The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  CIDA: The Descolada body isn’t bacterial. It seems to enter the cells of the body and take up permanent residence, just like mitochondria, reproducing when the cell reproduces. The fact that it spread to a new species within only a few years of our arrival here suggests that it is wildly adaptable. It must surely have spread through the entire biosphere of Lusitania long ago, so that it may now be endemic here, a permanent infection.

  GUSTO: If it’s permanent and everywhere, it isn’t an infection, Cida, it’s part of normal life.

  CIDA: But it isn’t necessarily inborn—it has the ability to spread. But yes, if it’s endemic then all the indigenous species must have found ways to fight it off—

  GUSTO: Or adapt to it and include it in their normal life cycle. Maybe they NEED it.

  CIDA: They NEED something that takes apart their genetic molecules and puts them back together at random?

  GUSTO: Maybe that’s why there are so few different species in Lusitania. The Descolada may be fairly recent—only half a million years old—and most species couldn’t adapt.

  CIDA: I wish we weren’t dying, Gusto. The next xenobiologist will probably work with standard genetic adaptations and won’t follow this up.

  GUSTO: That’s the only reason you can think of for regretting our death?

  —Vladimir Tiago Gussman and Ekaterina Maria Aparecida do Norte von Hesse-Gussman, unpublished dialogue embedded in working notes, two days before their deaths; first quoted in “Lost Threads of Understanding,”

  Meta-Science, the Journal of Methodology, 2001: 12:12:144-45

  Ender did not get home from the Ribeira house until late that night, and he spent more than an hour trying to make sense of all that happened, especially after Novinha came home. Despite this, Ender awoke early the next morning, his thoughts already full of questions he had to answer. It was always this way when he was preparing to speak a death; he could hardly rest from trying to piece together the story of the dead man as he saw himself, the life the dead woman meant to live, however badly it had turned out. This time, though, there was an added anxiety. He cared more for the living this time than he ever had before.

  “Of course you’re more involved,” said Jane, after he tried to explain his confusion to her. “You fell in love with Novinha before you left Trondheim.”

  “Maybe I loved the young girl, but this woman is nasty and selfish. Look what she let happen to her children.”

  “This is the Speaker for the Dead? Judging someone by appearances?”

  “Maybe I’ve fallen in love with Grego.”

  “You’ve always been a sucker for people who pee on you.”

  “And Quara. All of them—even Miro, I like the boy.”

  “And they love you, Ender.”

  He laughed. “People always think they love me, until I speak. Novinha’s more perceptive than most—she already hates me before I tell the truth.”

  “You’re as blind about yourself as anyone else, Speaker,” said Jane. “Promise me that when you die, you’ll let me speak your death. Have I got things to say.”

  “Keep them to yourself,” said Ender wearily. “You’re even worse at this business than I am.”

  He began his list of questions to be resolved.

  1. Why did Novinha marry Marcão in the first place?

  2. Why did Marcão hate his children?

  3. Why does Novinha hate herself?

  4. Why did Miro call me to speak Libo’s death?

  5. Why did Ela call me to speak her father’s death?

  6. Why did Novinha change her mind about my speaking Pipo’s death?

  7. What was the immediate cause of Marcão’s death?

  He stopped with the seventh question. It would be easy to answer it; a merely clinical matter. So that was where he would begin.

  The physician who autopsied Marcão was called Navio, which meant “ship.”

  “Not for my size,” he said, laughing. “Or because I’m much of a swimmer. My full name is Enrique o Navigador Caronada. You can bet I’m glad they took my nickname from ‘shipmaster’ rather than from ‘little cannon.’ Too many obscene possibilities in that one.”

  Ender was not deceived by his joviality. Navio was a good Catholic and he obeyed his bishop as well as anyone. He was determined to keep Ender from learning anything, though he’d not be uncheerful about it.

  “There are two ways I can get the answers to my questions,” Ender said quietly. “I can ask you, and you can tell me truthfully. Or I can submit a petition to the Starways Congress for your records to be opened to me. The ansible charges are very high, and since the petition is a routine one, and your resistance to it is contrary to law, the cost will be deducted from your colony’s already straitened funds, along with a double-the-cost penalty and a reprimand for you.”

