going on. Or don’t you understand it either?”
He watched them struggle with their annoyance. And then, to Ender’s relief, Miro
made a decision. Instead of answering with hauteur, he spoke simply, mildly. “No. We don’t understand it. We’re still playing guessing games with the piggies. They ask us questions, we ask them questions, and to the best of our ability neither they nor we have ever deliberately revealed a thing. We don’t even ask them the
questions whose answers we really want to know, for fear that they’ll learn too much about us from our questions.”
Ouanda was not willing to go along with Miro’s decision to cooperate. “We know more than you will in twenty years,” she said. “And you’re crazy if you think you can duplicate what we know in a ten-minute briefing in the forest.”

“I don’t need to duplicate what you know,” Ender said. “You don’t think so?” asked Ouanda.
“Because I have you with me.” Ender smiled.
Miro understood and took it as a compliment. He smiled back. “Here’s what we know, and it isn’t much. Leaf-eater probably isn’t glad to see you. There’s a schism between him and a piggy named Human. When they thought we weren’t going to bring you, Leaf-eater was sure he had won. Now his victory is taken away. Maybe we saved Human’s life.”
“And cost Leaf-eater his?” asked Ender.
“Who knows? My gut feeling is that Human’s future is on the line, but Leaf- eater’s isn’t. Leaf-eater’s just trying to make Human fail, not succeed himself.”
“But you don’t know.”
“That’s the kind of thing we never ask about.” Miro smiled again. “And you’re right. It’s so much a habit that we usually don’t even notice that we’re not asking.”
Ouanda was angry. “He’s right! He hasn’t even seen us at work, and suddenly he’s a critic of—”
But Ender had no interest in watching them squabble. He strode off in the direction Leaf-eater had gone, and let them follow as they would. And, of course, they did, leaving their argument for later. As soon as Ender knew they were walking with him, he began to question them again. “These Questionable Activities you’ve carried out,” he said as he walked. “You introduced new food into their diet?”
“We taught them how to eat the merdona root,” said Ouanda. She was crisp and businesslike, but at least she was speaking to him. She wasn’t going to let her anger keep her from being part of what was obviously going to be a crucial meeting with the piggies. “How to nullify the cyanide content by soaking it and drying it in the sun. That was the short-term solution.”
“The long-term solution was some of Mother’s cast-off amaranth adaptations,” said Miro. “She made a batch of amaranth that was so well-adapted to Lusitania that it wasn’t very good for humans. Too much Lusitanian protein structure, not enough Earthborn. But that sounded about right for the piggies. I got Ela to give me some of the cast-off specimens, without letting her know it was important.”
Don’t kid yourself about what Ela does and doesn’t know, Ender said silently.
“Libo gave it to them, taught them how to plant it. Then how to grind it, make flour, turn it into bread. Nasty-tasting stuff, but it gave them a diet directly under their control for the first time ever. They’ve been fat and sassy ever since.”
Ouanda’s voice was bitter. “But they killed Father right after the first loaves were taken to the wives.”
Ender walked in silence for a few moments, trying to make sense of this. The piggies killed Libo immediately after he saved them from starvation? Unthinkable,

and yet it happened. How could such a society evolve, killing those who contributed most to its survival? They should do the opposite—they should reward the valuable ones by enhancing their opportunity to reproduce. That’s how communities improve their chances of surviving as a group. How could the piggies possibly survive, murdering those who contribute most to their survival?
And yet there were human precedents. These children, Miro and Ouanda, with the Questionable Activities—they were better and wiser, in the long run, than the Starways committee that made the rules. But if they were caught, they would be taken from their homes to another world—already a death sentence, in a way, since everyone they knew would be dead before they could ever return—and they would be tried and punished, probably imprisoned. Neither their ideas nor their genes would propagate, and society would be impoverished by it.
Still, just because humans did it, too, did not make it sensible. Besides, the arrest and imprisonment of Miro and Ouanda, if it ever happened, would make sense if you viewed humans as a single community, and the piggies as their enemies; if you thought that anything that helped the piggies survive was somehow a menace to humanity. Then the punishment of people who enhanced the piggies’ culture would be designed, not to protect the piggies, but to keep the piggies from developing.
At that moment Ender saw clearly that the rules governing human contact with the piggies did not really function to protect the piggies at all. They functioned to guarantee human superiority and power. From that point of view, by performing
their Questionable Activities, Miro and Ouanda were traitors to the self-interest of their own species.
“Renegades,” he said aloud.
“What?” said Miro. “What did you say?”
“Renegades. Those who have denied their own people, and claimed the enemy as their own.”
“Ah,” said Miro.
“We’re not,” said Ouanda. “Yes we are,” said Miro.
“I haven’t denied my humanity!”
“The way Bishop Peregrino defines it, we denied our humanity long ago,” said
Miro.
“But the way I define it—” she began.
“The way you define it,” said Ender, “the piggies are also human. That’s why
you’re a renegade.”
“I thought you said we treated the piggies like animals!” Ouanda said. “When you don’t hold them accountable, when you don’t ask them direct
questions, when you try to deceive them, then you treat them like animals.”

