The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “So you’re saying they’re not terribly reliable in an emergency.”

  “They behaved splendidly last night,” said Kovano. “The ones who were on duty, I mean.”

  “Still, there’s not a hope of them controlling a real riot,” said Valentine.

  “They handled things last night,” said Bishop Peregrino. “Tonight the first shock will have worn off.”

  “On the contrary,” said Valentine. “Tonight the word will have spread. Everybody will know about Quim’s death and the anger will be all the hotter.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mayor Kovano. “But what worries me is the next day, when Andrew brings the body home. Father Estevão wasn’t all that popular a figure—he never went drinking with the boys—but he was a kind of spiritual symbol. As a martyr, he’ll have a lot more people wanting to avenge him than he ever had disciples wanting to follow him during his life.”

  “So you’re saying we should have a small and simple funeral,” said Peregrino.

  “I don’t know,” said Kovano. “Maybe what the people need is a big funeral, where they can vent their grief and get it all out and over with.”

  “The funeral is nothing,” said Valentine. “Your problem is tonight.”

  “Why tonight?” said Kovano. “The first shock of the news of Father Estevão’s death will be over. The body won’t be back till tomorrow. What’s tonight?”

  “Tonight you have to close all the bars. Don’t allow any alcohol to flow. Arrest Grego and confine him until after the funeral. Declare a curfew at sundown and put every policeman on duty. Patrol the city all night in groups of four, with nightsticks and sidearms.”

  “Our police don’t have sidearms.”

  “Give them sidearms anyway. They don’t have to load them, they just have to have them. A nightstick is an invitation to argue with authority, because you can always run away. A pistol is an incentive to behave politely.”

  “This sounds very extreme,” said Bishop Peregrino. “A curfew! What about night shifts?”

  “Cancel all but vital services.”

  “Forgive me, Valentine,” said Mayor Kovano, “but if we overreact so badly, won’t that just blow things out of proportion? Maybe even cause the kind of panic we want to avoid?”

  “You’ve never seen a riot, have you?”

  “Only what happened last night,” said the Mayor.

  “Milagre is a very small town,” said Bishop Peregrino. “Only about fifteen thousand people. We’re hardly large enough to have a real riot—that’s for big cities, on heavily populated worlds.”

  “It’s not a function of population size,” said Valentine, “it’s a function of population density and public fear. Your fifteen thousand people are crammed together in a space hardly large enough to be the downtown of a city. They have a fence around them—by choice—because outside that fence there are creatures who are unbearably strange and who think they own the whole world, even though everybody can see vast prairies that should be open for humans to use except the piggies refuse to let them. The city has been scarred by plague, and now they’re cut off from every other world and there’s a fleet coming sometime in the near future to invade and oppress and punish them. And in their minds, all of this, all of it, is the piggies’ fault. Last night they first learned that the piggies have killed again, even after they took a solemn vow not to harm a human being. No doubt Grego gave them a very colorful account of the piggies’ treachery—the boy has a way with words, especially nasty ones—and the few men who were in the bars reacted with violence. I assure you, things will only be worse tonight, unless you head them off.”

  “If we take that kind of oppressive action, they’ll think we’re panicking,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  “They’ll think you’re firmly in control. The levelheaded people will be grateful to you. You’ll restore public trust.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mayor Kovano. “No mayor has ever done anything like that before.”

  “No other mayor ever had the need.”

  “People will say that I used the slightest excuse to take dictatorial powers.”

  “Maybe they will,” said Valentine.

  “They’ll never believe that there would have been a riot.”

  “So perhaps you’ll get defeated at the next election,” said Valentine. “What of that?”

  Peregrino laughed aloud. “She thinks like a cleric,” he said.

  “I’m willing to lose an election in order to do the right thing,” said Kovano, a little resentfully.

  “You’re just not sure it’s the right thing,” said Valentine.

  “Well, you can’t know that there’ll be a riot tonight,” said Kovano.

  “Yes I can,” said Valentine. “I promise that unless you take firm control right now, and stifle any possibility of crowds forming tonight, you will lose a lot more than the next election.”

  The Bishop was still chuckling. “This does not sound like the woman who told us that whatever wisdom she had, she would share, but we mustn’t hope for much.”

  “If you think I’m overreacting, what do you propose?”

  “I’ll announce a memorial service for Quim tonight, and prayers for peace and calm.”

  “That will bring to the cathedral exactly the people who would never be part of a riot anyway,” said Valentine.

  “You don’t understand how important faith is to the people of Lusitania,” said Peregrino.

  “And you don’t understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.”

  “I’ll put all the police on alert tonight,” said Mayor Kovano, “and put half of them on duty from dusk to midnight. But I won’t close the bars or declare a curfew. I want life to go on as normally as possible. If we started changing everything, shutting everything down, we’d just be giving them more reasons to be afraid and angry.”

  “You’d be giving them a sense that authority was in command,” said Valentine. “You’d be taking action that was commensurate with the terrible feelings they have. They’d know that somebody was doing something.”

