Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  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 deja 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 Marcdo's death tonight, 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 so
ciety 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?”