Mandachuva nodded gravely. “The wives have great respect for what you have taught us. And they have great hope in the Speaker for the Dead. But what you tell us now, this is very bad. If the framlings hate us, what will we do?”
“I don't know,” said Miro. For the moment, his mind was racing to try to cope with all the information they had just told him. Three hundred twenty new babies. A population explosion. And Rooter somehow the father of half of them. Before today Miro would have dismissed the statement of Rooter's fatherhood as part of the piggies' totemic belief system. But having seen a tree uproot itself and fall apart in response to singing, he was prepared to question all his old assumptions.
Yet what good did it do to learn anything now? They'd never let him report again; he couldn't follow up; he'd be aboard a starship for the next quarter century while someone else did all his work. Or worse, no one else.
“Don't be unhappy,” said Human. “You'll see– the Speaker for the Dead will make it all work out well.”
“The Speaker. Yes, he'll make everything work out fine.” The way he did for me and Ouanda. My sister.
“The hive queen says he'll teach the framlings to love us.”
“Teach the framlings,” said Miro. “He'd better do it quickly then. It's too late for him to save me and Ouanda. They're arresting us and taking us off planet.”
“To the stars?” asked Human hopefully.
“Yes, to the stars, to stand trial! To be punished for helping you. It'll take us twenty-two years to get there, and they'll never let us come back.”
The piggies took a moment to absorb this information. Fine, thought Miro. Let them wonder how the Speaker is going to solve everything for them. I trusted in the Speaker, too, and it didn't do much for me. The piggies conferred together.
Human emerged from the group and came closer to the fence. “We'll hide you.”
“They'll never find you in the forest,” said Mandachuva.
“They have machines that can track me by my smell,” said Miro.
“Ah. But doesn't the law forbid them to show us their machines?” asked Human.
Miro shook his head. “It doesn't matter. The gate is sealed to me. I can't cross the fence.”
The piggies looked at each other.
“But you have capim right there,” said Arrow.
Miro looked stupidly at the grass. “So what?” he asked.
“Chew it,” said Human.
“Why?” asked Miro.
“We've seen humans chewing capim,” said Leaf-eater. “The other night, on the hillside, we saw the Speaker and some of the robe-humans chewing capim.”
“And many other times,” said Mandachuva.
Their impatience with him was frustrating. “What does that have to do with the fence?”
Again the piggies looked at each other. Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He sat down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. Finally Human gave him a particularly vicious pinch, and when Mandachuva did not respond, they began saying, in males' language, Ready, Time to go, Now, Ready.
Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.
Miro leaped to his feet and began to cry out just as Mandachuva reached the top; by the time he finished his cry, Mandachuva was standing up and dusting himself off.
“You can't do that,” said Miro. “It stimulates all the pain nerves in the body. The fence can't be crossed.”
“Oh,” said Mandachuva.
From the other side of the fence, Human was rubbing his thighs together. “He didn't know,” he said. “The humans don't know.”
“It's an anesthetic,” said Miro. “It stops you from feeling pain.”
“No,” said Mandachuva. “I feel the pain. Very bad pain. Worst pain in the world.”
“Rooter says the fence is even worse than dying,” said Human. “Pain in all the places.”
“But you don't care,” said Miro.
“It's happening to your other self,” said Mandachuva. “It's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self.”
Then Miro remembered a detail that had been lost in the grotesquerie of Libo's death. The dead man's mouth had been filled with a wad of capim. So had the mouth of every piggy that had died. Anesthetic. The death looked like hideous torture, but pain was not the purpose of it. They used an anesthetic. It had nothing to do with pain.
“So,” said Mandachuva. “Chew the grass, and come with us. We'll hide you.”
“Ouanda,” said Miro.
“Oh, I'll go get her,” said Mandachuva.
“You don't know where she lives.”
“Yes I do,” said Mandachuva.
“We do this many times a year,” said Human. “We know where everybody lives.”
“But no one has ever seen you,” said Miro.
“We're very secret,” said Mandachuva. “Besides, nobody is looking for us.”
Miro imagined dozens of piggies creeping about in Milagre in the middle of the night. No guard was kept. Only a few people had business that took them out in the darkness. And the piggies were small, small enough to duck down in the capim and disappear completely. No wonder they knew about metal and machines, despite all the rules designed to keep them from learning about them. No doubt they had seen the mines, had watched the shuttle land, had seen the kilns firing the bricks, had watched the fazendeiros plowing and planting the human-specific amaranth. No wonder they had known what to ask for.
How stupid of us, to think we could cut them off from our culture. They kept far more secrets from us than we could possibly keep from them. So much for cultural superiority.
Miro pulled up his own blade of capim.
“No,” said Mandachuva, taking the blade from his hands. “You don't get the root part. If you take the root part, it doesn't do you any good.” He threw away Miro's blade and tore off his own, about ten centimeters above the base. Then he folded it and handed it to Miro, who began to chew it.
Mandachuva pinched and poked him.
