Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  Speak. Novinha's more perceptive than most– she already hates me before I tell the truth."

  “You're as blind about yourself as anyone else, Speaker,” said Jane. “Promise me that when you die, you'll let me Speak your death. Have I got things to say.”

  “Keep them to yourself,” said Ender wearily. “You're even worse at this business than I am.”

  He began his list of questions to be resolved.

  1. Why did Novinha marry Marc o in the first place?

  2. Why did Marc o hate his children?

  3. Why does Novinha hate herself?

  4. Why did Miro call me to Speak Libo's death?

  5. Why did Ela call me to Speak her father's death?

  6. Why did Novinha change her mind about my Speaking Pipo's death?

  7. What was the immediate cause of Marc o's death?

  He stopped with the seventh question. It would be easy to answer it; a merely clinical matter. So that was where he would begin.

  The physician who autopsied Marc o was called Navio, which meant «ship.»

  “Not for my size,” he said, laughing. “Or because I'm much of a swimmer. My full name is Enrique o Navigador Caronada. You can bet I'm glad they took my nickname from 'shipmaster' rather than from 'little cannon.' Too many obscene possibilities in that one.”

  Ender was not deceived by his joviality. Navio was a good Catholic and he obeyed his bishop as well as anyone. He was determined to keep Ender from learning anything, though he'd not be uncheerful about it.

  “There are two ways I can get the answers to my questions,” Ender said quietly. “I can ask you, and you can tell me truthfully. Or I can submit a petition to the Starways Congress for your records to be opened to me. The ansible charges are very high, and since the petition is a routine one, and your resistance to it is contrary to law, the cost will be deducted from your colony's already straitened funds, along with a double-the-cost penalty and a reprimand for you.”

  Navio's smile gradually disappeared as Ender spoke. He answered coldly. “Of course I'll answer your questions,” he said.

  “There's no 'of course' about it,” said Ender. “Your bishop counseled the people of Milagre to carry out an unprovoked and unjustified boycott of a legally called-for minister. You would do everyone a favor if you would inform them that if this cheerful noncooperation continues, I will petition for my status to be changed from minister to inquisitor. I assure you that I have a very good reputation with the Starways Congress, and my petition will be successful.”

  Navio knew exactly what that meant. As an inquisitor, Ender would have congressional authority to revoke the colony's Catholic license on the grounds of religious persecution. It would cause a terrible upheaval among the Lusitanians, not least because the Bishop would be summarily dismissed from his position and sent to the Vatican for discipline.

  “Why would you do such a thing when you know we don't want you here?” said Navio.

  “Someone wanted me here or I wouldn't have come,” said Ender. “You may not like the law when it annoys you, but it protects many a Catholic on worlds where another creed is licensed.”

  Navio drummed his fingers on his desk. “What are your questions, Speaker,” he said. “Let's get this done.”

  “It's simple enough, to start with, at least. What was the proximate cause of the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira?”

  «Marc o!» said Navio. «You couldn't possibly have been summoned to Speak his death, he only passed away a few weeks ago–»

  «I have been asked to Speak several deaths, Dom Navio, and I choose to begin with Marc o's.»

  Navio grimaced. “What if I ask for proof of your authority?” Jane whispered in Ender's ear. “Let's dazzle the dear boy.” Immediately, Navio's terminal came alive with official documents, while one of Jane's most authoritative voices declared, “Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, has accepted the call for an explanation of the life and death of Marcos Maria Ribeira, of the city of Milagre, Lusitania Colony.”

  It was not the document that impressed Navio, however. It was the fact that he had not actually made the request, or even logged on to his terminal. Navio knew at once that the computer had been activated through the jewel in the Speaker's ear, but it meant that a very high-level logic routine was shadowing the Speaker and enforcing compliance with his requests. No one on Lusitania, not even Bosquinha herself, had ever had authority to do that. Whatever this Speaker was, Navio concluded, he's a bigger fish than even Bishop Peregrino can hope to fry.

  “All right,” Navio said, forcing a laugh. Now, apparently, he remembered how to be jovial again. “I meant to help you anyway– the Bishop's paranoia doesn't afflict everyone in Milagre, you know.”

  Ender smiled back at him, taking his hypocrisy at face value.

  “Marcos Ribeira died of a congenital defect.” He rattled off a long pseudo-Latin name. “You've never heard of it because it's quite rare, and is passed on only through the genes. Beginning at the onset of puberty, in most cases, it involves the gradual replacement of exocrine and endocrine glandular tissues with lipidous cells. What that means is that bit by bit over the years, the adrenal glands, the pituitary, the liver, the testes, the thyroid, and so on, are all replaced by large agglomerations of fat cells.”

  “Always fatal? Irreversible?”

  «Oh, yes. Actually, Marc o survived ten years longer than usual. His case was remarkable in several ways. In every other recorded case– and admittedly there aren't that many– the disease attacks the testicles first, rendering the victim sterile and, in most cases, impotent. With six healthy children, it's obvious that Marcos Ribeira's testes were the last of his glands to be affected. Once they were attacked, however, progress must have been unusually fast– the testes were completely replaced with fat cells, even though much of his liver and thyroid were still functioning.»