“In other words,” said Miro, “when we do follow the committee rules.” “Yes,” said Ouanda, “yes, that’s right, we are renegades.”
“And you?” said Miro. “Why are you a renegade?”
“Oh, the human race kicked me out a long time ago. That’s how I got to be a speaker for the dead.”
With that they arrived at the piggies’ clearing.





Mother wasn’t at dinner and neither was Miro. That was fine with Ela. When either one of them was there, Ela was stripped of her authority; she couldn’t keep control over the younger children. And yet neither Miro nor Mother took Ela’s place, either. Nobody obeyed Ela and nobody else tried to keep order. So it was quieter, easier when they stayed away.
Not that the little ones were particularly well-behaved even now. They just resisted her less. She only had to yell at Grego a couple of times to keep him from poking and kicking Quara under the table. And today both Quim and Olhado were keeping to themselves. None of the normal bickering.
Until the meal was over.
Quim leaned back in his chair and smiled maliciously at Olhado. “So you’re the one who taught that spy how to get into Mother’s files.”
Olhado turned to Ela. “You left Quim’s face open again, Ela. You’ve got to learn to be tidier.” It was Olhado’s way of appealing, through humor, for Ela’s intervention.
Quim did not want Olhado to have any help. “Ela’s not on your side this time, Olhado. Nobody’s on your side. You helped that sneaking spy get into Mother’s
files, and that makes you as guilty as he is. He’s the devil’s servant, and so are you.” Ela saw the fury in Olhado’s body; she had a momentary image in her mind of Olhado flinging his plate at Quim. But the moment passed. Olhado calmed himself.
“I’m sorry,” Olhado said. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
He was giving in to Quim. He was admitting Quim was right.
“I hope,” said Ela, “that you mean that you’re sorry that you didn’t mean to do it. I hope you aren’t apologizing for helping the Speaker for the Dead.”
“Of course he’s apologizing for helping the spy,” said Quim. “Because,” said Ela, “we should all help Speaker all we can.”
Quim jumped to his feet, leaned across the table to shout in her face. “How can you say that! He was violating Mother’s privacy, he was finding out her secrets, he was—”
To her surprise Ela found herself also on her feet, shoving him back across the table, shouting back at him, and louder. “Mother’s secrets are the cause of half the

