“There is a test going on here,” said Quim, “but not the one you think.”
“Oh?”
“It's the test of the Last Judgment. You stand before Christ, and he says to those on his right hand, 'I was a stranger, and you took me in. Hungry, and you fed me. Enter into the joy of the Lord.' Then he says to those on his left hand, 'I was hungry, and you gave me nothing. I was a stranger, and you mistreated me.' And they all say to him, 'Lord, when did we do these things to you?' and he answers, 'If you did it to the least of my brothers, you did it to me.' All you brothers, gathered here– I am the least of your brothers. You will answer to Christ for what you do to me here.”
“Foolish man,” said Warmaker. “We are doing nothing to you but holding you still. What happens to you is whatever God desires. Didn't Christ say, 'I do nothing but what I've seen the Father do'? Didn't Christ say, 'I am the way. Come follow me'? Well, we are letting you do what Christ did. He went without bread for forty days in the wilderness. We give you a chance to be one-fourth as holy. If God wants us to believe in your doctrine, he'll send angels to feed you. He'll turn stones into bread.”
“You're making a mistake,” said Quim.
“You made the mistake by coming here.”
“I mean that you're making a doctrinal mistake. You've got the lines down right– fasting in the wilderness, stones into bread, all of it. But didn't you think it might be a little too self-revelatory for you to give yourself Satan's part?”
That was when Warmaker flew into a rage, speaking so rapidly that the movements within the wood began to twist and press on Quim until he was afraid he would be torn to bits within the tree.
“You are Satan! Trying to get us to believe your lies long enough for you humans to figure out a way to kill the descolada and keep all the brothers from the third life forever! Do you think we don't see through you? We know all your plans, all of them! You have no secrets! And God keeps no secrets from us either! We're the ones who were given the third life, not you! If God loved you, he wouldn't make you bury your dead in the ground and then let nothing but worms come out of you!”
The brothers sat around the opening in the trunk, enthralled by the argument.
It went on for six days, doctrinal arguments worthy of any of the fathers of the church in any age. Not since the council at Nicaea were such momentous issues considered, weighed.
The arguments were passed from brother to brother, from tree to tree, from forest to forest. Accounts of the dialogue between Warmaker and Father Estevao always reached Rooter and Human within a day. But the information wasn't complete. It wasn't until the fourth day that they realized that Quim was being held prisoner, without any of the food containing the descolada inhibitor.
Then an expedition was mounted at once, Ender and Ouanda, Jakt and Lars and Varsam; Mayor Kovano sent Ender and Ouanda because they were widely known and respected among the piggies, and Jakt and his son and son-in-law because they weren't native-born Lusitanians. Kovano didn't dare to send any of the native-born colonists– if word of this got out, there was no telling what would happen. The five of them took the fastest car and followed the directions Rooter gave them. It was a three-day trip.
On the sixth day the dialogue ended, because the descolada had so thoroughly invaded Quim's body that he had no strength to speak, and was often too fevered and delirious to say anything intelligible when he did speak.
On the seventh day, he looked through the gap, upward, above the heads of the brothers who were still there, still watching. “I see the Savior sitting on the right hand of God,” he whispered. Then he smiled.
An hour later he was dead. Warmaker felt it, and announced it triumphantly to the brothers. “The Holy Ghost has judged, and Father Estevao has been rejected!”
Some of the brothers rejoiced. But not as many as Warmaker had expected.
* * *
At dusk, Ender's party arrived. There was no question now of the piggies capturing and testing them– they were too many, and the brothers were not all of one mind now anyway. Soon they stood before the split trunk of Warmaker and saw the haggard, disease-ravaged face of Father Estevao, barely visible in the shadows.
“Open up and let my son come out to me,” said Ender.
The gap in the tree widened. Ender reached in and pulled out the body of Father Estevao. He was so light inside his robes that Ender thought for a moment he must be bearing some of his own weight, must be walking. But he wasn't walking. Ender laid him on the ground before the tree.