  “What killed him in the end?”

  “The pituitary and the adrenals weren't functioning. He was a walking dead man. He just fell down in one of the bars, in the middle of some ribald song, as I heard.”

  As always, Ender's mind automatically found seeming contradictions. “How does a hereditary disease get passed on if it makes its victims sterile?”

  «It's usually passed through collateral lines. One child will die of it; his brothers and sisters won't manifest the disease at all, but they'll pass on the tendency to their children. Naturally, though, we were afraid that Marc o, having children, would pass on the defective gene to all of them.»

  “You tested them?”

  "Not a one had any of the genetic deformations. You can bet that Dona Ivanova was looking over my shoulder the whole time. We zeroed in immediately on the problem genes and cleared each of the children, bim bim bim, just like that. "

  “None of them had it? Not even a recessive tendency?”

  «Graqas a Deus,» said the doctor. «Who would ever have married them if they had had the poisoned genes? As it was, I can't understand how Marc o's own genetic defect went undiscovered.»

  “Are genetic scans routine here?”

  «Oh, no, not at all. But we had a great plague some thirty years ago. Dona Ivanova's own parents, the Venerado Gusto and the Venerada Cida, they conducted a detailed genetic scan of every man, woman, and child in the colony. It's how they found the cure. And their computer comparisons would definitely have turned up this particular defect– that's how I found out what it was when Marc o died. I'd never heard of the disease, but the computer had it on file.»

  “And Os Venerados didn't find it?”

  “Apparently not, or they would surely have told Marcos. And even if they hadn't told him, Ivanova herself should have found it.”

  “Maybe she did,” said Ender.

  Navio laughed aloud. «Impossible. No woman in her right mind would deliberately bear the children of a man with a genetic defect like that. Marc o was surely in constant agony for many years. You don't wish that on your own children. No, Ivanova may be eccentric, but
she's not insane.»

  Jane was quite amused. When Ender got home, she made her image appear above his terminal just so she could laugh uproariously.

  “He can't help it,” said Ender. “In a devout Catholic colony like this, dealing with the Biologista, one of the most respected people here, of course he doesn't think to question his basic premises.”

  “Don't apologize for him,” said Jane. “I don't expect wetware to work as logically as software. But you can't ask me not to be amused.”

  «In a way it's rather sweet of him,» said Ender. «He'd rather believe that Marc o's disease was different from every other recorded case. He'd rather believe that somehow Ivanova's parents didn't notice that Marcos had the disease, and so she married him in ignorance, even though Ockham's razor decrees that we believe the simplest explanation: Maredo's decay progressed like every other, testes first, and all of Novinha's children were sired by someone else. No wonder Marc o was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping with another man. It was probably part of their bargain in the beginning that she would not be faithful to him. But six children is rather rubbing his nose in it.»

  “The delicious contradictions of religious life,” said Jane. “She deliberately set out to commit adultery– but she would never dream of using a contraceptive.”

  “Have you scanned the children's genetic pattern to find the most likely father?”

  “You mean you haven't guessed?”

  “I've guessed, but I want to make sure the clinical evidence doesn't disprove the obvious answer.”

  “It was Libo, of course. What a dog! He sired six children on Novinha, and four more on his own wife.”

  "What I don't understand," said Ender, "is why Novinha didn't marry Libo in the first place. It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then to go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning. "

  “Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.”

  * * *

  Miro carefully picked his way through the forest. He recognized trees now and then, or thought he did– no human could ever have the piggies' knack for naming every single tree in the woods. But then, humans didn't worship the trees as totems of their ancestors, either.

  Miro had deliberately chosen a longer way to reach the piggies' log house. Ever since Libo accepted Miro as a second apprentice, to work with him alongside Libo's daughter, Ouanda, he had taught them that they must never form a path leading from Milagre to the piggies' home. Someday, Libo warned them, there may be trouble between human and piggy; we will make no path to guide a pogrom to its destination. So today Miro walked the far side of the creek, along the top of the high bank.

  Sure enough, a piggy soon appeared in the near distance, watching him. That was how Libo reasoned out, years ago, that the females must live somewhere in that direction; the males always kept a watch on the Zenadors when they went too near. And, as Libo had insisted, Miro made no effort to move any farther in the forbidden direction. His curiosity dampened whenever he remembered what Libo's body looked like when he and Ouanda found it. Libo had not been quite dead yet; his eyes were open and moving. He only died when both Miro and Ouanda knelt at either side of him, each holding a blood-covered hand. Ah, Libo, your blood still pumped when your heart lay naked in your open chest. If only you could have spoken to us, one word to tell us why they killed you.

  The bank became low again, and Miro [note: original text says “Libo,” probable accident] crossed the brook by running lightly on the moss-covered stones. In a few more minutes he was there, coming into the small clearing from the east.

  Ouanda was already there, teaching them how to churn the cream of cabra milk to make a sort of butter. She had been experimenting with the process for the past several weeks before she got it right. It would have been easier if she could have had some help from Mother, or even Ela, since they knew so much more about the chemical properties of cabra milk, but cooperating with a Biologista was out of the question. Os Venerados had discovered thirty years ago that cabra milk was nutritionally useless to humans. Therefore any investigation of how to process it for storage could only be for the piggies' benefit. Miro and Ouanda could not risk anything that might let it be known they were breaking the law and actively intervening in the piggies' way of life.

