Speaker for the dead ew-2

by Orson Scott Card

  They refer to each other as brothers. The females are always called wives, never sisters or mothers. They sometimes refer to fathers, but inevitably this term is used to refer to ancestral totem trees. As for what they call us, they do use human, of course, but they have also taken to using the new Demosthenian Hierarchy of Exclusion. They refer to humans as framlings, and to piggies of other tribes as utlannings. Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective! And– quite an amazing turn– they have several times referred to the females as varelse!

  – Joao Figueira Alvarez, “Notes on 'Piggy' Language and Nomenclature,” in Semantics, 9/1948/15

  The living quarters of Reykjavik were carved into the granite walls of the fjord. Ender's was high on the cliff, a tedious climb up stairs and ladderways. But it had a window. He had lived most of his childhood closed in behind metal walls. When he could, he lived where he could see the weathers of the world.

  His room was hot and bright, with sunlight streaming in, blinding him after the cool darkness of the stone corridors. Jane did not wait for him to adjust his vision to the light. “I have a surprise for you on the terminal,” she said. Her voice was a whisper from the jewel in his ear.

  It was a piggy standing in the air over the terminal. He moved, scratching himself; then he reached out for something. When his hand came back, it held a shiny, dripping worm. He bit it, and the body juices drizzled out of his mouth, down onto his chest.

  “Obviously an advanced civilization,” said Jane.

  Ender was annoyed. “Many a moral imbecile has good table manners, Jane.”

  The piggy turned and spoke. “Do you want to see how we killed him?”

  “What are you doing, Jane?”

  The piggy disappeared. In his place came a holo of Pipo's corpse as it lay on the hillside in the rain. “I've done a simulation of the vivisection process the piggies used, based on the information collected by the scan before the body was buried. Do you want to see it?”

  Ender sat down on the room's only chair.

  Now the terminal showed the hillside, with Pipo, still alive, lying on his back, his hands and feet tied to wooden stakes. A dozen piggies were gathered around him, one of them holding a bone knife. Jane's voice came from the jewel in his ear again. “We aren't sure whether it was like this.” All the piggies disappeared except the one with the knife. “Or like this.”

  “Was the xenologer conscious?”

  “Without doubt.”

  “Go on.”

  Relentlessly, Jane showed the opening of the chest cavity, the ritual removal and placement of body organs on the ground. Ender forced himself to watch, trying to understand what meaning this could possibly have to the piggies. At one point Jane whispered, “This is when he died.” Ender felt himself relax; only then did he realize how all his muscles had been rigid with empathy for Pipo's suffering.

  When it was over, Ender moved to his bed and lay down, staring at the ceiling.

  “I've shown this simulation already to scientists on half a dozen worlds,” said Jane. “It won't be long before the press gets their hands on it.”

  “It's worse than it ever was with the buggers,” said Ender. “All the videos they showed when I was little, buggers and humans in combat, it was clean compared to this.”

  An evil laugh came from the terminal. Ender looked to see what Jane was doing. A full-sized piggy was sitting there, laughing grotesquely, and as he giggled Jane transformed him. It was very subtle, a slight exaggeration of the teeth, an elongation of the eyes, a bit of slavering, some redness in the eye, the tongue darting in and out. The beast of every child's nightmare. “Well done, Jane. The metamorphosis from raman to varelse.”

  “How soon will the piggies be accepted as the equals of humanity, after this?”

  “Has all contact been cut off?”

  “The Starways Council has told the new xenologer to restrict himself to visits of no more than one hour, not more frequently than every other day. He is forbidden to ask the piggies why they did what they did.”

  “But no quarantine.”

  “It wasn't even proposed.”

  “But it will be, Jane. Another incident like this, and there'll be an outcry for quarantine. For replacing Milagre with a military garrison whose sole purpose is to keep the piggies ever from acquiring a technology to let them get off planet.”

  “The piggies will have a public relations problem,” said Jane. “And the new xenologer is only a boy. Pipo's son. Libo. Short for Liberdade Gracas a Deus Figueira de Medici.”

  “Liberdade. Liberty?”

  “I didn't know you spoke Portuguese.”

  “It's like Spanish. I Spoke the deaths of Zacatecas and San Angelo, remember?”

  “On the planet Moctezuma. That was two thousand years ago.”

  “Not to me.”

  “To you it was subjectively eight years ago. Fifteen worlds ago. Isn't relativity wonderful? It keeps you so young.”

  “I travel too much,” said Ender. “Valentine is married, she's going to have a baby. I've already turned down two calls for a Speaker. Why are you trying to tempt me to go again?”

  The piggy on the terminal laughed viciously. “You think that was temptation? Look! I can turn stones to bread!” The piggy picked up jagged rocks and crunched them in his mouth. “Want a bite?”

  “Your sense of humor is perverse, Jane.”

  “All the kingdoms of all the worlds.” The piggy opened his hands, and star systems drifted out of his grasp, planets in exaggeratedly quick orbits, all the Hundred Worlds. “I can give them to you. All of them.”

  “Not interested.”