poison in this house! Mother’s secrets are what’s making us all sick, including her! So maybe the only way to make things right here is to steal all her secrets and get them out in the open where we can kill them!” She stopped shouting. Both Quim and Olhado stood before her, pressed against the far wall as if her words were bullets and they were being executed. Quietly, intensely, Ela went on. “As far as I’m concerned, the Speaker for the Dead is the only chance we have to become a family again. And Mother’s secrets are the only barrier standing in his way. So today I told him everything I knew about what’s in Mother’s files, because I want to give him every shred of truth that I can find.”
“Then you’re the worst traitor of all,” said Quim. His voice was trembling. He was about to cry.
“I say that helping the Speaker for the Dead is an act of loyalty,” Ela answered. “The only real treason is obeying Mother, because what she wants, what she has worked for all her life, is her own self-destruction and the destruction of this family.”
To Ela’s surprise, it was not Quim but Olhado who wept. His tear glands did not function, of course, having been removed when his eyes were installed. So there was no moistening of his eyes to warn of the onset of crying. Instead he doubled over with a sob, then sank down along the wall until he sat on the floor, his head between his knees, sobbing and sobbing. Ela understood why. Because she had told him that his love for the Speaker was not disloyal, that he had not sinned, and he believed her when she told him that, he knew that it was true.
Then she looked up from Olhado to see Mother standing in the doorway. Ela felt herself go weak inside, trembling at the thought of what Mother must have overheard.
But Mother did not seem angry. Just a little sad, and very tired. She was looking at
Olhado.
Quim’s outrage found his voice. “Did you hear what Ela was saying?” he asked. “Yes,” said Mother, never taking her eyes from Olhado. “And for all I know she
might be right.”
Ela was no less unnerved than Quim.
“Go to your rooms, children,” Mother said quietly. “I need to talk to Olhado.” Ela beckoned to Grego and Quara, who slid off their chairs and scurried to Ela’s
side, eyes wide with awe at the unusual goings-on. After all, even Father had never been able to make Olhado cry. She led them out of the kitchen, back to their bedroom. She heard Quim walk down the hall and go into his own room, slam the door, and hurl himself on his bed. And in the kitchen Olhado’s sobs faded, calmed, ended as Mother, for the first time since he lost his eyes, held him in her arms and comforted him, shedding her own silent tears into his hair as she rocked him back

and forth.





Miro did not know what to make of the Speaker for the Dead. Somehow he had always imagined a Speaker to be very much like a priest—or rather, like a priest was supposed to be. Quiet, contemplative, withdrawn from the world, carefully leaving action and decision to others. Miro had expected him to be wise.
He had not expected him to be so intrusive, so dangerous. Yes, he was wise, all right, he kept seeing past pretense, kept saying or doing outrageous things that were, when you thought about it, exactly right. It was as if he were so familiar with the human mind that he could see, right on your face, the desires so deep, the truths so well-disguised that you didn’t even know yourself that you had them in you.
How many times had Miro stood with Ouanda just like this, watching as Libo handled the piggies? But always with Libo they had understood what he was doing; they knew his technique, knew his purpose. The Speaker, however, followed lines of thought that were completely alien to Miro. Even though he wore a human shape, it made Miro wonder if Ender was really a framling—he could be as baffling as the piggies. He was as much a ramen as they were, alien but still not animal.
What did the Speaker notice? What did he see? The bow that Arrow carried? The sun-dried pot in which merdona root soaked and stank? How many of the Questionable Activities did he recognize, and how many did he think were native practices?
The piggies spread out the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. “You,” said Arrow, “you wrote this?”
“Yes,” said the Speaker for the Dead.
Miro looked at Ouanda. Her eyes danced with vindication. So the Speaker is a liar. Human interrupted. “The other two, Miro and Ouanda, they think you’re a liar.” Miro immediately looked at the Speaker, but he wasn’t glancing at them. “Of
course they do,” he said. “It never occurred to them that Rooter might have told you
the truth.”
The Speaker’s calm words disturbed Miro. Could it be true? After all, people who traveled between star systems skipped decades, often centuries in getting from one system to another. Sometimes as much as half a millennium. It wouldn’t take all that many voyages for a person to survive three thousand years. But that would be too incredible a coincidence, for the original Speaker for the Dead to come here. Except that the original Speaker for the Dead was the one who had written the Hive Queen and the Hegemon; he would be interested in the first race of ramen since the
buggers. I don’t believe it, Miro told himself, but he had to admit the possibility that it might just be true.

