Xenocide ew-4

by Orson Scott Card

  “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 Estevao. 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 Espirito 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 corp
oreal 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 off, which is his way of withdrawing from life.”

  “So far,” said Peregrino, “it sounds like they're all taking Father Estevao'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 abencoe,” 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.”

  “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 Estevao 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 Estevao'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.”

  “Peopl
e 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.”