  “You are very wise,” said Bishop Peregrino, “and this would be the best advice for a large city, especially on a planet less true to the Christian faith. But we are a mere village, and the people are pious. They don’t need to be bullied. They need encouragement and solace tonight, not curfews and closings and pistols and patrols.”

  “These are your choices to make,” said Valentine. “As I said, what wisdom I have, I share.”

  “And we appreciate it. You can be sure I’ll be watching things closely tonight,” said Kovano.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” said Valentine. “But as you can see, as I predicted, it didn’t come to much.”

  She got up from her chair, her body aching from sitting so long in that impossible posture. She had not bowed herself forward. Nor did she bow even now, as the Bishop extended his hand to be kissed. Instead, she shook his hand firmly, then shook Mayor Kovano’s hand. As equals. As strangers.

  She left the room, burning inside. She had warned them and told them what they ought to do. But like most leaders who had never faced a real crisis, they didn’t believe that anything would be different tonight from most other nights. People only really believe in what they’ve seen before. After tonight, Kovano will believe in curfews and closings at times of public stress. But by then it will be too late. By then they will be counting the casualties.

  How many graves would be dug beside Quim’s? And whose bodies would go into them?

  Though Valentine was a stranger here and knew very few of the people, she couldn’t just accept the riot as inevitable. There was only one other hope. She would talk to Grego. Try to persuade him of the seriousness of what was happening here. If he went from bar to bar tonight, counseling patience, speaking calmly, then the riot might be forestalled. Only he had any chance of doing it. They knew him. He was Quim’s brother. He was
the one whose words had so angered them last night. Enough men might listen to him that the riot might be contained, forestalled, channeled. She had to find Grego.

  If only Ender were here. She was a historian; he had actually led men into battle. Well, boys, actually. He had led boys. But it was the same thing—he’d know what to do. Why is he away now? Why is this in my hands? I haven’t the stomach for violence and confrontation. I never have. That’s why Ender was born in the first place, a third child conceived at government request in an era when parents weren’t usually allowed to have more than two without devastating legal sanctions: because Peter had been too vicious, and she, Valentine, had been too mild.

  Ender would have talked the Mayor and the Bishop into acting sensibly. And if he couldn’t, he would have known how to go into town himself, calm things down, keep things under control.

  As she wished for Ender to be with her, though, she knew that even he couldn’t control what was going to happen tonight. Maybe even what she had suggested wouldn’t have been enough. She had based her conclusions about what would happen tonight on all that she had seen and read on many different worlds in many different times. Last night’s conflagration would definitely spread much farther tonight. But now she was beginning to realize that things might be even worse than she had first assumed. The people of Lusitania had lived in unexpressed fear on an alien world for far too long. Every other human colony had immediately spread out, taken possession of their world, made it their own within a few generations. The humans of Lusitania still lived in a tiny compound, a virtual zoo with terrifying swinelike creatures peering in at them through the bars. What was pent up within these people could not be estimated. It probably could not even be contained. Not for a single day.

  The deaths of Libo and Pipo in past years had been bad enough. But they had been scientists, working among the piggies. With them it was like airplane crashes or starship explosions. If only the crew was aboard, then the public didn’t get quite so upset—the crew was being paid for the risk they took. Only when civilians were killed did such accidents cause fear and outrage. And in the minds of the people of Lusitania, Quim was an innocent civilian.

  No, more than that: He was a holy man, bringing brotherhood and holiness to these undeserving half-animals. Killing him was not just bestial and cruel, it was also sacrilege.

  The people of Lusitania were every bit as pious as Bishop Peregrino thought. What he forgot was the way pious people had always reacted to insults against their god. Peregrino didn’t remember enough of Christian history, thought Valentine, or perhaps he simply thought that all that sort of thing had ended with the Crusades. If the cathedral was, in fact, the center of life in Lusitania, and if the people were devoted to their priests, why did Peregrino imagine that their grief at the murder of a priest could be expressed in a simple prayer service? It would only add to their fury, if the Bishop seemed to think that Quim’s death was nothing much. He was adding to the problem, not solving it.

  She was still searching for Grego when she heard the bells start to toll. The call to prayer. Yet this was not a normal time for mass; people must be looking up in surprise at the sound, wondering, Why is the bell tolling? And then remembering—Father Estevão is dead. Father Quim was murdered by the piggies. Oh, yes, Peregrino, what an excellent idea, ringing that prayer bell. That will help the people feel like things are calm and normal.

  From all wise men, O Lord, protect us.

  Miro lay curled in a bend of one of Human’s roots. He had not slept much the night before, if at all, yet even now he lay there unstirring, with pequeninos coming and going all around him, the sticks beating out rhythms on Human’s and Rooter’s trunks. Miro heard the conversations, understanding most of them even though he wasn’t yet fluent in Father Tongue because the brothers made no effort to conceal their own agitated conversations from him. He was Miro, after all. They trusted him. So it was all right for him to realize how angry and afraid they were.

