Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  “Not really.”

  “Do you know what would happen if people realized that the Ender is going to the piggies' world? They'd crucify you!”

  “They'd crucify me here, actually, except that no one but you knows who I am. Promise not to tell.”

  “What good can you do there? He'll have been dead for decades before you arrive.”

  “My subjects are usually quite cold before I arrive to Speak for them. It's the main disadvantage of being itinerant.”

  “I never thought to lose you again.”

  “But I knew we had lost each other on the day you first loved Jakt.”

  “Then you should have told me! I wouldn't have done it!”

  “That's why I didn't tell you. But it isn't true, Val. You would have done it anyway. And I wanted you to. You've never been happier.” He put his hands astride her waist. “The Wiggin genes were crying out for continuation. I hope you have a dozen more.”

  «It's considered impolite to have more than four, greedy to go past five, and barbaric to have more than six.» Even though she joked, she was deciding how best to handle the sўndring– let the graduate assistants take it without her, cancel it altogether, or postpone it until Ender left?

  But Ender made the question moot. “Do you think your husband would let one of his boats take me out to the mareld overnight, so I can shuttle to my starship in the morning?”

  His haste was cruel. “If you hadn't needed a ship from Jakt, would you have left me a note on the computer?”

  “I made the decision five minutes ago, and came straight to you.”

  “But you already booked passage– that takes planning!”

  “Not if you buy the starship.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry? The voyage takes decades–”

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “Twenty-two years! What difference would a couple of days make? Couldn't you wait a month to see my baby born?”

  “In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you.”

  “Then don't! What are the piggies to you? The buggers are ramen enough for one man's life. Stay, marry as I've married; you opened the stars to colonization, Ender, now stay here and taste the good fruits of your labor!”

  “You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to Calvinism. My labor isn't done yet, and Trondheim isn't my home.”

  Valentine felt his words like an accusation: You rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it's not my fault, she wanted to answer– you're the one who's leaving, not me. “Remember how it was,” she said, “when we left Peter on Earth and took a decades-long voyage to our first colony, to the world you governed? It was as if he died. By the time we got there he was old, and we were still young; when we talked by ansible he had become an ancient uncle, the power-ripened Hegemon, the legendary Locke, anyone but our brother.”

  “It was an improvement, as I recall.” Ender was trying to make things lighter.

  But Valentine took his words perversely. “Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?”

  “I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died.”

  “No, Ender, it's exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me.”

  He winced. “You don't mean that.”

  “I won't write to you. Why should I? To you it'll be only a week or two. You'd arrive on Lusitania, and the computer would have twenty years of letters for you from a person you left only the week before. The first five years would be grief, the pain of losing you, the loneliness of not having you to talk to–”

  “Jakt is your husband, not me.”

  "And then what would I write? Clever, newsy little letters about the baby? She'd be five years old, six, ten, twenty and married, and you wouldn't even know her, wouldn't even care. "

  “I'll care.”

  “You won't have the chance. I won't write to you until I'm very old, Ender. Until you've gone to Lusitania and then to another place, swallowing the decades in vast gulps. Then I'll send you my memoir. I'll dedicate it to you. To Andrew, my beloved brother. I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn't stay even two weeks when I asked you.”

  “Listen to yourself, Val, and then see why I have to leave now, before you tear me to pieces.”

  “That's a sophistry you wouldn't tolerate in your students, Ender! I wouldn't have said these things if you weren't leaving like a burglar who was caught in the act! Don't turn the cause around and blame it on me!”

  He answered breathlessly, his words tumbling over each other in his hurry; he was racing to finish his speech before emotion stopped him. “No, you're right, I wanted to hurry because I have a work to do there, and every day here is marking time, and because it hurts me every time I see you and Jakt growing closer and you and me growing more distant, even though I know that it's exactly as it should be, so when I decided to go, I thought that going quickly was better, and I was right; you know I'm right. I never thought you'd hate me for it.”

  Now emotion stopped him, and he wept; so did she. “I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart tom out and carried away–”

  And that was the end of speech.

  Rav's first mate took Ender out to the mareld, the great platform on the equatorial sea, where shuttles were launched into space to rendezvous with orbiting starships. They agreed silently that Valentine wouldn't go with him. Instead, she went home with her husband and clung to him through the night. The next day she went on sўndring with her students, and cried for Ender only at night, when she thought no one could see.

  But her students saw, and the stories circulated about Professor Wiggin's great grief for the departure of her brother, the itinerant Speaker. They made of this what students always do– both more and less than reality. But one student, a girl named Plikt, realized that there was more to the story of Valentine and Andrew Wiggin than anyone had guessed.

