Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  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 Leafeater 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 to 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 werewere 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. “Tree Language,” 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 pried 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.

  Chapter 15

  Speaking

  HUMAN: Why don't any of the other humans ever come see us?

  MIRO: We're the only ones allowed to come through the gate.

  HUMAN: Why don't they just climb over the fence?

  MIRO: Haven't any of you ever touched the fence? (Human does not answer.) It's very painful to touch the fence. To pass over the fence would be like every part of your body hurting as bad as possible, all at once.

  HUMAN: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

  – Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi, Dialogue Transcripts, 103:0:1970:1:1:5

  The sun was only an hour from the horizon when Mayor Bosquinha climbed the stairs to Bishop Peregrino's private office in the Cathedral. Dom and Dona Cristaes were already there, looking grave. Bishop Peregrino, however, looked pleased with himself. He always enjoyed it when all the political and religious leadership of Milagre was gathered under his roof. Never mind that Bosquinha was the one who called the meeting, and then she offered to have it at the Cathedral because she was the one with the skimmer. Peregrino liked the feeling that he was somehow the master of Lusitania Colony. Well, by the end of this meeting it would be plain to them all that no one in this room was the master of anything. Bosquinha greeted them all. She did not sit down in the offered chair, however. Instead she sat before the Bishop's own terminal, logged in, and ran the program she had prepared. In the air above the terminal there appeared several layers of tiny cubes. The highest layer had only a few cubes; most of the layers had many, many more. More than half the layers, starting with the highest, were colored red; the rest were blue.

  “Very pretty,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  Bosquinha looked over at Dom Cristao. “Do you recognize the model?”

  He shook his head. “But I think I know what this meeting is about.”

  Dona Crist leaned forward on her chair. «Is there any safe place where we can hide the things we want to keep?»

  Bishop Peregrino's expression of detached amusement vanished from his face. “I don't know what this meeting is about.”

  Bosquinha turned around on her stool to face him. “I was very young when I was appointed to be Governor of the new Lusitania Colony. It was a great honor to be chosen, a great trust. I had studied government of communities and social systems since my childhood, and I had done well in my short career in Oporto. What the committee apparently overlooked was the fact that I was already suspicious, deceptive, and chauvinistic.”

  “These are virtues of yours that we have all come to admire,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  Bosquinha smiled. “My chauvinism meant that as soon as Lusitania Colony was mine, I became more loyal to the interests of Lusitania than to the interests of the Hundred Worlds or Starways Congress. My deceptiveness led me to pretend to the committee that on the contrary, I had the best interests of Congress at heart at all times. And my suspicion led me to believe that Congress was not likely to give Lusitania anything remotely like independent and equal status among the Hundred Worlds.”

  “Of course not,” said Bishop Peregrino. “We are a colony.”

  “We are not a colony,” said Bosquinha. “We are an experiment. I examined our charter and license and all the Congressional Orders pertaining to us, and I discovered that the normal privacy laws did not apply to us. I discovered that the committee had the power of unlimited access to all the memory files of every person and institution on Lusitania.”

  The Bishop began to look angry. “Do you mean that the committee has the right to look at the confidential files of the Church?”

  “Ah,” said Bosquinha. “A fellow chauvinist.”

  “The Church has some rights under the Starways Code.”

  “Don't be angry with me.”

  “You never told me.”

  “If I had told you, you would have protested, and they would have pretended to back down, and then I couldn't have done what I did.”

  “Which is?”

  “This program. It monitors all ansible-initiated accesses to any files in Lusitania Colony.”

  Dom Cristao chuckled. “You're not supposed to do that.”

  “I know. As I said, I have many secret vices. But my program never found any major intrusion– oh, a few files each time the piggies killed one of our xenologers, that was to be expected– but nothing major. Until four days ago.”

  “When the Speaker for the Dead arrived,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  Bosquinha was amused that the Bishop obviously regarded the Speaker's arrival as such a landmark date that he instantly made such a connection. "Three days ago," said Bosquinha, "a nondestructive scan was initiated by ansible. It followed an interesting pattern. " She turned to the terminal and changed the display. Now it showed accesses primarily in high-level areas, and limited to only one region of the display. "It accessed everything to do with the xenologers and xenobiologists of Milagre. It ignored all security routines as if they didn't exist. Everything they discovered, and everything to do with their personal lives. And yes, Bishop Peregrino, I believed at the time and I believe today that this had to do with the Speaker."

  “Surely he has no authority with Starways Congress,” said the Bishop.

  Dom Cristao nodded wisely. “San Angelo once wrote– in his private journals, which no one but the Children of the Mind ever read–”

  The Bishop turned on him with glee. “So the Children of the Mind do have secret writings of San Angelo!”

  «Not secret,» said Dona Crist . «Merely boring. Anyone can read the journals, but we're the only ones who bother.»

  «What he wrote,» said Dom Crist o, «was that Speaker Andrew is older than we know. Older than Starways Congress, and in his own way perhaps more powerful.»

  Bishop Peregrino snorted. “He's a boy. Can't be forty years old yet.”

  “Your stupid rivalries are wasting time,” said Bosquinha sharply. “I called this meeting because of an emergency. As a courtesy to you, because I have already acted for the benefit of the government of Lusitania.”

  The others fell silent.

  Bosquinha returned the terminal to the original display. “This morning my program alerted me for a second time. Another systematic ansible access, only this time it was not the selective nondestructive access of three days ago. This time it is reading everything at data-transfer speed, which implies that all our files are being copied into offworld computers. Then the directories are rewritten so that a single ansible-initiated command will completely destroy every single file in our computer memories.”

  Bosquinha could see that Bishop Peregrino was surprised– a
nd the Children of the Mind were not.

  “Why?” said Bishop Peregrino. “To destroy all our files– this is what you do to a nation or a world that is– in rebellion, that you wish to destroy, that you–”

  “I see,” said Bosquinha to the Children of the Mind, “that you also were chauvinistic and suspicious.”

  «Much more narrowly than you, I'm afraid,» said Dom Crist o. «But we also detected the intrusions. We of course copied all our records– at great expense– to the monasteries of the Children of the Mind on other worlds, and they will try to restore our files after they are stripped. However, if we are being treated as a rebellious colony, I doubt that such a restoration will be permitted. So we are also making paper copies of the most vital information. There is no hope of printing everything, but we think we may be able to print out enough to get by. So that our work isn't utterly destroyed.»

  “You knew this?” said the Bishop. “And you didn't tell me?”

  “Forgive me, Bishop Peregrino, but it did not occur to us that you would not have detected this yourselves.”

  “And you also don't believe we do any work that is important enough to be worth printing out to save!”

  “Enough!” said Mayor Bosquinha. “Printouts can't save more than a tiny percentage– there aren't enough printers in Lusitania to make a dent in the problem. We couldn't even maintain basic services. I don't think we have more than an hour left before the copying is complete and they are able to wipe out our memory. But even if we began this morning, when the intrusion started, we could not have printed out more than a hundredth of one percent of the files that we access every day. Our fragility, our vulnerability is complete.”

  “So we're helpless,” said the Bishop.

  “No. But I wanted to make clear to you the extremity of our situation, so that you would accept the only alternative. It will be very distasteful to you.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  “An hour ago, as I was wrestling with this problem, trying to see if there was any class of files that might be immune to this treatment, I discovered that in fact there was one person whose files were being completely overlooked. At first I thought it was because he was a framling, but the reason is much more subtle than that. The Speaker for the Dead has no files in Lusitanian memory.”