Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  And now, walking along the damp, grassy hillside in the chill air, Ender– Andrew, Speaker– could think only of the piggies, who were already committing inexplicable murders, just as the buggers had carelessly done when they first visited humankind. Was it something unavoidable, when strangers met, that the meeting had to be marked with blood? The buggers had casually killed human beings, but only because they had a hive mind; to them, individual life was as precious as nail parings, and killing a human or two was simply their way of letting us know they were in the neighborhood. Could the piggies have such a reason for killing, too?

  But the voice in his ear had spoken of torture, a ritual murder similar to the execution of one of the piggies' own. The piggies were not a hive mind, they were not the buggers, and Ender Wiggin had to know why they had done what they did.

  “When did you hear about the death of the xenologer?”

  Ender turned. It was Plikt. She had followed him instead of going back to the Caves, where the students lived.

  “Then, while we spoke.” He touched his ear; implanted terminals were expensive, but they were not all that rare.

  “I checked the news just before class. There was nothing about it then. If a major story had been coming in by ansible, there would have been an alert. Unless you got the news straight from the ansible report.”

  Plikt obviously thought she had a mystery on her hands. And, in fact, she did. “Speakers have high priority access to public information,” he said.

  “Has someone asked you to Speak the death of the xenologer?”

  He shook his head. “Lusitania is under a Catholic License.”

  “That's what I mean,” she said. “They won't have a Speaker of their own there. But they still have to let a Speaker come, if someone requests it. And Trondheim is the closest world to Lusitania.”

  “Nobody's called for a Speaker.”

  Plikt tugged at his sleeve. “Why are you here?”

  “You know why I came. I Spoke the death of Wutan.”

  “I know you came here with your sister, Valentine. She's a much more popular teacher than you are– she answers questions with answers; you just answer with more questions.”

  “That's because she knows some answers.”

  “Speaker, you have to tell me. I tried to find out about you– I was curious. Your name, for one thing, where you came from. Everything's classified. Classified so deep that I can't even find out what the access level is. God himself couldn't look up your life story.”

  Ender took her by the shoulders, looked down into her eyes. “It's none of your business, that's what the access level is.”

  “You are more important than anybody guesses, Speaker,” she said. “The ansible reports to you before it reports to anybody, doesn't it? And nobody can look up information about you.”

  “Nobody has ever tried. Why you?”

  “I want to be a Speaker,” she said.

  "Go ahead then. The computer will train you. It isn't like a religion– you don't have to memorize any catechism. Now leave me alone. " He let go of her with a little shove. She staggered backward as he strode off.

  “I want to Speak for you,” she cried.

  “I'm not dead yet!” he shouted back.

  “I know you're going to Lusitania! I know you are!”

  Then you know more than I do, said Ender silently. But he trembled as he walked, even though the sun was shining and he wore three sweaters to keep out the cold. He hadn't known Plikt had so much emotion in her. Obviously she had come to identify with him. It frightened him to have this girl need something from him so desperately. He had spent years now without making any real connection with anyone but his sister Valentine– her and, of course, the dead that he Spoke. All the other people who had meant anything to him in his life were dead. He and Valentine had passed them by centuries ago, worlds ago.

  The idea of casting a root into the icy soil of Trondheim repelled him. What did Plikt want from him? It didn't matter; he wouldn't give it. How dare she demand things from him, as if he belonged to her? Ender Wiggin didn't belong to anybody. If she knew who he really was, she would loathe him as the Xenocide; or she would worship him as the Savior of Mankind– Ender remembered what it was like when people used to do that, too, and he didn't like it any better. Even now they knew him only by his role, by the name Speaker, Talman, Falante, Spieler, whatever they called the Speaker for the Dead in the language of their city or nation or world.

  He didn't want them to know him. He did not belong to them, to the human race. He had another errand, he belonged to someone else. Not human beings. Not the bloody piggies, either. Or so he thought.

  Chapter 3

  Libo

  Observed Diet: Primarily macios, the shiny worms that live among merclona vines on the bark of the trees. Sometimes they have been seen to chew capirn blades. Sometimes– accidently? –they ingest merclona leaves along with the maclos.

  We've never seen them eat anything else. Novinha analyzed all three foods– macios, capim blades, and merclona leaves– and the results were surprising. Either the peclueninos don't need many different proteins, or they're hungry all the time. Their diet is sehously lacking in many trace elements. And calcium intake is so low, we wonder whether their bones use calcium the same way ours do.