  The fathertree named Warmaker had killed a human. And not just any human—he and his tribe had murdered Father Estevão, the most beloved of human beings after only the Speaker for the Dead himself. It was unspeakable. What should they do? They had promised the Speaker not to make war on each other anymore, but how else could they punish Warmaker’s tribe and show the humans that the pequeninos repudiated their vicious act? War was the only answer, all the brothers of every tribe attacking Warmaker’s forest and cutting down all their trees except those known to have argued against Warmaker’s plan.

  And their mothertree? That was the debate that still raged: Whether it was enough to kill all the brothers and complicit fathertrees in Warmaker’s forest, or whether they should cut down the mothertree as well, so that there was no chance of any of Warmaker’s seed taking root in the world again. They would leave Warmaker alive long enough to see the destruction of his tribe, and then they would burn him to death, the most terrible of all executions, and the only time the pequeninos ever used fire within a forest.

  Miro heard all this, and wanted to speak, wanted to say, What good is all this, now? But he knew that the pequeninos could not be stopped. They were too angry now. They were angry partly because of grief at Quim’s death, but also in large part because they were ashamed. Warmaker had shamed them all by breaking their treaty. Humans would never trust the pequeninos again, unless they destroyed Warmaker and his tribe utterly.

  The decision was made. Tomorrow morning all the brothers would begin the journey toward Warmaker’s forest. They would spend many days gathering, because this had to be an action of all the forests of the world together. When they were ready, with Warmaker’s forest utterly surrounded, then they would destroy it so thoroughly that no one would ever guess that there had once been a forest there.

  The humans would see it. Their satellites would show them how the pequeninos dealt with treaty-breakers and cowardly murderers. Then the humans would trust the pequeninos again. Then the pequeninos could lift up their heads without shame in the presence of a human.

  Gradually Miro realized that they were not just letting him overhear their conversations and deliberations. They were making sure he heard and understood all they were doing. They expect me to take the word back to the city. They expect me to explain to the humans of Lusitania exactly how the pequeninos plan to punish Quim’s murderers.

  Don’t they realize that I’m a stranger here now? Who would listen to me, among the humans of Lusitania—me, a crippled boy out of the past, whose speech is so slow and hard to follow. I have no influence over other humans. I barely have influence over my own body.

  Still, it was Miro’s duty. He got up slowly, unknotting himself from his place amid Human’s roots. He would try. He would go to Bishop Peregrino and tell him what the pequeninos were planning. Bishop Peregrino would spread the word, and then the people could all feel better knowing that thousands of innocent pequenino infants would be killed to make up for the death of one man.

  What are pequenino babies, after all? Just worms living in the dark belly of a mothertree. It would never occur to these people that there was scant moral difference between this mass murder of pequenino babies and King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents at the time of Jesus’ birth. This was justice they were pursuing. What is the complete obliteration of a tribe of pequeninos compared with that?

  Grego: standing in the middle of the grassy square, the crowd alert around me, each of them connected to me by a taut invisible wire so that my will is their will, my mouth speaks their words, their hearts beat to my rhythm. I have never felt this before, this kind of life, to be part of a group like this, and not just part of it, but the mind of it, the center, so that my self includes all of them, hundreds of them, my rage is their rage, their hands are my hands, their eyes see only what I show them.

  The music of it, the cadence of invocation, answer, invocation, answer:

  “The Bishop says that we’ll pray for justice, but is that enough for us?” “No!”
>
  “The pequeninos say that they’ll destroy the forest that murdered my brother, but do we believe them?”

  “No!”

  They complete my phrases; when I have to stop to breathe in, they shout for me, so that my voice is never stilled, but rises out of the throats of five hundred men and women. The Bishop came to me, full of peace and patience. The Mayor came to me with his warnings of police and riot and his hints of prison. Valentine came to me, all icy intellect, speaking of my responsibility. All of them know my power, power I never even knew I had, power that began only when I stopped obeying them and finally spoke what was in my heart to the people themselves. Truth is my power. I stopped deceiving the people and gave them the truth and now see what I’ve become, what we’ve become together.

  “If anybody punishes the swine for killing Quim, it should be us. A human life should be avenged by human hands! They say that the sentence for the murderers is death—but we’re the only ones who have the right to appoint the executioner! We’re the ones who have to make sure the sentence is carried out!”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “They let my brother die in the agony of the descolada! They watched his body burn from the inside out! Now we’ll burn that forest to the ground!”

  “Burn them! Fire! Fire!”

  See how they strike matches, how they tear up tufts of grass and light them. The flame we’ll light together!

  “Tomorrow we’ll leave on the punitive expedition—”

  “Tonight! Tonight! Now!”

  “Tomorrow—we can’t go tonight—we have to collect water and supplies—”

  “Now! Tonight! Burn!”

  “I tell you we can’t get there in a single night, it’s hundreds of kilometers away, it’ll take days to get there—”

  “The piggies are right over the fence!”