Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  And Dad, not yet off to work, so he could stand there, watching them, patting them, kissing them, saying a few words. Light, clever, loving — the predictable father. So, what's wrong with this picture? The dad is Olhado. He has no eyes. Just the silvery metal orbs punctuated with two lens apertures in the one eye, and the computer I/0 outlet in the other. The kids don't seem to notice. I'm still not used to it.

  "Valentine," he said, when he saw her.

  "We need to talk," she said.

  He ushered her inside. He introduced his wife, Jaqueline. Skin so black it was almost blue, laughing eyes, a beautiful wide smile that you wanted to dive into, it was so welcoming. She brought a limonada, ice-cold and sweating in the morning heat, and then discreetly withdrew. "You can stay," said Valentine. "This isn't all that private." But she didn't want to stay. She had work to do, she said. And she was gone.

  "I've wanted to meet you for a long time," said Olhado.

  "I was meetable," she said.

  "You were busy."

  "I have no business," said Valentine.

  "You have Andrew's business."

  "We're meeting now, anyway. I've been curious about you, Olhado. Or do you prefer your given name, Lauro?"

  "In Milagre, your name is whatever people call you. I used to be Sule, for my middle name, Suleimdo."

  "Solomon the wise."

  "But after I lost my eyes, I was Olhado, then and forever."

  "'The watched one'?"

  "Olhado could mean that, yes, past participle of olhar, but in this case it means 'The guy with the eyes.'"

  "And that's your name."

  "My wife calls me Lauro," he said. "And my children call me Father."

  "And I?"

  "Whatever.

  "Sule, then."

  "Lauro, if you must. Sule makes me feel like I'm six."

  "And reminds you of the time when you could see."

  He laughed. "Oh, I can see now, thanks very much. I see very well."

  "So Andrew says. That's why I've come to you. To find out what you see."

  "Want me to play back a scene for you? A blast from the past? I have all my favourite memories stored on computer. I can plug in and play back anything you want. I have, for instance, Andrew's first visit in my family's home. I also have some top-flight family quarrels. Or do you prefer public events? Every Mayor's inaugural since I got these eyes? People do consult me about things like that — what was worn, what was said. I often have trouble convincing them that my eyes record vision, not sound — just like their eyes. They think I should be a holographer and record it all for entertainment."

  "I don't want to see what you see. I want to know what you think."

  "Do you, now?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "I have no opinions. Not on anything you'd be interested in. I stay out of the family quarrels. I always have."

  "And out of the family business. The only one of Novinha's children not to go into science."

  "Science has brought everyone else so much happiness, it's hard to imagine why I wouldn't have gone into it."

  "Not hard to imagine," said Valentine. And then, because she had found that brittle-sounding people will talk quite openly if goaded, she added a little barb. "I imagine that you simply didn't have the brains to keep up."

  "Absolutely true," said Olhado. "I only have wit enough to make bricks."

  "Really?" said Valentine. "But you don't make bricks."

  "On the contrary. I make hundreds of bricks a day. And with everyone knocking holes in their houses to build the new chapel, I foresee a booming business in the near future."

  "Lauro," said Valentine, "you don't make bricks. The labourers in your factory make bricks."

  "And I, as manager, am not part of that?"

  "Brick makers make bricks. You make brick makers."

  "I suppose. Mostly I make brick makers tired."

  "You make other things," said Valentine. "Children."

  "Yes," said Olhado, and for the first time in the conversation he relaxed. "I do that. Of course, I have a partner."

  "A gracious and beautiful woman."

  "I looked for perfection, and found something better." It wasn't just a line of patter. He meant it. And now the brittleness was gone, the wariness too. "You have children. A husband."

  "A good family. Maybe almost as good as yours. Ours lacks only the perfect mother, but the children will recover from that."

  "To hear Andrew talk about you, you're the greatest human being who ever lived."

  "Andrew is very sweet. He could also get away with saying such things because I wasn't here."

  "Now you are here," said Olhado. "Why?"

  "It happens that worlds and species of raman are at a cusp of decision, and the way events have turned out, their future depends in large part on your family. I don't have time to discover things in a leisurely way— I don't have time to understand the family dynamics, why Grego can pass from monster to hero in a single night, how Miro can be both suicidal and ambitious, why Quara is willing to let the pequeninos die for the descolada's sake—"

  "Ask Andrew. He understands them all. I never could."

