“Yes.”
“Why now? After all these years? Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Because you did better work on your own, without my help.”
“You know what I was doing?”
“You’re my apprentice. I have complete access to your files without leaving any footprints. What kind of master would I be if I didn’t watch your work?”
“But—”
“I also read the files you hid under Quara’s name. You’ve never been a mother, so you didn’t know that all the file activities of a child under twelve are reported to the parents every week. Quara was doing some remarkable research. I’m glad you’re coming with me. When I tell the Speaker, I’ll be telling you, too.”
“You’re going the wrong way,” said Ela.
Mother stopped. “Isn’t the Speaker’s house near the praça?”
“The meeting is in the Bishop’s chambers.”
For the first time Mother faced Ela directly. “What are you and the Speaker trying to do to me?”
“We’re trying to save Miro,” said Ela. “And Lusitania Colony, if we can.”
“Taking me to the spider’s lair—”
“The Bishop has to be on our side or—”
“Our side! So when you say we, you mean you and the Speaker, is that it? Do you think I haven’t noticed that? All my children, one by one, he’s seduced you all—”
“He hasn’t seduced anybody!”
“He seduced you with his way of knowing just what you want to hear, of—”
“He’s no flatterer,” said Ela. “He doesn’t tell us what we want. He tells us what we know is true. He didn’t win our affection, Mother, he won our trust.”
“Whatever he gets from you, you never gave it to me.”
“We wanted to.”
Ela did not bend this time before her mother’s piercing, demanding glare. It was her mother, instead, who bent, who looked away and then looked back with tears in her eyes. “I wanted to tell you.” Mother wasn’t talking about her files. “When I saw how you hated him, I wanted to say, He’s not your father, your father is a good, kind man—”
“Who didn’t have the courage to tell us himself.”
Rage came into Mother’s eyes. “He wanted to. I wouldn’t let him.”
“I’ll tell you something, Mother. I loved Libo, the way everybody in Milagre loved him. But he was willing to be a hypocrite, and so were you, and without anybody even guessing, the poison of your lies hurt us all. I don’t blame you, Mother, or him. But I thank God for the Speaker. He was willing to tell us the truth, and it set us free.”
“It’s easy to tell the truth,” said Mother softly, “when you don’t love anybody.”
“Is that what you think?” said Ela. “I think I know something, Mother. I think you can’t possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them. I think the Speaker loved Father. Marcão, I mean. I think he understood him and loved him before he spoke.”
Mother didn’t answer, because she knew that it was true.
“And I know he loves Grego, and Quara, and Olhado. And Miro, and even Quim. And me. I know he loves me. And when he shows me that he loves me, I know it’s true because he never lies to anybody.”
Tears came out of Mother’s eyes and drifted down her cheeks.
“I have lied to you and everybody else,” Mother said. Her voice sounded weak and strained. “But you have to believe me anyway. When I tell you that I love you.”
Ela embraced her mother, and for the first time in years she felt warmth in her mother’s response. Because the lies between them now were gone. The Speaker had erased the barrier, and there was no reason to be tentative and cautious anymore.
“You’re thinking about that damnable Speaker even now, aren’t you?” whispered her mother.
“So are you,” Ela answered.
Both their bodies shook with Mother’s laugh. “Yes.” Then she stopped laughing and pulled away, looked Ela in the eyes. “Will he always come between us?”
“Yes,” said Ela. “Like a bridge he’ll come between us, not a wall.”
Miro saw the piggies when they were halfway down the hillside toward the fence. They were so silent in the forest, but the piggies had no great skill in moving through the capim—it rustled loudly as they ran. Or perhaps in coming to answer Miro’s call they felt no need to conceal themselves. As they came nearer, Miro recognized them. Arrow, Human, Mandachuva, Leaf-eater, Cups. He did not call out to them, nor did they speak when they arrived. Instead they stood behind the fence opposite him and regarded him silently. No Zenador had ever called the piggies to the fence before. By their stillness they showed their anxiety.
“I can’t come to you anymore,” said Miro.
They waited for his explanation.
“The framlings found out about us. Breaking the law. They sealed the gate.”
Leaf-eater touched his chin. “Do you know what it was the framlings saw?”
Miro laughed bitterly. “What didn’t they see? Only one framling ever came with us.”
“No,” said Human. “The hive queen says it wasn’t the Speaker. The hive queen says they saw it from the sky.”
The satellites? “What could they see from the sky?”
“Maybe the hunt,” said Arrow.
“Maybe the shearing of the cabra,” said Leaf-eater.
“Maybe the fields of amaranth,” said Cups.
“All of those,” said Human. “And maybe they saw that the wives have let three hundred twenty children be born since the first amaranth harvest.”
“Three hundred!”
“And twenty,” said Mandachuva.
“They saw that food would be plenty,” said Arrow. “Now we’re sure to win the next war. Our enemies will be planted in huge new forests all over the plain, and the wives will put mother trees in every one of them.”
Miro felt sick. Is this what all their work and sacrifice was for, to give some transient advantage to one tribe of piggies? Almost he said, Libo didn’t die so you could conquer the world. But his training took over, and he asked a noncommittal question. “Where are all these new children?”
“None of the little brothers come to us,” explained Human. “We have too much to do, learning from you and teaching all the other brother-houses. We can’t be training little brothers.” Then, proudly, he added, “Of the three hundred, fully half are children of my father, Rooter.”
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 ha
d 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 Cristão 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 Cristã.
“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 Cristão.
“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.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 66
