They murmur and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.”
The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.
“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”
So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.
—San Angelo, Letters to an Incipient Heretic, trans. Amai a Tudomundo Para Que Deus Vos Ame Cristão, 103:72:54:2
Minha irmã. My sister. The words kept running through Miro’s head until he didn’t hear them anymore, they were part of the background: A Ouanda é minha irmã. She’s my sister. His feet carried him by habit from the praça to the playing fields and over the saddle of the hill. The crown of the higher peak held the Cathedral and the monastery, which always loomed over the Zenador’s Station, as if they were a fortress keeping watch over the gate. Did Libo walk this way as he went to meet my mother? Did they meet in the Xenobiologist’s Station? Or was it more discreet, rutting in the grass like hogs on the fazendas?
He stood at the door of the Zenador’s Station and tried to think of some reason to go inside. Nothing to do there. Hadn’t written a report on what happened today, but he didn’t know how to write it anyway. Magical powers, that’s what it was. The piggies sing to the trees and the trees split themselves into kindling. Much better than carpentry. The aboriginals are a good deal more sophisticated than previously supposed. Multiple uses for everything. Each tree is at once a totem, a grave marker, and a small lumber mill. Sister. There’s something I have to do but I can’t remember.
The piggies have the most sensible plan. Live as brothers only, and never mind the women. Would have been better for you, Libo, and that’s the truth—no, I should call you Papai, not Libo. Too bad Mother never told you or you could have dandled me on your knee. Both your eldest children, Ouanda on one knee and Miro on the other, aren’t we proud of our two children? Born the same year, only two months apart, what a busy fellow Papai was then, sneaking along the fence to tup Mamãe in her own back yard. Everyone felt sorry for you because you had nothing but daughters. No one to carry on the family name. Their sympathy was wasted. You were brimming over with sons. And I have far more sisters than I ever thought. One more sister than I wanted.
He stood at the gate, looking up toward the woods atop the piggies’ hill. There is no scientific purpose to be served by visiting at night. So I guess I’ll serve an unscientific purposelessness and see if they have room for another brother in the tribe. I’m probably too big for a bedspace in the log house, so I’ll sleep outside, and I won’t be much for climbing trees, but I do know a thing or two about technology, and I don’t feel any particular inhibitions now about telling you anything you want to know.
He laid his right hand on the identification box and reached out his left to pull the gate. For a split second he didn’t realize what was happening. Then his hand felt like it was on fire, like it was being cut off with a rusty saw, he shouted and pulled his left hand away from the gate. Never since the gate was built had it stayed hot after the box was touched by the Zenador’s hand.
“Marcos Vladimir Ribeira von Hesse, your passage through the fence has been revoked by order of the Lusitanian Evacuation Committee.”
Never since the gate was built had the voice challenged a Zenador. It took a moment before Miro understood what it was saying.
“You and Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi will present yourselves to Deputy Chief of Police Faria Lima Maria do Bosque, who will arrest you in the name of Starways Congress and present you on Trondheim for trial.”
For a moment he was lightheaded and his stomach felt heavy and sick. They know. Tonight of all nights. Everything over. Lose Ouanda, lose the piggies, lose my work, all gone. Arrest. Trondheim. Where the Speaker came from, twenty-two years in transit, everybody gone except Ouanda, the only one left, and she’s my sister—
His hand flashed out again to pull at the gate; again the excruciating pain shot through his arm, the pain nerves all alerted, all afire at once. I can’t just disappear. They’ll seal the gate to everyone. Nobody will go to the piggies, nobody will tell them, the piggies will wait for us to come and no one will ever come out of the gate again. Not me, not Ouanda, not the Speaker, nobody, and no explanation.
Evacuation Committee. They’ll evacuate us and wipe out every trace of our being here. That much is in the rules, but there’s more, isn’t there? What did they see? How did they find out? Did the Speaker tell them? He’s so addicted to truth. I have to explain to the piggies why we won’t be coming back, I have to tell them.
A piggy always watched them, followed them from the moment they entered the forest. Could a piggy be watching now? Miro waved his hand. It was too dark, though. They couldn’t possibly see him. Or perhaps they could; no one knew how good the piggies’ vision was at night. Whether they saw him or not, they didn’t come. And soon it would be too late; if the framlings were watching the gate, they had no doubt already notified Bosquinha, and she’d be on her way, zipping over the grass. She would be oh-so-reluctant to arrest him, but she would do her job, and never mind arguing with her about whether it was good for humans or piggies, either one, to maintain this foolish separation, she wasn’t the sort to question the law, she just did what she was told. And he’d surrender, there was no reason to fight, where could he hide inside the fence, out among the cabra herds? But before he gave up, he’d tell the piggies, he had to tell them.