“Don't worry about that,” said Miro. “Go get Ouanda. They could arrest her any minute. Go. Now. Go on.”
Mandachuva looked at the others and, seeing some invisible signal of consent, jogged off along the fenceline toward the slopes of Vila Alta, where Ouanda lived.
Miro chewed a little more. He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn't care. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda. Forget the rules, all the rules. They had no power over him once he left the human enclave and entered the piggies' forest. He would become a renegade, as they already accused him of being, and he and Ouanda could leave behind all the insane rules of human behavior and live as they wanted to, and raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies, from the forest life; something new in the Hundred Worlds, and Congress would be powerless to stop them.
He ran at the fence and seized it with both hands. The pain was no less than before, but now he didn't care, he scrambled up to the top. But with each new handhold the pain grew more intense, and he began to care, he began to care very much about the pain, he began to realize that the capim had no anesthetic effect on him at all, but by this time he was already at the top of the fence. The pain was maddening; he couldn't think; momentum carried him above the top and as he balanced there his head passed through the vertical field of the fence. All the pain possible to his body came to his brain at once, as if every part of him were on fire.
The Little Ones watched in horror as their friend hung there atop the fence, his head and torso on one side, his hips and legs on the other. At once they cried out, reached for him, tried to pull him down. Since
they had not chewed capim, they dared not touch the fence.
Hearing their cries, Mandachuva ran back. Enough of the anesthetic remained in his body that he could climb up and push the heavy human body over the top. Miro landed with a bone-crushing thump on the ground, his arm still touching the fence. The piggies pulled him away. His face was frozen in a rictus of agony.
“Quick!” shouted Leaf-eater. “Before he dies, we have to plant him!”
“No!” Human answered, pushing Leaf-eater away from Miro's frozen body. “We don't know if he's dying! The pain is just an illusion, you know that, he doesn't have a wound, the pain should go away–”
“It isn't going away,” said Arrow. “Look at him.”
Miro's fists were clenched, his legs were doubled under him, and his spine and neck were arched backward. Though he was breathing in short, hard pants, his face seemed to grow even tighter with pain.
“Before he dies,” said Leaf-eater. “We have to give him root.”
“Go get Ouanda,” said Human. He turned to face Mandachuva. “Now! Go get her and tell her Miro is dying. Tell her the gate is sealed and Miro is on this side of it and he's dying.”
Mandachuva took off at a run.
* * *
The secretary opened the door, but not until he actually saw Novinha did Ender allow himself to feel relief. When he sent Ela for her, he was sure that she would come; but as they waited so many long minutes for her arrival, he began to doubt his understanding of her. There had been no need to doubt. She was the woman that he thought she was. He noticed that her hair was down and windblown, and for the first time since he came to Lusitania, Ender saw in her face a clear image of the girl who in her anguish had summoned him less than two weeks, more than twenty years ago.
She looked tense, worried, but Ender knew her anxiety was because of her present situation, coming into the Bishop's own chambers so shortly after the disclosure of her transgressions. If Ela told her about the danger to Miro, that, too, might be part of her tension. All this was transient; Ender could see in her face, in the relaxation of her movement, in the steadiness of her gaze, that the end of her long deception was indeed the gift he had hoped, had believed it would be. I did not come to hurt you, Novinha, and I'm glad to see that my Speaking has brought you better things than shame.
Novinha stood for a moment, looking at the Bishop. Not defiantly, but politely, with dignity; he responded the same way, quietly offering her a seat. Dom Crist o started to rise from his stool, but she shook her head, smiled, took another stool near the wall. Near Ender. Ela came and stood behind and beside her mother, so she was also partly behind Ender. Like a daughter standing between her parents, thought Ender; then he thrust the thought away from him and refused to think of it anymore. There were far more important matters at hand.
“I see,” said Bosquinha, “that you intend this meeting to be an interesting one.”
«I think Congress decided that already,» said Dona Crist .
“Your son is accused,” Bishop Peregrino began, “of crimes against–”
“I know what he's accused of,” said Novinha. “I didn't know until tonight, when Ela told me, but I'm not surprised. My daughter Elanora has also been defying some rules her master set for her. Both of them have a higher allegiance to their own conscience than to the rules others set down for them. It's a failing, if your object is to maintain order, but if your goal is to learn and adapt, it's a virtue.”
«Your son isn't on trial here,» said Dom Crist o.
“I asked you to meet together,” said Ender, “because a decision must be made. Whether or not to comply with the orders given us by Starways Congress.”
“We don't have much choice,” said Bishop Peregrino.
“There are many choices,” said Ender, “and many reasons for choosing. You already made one choice– when you found your files being stripped, you decided to try to save them, and you decided to trust them with me, a stranger. Your trust was not misplaced– I'll return your files to you whenever you ask, unread, unaltered.”
«Thank you,» said Dona Crist . «But we did that before we knew the gravity of the charge.»
«They're going to evacuate us,» said Dom Crist o.
“They control everything,” said Bishop Peregrino.