  So she began to try to research their story, to trace backward their voyages together among the stars. When Valentine's daughter Syfte was four years old, and her son Ren was two, Plikt came to her. She was a young professor at the university by then, and she showed Valentine her published story. She had cast it as fiction, but it was true, of course, the story of the brother and sister who were the oldest people in the universe, born on Earth before any colonies had been planted on other worlds, and who then wandered from world to world, rootless, searching.

  To Valentine's relief– and, strangely, disappointment– Plikt had not uncovered the fact that Ender was the original Speaker for the Dead, and Valentine was Demosthenes. But she knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on. The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it had really been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.

  “Why did you write this?” Valentine asked her.

  “Isn't it good enough for it to be its own reason for writing?”

  The twisted answer amused Valentine, but it did not put her off. “What was my brother Andrew to you, that you've done the research to create this?”

  “That's still the wrong question,” said Plikt.

  “I seem to be failing some kind of test. Can you give me a hint what question I should ask?”

  “Don't be angry. You should be asking me why I wrote it as fiction instead of biography.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Because I discovered that Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, is Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide.”

  Even though Ender was four years gone, he was still eighteen years from his destination. Valentine felt sick with dread, thinking of what his life would be like if he was welcomed on Lusitania as the most shameworthy man in human history.

  “You don't need to be afraid, Professor Wiggin. If I meant to tell, I could have. When I found it out, I reali
zed that he had repented what he did. And such a magnificent penance. It was the Speaker for the Dead who revealed his act as an unspeakable crime– and so he took the title Speaker, like so many hundreds of others, and acted out the role of his own accuser on twenty worlds.”

  “You have found so much, Plikt, and understood so little.”

  “I understand everything! Read what I wrote– that was understanding!”

  Valentine told herself that since Plikt knew so much, she might as well know more. But it was rage, not reason, that drove Valentine to tell what she had never told anyone before. “Plikt, my brother didn't imitate the original Speaker for the Dead. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon.”

  When Plikt realized that Valentine was telling the truth, it overwhelmed her. For all these years she had regarded Andrew Wiggin as her subject matter, and the original Speaker for the Dead as her inspiration. To find that they were the same person struck her dumb for half an hour.

  Then she and Valentine talked and confided and came to trust each other until Valentine invited Plikt to be the tutor of her children and her collaborator in writing and teaching. Jakt was surprised at the new addition to the household, but in time Valentine told him the secrets Plikt had uncovered through research or provoked out of her. It became the family legend, and the children grew up hearing marvelous stories of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr.

  The years passed, the family prospered, and Valentine's pain at Ender's loss became pride in him and finally a powerful anticipation. She was eager for him to arrive on Lusitania, to solve the dilemma of the piggies, to fulfil his apparent destiny as the apostle to the ramen. It was Plikt, the good Lutheran, who taught Valentine to conceive of Ender's life in religious terms; the powerful stability of her family life and the miracle of each of her five children combined to instill in her the emotions, if not the doctrines, of faith.

  It was bound to affect the children, too. The tale of Uncle Ender, because they could never mention it to outsiders, took on supernatural overtones. Syfte, the eldest daughter, was particularly intrigued, and even when she turned twenty, and rationality overpowered the primitive, childish adoration of Uncle Ender, she was still obsessed with him. He was a creature out of legend, and yet he still lived, and on a world not impossibly far away.

  She did not tell her mother and father, but she did confide in her former tutor. “Someday, Plikt, I'll meet him. I'll meet him and help him in his work.”

  “What makes you think he'll need help? Your help, anyway?” Plikt was always a skeptic until her student had earned her belief.

  “He didn't do it alone the first time, either, did he?” And Syfte's dreams turned outward, away from the ice of Trondheim, to the distant planet where Ender Wiggin had not yet set foot. People of Lusitania, you little know what a great man will walk on your earth and take up your burden. And I will join him, in due time, even though it will be a generation late– be ready for me, too, Lusitania.

  * * *

  On his starship, Ender Wiggin had no notion of the freight of other people's dreams he carried with him. It had been only days since he left Valentine weeping on the dock. To him, Syfte had no name; she was a swelling in Valentine's belly, and nothing more. He was only beginning to feel the pain of losing Valentine– a pain she had long since got over. And his thoughts were far from his unknown nieces and nephews on a world of ice.

  It was a lonely, tortured young girl named Novinha that he thought of, wondering what the twenty-two years of his voyage were doing to her, and whom she would have become by the time they met. For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

  Chapter 6

  Olhado

  Their only intercourse with other tribes seems to be warfare, When they tell stories to each other (usually during rainy weather), it almost always deals with battles and heroes. The ending is always death, for heroes and cowards alike. If the stories are any guideline, piggies don't expect to live through war. And they never, ever, give the slightest hint of interest in the enemy females, either for rape, murder, or slavery, the traditional human treatment of the wives of fallen soldiers.