A brother beat a rhythm on Warmaker's trunk.
“He must belong to you indeed, Speaker for the Dead, because he is dead. The Holy Ghost has burned him up in the second baptism.”
“You broke the oath,” said Ender. “You betrayed the word of the fathertrees.”
“No one harmed a hair of his head,” said Warmaker.
“Do you think anyone is deceived by your lies?” said Ender. “Anyone knows that to withhold medicine from a dying man is an act of violence as surely as if you stabbed him in the heart. There is his medicine. At any time you could have given it to him.”
“It was Warmaker,” said one of the brothers standing there.
Ender turned to the brothers. “You helped Warmaker. Don't think you can give the blame to him alone. May none of you ever pass into the third life. And as for you, Warmaker, may no mother ever crawl on your bark.”
“No human can decide things like that,” said Warmaker.
“You decided it yourself, when you thought you could commit murder in order to win your argument,” said Ender. “And you brothers, you decided it when you didn't stop him.”
“You're not our judge!” cried one of the brothers.
“Yes I am,” said Ender. “And so is every other inhabitant of Lusitania, human and fathertree, brother and wife.”
They carried Quim's body to the car, and Jakt, Ouanda, and Ender rode with him. Lars and Varsam took the car that Quim had used. Ender took a few minutes to tell Jane a message to give to Miro back in the colony. There was no reason Novinha should wait three days to hear that her son had died at the hands of the pequeninos. And she wouldn't want to hear it from Ender's mouth, that was certain. Whether Ender would have a wife when he returned to the colony was beyond his ability to guess. The only certain thing was that Novinha would not have her son Estevao.
“Will you speak for him?” asked Jakt, as the car skimmed over the capim. He had heard Ender speak for the dead once on Trondheim.
“No,” said Ender. “I don't think so.”
“Because he's a priest?” asked Jakt.
“I've spoken for priests before,” said Ender. “No, I won't speak for Quim because there's no reason to. Quim was always exactly what he seemed to be, and he died exactly as he would have have chosen– serving God and preaching to the little ones. I have nothing to add to his story. He completed it himself.”
Chapter 11 – THE JADE OF MASTER HO
Wang-mu watched the words and numbers moving through the display above her mistress's terminal. Qing-jao was asleep, breathing softly on her mat not far away. Wang-mu had also slept for a time, but something had wakened her. A cry, not far off; a cry of pain perhaps. It had been part of Wang-mu's dream, but when she awoke she heard the last of the sound in the air. It was not Qing-jao's voice. A man perhaps, though the sound was high. A wailing sound. It made Wang-mu think of death.
But she did not get up and investigate. It was not her place to do that; her place was with her mistress at all times, unless her mistress sent her away. If Qing-jao needed to hear the news of what had happened to cause that cry, another servant wou
ld come and waken Wang-mu, who would then waken her mistress– for once a woman had a secret maid, and until she had a husband, only the hands of the secret maid could touch her without invitation.
So Wang-mu lay awake, waiting to see if someone came to tell Qing-jao why a man had wailed in such anguish, near enough to be heard in this room at the back of the house of Han Fei-tzu. While she waited, her eyes were drawn to the moving display as the computer performed the searches Qing-jao had programmed.
The display stopped moving. Was there a problem? Wang-mu rose up to lean on one arm; it brought her close enough to read the most recent words of the display. The search was completed. And this time the report was not one of the curt messages of failure: NOT FOUND. NO INFORMATION. NO CONCLUSION. This time the message was a report.
Wang-mu got up and stepped to the terminal. She did as Qing-jao had taught her, pressing the key that logged all current information so the computer would guard it no matter what happened. Then she went to Qing-jao and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.
Qing-jao came awake almost at once; she slept alertly. “The search has found something,” said Wang-mu.
Qing-jao shed her sleep as easily as she might shrug off a loose jacket. In a moment she was at the terminal taking in the words there.
“I've found Demosthenes,” she said.