  The younger piggies took to butter-churning with delightthey had made a dance out of kneading the cabra bladders and were singing now, a nonsensical song that mixed Stark, Portuguese, and two of the piggies' own languages into a hopeless but hilarious muddle. Miro tried to sort out the languages. He recognized Males' Language, of course, and also a few fragments of Fathers' Language, the language they used to speak to their totem trees; Miro recognized it only by its sound; even Libo hadn't been able to translate a single word. It all sounded like ms and bs and gs, with no detectable difference among the vowels.

  The piggy who had been shadowing Miro in the woods now emerged and greeted the others with a loud hooting sound. The dancing went on, but the song stopped immediately. Mandachuva detached himself from the group around Ouanda and came to meet Miro at the clearing's edge.

  "Welcome, I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire." That was, of course, an extravagantly precise translation of Miro's name into Stark. Mandachuva loved translating names back and forth between Portuguese and Stark, even though Miro and Ouanda had both explained that their names didn't really mean anything at all, and it was only coincidence if they sounded like words. But Mandachuva enjoyed his language games, as so many piggies did, and so Miro answered to I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire, just as Ouanda patiently answered to Vaga, which was Portuguese for "wander," the Stark word that most sounded like "Ouanda. "

  Mandachuva was a puzzling case. He was the oldest of the piggies. Pipo had known him, and wrote of him as though he were the most prestigious of the piggies. Libo, too, seemed to think of him as a leader. Wasn't his name a slangy Portuguese term for “boss”? Yet to Miro and Ouanda, it seemed as though Mandachuva was the least powerful and prestigious of the piggies. No one seemed to consult him on anything; he was the one piggy who always had free time to converse with the Zenadors, because he was almost never engaged in an important task.

  Still, he was the piggy who gave the most information to the Zenadors. Miro couldn't begin to guess whether he had lost his prestige because of his information-sharing, or shared information with the humans to make up for his low prestige among the piggies. It didn't even matter. The fact was that Miro liked Mandachuva. He thought of the old piggy as his friend.

  “Has the woman forced you to eat that foul-smelling paste?” asked Miro.

  “Pure garbage, she says. Even the baby cabras cry when they have to suck a teat.” Mandachuva giggled.

  “If you leave that as a gift for the ladyfolk, they'll never speak to you again.”

  “Still, we must, we must,” said Mandachuva, sighing. “They have to see everything, the prying macios!”

  Ah, yes, the bafflement of the females. Sometimes the piggies spoke of them with sincere, elaborate respect, almost awe, as if they were gods. Then a piggy would say something as crude as to call them “macios,” the worms that slithered on the bark of trees. The Zenadors couldn't even ask about them– the piggies would never answer questions about the females. There had been a time– a long time– when the piggies didn't even mention the existence of females at all. Libo always hinted darkly that the change had something to do with Pipo's death. Before he died, the mention of females was tabu, except with reverence at rare moments of great holiness; afterward, the piggies also showed this wistful, melancholy way of joking about “the wives.” But the Zenadors could never get an answer to a question about the females. The piggies made it plain that the females were none of their business.

  A whistle
came from the group around Ouanda. Mandachuva immediately began pulling Miro toward the group. “Arrow wants to talk to you.”

  Miro came and sat beside Ouanda. She did not look at him-they had learned long ago that it made the piggies very uncomfortable when they had to watch male and female humans in direct conversation, or even having eye contact with each other. They would talk with Ouanda alone, but whenever Miro was present they would not speak to her or

  endure it if she spoke to them. Sometimes it drove Miro crazy that she couldn't so much as wink at him in front of the piggies. He could feel her body as if she were giving off heat like a small star.

  “My friend,” said Arrow. “I have a great gift to ask of you.”

  Miro could hear Ouanda tensing slightly beside him. The piggies did not often ask for anything, and it always caused difficulty when they did.

  “Will you hear me?”

  Miro nodded slowly. “But remember that among humans I am nothing, with no power.” Libo had discovered that the piggies were not at all insulted to think that the humans sent powerless delegates among them, while the image of impotence helped them explain the strict limitations on what the Zenadors could do.

  “This is not a request that comes from us, in our silly and stupid conversations around the night fire.”

  “I only wish I could hear the wisdom that you call silliness,” said Miro, as he always did.

  “It was Rooter, speaking out of his tree, who said this.”

  Miro sighed silently. He liked dealing with piggy religion as little as he liked his own people's Catholicism. In both cases he had to pretend to take the most outrageous beliefs seriously. Whenever anything particularly daring or importunate was said, the piggies always ascribed it to one ancestor or another, whose spirit dwelt in one of the ubiquitous trees. It was only in the last few years, beginning not long before Libo's death, that they started singling out Rooter as the source of most of the troublesome ideas. It was ironic that a piggy they had executed as a rebel was now treated with such respect in their ancestor-worship.