“Why are they so stupid?” asked Human. “Not to know the truth when they hear it?”
“They aren’t stupid,” said the Speaker. “This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe, and those we never think to question. They never thought to question the idea that the original Speaker for the Dead died three thousand years ago, even though they know how star travel prolongs life.”
“But we told them.”
“No—you told them that the hive queen told Rooter that I wrote this book.” “That’s why they should have known it was true,” said Human. “Rooter is wise,
he’s a father; he would never make a mistake.”
Miro did not smile, but he wanted to. The Speaker thought he was so clever, but now here he was, where all the important questions ended, frustrated by the piggies’ insistence that their totem trees could talk to them.
“Ah,” said Speaker. “There’s so much that we don’t understand. And so much that you don’t understand. We should tell each other more.”
Human sat down beside Arrow, sharing the position of honor with him. Arrow gave no sign of minding. “Speaker for the Dead,” said Human, “will you bring the hive queen to us?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” said the Speaker.
Again Miro looked at Ouanda. Was the Speaker insane, hinting that he could deliver what could not be delivered?
Then he remembered what the Speaker had said about questioning all our beliefs except the ones we really believed. Miro had always taken for granted what everyone knew—that all the buggers had been destroyed. But what if a hive queen had survived? What if that was how the Speaker for the Dead had been able to write his book, because he had a bugger to talk to? It was unlikely in the extreme, but it was not impossible. Miro didn’t know for sure that the last bugger had been killed. He only knew that everybody believed it, and that no one in three thousand years had produced a shred of evidence to the contrary.
But even if it was true, how could Human have known it? The simplest
explanation was that the piggies had incorporated the powerful story of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon into their religion, and were unable to grasp the idea that there were many speakers for the dead, and none of them was the author of the book; that all the buggers were dead, and no hive queen could ever come. That was the simplest explanation, the one easiest to accept. Any other explanation would force him to admit the possibility that Rooter’s totem tree somehow talked to the piggies.
“What will make you decide?” said Human. “We give gifts to the wives, to win their honor, but you are the wisest of all humans, and we have nothing that you

need.”
“You have many things that I need,” said Speaker.
“What? Can’t you make better pots than these? Truer arrows? The cape I wear is made from cabra wool—but your clothing is finer.”
“I don’t need things like that,” said Speaker. “What I need are true stories.” Human leaned closer, then let his body become rigid in excitement, in
anticipation. “O Speaker!” he said, and his voice was powerful with the importance of his words. “Will you add our story to the Hive Queen and the Hegemon?”
“I don’t know your story,” said the Speaker. “Ask us! Ask us anything!”
“How can I tell your story? I only tell the stories of the dead.”
“We are dead!” shouted Human. Miro had never seen him so agitated. “We are being murdered every day. Humans are filling up all the worlds. The ships travel through the black of night from star to star to star, filling up every empty place. Here we are, on our one little world, watching the sky fill up with humans. The humans build their stupid fence to keep us out, but that is nothing. The sky is our fence!” Human leapt upward—startlingly high, for his legs were powerful. “Look how the fence throws me back down to the ground!”
He ran at the nearest tree, bounded up the trunk, higher than Miro had ever seen him climb; he shinnied out on a limb and threw himself upward into the air. He hung there for an agonizing moment at the apex of his leap; then gravity flung him downward onto the hard ground.
Miro could hear the breath thrust out of him by the force of the blow. The Speaker immediately rushed to Human; Miro was close behind. Human wasn’t breathing.
“Is he dead?” asked Ouanda behind him.
“No!” cried a piggy in the Males’ Language. “You can’t die! No, no, no!” Miro looked; to his surprise, it was Leaf-eater. “You can’t die!”
Then Human reached up a feeble hand and touched the Speaker’s face. He inhaled, a deep gasp. And then spoke, “You see, Speaker? I would die to climb the wall that keeps us from the stars.”
In all the years that Miro had known the piggies, in all the years before, they had
never once spoken of star travel, never once asked about it. Yet now Miro realized that all the questions they did ask were oriented toward discovering the secret of starflight. The xenologers had never realized that because they knew—knew without questioning—that the piggies were so remote from the level of culture that could build starships that it would be a thousand years before such a thing could possibly be in their reach. But their craving for knowledge about metal, about motors, about flying above the ground, it was all their way of trying to find the secret of starflight.
Human slowly got to his feet, holding the Speaker’s hands. Miro realized that in