“Where is he?” asked Wang-mu, breathless. The great Demosthenes– no, the terrible Demosthenes. My mistress wishes me to think of him as an enemy. But the Demosthenes, in any case, the one whose words had stirred her so when she heard her father reading them aloud. “As long as one being gets others to bow to him because he has the power to destroy them and all they have and all they love, then all of us must be afraid together.” Wang-mu had overheard those words almost in her infancy– she was only three years old– but she remembered them because they had made such a picture in her mind. When her father read those words, she had remembered a scene: her mother spoke and Father grew angry. He didn't strike her, but he did tense his shoulder and his arm jerked a bit, as if his body had meant to strike and he had only with difficulty contained it. And when he did that, though no violent act was committed, Wang-mu's mother bowed her head and murmured something, and the tension eased. Wang-mu knew that she had seen what Demosthenes described: Mother had bowed to Father because he had the power to hurt her. And Wang-mu had been afraid, both at the time and again when she remembered; so as she heard the words of Demosthenes she knew that they were true, and marveled that her father could say those words and even agree with them and not realize that he had acted them out himself. That was why Wang-mu had always listened with great interest to all the words of the great– the terrible– Demosthenes, because great or terrible, she knew that he told the truth.
“Not he,” said Qing-jao. “Demosthenes is a woman.”
The idea took Wang-mu's breath away. So! A woman all along. No wonder I heard such sympathy in Demosthenes; she is a woman, and knows what it is to be ruled by others every waking moment. She is a woman, and so she dreams of freedom, of an hour in which there is no duty waiting to be done. No wonder there is revolution burning in her words, and yet they remain always words and never violence. But why doesn't Qing-jao see this? Why has Qing-jao decided we must both hate Demosthenes?
“A woman named Valentine,” said Qing-jao; and then, with awe in her voice, “Valentine Wiggin, born on Earth more than three– more than three thousand years ago.”
“Is she a god, to live so long?”
“Journeys. She travels from world to world, never staying anywhere more than a few months. Long enough to write a book. All the great histories under the name Demosthenes were written by that same woman, and yet nobody knows it. How can she not be famous?”
“She must want to hide,” said Wang-mu, understanding very well why a woman might want to hide behind a man's name. I'd do it too, if I could, so that I could also journey from world to world and see a thousand places and live ten thousand years.
“Subjectively she's only in her fifties. Still young. She stayed on one world for many years, married and had children. But now she's gone again. To–” Qing-jao gasped.
“Where?” asked Wang-mu.
“When she left her home she took her family with her on a starship. They headed first toward Heavenly Peace and passed near Catalonia, and then they set out on a course directly toward Lusitania!”
Wang-mu's first thought was: Of course! That's why Demosthenes has such sympathy and understanding for the Lusitanians. She has talked to them– to the rebellious xenologers, to the pequeninos themselves. She has met them and knows that they are raman!
Then she thought: If the Lusitania Fleet arrives there and fulfills its mission, Demosthenes will be captured and her words will end.
And then she realized something that made this all impossible. “How could she be on Lusitania, when Lusitania has destroyed its ansible? Wasn't that the first thing they did when they went into revolt? How can her writings be reaching us?”
Qing-jao shook her head. “She hasn't reached Lusitania yet. Or if she has, it's only in the last few months. She's been in flight for the last thirty years. Since before the rebellion. She left before the rebellion.”
“Then all her writings have been done in flight?” Wang-mu tried to imagine how the different timeflows would be reconciled. “To have written so much since the Lusitania Fleet left, she must have–”
“Must have been spending every waking moment on the starship, writing and writing and writing,” said Qing-jao. “And yet there's no record of her starship having sent any signals anywhere, except for the captain's reports. How has she been getting her writings distributed to so many different worlds, if she's been on a starship the whole time? It's impossible. There'd be some record of the ansible transmissions, somewhere.”