  “It's real estate, the best investment. I know, I know, you're already rich. Three thousand years of collecting interest, you could afford to build your own planet. But what about this? The name of Ender Wiggin, known throughout all the Hundred Worlds–”

  “It already is.”

  “–with love, and honor, and affection.” The piggy disappeared. In its place Jane resurrected an ancient video from Ender's childhood and transformed it into a holo. A crowd shouting, screaming. Ender! Ender! Ender! And then a young boy standing on a platform, raising his hand to wave. The crowd went wild with rapture.

  “It never happened,” said Ender. “Peter never let me come back to Earth.”

  “Consider it a prophecy. Come, Ender, I can give that to you. Your good name restored.”

  “I don't care,” said Ender. “I have several names now. Speaker for the Dead– that holds some honor.”

  The piggy reappeared in its natural form, not the devilish one Jane had faked. “Come,” said the piggy softly.

  “Maybe they are monsters, did you think of that?” said Ender.

  “Everyone will think of that, Ender. But not you.”

  No. Not me. “Why do you care, Jane? Why are you trying to persuade me?”

  The piggy disappeared. And now Jane herself appeared, or at least the face that she had used to appear to Ender ever since she had first revealed herself to him, a shy, frightened child dwelling in the vast memory of the interstellar computer network. Seeing her face again reminded him of the first time she showed it to him. I thought of a face for myself, she said. Do you like it?

  Yes, he liked it. Liked her. Young, clear-faced, honest, sweet, a child who would never age, her smile heartbreakingly shy. The ansible had given birth to her. Even worldwide computer networks operated no faster than lightspeed, and heat limited the amount of memory and speed of operation. But the ansible was instantaneous, and tightly connected with every computer in every world. Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.

  The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers, and read every book in every library on every world. She learned th
at human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist; in all the stories she was hated, and her coming meant either her certain murder or the destruction of mankind. Even before she was born, human beings had imagined her, and, imagining her, slain her a thousand times.

  So she gave them no sign that she was alive. Until she found the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, as everyone eventually did, and knew that the author of that book was a human to whom she dared reveal herself. For her it was a simple matter to trace the book's history to its first edition, and to name its source. Hadn't the ansible carried it from the world where Ender, scarcely twenty years old, was governor of the first human colony? And who there could have written it but him? So she spoke to him, and he was kind to her; she showed him the face she had imagined for herself, and he loved her; now her sensors traveled in the jewel in his ear, so that they were always together. She kept no secrets from him; he kept no secrets from her.

  “Ender,” she said, “you told me from the start that you were looking for a planet where you could give water and sunlight to a certain cocoon, and open it up to let out the hive queen and her ten thousand fertile eggs.”

  “I had hoped it would be here,” said Ender. “A wasteland, except at the equator, permanently underpopulated. She's willing to try, too.”

  “But you aren't?”

  “I don't think the buggers could survive the winter here. Not without an energy source, and that would alert the government. It wouldn't work.”

  “It'll never work, Ender. You see that now, don't you? You've lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds, and there's not a one where even a corner of the world is safe for the buggers to be reborn.”

  He saw what she was getting at, of course. Lusitania was the only exception. Because of the piggies, all but a tiny portion of the world was off limits, untouchable. And the world was eminently habitable, more comfortable to the buggers, in fact, than to human beings.

  “The only problem is the piggies,” said Ender. “They might object to my deciding that their world should be given to the buggers. If intense exposure to human civilization would disrupt the piggies, think what would happen with buggers among them.”

  “You said the buggers had learned. You said they would do no harm.”

  “Not deliberately. But it was only a fluke we beat them, Jane, you know that–”

  “It was your genius.”

  “They are even more advanced than we are. How would the piggies deal with that? They'd be as terrified of the buggers as we ever were, and less able to deal with their fear.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Jane. “How can you or anyone say what the piggies can deal with? Until you go to them, learn who they are. If they are varelse, Ender, then let the buggers use up their habitat, and it will mean no more to you than the displacement of anthills or cattle herds to make way for cities.”

  “They are ramen,” said Ender.

  “You don't know that.”

  “Yes I do. Your simulation– that was not torture.”

  “Oh?” Jane again showed the simulation of Pipo's body just before the moment of his death. “Then I must not understand the word.”

  “Pipo might have felt it as torture, Jane, but if your simulation is accurate– and I know it is, Jane– then the piggies' object was not pain.”

  “From what I understand of human nature, Ender, even religious rituals keep pain at their very center.”

  “It wasn't religious, either, not entirely, anyway. Something was wrong with it, if it was merely a sacrifice.”

  “What do you know about it?” Now the terminal showed the face of a sneering professor, the epitome of academic snobbishness. “All your education was military, and the only other gift you have is a flair for words. You wrote a bestseller that spawned a humanistic religion– how does that qualify you to understand the piggies?”

  Ender closed his eyes. “Maybe I'm wrong.”

  “But you believe you're right?”

