Quara was the last to arrive at Mother’s house. It was Planter who fetched her, the pequenino who served as Ender’s assistant in the fields. It was clear from the expectant silence in the living room that Miro had not actually told anyone anything yet. But they all knew, as surely as Quara knew, why he had called them together. It had to be Quim. Ender might have reached Quim by now, just barely; and Ender could talk to Miro by way of the transmitters they wore.
If Quim were all right, they wouldn’t have been summoned. They would simply have been told.
So they all knew. Quara scanned their faces as she stood in the doorway. Ela, looking stricken. Grego, his face angry—always angry, the petulant fool. Olhado, expressionless, his eyes gleaming. And Mother. Who could read that terrible mask she wore? Grief, certainly, like Ela, and fury as hot as Grego’s, and also the cold inhuman distance of Olhado’s face. We all wear Mother’s face, one way or another. What part of her is me? If I could understand myself, what would I then recognize in Mother’s twisted posture in her chair?
“He died of the descolada,” Miro said. “This morning. Andrew got there just now.”
“Don’t say that name,” Mother said. Her voice was husky with illcontained grief.
“He died as a martyr,” said Miro. “He died as he would have wanted to.”
Mother got up from her chair, awkwardly—for the first time, Quara realized that Mother was getting old. She walked with uncertain steps until she stood right in front of Miro, straddling his knees. Then she slapped him with all her strength across the face.
It was an unbearable moment. An adult woman striking a helpless cripple, that was hard enough to see; but Mother striking Miro, the one who had been their strength and salvation all through their childhood, that could not be endured. Ela and Grego leaped to their feet and pulled her away, dragged her back to her chair.
“What are you trying to do!” cried Ela. “Hitting Miro won’t bring Quim back to us!”
“Him and that jewel in his ear!” Mother shouted. She lunged toward Miro again; they barely held her back, despite her seeming feebleness. “What do you know about the way people want to die!”
Quara had to admire the way Miro faced her, unabashed, even though his cheek was red from her blow. “I know that death is not the worst thing in this world,” said Miro.
“Get out of my house,” said Mother.
Miro stood up. “You aren’t grieving for him,” he said. “You don’t even know who he was.”
“Don’t you dare say that to me!”
“If you loved him you wouldn’t have tried to stop him from going,” said Miro. His voice wasn’t loud, and his speech was thick and hard to understand. They listened, all of them, in silence. Even Mother, in anguished silence, for his words were terrible. “But you don’t love him. You don’t know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them to, Mother, you’ll always feel betrayed. And because eventually everybody dies, you’ll always feel cheated. But you’re the cheat, Mother. You’re the one who uses our love for you to try to control us.”
“Miro,” said Ela. Quara recognized the tone in Ela’s voice. It was as if they were all little children again, with Ela trying to calm Miro, to persuade him to soften his judgment. Quara remembered hearing Ela speak to him that way once when Father had just beaten Mother, and Miro said, “I’ll kill him. He won’t live out this night.” This was the same thing. Miro was saying vicious things to Mother, words that had the power to kill. Only Ela couldn’t stop him in time, not now, because the words had already been said. His poison was in Mother now, doing its work, seeking out her heart to burn it up.
“You heard Mother,” said Grego. “Get out of here.”
“I’m going,” said Miro. “But I said only the truth.”
Grego strode toward Miro, took him by the shoulders, and bodily propelled him toward the door. “You’re not one of us!” said Grego. “You’ve got no right to say anything to us!”
Quara shoved herself between them, facing Grego. “If Miro hasn’t earned the right to speak in this family, then we aren’t a family!”
“You said it,” murmured Olhado.
“Get out of my way,” said Grego. Quara had heard him speak threateningly before, a thousand times at least. But this time, standing so close to him, his breath in her face, she realized that he was out of control. That the news of Quim’s death had hit him hard, that maybe at this moment he wasn’t quite sane.
“I’m not in your way,” said Quara. “Go ahead. Knock a woman down. Shove a cripple. It’s in your nature, Grego. You were born to destroy things. I’m ashamed to belong to the same species as you, let alone the same family.”
Only after she spoke did she realize that maybe she was pushing Grego too far. After all these years of sparring between them, this time she had drawn blood. His face was terrifying.
But he didn’t hit her. He stepped around her, around Miro, and stood in the doorway, his hands on the doorframe. Pushing outward, as if he were trying to press the walls out of his way. Or perhaps he was clinging to the walls, hoping they could hold him in.
