Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  That was the list, the whole list of surface animals and plants of Lusitania. Under water there were many, many more. But the Descolada had left Lusitania monotonous.

  And yet even the monotony had a peculiar beauty. The geography was as varied as any other world– rivers, hills, mountains, deserts, oceans, islands. The carpet of capim and the patches of forest became background music to the symphony of landforms. The eye became sensitized to undulations, outcroppings, cliffs, pits, and, above all, the sparkle and rush of water in the sunlight. Lusitania, like Trondheim, was one of the rare worlds that was dominated by a single motif instead of displaying the whole symphony of possibility. With Trondheim, however, it was because the planet was on the bare edge of habitability, its climate only just able to support surface life. Lusitania's climate and soil cried out a welcome to the oncoming plow, the excavator's pick, the mason's trowel. Bring me to life, it said.

  Ender did not understand that he loved this place because it was as devastated and barren as his own life, stripped and distorted in his childhood by events every bit as terrible, on a small scale, as the Descolada had been to this world. And yet it had thrived, had found a few threads strong enough to survive and continue to grow. Out of the challenge of the Descolada had come the three lives of the Little Ones. Out of the Battle School, out of years of isolation, had come Ender Wiggin. He fit this place as if he had planned it. The boy who walked beside him through the grama felt like his true son, as if he had known the boy from infancy. I know how it feels to have a metal wall between me and the world, Olhado.

  But here and now I have made the wall come down, and flesh touches earth, drinks water, gives comfort, takes love. The earthen bank of the river rose in terraces, a dozen meters from shore to crest. The soil was moist enough to dig and hold its shape. The hive queen was a burrower; Ender felt the desire in him to dig, and so he dug, Olhado beside him. The ground gave way easily enough, and yet the roof of their cavelet stayed firm.

 

  And so it was decided.

  “Here it is,” said Ender aloud.

  Olhado grinned. But it was really Jane that Ender was talking to, and her answer that he heard. “Novinha thinks they have it. The tests all came through negative– the Descolada stayed inactive with the new Colador present in the cloned bugger cells. Ela thinks that the daisies she's been working with can be adapted to produce the Colador naturally. If that works, you'll only have to plant seeds here and there and the buggers can keep the Descolada at bay by sucking flowers.”

  Her tone was lively enough, but it was all business, no fun. No fun at all. “Fine,” Ender said. He felt a stab of jealousy– Jane was no doubt talking far more easily with Miro, teasing him, taunting him as she used to do with Ender.

  But it was easy enough to drive the feeling of jealousy away. He put out a hand and rested it easily on Olhado's shoulder; he momentarily pulled the boy close, and then together they walked back to the waiting flyer. Olhado marked the spot on the map and stored it. He laughed and made jokes all the way home, and Ender laughed with him. The boy wasn't Jane. But he was Olhado, and Ender loved him, and Olhado needed Ender, and that was what a few million years of evolution had decided Ender needed most. It was the hunger that had gnawed at him through all those years with Valentine, that had kept him moving from world to world. This boy with metal eyes. His bright and devastatingly destructive little brother Grego. Quara's penetrating understanding, her innocence; Quim's utter self-control, asceticism, faith; Ela's dependability, like a rock, and yet she knew when to move out and act; and Miro…

  Miro. I have no consolation for Miro, not in this world, not at this time. His life's work was taken from him, his body, his hope for the future, and nothing I can say or do will give him a vital work to do. He lives in pain, his lover turned into his sister, his life among the piggies now impossible to him as they look to other humans for friendship and learning.

  “Miro needs…” Ender said softly.

  “Miro needs to leave Lusitania,” said Olhado.

  “Mm,” said Ender.

  “You've got a starship, haven't you?” said Olhado. “I remember reading a story once. Or maybe it was a vid. About an old-time hero in the Bugger Wars, Mazer Rackham. He saved Earth from destruction once, but they knew he'd be dead long before the next battle. So they sent him out in a starship at relativistic speeds, just sent him out and had him come back. A hundred years had gone by for the Earth, but only two years for him.”

  “You think Miro needs something as drastic as that?”

  «There's a battle coming. There are decisions to make. Miro's the smartest person in Lusitania, and the best. He doesn't get mad, you know. Even in the worst of times with Father. Marc o. Sorry, I still call him Father.»

  “That's all right. In most ways he was.”

  “Miro would think, and he'd decide the best thing to do, and it always was the best thing. Mother depended on him to. The way I see it, we need Miro when Starways Congress sends its fleet against us. He'll study all the information, everything we've learned in the years that he was gone, put it all together, and tell us what to do.”

  Ender couldn't help himself. He laughed. “So it's a dumb idea,” said Olhado.

  “You see better than anybody else I know,” said Ender. “I've got to think about this, but you might be right.”

  They drove on in silence for a while.

  “I was just talking,” said Olhado. “When I said that about Miro. It was just something I thought, putting him together with that old story. It probably isn't even a true story.”

  “It's true,” said Ender.

  “How do you know?”

  “I knew Mazer Rackham.”