So he walked along the fence, away from the gate, toward the open grassland directly down the hill from the Cathedral, where no one lived near enough to hear his voice. As he walked, he called. Not words, but a high hooting sound, a cry that he and Ouanda used to call each other’s attention when they were separated among the piggies. They’d hear it, they had to hear it, they had to come to him because he couldn’t possibly pass the fence. So come, Human, Leaf-eater, Mandachuva, Arrow, Cups, Calendar, anyone, everyone, come and let me tell you that I cannot tell you any more.
Quim sat miserably on a stool in the Bishop’s office.
“Estevão,” the Bishop said quietly, “there’ll be a meeting here in a few minutes, but I want to talk to you a minute first.”
“Nothing to talk about,” said Quim. “You warned us, and it happened. He’s the devil.”
“Estevão, we’ll talk for a minute and then you’ll go home and sleep.”
“Never going back there.”
“The Master ate with worse sinners than your mother, and forgave them. Are you better than he?”
“None of the adulteresses he forgave was his mother!”
“Not
everyone’s mother can be the Blessed Virgin.”
“Are you on his side, then? Has the Church made way here for the speakers for the dead? Should we tear down the Cathedral and use the stones to make an amphitheater where all our dead can be slandered before we lay them in the ground?”
A whisper: “I am your Bishop, Estevão, the vicar of Christ on this planet, and you will speak to me with the respect you owe to my office.”
Quim stood there, furious, unspeaking.
“I think it would have been better if the Speaker had not told these stories publicly. Some things are better learned in privacy, in quiet, so that we need not deal with shocks while an audience watches us. That’s why we use the confessional, to shield us from public shame while we wrestle with our private sins. But be fair, Estevão. The Speaker may have told the stories, but the stories all were true. Né?”
“É.”
“Now, Estevão, let us think. Before today, did you love your mother?”
“Yes.”
“And this mother that you loved, had she already committed adultery?”
“Ten thousand times.”
“I suspect she was not so libidinous as that. But you tell me that you loved her, though she was an adulteress. Isn’t she the same person tonight? Has she changed between yesterday and today? Or is it only you who have changed?”
“What she was yesterday was a lie.”
“Do you mean that because she was ashamed to tell her children that she was an adulteress, she must also have been lying when she cared for you all the years you were growing up, when she trusted you, when she taught you—”
“She was not exactly a nurturing mother.”
“If she had come to the confessional and won forgiveness for her adultery, then she would never have had to tell you at all. You would have gone to your grave not knowing. It would not have been a lie; because she would have been forgiven, she would not have been an adulteress. Admit the truth, Estevão: You’re not angry with her adultery. You’re angry because you embarrassed yourself in front of the whole city by trying to defend her.”
“You make me seem like a fool.”
“No one thinks you’re a fool. Everyone thinks you’re a loyal son. But now, if you’re to be a true follower of the Master, you will forgive her and let her see that you love her more than ever, because now you understand her suffering.” The Bishop glanced toward the door. “I have a meeting here now, Estevão. Please go into my inner chamber and pray to the Madelena to forgive you for your unforgiving heart.”
Looking more miserable than angry, Quim passed through the curtain behind the Bishop’s desk.
The Bishop’s secretary opened the other door and let the Speaker for the Dead into the chamber. The Bishop did not rise. To his surprise, the Speaker knelt and bowed his head. It was an act that Catholics did only in a public presentation to the Bishop, and Peregrino could not think what the Speaker meant by this. Yet the man knelt there, waiting, and so the Bishop arose from his chair, walked to him, and held out his ring to be kissed. Even then the Speaker waited, until finally Peregrino said, “I bless you, my son, even though I’m not sure whether you mock me with this obeisance.”
Head still bowed, the Speaker said, “There’s no mockery in me.” Then he looked up at Peregrino. “My father was a Catholic. He pretended not to be, for the sake of convenience, but he never forgave himself for his faithlessness.”
“You were baptized?”
“My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it.” The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. “Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in.”
Peregrino was skeptical. It was too elegant a gesture, for the Speaker to turn out to be Catholic. “I thought,” said the Bishop, “that you speakers for the dead renounced all religions before taking up your, shall we say, vocation.”
“I don’t know what the others do. I don’t think there are any rules about it—certainly there weren’t when I became a speaker.”
Bishop Peregrino knew that speakers were not supposed to lie, but this one certainly seemed to be evasive. “Speaker Andrew, there isn’t a place in all the Hundred Worlds where a Catholic has to conceal his faith, and there hasn’t been for three thousand years. That was the great blessing of space travel, that it removed the terrible population restrictions on an overcrowded Earth. Are you telling me that your father lived on Earth three thousand years ago?”