  Pure speculation: Since we can't take tissue samples, our only knowledge of piggy anatomy and physiology is what we were able to glean from our photographs of the vivisected corpse of the piggy called Rooter. Still, there are some obvious anomalies. The piggles' tongues, which are so fantastically agile that they can produce any sound we make, and a lot we can't, must have evolved for some purpose. Probing for insects in tree bark or in nests in the ground, maybe. Whether an ancient ancestral piggy did that, they certainly don't do it now. And the horny pads on their feet and inside their knees allow them to climb trees and cling by their legs alone. Why did that evolve? To escape from some predator? There is no predator on Lusitania large enough to harm them. To cling to the tree while probing for insects in the bark? That fits in with their tongues, but where are the insects? The only insects are the suckflies and the puladors, but they don't bore into the bark and the piggies don't eat them anyway. The macios are large, live on the bark's surface, and can easily be harvested by pulling down the merclona vines; they really don't even have to climb the trees.

  Libo's speculation: The tongue, the tree-climbing evolved in a different environment, with a much more varied diet, including insects. But something– an ice age? Migration? A disease? –caused the environment to change. No more barkbugs, etc. Maybe all the big predators were wiped out then. It would explain why there are so few species on Lusitania, despite the very favorable conditions. The cataclysm might have been fairly recent– half a million years ago? –so that evolution hasn't had a chance to differentiate much yet.

  It's a tempting hypothesis, since there's no obvious reason in the present environment for piggles to have evolved at all. There's no competition for them, The ecological niche they occupy could be filled by gophers. Why would intelligence ever be an adaptive trait? But inventing a cataclysm to explain why the piggies have such a boring, non-nutritious diet is probably overkill. Ockham's razor cuts this to ribbons.

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

  As soon as Mayor Bosquinha arrived at the Zenador's Station, matters slipped out of Libo's and Novinha's control. Bosquinha was accustomed to taking command, and her attitude did not leave much opportunity for protest, or even for consideration. “You wait here,” she said to Libo almost as soon as she had grasped the situation. “As soon as I got your call, I sent the Arbiter to tell your mother.”

  “We have to bring his body in,” said Libo.

  “I also called some of the men who live nearby to help with that,” she said. “And Bishop Peregrino is preparing a place for him in the Cathedral graveyard.”
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  “I want to be there,” insisted Libo.

  “You understand, Libo, we have to take pictures, in detail.”

  “I was the one who told you we have to do that, for the report to the Starways Committee.”

  “But you should not be there, Libo.” Bosquinha's voice was authoritative. “Besides, we must have your report. We have to notify Starways as quickly as possible. Are you up to writing it now, while it's fresh in your mind?”

  She was right, of course. Only Libo and Novinha could write firsthand reports, and the sooner they wrote them, the better. “I can do it,” said Libo.

  “And you, Novinha, your observations also. Write your reports separately, without consultation. The Hundred Worlds are waiting.”

  The computer had already been alerted, and their reports went out by ansible even as they wrote them, mistakes and corrections and all. On all the Hundred Worlds the people most involved in xenology read each word as Libo or Novinha typed it in. Many others were given instantaneous computer-written summaries of what had happened. Twenty-two light-years away, Andrew Wiggin learned that Xenologer Jodo Figueira “Pipo” Alvarez had been murdered by the piggies, and told his students about it even before the men had brought Pipo's body through the gate into Milagre.

  His report done, Libo was at once surrounded by authority. Novinha watched with increasing anguish as she saw the incapability of the leaders of Lusitania, how they only intensified Libo's pain. Bishop Peregrino was the worst; his idea of comfort was to tell Libo that in all likelihood, the piggies were actually animals, without souls, and so his father had been torn apart by wild beasts, not murdered. Novinha almost shouted at him, Does that mean that Pipo's life work was nothing but studying beasts? And his death, instead of being murder, was an act of God? But for Libo's sake she restrained herself; he sat in the Bishop's presence, nodding and, in the end, getting rid of him by sufferance far more quickly than Novinha could ever have done by argument.

  Dom Crist o of the Monastery was more helpful, asking intelligent questions about the events of the day, which let Libo and Novinha be analytical, unemotional as they answered. However, Novinha soon withdrew from answering. Most people were asking why the piggies had done such a thing; Dom Crist o was asking what Pipo might have done recently to trigger his murder. Novinha knew perfectly well what Pipo had done– he had told the piggies the secret he discovered in Novinha's simulation. But she did not speak of this, and Libo seemed to have forgotten what she had hurriedly told him a few hours ago as they were leaving to go searching for Pipo. He did not even glance toward the simulation. Novinha was content with that; her greatest anxiety was that he would remember.

  Dom Crist o's questions were interrupted when the Mayor came back with several of the men who had helped retrieve the corpse. They were soaked to the skin despite their plastic raincoats, and spattered with mud; mercifully, any blood must have been washed away by the rain. They all seemed vaguely apologetic and even worshipful, nodding their heads to Libo, almost bowing. It occurred to Novinha that their deference wasn't just the normal wariness people always show toward those whom death had so closely touched.