  Does this mean that there is no genetic exchange between tribes? Not at all. The genetic exchanges may be conducted by the females, who may have some system of trading genetic favors. Given the apparent utter subservience of the males to the females in piggy society, this could easily be going on without the males having any idea; or it might cause them such shame that they just won't tell us about it.

  What they want to tell us about is battle. A typical description, from my daughter Ouanda's notes of 2:21 last year, during a session of storytelling inside the log house:

  PIGGY (speaking Stark): He killed three of the brothers without taking a wound. I have never seen such a strong and fearless warrior. Blood was high on his arms, and the stick in his hand was splintered and covered with the brains of my brothers. He knew he was honorable, even though the rest of the battle went against his feeble tribe. Dei honra! Eu lhe dei! (I gave honor! I gave it to him!)

  (Other piggles click their tongues and squeak,)

  PIGGY: I hooked him to the ground. He was powerful in his struggles until I showed him the grass in my hand. Then he opened his mouth and hummed the strange songs of the far country. Nunca sera madeira na mao da gente! (He will never be a stick in our hands!) (At this point they joined in singing a song in the Wives' Language, one of the longest passages yet heard.)

  (Note that this is a common pattern among them, to speak primarily in Stark, then switch into Portuguese at the moment of climax and conclusion. On reflection, we have realized that we do the same thing, falling into our native Portuguese at the most emotional moments.)

  This account of battle may not seem so unusual until you hear enough stories to realize that they always end with the hero's death. Apparently they have no taste for light comedy.

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

  There wasn't much to do during interstellar flight. Once the course was charted and the ship had made the Park shift, the only task was to calculate how near to lightspeed the ship was traveling. The shipboard computer figured the exact velocity and then determined how long, in subjective time, the voyage should continue before making the Park shift back to a manageable sublight speed. Like a stopwatch, thought Ender. Click it on, click it off, and the race is over.

  Jane couldn't put much of herself into the shipboard brain, so Ender had the eight days of the voyage practically alone.

  The ship's computers were bright enough to help him get the hang of the switch from Spanish to Portuguese. It was easy enough to speak, but so many consonants were left out that understanding it was hard.

  Speaking Portuguese with a slow-witted computer became maddening after an hour or two each day. On every other voyage, Val had been there. Not that they had always talked– Val and Ender knew each other so well that there was often nothing to say. But without her there, Ender grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to.

  Even the hive queen was no help. Her thoughts were instantaneous; bound, not to synapses, but to philotes that were untouched by the relativistic effects of lightspeed. She passed sixteen hours for every minute of Ender's time– the differential was too great for him to receive any kind of communication from her. If she were not in a cocoon, she would have thousands of individual buggers, each doing its own task and passing to her vast memory its experiences. But now all she had were her memories, and in his eight days of captivity, Ender began to understand her eagerness to be delivered.

  By the time the eight days passed, he was doing fairly well at speaking Portuguese directly instead of translating from Spanish whenever he wanted to say anythi
ng. He was also desperate for human company– he would have been glad to discuss religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship's computer to talk to.

  The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest of the universe. Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while the starship remained truly motionless. No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe the phenomenon. It was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway; the ansible had been discovered half by accident, and along with it the Park Instantaneity Principle. It may not be comprehensible, but it worked.

  The windows of the starship instantly filled with stars as light became visible again in all directions. Someday a scientist would discover why the Park shift took almost no energy. Somewhere, Ender was certain, a terrible price was being paid for human starflight. He had dreamed once of a star winking out every time a starship made the Park shift. Jane assured him that it wasn't so, but he knew that most stars were invisible to us; a trillion of them could disappear and we'd not know it. For thousands of years we would continue to see the photons that had already been launched before the star disappeared. By the time we could see the galaxy go blank, it would be far too late to amend our course.

  “Sitting there in paranoid fantasy,” said Jane.

  “You can't read minds,” said Ender.

  “You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It's your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness.”

  “Have you alerted Lusitanian authorities that I'm coming?”

  “It's a very small colony. There's no Landing Authority because hardly anybody goes there. There's an orbiting shuttle that automatically takes people up and down to a laughable little shuttleport.”

  “No clearance from Immigration?”

  “You're a Speaker. They can't turn you away. Besides, immigration consists of the Governor, who is also the Mayor, since the city and the colony are identical. Her name is Faria Lima Maria do Bosque, called Bosquinha, and she sends you greetings and wishes you would go away, since they've got trouble enough without a prophet of agnosticism going around annoying good Catholics.”