“I’m telling you that my father saw to it I was baptized a Catholic, and for his sake I did what he never could do in his life. It was for him that I knelt before a bishop and received his blessing.”
“But it was you that I blessed.” And you’re still dodging my question. Which implies that my inference about your father’s time of life is true, but you don’t want to discuss it. Dom Cristão said that there was more to you than met the eye.
“Good,” said the Speaker. “I need the blessing more than my father, since he’s dead, and I have many more problems to deal with.”
“Please sit down.” The Speaker chose a stool near the far wall. The Bishop sat in his massive chair behind his desk. “I wish you hadn’t spoken today. It came at an inconvenient time.”
“I had no warning that Congress would do this.”
“But you knew that Miro and Ouanda had violated the law. Bosquinha told me.”
“I found out only a few hours before the speaking. Thank you for not arresting them yet.”
“That’s a civil matter.” The Bishop brushed it aside, but they both knew that if he had insisted, Bosquinha would have had to obey her orders and arrest them regardless of the Speaker’s request. “Your speaking has caused a great deal of distress.”
“More than usual, I’m afraid.”
“So—is your responsibility over? Do you inflict the wounds and leave it to others to heal them?”
“Not wounds, Bishop Peregrino. Surgery. And if I can help to heal the pain afterward, then yes, I stay and help. I have no anesthesia, but I do try for antisepsis.”
“You should have been a priest, you know.”
“Younger sons used to have only two choices. The priesthood or the military. My parents chose the latter course for me.”
“A younger son. Yet you had a sister. And you lived in the time when population controls forbade parents to have more than two children unless the government gave special permission. They called such a child a Third, yes?”
“You know your history.”
“Were you born on Earth, before starflight?”
“What concerns us, Bishop Peregrino, is the future of Lusitania, not the biography of a speaker for the dead who is plainly only thirty-five years old.”
“The future of Lusitania is my concern, Speaker Andrew, not yours.”
“The future of the humans on Lusitania is your concern, Bishop. I’m concerned with the pequeninos as well.”
“Let’s not compete to see whose concern is greater.”
The secretary opened the door again, and Bosquinha, Dom Cristão, and Dona Cristã came in. Bosquinha glanced back and forth between the Bishop and the Speaker.
“There’s no blood on the floor, if that’s what you’re looking for,” said the Bishop.
“I was just estimating the temperature,” said Bosquinha.
“The warmth of mutual respect, I think,” said the Speaker. “Not the heat of anger or the ice of hate.”
“The Speaker is a Catholic by baptism, if not by belief,” said the Bishop. “I blessed him, and it seems to have made him docile.”
“I’ve always been respectful of authority,” said the Speaker.
“You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor,” the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.
The Speaker’s smile was just as chilly. “And you’re the on
e who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn’t talk to me.”
While the Bishop and the Speaker grinned at each other, the others laughed nervously, sat down, waited.
“It’s your meeting, Speaker,” said Bosquinha.
“Forgive me,” said the Speaker. “There’s someone else invited. It’ll make things much simpler if we wait a few more minutes for her to come.”
Ela found her mother outside the house, not far from the fence. A light breeze that barely rustled the capim had caught her hair and tossed it lightly. It took a moment for Ela to realize why this was so startling. Her mother had not worn her hair down in many years. It looked strangely free, all the more so because Ela could see how it curled and bent where it had been so long forced into a bun. It was then that she knew that the Speaker was right. Mother would listen to his invitation. Whatever shame or pain tonight’s speaking might have caused her, it led her now to stand out in the open, in the dusk just after sunset, looking toward the piggies’ hill. Or perhaps she was looking at the fence. Perhaps remembering a man who met her here, or somewhere else in the capim, so that unobserved they could love each other. Always in hiding, always in secret. Mother is glad, thought Ela, to have it known that Libo was her real husband, that Libo is my true father. Mother is glad, and so am I.
Mother did not turn to look at her, though she surely could hear Ela’s approach through the noisy grass. Ela stopped a few steps away.
“Mother,” she said.
“Not a herd of cabra, then,” said Mother. “You’re so noisy, Ela.”
“The Speaker. Wants your help.”
“Does he.”
Ela explained what the Speaker had told her. Mother did not turn around. When Ela was finished, Mother waited a moment, and then turned to walk over the shoulder of the hill. Ela ran after her, caught up with her. “Mother,” said Ela. “Mother, are you going to tell him about the Descolada?”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 65