  Olhado whistled. “You're old. You're older than any of the trees.”

  “I'm older than any of the human colonies. It doesn't make me wise, unfortunately.”

  “Are you really Ender? The Ender?”

  “That's why it's my password.”

  “It's funny. Before you got here, the Bishop tried to tell us all that you were Satan. Quim's the only one in the family that took him seriously. But if the Bishop had told us you were Ender, we would have stoned you to death in the praqa the day you arrived.”

  “Why don't you now?”

  “We know you now. That makes all the difference, doesn't it? Even Quim doesn't hate you now. When you really know somebody, you can't hate them.”

  “Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them.”

  «Is that a circular paradox? Dom Crist o says that most truth can only be expressed in circular paradoxes.»

  “I don't think it has anything to do with truth, Olhado. It's just cause and effect. We never can sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause– knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”

  “Mother doesn't like it that you're Ender.”

  “I know.”

  “But she loves you anyway.”

  “I know.”

  “And Quim– it's really funny, but now that he knows you're Ender, he likes you better for it.”

  “That's because he's a crusader, and I got my bad reputation by winning a crusade.”

  “And me,” said Olhado.

  “Yes, you,” said Ender.

  “You killed more people than anybody in history.”

  “Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.”

  “But when you Spoke for Father, you made me feet sorry for him. You make people love each other and forgive each other. How could you kill all those millions of people in the Xenocide?”

  “I thought I was playing games. I didn't know it was the real thing. But that
's no excuse, Olhado. If I had known the battle was real, I would have done the same thing. We thought they wanted to kill us. We were wrong, but we had no way to know that.” Ender shook his head. “Except that I knew better. I knew my enemy. That's how I beat her, the hive queen, I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.”

  “And today we found the place to bring her back to life.” Olhado was very serious. “Are you sure she won't try to get even? Are you sure she won't try to wipe out humankind, starting with you?”

  “I'm as sure,” said Ender, “as I am of anything.”

  “Not absolutely sure,” said Olhado.

  “Sure enough to bring her back to life,” said Ender. “And that's as sure as we ever are of anything. We believe it enough to act as though it's true. When we're that sure, we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our lives on it.”

  “I guess that's what you're doing. Betting your life on her being what you think she is.”

  “I'm more arrogant than that. I'm betting your life, too, and everybody else's, and I'm not so much as asking anyone else's opinion.”

  “Funny,” said Olhado. “If I asked somebody whether they'd trust Ender with a decision that might affect the future of the human race, they'd say, of course not. But if I asked them whether they'd trust the Speaker for the Dead, they'd say yes, most of them. And they wouldn't even guess that they were the same person.”

  “Yeah,” said Ender. “Funny.”

  Neither of them laughed. Then, after a long time, Olhado spoke again. His thoughts had wandered to a subject that mattered more. “I don't want Miro to go away for thirty years.”

  “Say twenty years.”

  “In twenty years I'll be thirty-two. But he'd come back the age he is now. Twenty. Twelve years younger than me. If there's ever a girl who wants to marry a guy with reflecting eyes, I might even be married and have kids then. He won't even know me. I won't be his little brother anymore.” Olhado swallowed. “It'd be like him dying.”

  “No,” said Ender. “It'd be like him passing from his second life to his third.”

  “That's like dying, too,” said Olhado.

  “It's also like being born,” said Ender. “As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes.”

  Valentine called the next day. Ender's fingers trembled as he keyed instructions into the terminal. It wasn't just a message, either. It was a call, a full ansible voice communication. Incredibly expensive, but that wasn't a problem. It was the fact that ansible communications with the Hundred Worlds were supposedly cut off; for Jane to allow this call to come through meant that it was urgent. It occurred to Ender right away that Valentine might be in danger. That Starways Congress might have decided Ender was involved in the rebellion and traced his connection with her.

  She was older. The hologram of her face showed weather lines from many windy days on the islands, floes, and boats of Trondheim. But her smile was the same, and her eyes danced with the same light. Ender was silenced at first by the changes the years had wrought in his sister; she, too, was silenced, by the fact that Ender seemed unchanged, a vision coming back to her out of her past.

  “Ah, Ender,” she sighed. “Was I ever so young?”

  “And will I age so beautifully?”

  She laughed. Then she cried. He did not; how could he? He had missed her for a couple of months. She had missed him for twenty-two years.

  “I suppose you've heard,” he said, “about our trouble getting along with Congress.”

  “I imagine that you were at the thick of it.”

  “Stumbled into the situation, really,” said Ender. “But I'm glad I was here. I'm going to stay.”

  She nodded, drying her eyes. “Yes. I thought so. But I had to call and make sure. I didn't want to spend a couple of decades flying to meet you, and have you gone when I arrive.”

  “Meet me?” he said.