  One of the men said to Libo, “You're Zenador now, aren't you?” and there it was, in words. The Zenador had no official authority in Milagre, but he had prestige– his work was the whole reason for the colony's existence, wasn't it?

  Libo was not a boy anymore; he had decisions to make, he had prestige, he had moved from the fringe of the colony's life to its very center.

  Novinha felt control of her life slip away. This is not how things are supposed to be. I'm supposed to continue here for years ahead, learning from Pipo, with Libo as my fellow student; that's the pattern of life. Since she was already the colony's zenobiologista, she also had an honored adult niche to fill. She wasn't jealous of Libo, she just wanted to remain a child with him for a while. Forever, in fact.

  But Libo could not be her fellow student, could not be her fellow anything. She saw with sudden clarity how everyone in the room focused on Libo, what he said, how he felt, what he planned to do now. “We'll not harm the piggies,” he said, “or even call it murder. We don't know what Father did to provoke them, I'll try to understand that later, what matters now is that whatever they did undoubtedly seemed right to them. We're the strangers here, we must have violated some– taboo, some law– but Father was always prepared for this, he always knew it was a possibility. Tell them that he died with the honor of a soldier in the field, a pilot in his ship, he died doing his job.”

  Ah, Libo, you silent boy, you have found such eloquence now that you can't be a mere boy anymore. Novinha felt a redoubling of her grief. She had to look away from Libo, look anywhere. And where she looked was into the eyes of the only other person in the room who was not watching Libo. The man was very tall, but very young– younger than she was, she realized, for she knew him: he had been a student in the class below her. She had gone before Dona Crist once, to defend him. Marcos Ribeira, that was his name, but they had always called him Marc o, because he was so big. Big and dumb, they said, calling him also simply C o, the crude word for dog. She had seen the sullen anger in his eyes, and once she had seen him, goaded beyond endurance, lash out and strike down one of his tormentors. His victim was in a shoulder cast for much of a year.

  Of course they accused Marc o of having done it without provocation– that's the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back. But Novinha didn't belong to the group of children– she was as isolated as Marc o, though not as helpless– and so she had no loyalty to stop her from telling the truth. It was part of her training to Speak for the piggies, she thought. Marc o himself meant nothing to her. It never occurred to her that the incident might have been important to him, that he might have remembered her as the one person who ever stood up for him in his continuous war with the other children. She hadn't seen or thought of him in the years since she became xenobiologist.

  Now here he was, stained with the mud of Pipo's death scene, his face looking even more haunted and bestial than ever with his hair plastered by rain and sweat over his face and ears. And what was he looking at? His eyes were only for her, even as she frankly stared at him. Why are you watching me? she asked silently. Because I'm hungry, said his animal eyes. But no, no, that was her fear, that was her vision of the murderous piggies. Marc o is nothing to me, and no matter what he might think, I am nothing to him.

  Yet she had a flash of insight, just for a moment. Her action in defending Marc o meant one thing to him and something quite different to her; it was so different that it was not even the same event. Her mind connected this with the piggies' murder of Pipo, and it seemed very important, it seemed to verge on explaining what had happened, but then the thought slipped away in a flurry of conversation and activity as the Bishop led the men off again, heading for the graveyard. Coffins were not used for burial here, where for the piggies' sake it was forbidden to cut trees. So Pipo's body was to be buried at once, though the graveside funeral would be held no sooner than tomorrow, and probably later; many people would want to gather for the Zenador's requiem mass. Marc o and the other men trooped off into the storm, leaving Novinha and Libo to deal with all the people who thought they had urgent business to attend to in the aftermath of Pipo's death. Self-important strangers wandered in and out, making decisions that Novinha did not understand and Libo did not seem to care about.

  Until finally it was the Arbiter standing by Libo, his hand on the boy's shoulder. “You will, of course, stay with us,” said the Arbiter. “Tonight at least.”

  Why your house, Arbiter? thought Novinha. You're nobody to us, we've never brought a case before you, who are you to decide this? Does Pipo's death mean that we're suddenly little children who can't decide anything?

  “I'll stay with my mother,” said Libo.

  The Arbiter looked at him in surprise– the mere idea of a child resisting his will seemed to be completely outside the real
m of his experience. Novinha knew that this was not so, of course. His daughter Cleopatra, several years younger than Novinha, had worked hard to earn her nickname, Bruxinha– little witch. So how could he not know that children had minds of their own, and resisted taming?

  But the surprise was not what Novinha had assumed. “I thought you realized that your mother is also staying with my family for a time,” said the Arbiter. “These events have upset her, of course, and she should not have to think about household duties, or be in a house that reminds her of who is not there with her. She is with us, and your brothers and sisters, and they need you there. Your older brother Jodo is with them, of course, but he has a wife and child of his own now, so you're the one who can stay and be depended on.”