all the years he had known the piggies, never once had a piggy taken him by the hand. He felt a deep regret. And the sharp pain of jealousy.
Now that Human was clearly not injured, the other piggies crowded close around the Speaker. They did not jostle, but they wanted to be near.
“Rooter says the hive queen knows how to build starships,” said Arrow. “Rooter says the hive queen will teach us everything,” said Cups. “Metal, fire
made from rocks, houses made from black water, everything.”
Speaker raised his hands, fended off their babbling. “If you were all very thirsty, and saw that I had water, you’d all ask me for a drink. But what if I knew that the water I had was poisoned?”
“There is no poison in the ships that fly to the stars,” said Human.
“There are many paths to starflight,” said the Speaker. “Some are better than others. I’ll give you everything I can that won’t destroy you.”
“The hive queen promises!” said Human. “And so do I.”
Human lunged forward, grabbed the Speaker by the hair and ears, and pulled him face to face. Miro had never seen such an act of violence; it was what he had dreaded, the decision to murder—
“If we are ramen,” shouted Human into the Speaker’s face, “then it is ours to decide, not yours! And if we are varelse, then you might as well kill us all right now, the way you killed all the hive queen’s sisters!”
Miro was stunned. It was one thing for the piggies to decide this was the Speaker who wrote the book. But how could they reach the unbelievable conclusion that he was somehow guilty of the Xenocide? Who did they think he was, the monster Ender?
And yet there sat the Speaker for the Dead, tears running down his cheeks, his eyes closed, as if Human’s accusation had the force of truth.
Human turned his head to speak to Miro. “What is this water?” he whispered. Then he touched the Speaker’s tears.
“It’s how we show pain or grief or suffering,” Miro answered.
Mandachuva suddenly cried out, a hideous cry that Miro had never heard before, like an animal dying.
“That is how we show pain,” whispered Human.
“Ah! Ah!” cried Mandachuva. “I have seen that water before! In the eyes of Libo and Pipo I saw that water!”
One by one, and then all at once, all the other piggies took up the same cry. Miro was terrified, awed, excited all at once. He had no idea what it meant, but the piggies were showing emotions that they had concealed from the xenologers for forty-seven years.

“Are they grieving for Papa?” whispered Ouanda. Her eyes, too, glistened with excitement, and her hair was matted with the sweat of fear.
Miro said it the moment it occurred to him: “They didn’t know until this moment that Pipo and Libo were crying when they died.”
Miro had no idea what thoughts then went through Ouanda’s head; he only knew that she turned away, stumbled a few steps, fell to her hands and knees, and wept bitterly.
All in all, the coming of the Speaker had certainly stirred things up.
Miro knelt beside the Speaker, whose head was now bowed, his chin pressed against his chest. “Speaker,” Miro said. “Como pode ser? How can it be, that you are the first Speaker, and yet you are also Ender? Não pode ser.”
“She told them more than I ever thought she would,” he whispered.
“But the Speaker for the Dead, the one who wrote this book, he’s the wisest man who lived in the age of flight among the stars. While Ender was a murderer, he
killed a whole people, a beautiful race of ramen that could have taught us everything
—”
“Both human, though,” whispered the Speaker.
Human was near them now, and he spoke a couplet from the Hegemon: “Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand.”
“Human,” said the Speaker, “tell your people not to grieve for what they did in ignorance.”
“It was a terrible thing,” said Human. “It was our greatest gift.” “Tell your people to be quiet, and listen to me.”
Human shouted a few words, not in the Males’ Language, but in the Wives’ Language, the language of authority. They fell silent, then sat to hear what Speaker would say.
“I’ll do everything I can,” said the Speaker, “but first I have to know you, or how can I tell your story? I have to know you, or how can I know whether the drink is poisonous or not? And the hardest problem of all will still remain. The human race is free to love the buggers because they think the buggers all are dead. You are still alive, and so they’re still afraid of you.”
Human stood among them and gestured toward his body, as if it were a weak and
feeble thing. “Of us!”
“They’re afraid of the same thing you fear, when you look up and see the stars fill up with humans. They’re afraid that someday they’ll come to a world and find that you have got there first.”
“We don’t want to be there first,” said Human. “We want to be there too.” “Then give me time,” said the Speaker. “Teach me who you are, so that I can
teach them.”