  "Andrew is in his own little hell right now. He feels responsible for everything. He's done his best, but Quim is dead, and the one thing your mother and Andrew both agree on is that somehow it's Andrew's fault. Your mother's leaving him has torn him up."

  "I know."

  "I don't even know how to console him. Or even which, as his loving sister, to hope for— that she'll come back into his life, or leave him forever."

  Olhado shrugged. All the brittleness was back.

  "Do you really not care?" asked Valentine. "Or have you decided not to care?"

  "Maybe I decided long ago, and now I really don't."

  Part of being a good interviewer, too, is knowing when to be silent. Valentine waited.

  But Olhado was also good at waiting. Valentine almost gave up and said something. She even toyed with the idea of confessing failure and leaving.

  Then he spoke. "When they replaced my eyes, they also took out the tear ducts. Natural tears would interfere with the industrial lubricants they put in my eyes. "

  "Industrial?"

  "My little joke," said Olhado. "I seem to be very dispassionate all the time, because my eyes never well up with tears. And people can't read my expressions. It's funny, you know. The actual eyeball doesn't have any ability to change shape and show an expression. It just sits there. Yes, your eyes dart around— they either keep steady eye contact or look down or up— but my eyes do that, too. They still move with perfect symmetry. They still point in the direction I'm looking. But people can't stand to look at them. So they look away. They don't read the expressions on my face. And therefore they think there are no expressions. My eyes still sting and redden and swell a little at times when I would have cried, if I still had tears."

  "In other words," said Valentine, "you do care."

  "I always cared," he said. "Sometimes I thought I was the only one who understood, even though half the time I didn't know what it was that I was understanding. I withdrew and watched, and because I didn't have any personal ego on the line in the family quarrels, I could see more clearly than any of them. I saw the lines of power— Mother's absolute dominance even though Marcão beat her when he was angry or drunk. Miro, thinking it was Marcão he was rebelling against, when always it was Mother. Grego's meanness— his way of handling fear. Quara, absolutely contrary by nature, doing whatever she thought the people who mattered to her didn't want her to do. Ela, the noble martyr— what in the world would she be, if she couldn't suffer? Holy, righteous Quim, finding God as his father, on the premise that the best father is the invisible kind who never raises his voice."

  "You saw all this as a child?"

  "I'm good at seeing things. We passive, un-belonging observers always see better. Don't you think?"

  Valentine laughed. "Yes, we do. The same role, then, you think? You and I, both
historians?"

  "Till your brother came. From the moment he walked in the door, it was obvious that he saw and understood everything, just the way I saw it. It was exhilarating. Because of course I had never actually believed my own conclusions about my family. I never trusted my own judgements. Obviously no one saw things the way I did, so I must be wrong. I even thought that I saw things so peculiarly because of my eyes. That if I had real eyes I would have seen things Miro's way. Or Mother's."

  "So Andrew confirmed your judgements."

  "More than that. He acted on them. He did something about them."

  "Oh?"

  "He was here as a speaker for the dead. But from the moment he walked in the door, he took— he took—"

  "Over?"

  "Took responsibility. For change. He saw all the sicknesses I saw, but he started healing them as best he could. I saw how he was with Grego, firm but kind. With Quara, responding to what she really wanted instead of what she claimed to want. With Quim, respecting the distance he wanted to keep. With Miro, with Ela, with Mother, with everybody."

  "With you?"

  "Making me part of his life. Connecting with me. Watching me jack into my eye and still talking to me like a person. Do you know what that meant to me?"

  "I can guess."

  "Not the part about me. I was a hungry little kid, I'll admit; the first kind person could have conned me, I'm sure. It's what he did about us all. It's how he treated us all differently, and yet remained himself. You've got to think about the men in my life. Marcão, who we thought was our father— I had no idea who he was. All I ever saw was the liquor in him when he was drunk, and the thirst when he was sober. Thirst for alcohol but also a thirst for respect that he could never get. And then he dropped over dead. Things got better at once. Still not good, but better. I thought, the best father is the one who isn't there. Only that wasn't true, either, was it? Because my real father, Libo, the great scientist, the martyr, the hero of research, the love of my mother's life— he had sired all these delightful children on my mother, he could see the family in torment, and yet he did nothing."