“I’m not going to let you make me angry at you, Quara,” said Grego. “I know who my enemy is.”
Then he was gone, out the door into the new darkness.
A moment later, Miro followed, saying nothing more.
Ela spoke as she also walked to the door. “Whatever lies you may be telling yourself, Mother, it wasn’t Ender or anyone
else who destroyed our family here tonight. It was you.” Then she was gone.
Olhado got up and left, wordlessly. Quara wanted to slap him as he passed her, to make him speak. Have you recorded everything in your computer eyes, Olhado? Have you got all the pictures etched in memory? Well, don’t be too proud of yourself. I may have only a brain of tissues to record this wonderful night in the history of the Ribeira family, but I’ll bet my pictures are every bit as clear as yours.
Mother looked up at Quara. Mother’s face was streaked with tears. Quara couldn’t remember—had she ever seen Mother weep before?
“So you’re all that’s left,” said Mother.
“Me?” said Quara. “I’m the one you cut off from access to the lab, remember? I’m the one you cut off from my life’s work. Don’t expect me to be your friend.”
Then Quara, too, left. Walked out into the night air feeling invigorated. Justified. Let the old hag think about that one for a while, see if she likes feeling cut off, the way she made me feel.
It was maybe five minutes later, when Quara was nearly to the gate, when the glow of her riposte had faded, that she began to realize what she had done to her mother. What they all had done. Left Mother alone. Left her feeling that she had lost, not just Quim, but her entire family. That was a terrible thing to do to her, and Mother didn’t deserve it.
Quara turned at once and ran back to the house. But as she came through the door, Ela also entered the living room from the other door, the one that led back farther into the house.
“She isn’t here,” said Ela.
“Nossa Senhora,” said Quara. “I said such awful things to her.”
“We all did.”
“She needed us. Quim is dead, and all we could do—”
“When she hit Miro like that, it was …”
To her surprise, Quara found herself weeping, clinging to her older sister. Am I still a child, then, after all? Yes, I am, we all are, and Ela is still the only one who knows how to comfort us. “Ela, was Quim the only one who held us together? Aren’t we a family anymore, now that he’s gone?”
“I don’t know,” said Ela.
“What can we do?”
In answer, Ela took her hand and led her out of the house. Quara asked where they were going, but Ela wouldn’t answer, just held her hand and led her along. Quara went willingly—she had no good idea of what to do, and it felt safe somehow, just to follow Ela. At first she thought Ela was looking for Mother, but no—she didn’t head for the lab or any other likely place. Where they ended up surprised her even more.
They stood before the shrine that the people of Lusitania had erected in the middle of the town. The shrine to Gusto and Cida, their grandparents, the xenobiologists who had first discovered a way to contain the descolada virus and thus saved the human colony on Lusitania. Even as they found the drugs that would stop the descolada from killing people, they themselves had died, too far gone with the infection for their own drug to save them.
The people adored them, built this shrine, called them Os Venerados even before the church beatified them. And now that they were only one step away from canonization as saints, it was permitted to pray to them.
To Quara’s surprise, that was why Ela had come here. She knelt before the shrine, and even though Quara really wasn’t much of a believer, she knelt beside her sister.
“Grandfather, Grandmother, pray to God for us. Pray for the soul of our brother Estevão. Pray for all our souls. Pray to Christ to forgive us.”
That was a prayer in which Quara could join with her whole heart.
“Protect your daughter, our mother, protect her from … from her grief and anger and make her know that we love her and that you love her and that … God loves her, if he does—oh, please, tell God to love her and don’t let her do anything crazy.”
Quara had never heard anyone pray like this. It was always memorized prayers, or written-down prayers. Not this gush of words. But then, Os Venerados were not like any other saints or blessed ones. They were Grandmother and Grandfather, even though we never met them in our lives.
“Tell God that we’ve had enough of this,” said Ela. “We have to find a way out of all this. Piggies killing humans. This fleet that’s coming to destroy us. The descolada trying to wipe everything out. Our family hating each other. Find us a way out of this, Grandfather, Grandmother, or if there isn’t a way then get God to open up a way because this can’t go on.”
Then an exhausted silence, both Ela and Quara breathing heavily.
“Em nome do Pai e do Filho e do Espírito Santo,” said Ela. “Amem.”
“Amem,” whispered Quara.