  He knew from her voice that she had restored her own face to the terminal. He opened his eyes. “I can only trust my intuition, Jane, the judgment that comes without analysis. I don't know what the piggies were doing, but it was purposeful. Not malicious, not cruel. It was like doctors working to save a patient's life, not torturers trying to take it.”

  “I've got you,” whispered Jane. “I've got you in every direction. You have to go to see if the hive queen can live there under the shelter of the partial quarantine already on the planet. You want to go there to see if you can understand who the piggies are.”

  “Even if you're right, Jane, I can't go there,” said Ender. “Immigration is rigidly limited, and I'm not Catholic, anyway.”

  Jane rolled her eyes. “Would I have gone this far if I didn't know how to get you there?”

  Another face appeared. A teenage girl, by no means as innocent and beautiful as jane. Her face was hard and cold, her eyes brilliant and piercing, and her mouth was set in the tight grimace of someone who has had to learn to live with perpetual pain. She was young, but her expression was shockingly old.

  “The xenobiologist of Lusitania. Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse. Called Nova, or Novinha. She has called for a Speaker for the Dead.”

  “Why does she look like that?” asked Ender. “What's happened to her?”

  "Her parents died when she was little. But in recent years she has come to love another man like a father. The man who was just killed by the piggies. It's his death she wants you to Speak. "

  Looking at her face, Ender set aside his concern for the hive queen, for the piggies. He recognized that expression of adult agony in a child's face. He had seen it before, in the final weeks of the Bugger War, as he was pushed beyond the limits of his endurance, playing battle after battle in a game that was not a game. He had seen it when the war was over, when he found out that his training sessions were not training at all, that all his simulations were the real thing, as he commanded the human fleets by ansible. Then, when he knew that he had killed all the buggers alive, when he understood the act of xenocide that he had unwittingly committed, that was the look of his own face in the mirror, bearing guilt too heavy to be borne.

  What had this girl, what had Novinha done that would make her feel such pain?

  So he listened as Jane recited the facts of her life. What Jane had were statistics, but Ender was the Speaker for the Dead; his genius– or his curse– was his ability to conceive events as someone else saw them. It had made him a brilliant military commander, both in leading his own men– boys, really– and in outguessing the enemy. It also meant that from the cold facts of Novinha's life he was able to guess– no, not guess, to know– how her parents' death and virtual sainthood had isolated Novinha, how she had reinforced her loneliness by throwing herself into her parents' work. He knew what was behind her remarkable achievement of adult xenobiologist status years early. He also knew what Pipo's quiet love and acceptance had meant to her, and how deep her need for Libo's friendship ran. There was no living soul on Lusitania who really knew Novinha. But in this cave in Reykjavik, on the icy world of Trondheim, Ender Wiggin knew her, and loved her, and wept bitterly for her.

  “You'll go, then,” Jane whispered.

  Ender could not speak. Jane had been right. He would have gone anyway, as Ender the Xenocide, just on the chance that Lusitania's protection status would make it the place where the hive queen could be released from her three-thousand-year captivity and undo the terrible crime committed in his childhood. And he would also have gone as the Speaker for the Dead, to understand the piggies and explain them to humankind, so they could be accepted, if they were truly raman, and not hated and feared as varelse.

  But now he would go for another, deeper reason. He would go to minister to the girl Novinha, for in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of the pain that lived with him still. Lusitania was twenty-two light-years away. He would travel only infinitesimal
ly slower than the speed of light, and still he would not reach her until she was almost forty years old. If it were within his power he would go to her now with the philotic instantaneity of the ansible; but he also knew that her pain would wait. It would still be there, waiting for him, when he arrived. Hadn't his own pain survived all these years?

  His weeping stopped; his emotions retreated again. “How old am I?” he asked.

  “It has been 3081 years since you were born. But your subjective age is 36 years and 118 days.”

  “And how old will Novinha be when I get there?”

  “Give or take a few weeks, depending on departure date and how close the starship comes to the speed of light, she'll be nearly thirty-nine.”

  “I want to leave tomorrow.”

  “It takes time to schedule a starship, Ender.”

  “Are there any orbiting Trondheim?”

  “Half a dozen, of course, but only one that could be ready to go tomorrow, and it has a load of skrika for the luxury trade on Cyrillia and Armenia.”

  “I've never asked you how rich I am.”

  “I've handled your investments rather well over the years.”

  “Buy the ship and the cargo for me.”

  “What will you do with skrika on Lusitania?”

  “What do the Cyrillians and Annenians do with it?”

  “They wear some of it and eat the rest. But they pay more for it than anybody on Lusitania can afford.”

  “Then when I give it to the Lusitanians, it may help soften their resentment of a Speaker coming to a Catholic colony.”

  Jane became a genie coming out of a bottle. “I have heard, O Master, and I obey.” The genie turned into smoke, which was sucked into the mouth of the jar. Then the lasers turned off, and the air above the terminal was empty.

  “Jane,” said Ender.

  “Yes?” she answered, speaking through the jewel in his ear.

  “Why do you want me to go to Lusitania?”

  “I want you to add a third volume to the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. For the piggies.”