“I already told him that,” said Bosquinha.
“They don't control everything,” said Ender. “They only control you through the ansible connection.”
“We can't cut off the ansible,” said Bishop Peregrino. “That is our only connection with the Vatican.”
“I don't suggest cutting off the ansible. I only tell you what I can do. And when I tell you this, I am trusting you the way you trusted me. Because if you repeat this to anyone, the cost to me– and to someone else, whom I love and depend on– would be immeasurable.”
He looked at each of them, and each in turn nodded acquiescence.
“I have a friend whose control over ansible communications among all the Hundred Worlds is complete– and completely unsuspected. I'm the only one who knows what she can do. And she has told me that when I ask her to, she can make it seem to all the framlings that we here on Lusitania have cut off our ansible connection. And yet we will have the ability to send guarded messages if we want to– to the Vatican, to the offices of your order. We can read distant records, intercept distant communications. In short, we will have eyes and they will be blind.”
“Cutting off the ansible, or even seeming to, would be an act of rebellion. Of war.” Bosquinha was saying it as harshly as possible, but Ender could see that the idea appealed to her, though she was resisting it with all her might. “I will say, though, that if we were insane enough to decide on war, what the Speaker is offering us is a clear advantage. We'd need any advantage we could get– if we were mad enough to rebel.”
“We have nothing to gain by rebellion,” said the Bishop, “and everything to lose. I grieve for the tragedy it would be to send Miro and Ouanda to stand trial on another world, especially because they are so young. But the court will no doubt take that into account and treat them with mercy. And by complying with the orders of the committee, we will save this community much suffering.”
“Don't you think that having to evacuate this world will also cause them suffering?” asked Ender.
“Yes. Yes, it will. But a law was broken, and the penalty must be paid.”
“What if the law was based on a misunderstanding, and the penalty is far out of proportion to the sin?”
“We can't be the judges of that,” said the Bishop.
“We are the judges of that. If we go along with Congressional orders, then we're saying that the law is good and the punishment is just. And it may be that at the end of this meeting you'll decide exactly that. But there are some things you must know before you can make your decision. Some of those things I can tell you, and some of those things only Ela and Novinha can tell you. You shouldn't make your decision until you know all that we know.”
“I'm always glad to know as much as possible,” said the Bishop. “Of course, the final decision is Bosquinha's, not mine–”
“The final decision belongs to all of you together, the civil and religious and intellectual leadership of Lusitania. If any one of you decides against rebellion, rebellion is impossible. Without the Church's support, Bosquinha can't lead. Without civil support, the Church has no power.”
«We have no power,» said Dom Crist o. «Only opinions.»
“Every adult in Lusitania looks to you for wisdom and fairmindedness.”
“You forget a fourth power,” said Bishop Peregrino. “Yourself.”
“I'm a framling here.”
"A most extraordinary framling," said the Bishop. "In your four days here you have captured the soul of this people in a way I feared and foretold. Now you counsel rebellion that could cost us everything. You are as dangerous as Satan. And yet here you are, submitting to our authority as if you weren't free to get on the shuttle and leave here w
hen the starship returns to Trondheim with our two young criminals aboard. "
“I submit to your authority,” said Ender, “because I don't want to be a framling here. I want to be your citizen, your student, your parishioner.”
“As a Speaker for the Dead?” asked the Bishop.
“As Andrew Wiggin. I have some other skills that might be useful. Particularly if you rebel. And I have other work to do that can't be done if humans are taken from Lusitania.”
“We don't doubt your sincerity,” said the Bishop. “But you must forgive us if we are doubtful about casting in with a citizen who is something of a latecomer.”
Ender nodded. The Bishop could not say more until he knew more. “Let me tell you first what I know. Today, this afternoon, I went out into the forest with Miro and Ouanda.”
“You! You also broke the law!” The Bishop half-rose from his chair.
Bosquinha reached forward, gestured to settle the Bishop's ire. “The intrusion in our files began long before this afternoon. The Congressional Order couldn't possibly be related to his infraction.”
“I broke the law,” said Ender, “because the piggies were asking for me. Demanding, in fact, to see me. They had seen the shuttle land. They knew that I was here. And, for good or ill, they had read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon.”
“They gave the piggies that book?” said the Bishop.
“They also gave them the New Testament,” said Ender. “But surely you won't be surprised to learn that the piggies found much in common between themselves and the hive queen. Let me tell you what the piggies said. They begged me to convince all the Hundred Worlds to end the rules that keep them isolated here. You see, the piggies don't think of the fence the way we do. We see it as a way of protecting their culture from human influence and corruption. They see it as a way of keeping them from learning all the wonderful secrets that we know. They imagine our ships going from star to star, colonizing them, filling them up. And five or ten thousand years from now, when they finally learn all that we refuse to teach them, they'll emerge into space to find all the worlds filled up. No place for them at all. They think of our fence as a form of species murder. We will keep them on Lusitania like animals in a zoo, while we go out and take all the rest of the universe.”
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