Then Ela embraced her sister and they wept together in the night.
Valentine was surprised to find that the Mayor and the Bishop were the only other people at the emergency meeting. Why was she there? She had no constituency, no claim to authority.
Mayor Kovano Zeljezo pulled up a chair for her. All the furniture in the Bishop’s private chamber was elegant, but the chairs were designed to be painful. The seat was so shallow from front to back that to sit at all, you had to keep your buttocks right up against the back. And the back itself was ramrod straight, with no allowances at all for the shape of the human spine, and it rose so high that your head was pushed forward. If you sat on one for any length of time, the chair would force you to bend forward, to lean your arms on your knees.
Perhaps that was the point, thought Valentine. Chairs that make you bow in the presence of God.
Or perhaps it was even more subtle. The chairs were designed to make you so physically uncomfortable that you longed for a less corporeal existence. Punish the flesh so you’ll prefer to live in the spirit.
“You look puzzled,” said Bishop Peregrino.
“I can see why the two of you would confer in an emergency,” said Valentine. “Did you need me to take notes?”
“Sweet humility,” said Peregrino. “But we have read your writings, my daughter, and we would be fools not to seek out your wisdom in a time of trouble.”
“Whatever wisdom I have I’ll give you,” said Valentine, “but I wouldn’t hope for much.”
With that, Mayor Kovano plunged into the subject of the meeting. “There are many long-term problems,” he said, “but we won’t have much chance to solve those if we don’t solve the immediate one. Last night there was some kind of quarrel at the Ribeira house—”
“Why must our finest minds be grouped in our most unstable family?” murmured the Bishop.
“They aren’t the most unstable family, Bishop Peregrino,” said Valentine. “They’re merely the family whose inner quakings cause the most perturbation at the surface. Other families suffer much worse turmoil, but you never notice because they don’t matter so much to the colony.”
The Bishop nodded sagely, but Valentine suspected that he was annoyed at being corrected on so trivial a point. Only it wasn’t trivial, she knew. If the Bishop and the Mayor started thinking that the Ribeira family was more unstable than in fact it was, they might lose trust in Ela or Miro or Novinha, all of whom were absolutely essential if Lusitania were to survive the coming crises. For that matter, even the most immature ones, Quara and Grego, might be needed. They had already lost Quim, probably the best of them all. It would be foolish to throw the others away as well; yet if the colony’s leaders were to start misjudging the Ribeiras as a group, they would soon misjudge them as individuals, too.
“Last night,” Mayor Kovano continued, “the family dispersed, and as far as we know, few of them are speaking to any of the others. I tried to find Novinha, and only recently learned that she has taken refuge with the Children of the Mind of Christ and won’t see or speak to anyone. Ela tells me that her mother has put a seal on all the files in the xenobiology laboratory, so that work there has come to an absolute standstill this morning. Quara is with Ela, believe it or not. The boy Miro is outside the perimeter somewhere. Olhado is at home and his wife says he has turned his eyes of
f, which is his way of withdrawing from life.”
“So far,” said Peregrino, “it sounds like they’re all taking Father Estevão’s death very badly. I must visit with them and help them.”
“All of these are perfectly acceptable grief responses,” said Kovano, “and I wouldn’t have called this meeting if this were all. As you say, Your Grace, you would deal with this as their spiritual leader, without any need for me.”
“Grego,” said Valentine, realizing who had not been accounted for in Kovano’s list.
“Exactly,” said Kovano. “His response was to go into a bar—several bars, before the night was over—and tell every half-drunk paranoid bigot in Milagre—of which we have our fair share—that the piggies have murdered Father Quim in cold blood.”
“Que Deus nos abençõe,” murmured Bishop Peregrino.
“One of the bars had a disturbance,” said Kovano. “Windows shattered, chairs broken, two men hospitalized.”
“A brawl?” asked the Bishop.
“Not really. Just anger vented in general.”
“So they got it out of their system.”
“I hope so,” said Kovano. “But it seemed only to stop when the sun came up. And when the constable arrived.”
“Constable?” asked Valentine. “Just one?”
“He heads a volunteer police force,” said Kovano. “Like the volunteer fire brigade. Two-hour patrols. We woke some up. It took twenty of them to quiet things down. We only have about fifty on the whole force, usually with only four on duty at any one time. They usually spend the night walking around telling each other jokes. And some of the off-duty police were among the ones trashing the bar.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 106