  “I got much too excited about your revolution there, Ender. After twenty years of raising a family, teaching my students, loving my husband, living at peace with myself, I thought I'd never resurrect Demosthenes again. But then the story came about illegal contact with the piggies, and right away the news that Lusitania was in revolt, and suddenly people were saying the most ridiculous things, and I saw it was the beginning of the same old hate. Remember the videos about the buggers? How terrifying and awful they were? Suddenly we were seeing videos of the bodies they found, of the xenologers, I can't remember their names, but grisly pictures everywhere you looked, heating us up to war fever. And then stories about the Descolada, how if anyone ever went from Lusitania to another world it would destroy everything– the most hideous plague imaginable–”

  “It's true,” said Ender, “but we're working on it. Trying to find ways to keep the Descolada from spreading when we go to other worlds.”

  “True or not, Ender, it's all leading to war. I remember war– nobody else does. So I revived Demosthenes. I stumbled across some memos and reports. Their fleet is carrying the Little Doctor, Ender. If they decide to, they can blow Lusitania to bits. Just like–”

  “Just like I did before. Poetic justice, do you think, for me to end the same way? He who lives by the sword–”

  “Don't joke with me, Ender! I'm a middle-aged matron now, and I've lost my patience with silliness. At least for now. I wrote some very ugly truths about what Starways Congress is doing, and published them as Demosthenes. They're looking for me. Treason is what they're calling it.”

  “So you're coming here?”

  “Not just me. Dear Jakt is turning the fleet over to his brothers and sisters. We've already bought a starship. There's apparently some kind of resistance movement that's helping us– someone named Jane has jimmied the computers to cover our tracks.”

  “I know Jane,” said Ender.

  “So you do have an organization here! I was shocked when I got a message that I could call you. Your ansible was supposedly blown up.”

  “We have powerful friends.”

  “Ender, Jakt and I are leaving today. We're bringing our three children.”

  “Your first one–”

  “Yes, Syfte, the one who was making me fat when you left, she's almost twenty-two now. A very lovely girl. And a good friend, the children's tutor, named Plikt.”

  “I have a student by that name,” said Ender, thinking back to conversations only a couple of months ago.

  “Oh, yes, well, that was twenty years ago, Ender. And we're bringing several of Jakt's best men and their families. Something of an ark. It's not an emergency– you have twenty-two years to prepare for me. Actually longer, more like thirty years. We're taking the voyage in several hops, the first few in the wrong direction, so that nobody can be sure we're going to Lusitania.”

  Coming here. Thirty years from now. I'll be older than she is now. Coming here. By then I'll have my family, too. Novinha's and my children, if we have any, all grown, like hers.

  And then, thinking of Novinha, he remembered Miro, remembered what Olhado had suggested several days ago, the day they found the nesting place for the hive queen.

  “Would you mind terribly,” said Ender, “if I sent someone to meet you on the way?”

  “Meet us? In deep space? No, don't send someone to do that, Ender– it's too terrible a sacrifice, to come so far when the computers can guide us in just fine–”

  “It's not really for you, though I want him to meet you. He's one of the xenologers. He was badly injured in an accident. Some brain damage; like a bad stroke. He's– he's the smartest person in Lusitania, says someone whose judgment I trust, but he's lost all his connections with our life here. Yet we'll need him later. When you arrive. He's a very good man, Val. He can make the last week of your voyage very educational.”

  “Can your friend arrange to get us course information for such a rendezvous? We're navigators, but only on the sea.”
/>
  “Jane will have the revised navigational information in your ship's computer when you leave.”

  “Ender– for you it'll be thirty years, but for me– I'll see you in only a few weeks.” She started to cry.

  “Maybe I'll come with Miro to meet you.”

  “Don't!” she said. “I want you to be as old and crabbed as possible when I arrive. I couldn't put up with you as the thirty-year-old brat I see on my terininal.”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “You'll be there when I arrive!” she demanded.

  “I will,” he said. “And Miro, the boy I'm sending to you. Think of him as my son.”

  She nodded gravely. “These are such dangerous times, Ender. I only wish we had Peter.”

  “I don't. If he were running our little rebellion, he'd end up Hegemon of all the Hundred Worlds. We just want them to leave us alone.”

  “It may not be possible to get the one without the other,” said Val. “But we can quarrel about that later. Good-bye, my dear brother.”

  He didn't answer. Just looked at her and looked at her until she smiled wryly and switched off the connection.

  * * *

  Ender didn't have to ask Miro to go; Jane had already told him everything.

  “Your sister is Demosthenes?” asked Miro. Ender was used to his slurred speech now. Or maybe his speech was clearing a little. It wasn't as hard to understand, anyway.

  “We were a talented family,” said Ender. “I hope you like her.”

  “I hope she likes me.” Miro smiled, but he looked afraid.

  “I told her,” said Ender, “to think of you as my son.”

  Miro nodded. “I know,” he said. And then, almost defiantly, “She showed me your conversation with her.”

  Ender felt cold inside.

  Jane's voice came into his ear. “I should have asked you,” she said. “But you know you would have said yes.”

  It wasn't the invasion of privacy that Ender minded. It was the fact that Jane was so very close to Miro. Get used to it, he told himself. He's the one she's looking out for now.