“It's always the ansible,” said Wang-mu. “The Lusitania Fleet stops sending messages, and her starship must be sending them but it isn't. Who knows? Maybe Lusitania is sending secret messages, too.” She thought of the Life of Human.
“There can't be any secret messages,” said Qing-jao. “The ansible's philotic connections are permanent, and if there's any transmission at any frequency, it would be detected and the computers would keep a record of it.”
“Well, there you are,” said Wang-mu. “If the ansibles are all still connected, and the computers don't have a record of transmissions, and yet we know that there have been transmissions because Demosthenes has been writing all these things, then the records must be wrong.”
“There is no way for anyone to hide an ansible transmission,” said Qingjao. “Not unless they were right in there at the very moment the transmission was received, switching it away from the normal logging programs and– anyway, it can't be done. A conspirator would have to be sitting at every ansible all the time, working so fast that–”
“Or they could have a program that did it automatically.”
“But then we'd know about the program– it would be taking up memory, it would be using processor time.”
“If somebody could make a program to intercept the ansible messages, couldn't they also make it hide itself so it didn't show up in memory and left no record of the processor time it used?”
Qing-jao looked at Wang-mu in anger. “Where did you learn so many questions about computers and you still don't know that things like that can't be done!”
Wang-mu bowed her head and touched it to the floor. She knew that humiliating herself like this would make Qing-jao ashamed of her anger and they could talk again.
“No,” said Qing-jao, “I had no right to be angry, I'm sorry. Get up, Wang-mu. Keep asking questions. Those are good questions. It might be possible because you can think of it, and if you can think of it maybe somebody could do it. But here's why I think it's impossible: Because how could anybody install such a masterful program on– it would have to be on every computer that processes ansible communications anywhere. Thousands and thousands of them. And if
one breaks down and another one comes online, it would have to download the program into the new computer almost instantly. And yet it could never put itself into permanent storage or it would be found there; it must keep moving itself all the time, dodging, staying out of the way of other programs, moving into and out of storage. A program that could do all that would have to be– intelligent, it would have to be trying to hide and figuring out new ways to do it all the time or we would have noticed it by now and we never have. There's no program like that. How would anyone have ever programmed it? How could it have started? And look, Wang-mu– this Valentine Wiggin who writes all of the Demosthenes things– she's been hiding herself for thousands of years. If there's a program like that it must have been in existence the whole time. It wouldn't have been made up by the enemies of Starways Congress because there wasn't a Starways Congress when Valentine Wiggin started hiding who she was. See how old these records are that gave us her name? She hasn't been openly linked to Demosthenes since these earliest reports from– from Earth. Before starships. Before …”
Qing-jao's voice trailed off, but Wang-mu already understood, had reached this conclusion before Qing-jao vocalized it. “So if there's a secret program in the ansible computers,” said Wang-mu, “it must have been there all along. Right from the start.”
“Impossible,” whispered Qing-jao. But since everything else was impossible, too, Wang-mu knew that Qing-jao loved this idea, that she wanted to believe it because even though it was impossible at least it was conceivable, it could be imagined and therefore it might just be real. And I conceived of it, thought Wang-mu. I may not be godspoken but I'm intelligent too. I understand things. Everybody treats me like a foolish child, even Qing-jao, even though Qing-jao knows how quickly I learn, even though she knows that I think of ideas that other people don't think of– even she despises me. But I am as smart as anyone, Mistress! I am as smart as you, even though you never notice that, even though you will think you thought of this all by yourself. Oh, you'll give me credit for it, but it will be like this: Wang-mu said something and it got me thinking and then I realized the important idea. It will never be: Wang-mu was the one who understood this and explained it to me so I finally understood it. Always as if I were a stupid dog who happens to bark or yip or scratch or snap or leap, just by coincidence, and it happens to turn your mind toward the truth. I am not a dog. I understood. When I asked you those questions it was because I already realized the implications. And I realize even more than you have said so far– but I must tell you this by asking, by pretending not to understand, because you are godspoken and a mere servant could never give ideas to one who hears the voices of the gods.
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