  "Your mother didn't let him, Andrew said."

  "That's right— and one must always do things Mother's way, mustn't one?"

  "Novinha is a very imposing woman."

  "She thinks she's the only one in the world ever to suffer," said Olhado. "I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she is so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously."

  "Try saying something rancorous next time. It might be more kind."

  Olhado looked surprised. "Oh, you're judging me? Is this motherhood solidarity or something? Children who speak ill of their mothers must be slapped down? But I assure you, Valentine, I meant it. No rancour. No grudges. I know my mother, that's all. You said you wanted me to tell you what I saw— that's what I see. That's what Andrew saw, too. All that pain. He's drawn to it. Pain sucks him like a magnet. And Mother had so much she almost sucked him dry. Except that maybe you can't suck Andrew dry. Maybe the well of compassion inside him is bottomless."

  His passionate speech about Andrew surprised her. And pleased her, too. "You say Quim turned to God for the perfect invisible father. Who did you turn to? Not someone invisible, I think."

  "No, not someone invisible."

  Valentine studied his face in silence.

  "I see everything in bas-relief," said Olhado. "My depth perception is very poor. If we'd put a lens in each eye instead of both in one, the binocularity would be much improved. But I wanted to have the jack. For the computer link. I wanted to be able to record the pictures, to be able to share them. So I see in bas-relief. As if everybody were a slightly rounded cardboard cut-out, sliding across a flat painted background. In a way it makes everybody seem so much closer together. Sliding over each other like sheets of paper, rubbing on each other as they pass."

  She listened, but said nothing for a while longer.

  "Not someone invisible," he said, echoing, remembering. "That's right. I saw what Andrew did in our family. I saw that he came in and listened and watched and understood who we were, each individual one of us. He tried to discover our need and then supply it. He took responsibility for other people and it didn't seem to matter to him how much it cost him. And in the end, while he could never make the Ribeira family normal, he gave us peace and pride and identity. Stability. He married Mother and was kind to her. He loved us all. He was always there when we wanted him, and seemed unhurt by it when we didn't. He was firm with us about expecting civilised behaviour, but never indulged his whims at our expense. And I thought: This is so much more important than science. Or politics, either. Or any particular profession or accomplishment or thing you can make. I thought: If I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to other children, their whole lives, what Andrew was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.

  "So you're a career father," said Valentine.

  "Who works at a brick factory to feed and clothe the family. Not a brick maker who also has kids. Lini also feels the same way."

  "Lini?"

  "Jaqueline. My wife. She followed her own road to the same place. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books."

  "You'd be surprised," said Valentine.

  "It's a boring life, to read about," said Olhado. "Not to live, though."

  "So the secret that you protect from your tormented siblings is— happiness."

  "Peace. Beauty. Love. All the great abstractions. I may see them in bas-relief, but I see them up close."

  "And you learned it from Andrew. Does he know?"

  "I think so," said Olhado. "Do you want to know my most closely guarded secret? When we're alone together, just him and me, or me and Lini and him— when we're alone, I call him Papa, and he calls me Son."

  Valentine made no effort to stop her tears from flowing, as if they flowed half for him and half for her. "So Ender does have children, after all," she said.

  "I learned how to be a father from him, and I'm a damned good one."

  Valentine leaned forward. It was time to get down to business. "That means that you, more than any of the others, stand to lose something truly beautiful and fine if we don't succeed in our endeavours."

  "I know," said Olhado. "My choice was a selfish one in the long run. I'm happy, but I can't do anything to help save Lusitania."

  "Wrong," said Valentine. "You just don't know yet."

  "What can I do?"

  "Let's talk a while longer, and see if we can find out. And if it's all right with you, Lauro, your Jaqueline should stop eavesdropping from the kitchen now, and come on in and join us."

  Bashfully, Jaqueline came in and sat beside her husband. Valentine liked the way they held hands. After so many children— it reminded herself of holding hands with Jakt, and how glad it made her feel.