“Anything,” said Human. He looked around at the others. “We’ll teach you anything.”
Leaf-eater stood up. He spoke in the Males’ Language, but Miro understood him. “Some things aren’t yours to teach.”
Human answered him sharply, and in Stark. “What Pipo and Libo and Ouanda and
Miro taught us wasn’t theirs to teach, either. But they taught us.”
“Their foolishness doesn’t have to be our foolishness,” Leaf-eater still spoke in
Males’ Language.
“Nor does their wisdom necessarily apply to us,” Human retorted.
Then Leaf-eater said something in Tree Language that Miro could not understand. Human made no answer, and Leaf-eater walked away.
As he left, Ouanda returned, her eyes red from crying.
Human turned back to the Speaker. “What do you want to know?” he asked. “We’ll tell you, we’ll show you, if we can.”
Speaker in turn looked at Miro and Ouanda. “What should I ask them? I know so little that I don’t know what we need to know.”
Miro looked at Ouanda.
“You have no stone or metal tools,” she said. “But your house is made of wood, and so are your bows and arrows.”
Human stood, waiting. The silence lengthened. “But what is your question?” Human finally said.
How could he have missed the connection? Miro thought.
“We humans,” said Speaker, “use tools of stone or metal to cut down trees, when we want to shape them into houses or arrows or clubs like the ones I see some of you carrying.”
It took a moment for the Speaker’s words to sink in. Then, suddenly, all the piggies were on their feet. They began running around madly, purposelessly, sometimes bumping into each other or into trees or the log houses. Most of them were silent, but now and then one of them would wail, exactly as they had cried out a few minutes ago. It was eerie, the almost silent insanity of the piggies, as if they had suddenly lost control of their bodies. All the years of careful noncommunication, refraining from telling the piggies anything, and now Speaker breached that policy and the result was this madness.
Human emerged from the chaos and threw himself to the ground in front of
Speaker. “O Speaker!” he cried loudly. “Promise that you’ll never let them cut my father Rooter with their stone and metal tools! If you want to murder someone, there are ancient brothers who will give themselves, or I will gladly die, but don’t let them kill my father!”
“Or my father!” cried the other piggies. “Or mine!”

“We would never have planted Rooter so close to the fence,” said Mandachuva, “if we had known you were—were varelse.”
Speaker raised his hands again. “Has any human cut a tree in Lusitania? Never. The law here forbids it. You have nothing to fear from us.”
There was a silence as the piggies became still. Finally Human picked himself up from the ground. “You’ve made us fear humans all the more,” he said to Speaker. “I wish you had never come to our forest.”
Ouanda’s voice rang out above his. “How can you say that after the way you murdered my father!”
Human looked at her with astonishment, unable to answer. Miro put his arm around Ouanda’s shoulders. And the Speaker for the Dead spoke into the silence. “You promised me that you’d answer all my questions. I ask you now: How do you build a house made of wood, and the bow and arrows that this one carries, and those clubs? We’ve told you the only way we know; you tell me another way, the way you do it.”
“The brother gives himself,” said Human. “I told you. We tell the ancient brother of our need, and we show him the shape, and he gives himself.”
“Can we see how it’s done?” said Ender.
Human looked around at the other piggies. “You want us to ask a brother to give himself, just so you can see it? We don’t need a new house, not for years yet, and we have all the arrows we need—”
“Show him!”
Miro turned, as the others also turned, to see Leaf-eater re-emerging from the forest. He walked purposefully into the middle of the clearing; he did not look at them, and he spoke as if he were a herald, a town crier, not caring whether anyone was listening to him or not. He spoke in the Wives’ Language, and Miro could understand only bits and pieces.
“What is he saying?” whispered the Speaker.
Miro, still kneeling beside him, translated as best he could. “He went to the wives, apparently, and they said to do whatever you asked. But it isn’t that simple, he’s telling them that—I don’t know these words—something about all of them dying. Something about brothers dying, anyway. Look at them—they aren’t afraid, any of them.”
“I don’t know what their fear looks like,” said Speaker. “I don’t know these people at all.”
“I don’t either,” said Miro. “I’ve got to hand it to you—you’ve caused more excitement here in half an hour than I’ve seen in years of coming here.”
“It’s a gift I was born with,” said the Speaker. “I’ll make you a bargain. I won’t tell anybody about your Questionable Activities. And you don’t tell anybody who I

am.”
“That’s easy,” said Miro. “I don’t believe it anyway.”
Leaf-eater’s speech ended. He immediately padded to the house and went inside. “We’ll ask for the gift of an ancient brother,” said Human. “The wives have said
so.”
So it was that Miro stood with his arm around Ouanda, and the Speaker standing
at his other side, as the piggies performed a miracle far more convincing than any of the ones that had won old Gusto and Cida their title Os Venerados.
The piggies gathered in a circle around a thick old tree at the clearing’s edge. Then, one by one, each piggy shimmied up the tree and began beating on it with a club. Soon they were all in the tree, singing and pounding out complex rhythms. “Father Tongue,” Ouanda whispered.
After only a few minutes of this the tree tilted noticeably. Immediately about half the piggies jumped down and began pushing the tree so it would fall into the open ground of the clearing. The rest began beating all the more furiously and singing all the louder.
One by one the great branches of the tree began to fall off. Immediately piggies ran out and picked them up, dragged them away from the area where the tree was meant to fall. Human carried one to the Speaker, who took it carefully, and showed it to Miro and Ouanda. The raw end, where it had been attached to the tree, was absolutely smooth. It wasn’t flat—the surface undulated slightly along an oblique angle. But there was no raggedness to it, no leaking sap, nothing to imply the
slightest violence in its separation from the tree. Miro touched his finger to it, and it was cold and smooth as marble.
Finally the tree was a single straight trunk, nude and majestic; the pale patches where branches once had grown were brightly lit by the afternoon sun. The singing reached a climax, then stopped. The tree tilted and then began a smooth and graceful fall to the earth. The ground shook and thundered when it struck, and then all was still.
Human walked to the fallen tree and began to stroke its surface, singing softly.
The bark split gradually under his hands; the crack extended itself up and down the length of the tree until the bark was split completely in half. Then many piggies took hold of it and prised it from the trunk; it came away on one side and the other, in two continuous sheets of bark. The bark was carried to the side.
“Have you ever seen them use the bark?” Speaker asked Miro. Miro shook his head. He had no words to say aloud.
Now Arrow stepped forward, singing softly. He drew his fingers up and down the trunk, as if tracing exactly the length and width of a single bow. Miro saw how lines appeared, how the naked wood creased, split, crumbled until only the bow remained,

perfect and polished and smooth, lying in a long trench in the wood.
Other piggies came forward, drawing shapes on the trunk and singing. They came away with clubs, with bows and arrows, thin-bladed knives, and thousands of strands of thin basketwood. Finally, when half the trunk was dissipated, they all stepped
back and sang together. The tree shivered and split into half a dozen long poles. The tree was entirely used up.
Human walked slowly forward and knelt by the poles, his hands gently resting on the nearest one. He tilted back his head and began to sing, a wordless melody that was the saddest sound that Miro had ever heard. The song went on and on, Human’s voice alone; only gradually did Miro realize that the other piggies were looking at him, waiting for something.
Finally Mandachuva came to him and spoke softly. “Please,” he said. “It’s only right that you should sing for the brother.”
“I don’t know how,” said Miro, feeling helpless and afraid.
“He gave his life,” said Mandachuva, “to answer your question.”
To answer my question and then raise a thousand more, Miro said silently. But he walked forward, knelt beside Human, curled his fingers around the same cold smooth pole that Human held, tilted back his head, and let his voice come out. At first weak and hesitant, unsure what melody to sing; but soon he understood the reason for the tuneless song, felt the death of the tree under his hands, and his voice became loud and strong, making agonizing disharmonies with Human’s voice that mourned the death of the tree and thanked it for its sacrifice and promised to use its death for the good of the tribe, for the good of the brothers and the wives and the children, so that all would live and thrive and prosper. That was the meaning of the song, and the meaning of the death of the tree, and when the song was finally over Miro bent until his forehead touched the wood and he said the words of extreme unction, the same words he had whispered over Libo’s corpse on the hillside five years ago.