  Navio’s smile gradually disappeared as Ender spoke. He answered coldly. “Of course I’ll answer your questions,” he said.

  “There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said Ender. “Your bishop counseled the people of Milagre to carry out an unprovoked and unjustified boycott of a legally called-for minister. You would do everyone a favor if you would inform them that if this cheerful noncooperation continues, I will petition for my status to be changed from minister to inquisitor. I assure you that I have a very good reputation with the Starways Congress, and my petition will be successful.”

  Navio knew exactly what that meant. As an inquisitor, Ender would have congressional authority to revoke the colony’s Catholic license on the grounds of religious persecution. It would cause a terrible upheaval among the Lusitanians, not least because the Bishop would be summarily dismissed from his position and sent to the Vatican for discipline.

  “Why would you do such a thing when you know we don’t want you here?” said Navio.

  “Someone wanted me here or I wouldn’t have come,” said Ender. “You may not like the law when it annoys you, but it protects many a Catholic on worlds where another creed is licensed.”

  Navio drummed his fingers on his desk. “What are your questions, Speaker,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

  “It’s simple enough, to start with, at least. What was the proximate cause of the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira?”

  “Marcão!” said Navio. “You couldn’t possibly have been summoned to speak his death, he only passed away a few weeks ago—”

  “I have been asked to speak several deaths, Dom Navio, and I choose to begin with Marcão’s.”

  Navio grimaced. “What if I ask for proof of your authority?”

  Jane whispered in Ender’s ear. “Let’s dazzle the dear boy.” Immediately, Navio’s terminal came alive with official documents, while one of Jane’s most authoritative voices declared, “Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, has accepted the call for an explanation of the life and death of Marcos Maria Ribeira, of the city of Milagre, Lusitania Colony.”

  It was not the document that impressed Navio, however. It was the fact that he had not actually made the request, or even logged on to his terminal. Navio knew at once that the computer had been activated through the jewel in the Speaker’s ear, but it meant that a very high-level logic routine was shadowing the Speaker and enforcing compliance with his requests. No one on Lusitania, not even Bosquinha herself, had ever had authority to do that. Whatever this speaker was, Navio concluded, he’s a bigger fish than even Bishop Peregrino can hope to fry.

  “All right,” Navio said, forcing a laugh. Now, apparently, he remembered how to be jovial again. “I meant to help you anyway—the Bishop’s paranoia doesn’t afflict everyone in Milagre, you know.”

  Ender smiled back at him, taking his hypocrisy at face value.

  “Marcos Ribeira died of a congenital defect.” He rattled off a long pseudo-Latin name. “You’ve never heard of it because it’s quite rare, and is passed on only through the genes. Beginning at the onset of puberty, in most cases, it involves the gradual replacement of exocrine and endocrine glandular tissues with lipidous
cells. What that means is that bit by bit over the years, the adrenal glands, the pituitary, the liver, the testes, the thyroid, and so on, are all replaced by large agglomerations of fat cells.”

  “Always fatal? Irreversible?”

  “Oh, yes. Actually, Marcão survived ten years longer than usual. His case was remarkable in several ways. In every other recorded case—and admittedly there aren’t that many—the disease attacks the testicles first, rendering the victim sterile and, in most cases, impotent. With six healthy children, it’s obvious that Marcos Ribeira’s testes were the last of his glands to be affected. Once they were attacked, however, progress must have been unusually fast—the testes were completely replaced with fat cells, even though much of his liver and thyroid were still functioning.”

  “What killed him in the end?”

  “The pituitary and the adrenals weren’t functioning. He was a walking dead man. He just fell down in one of the bars, in the middle of some ribald song, as I heard.”

  As always, Ender’s mind automatically found seeming contradictions. “How does a hereditary disease get passed on if it makes its victims sterile?”

  “It’s usually passed through collateral lines. One child will die of it; his brothers and sisters won’t manifest the disease at all, but they’ll pass on the tendency to their children. Naturally, though, we were afraid that Marcão, having children, would pass on the defective gene to all of them.”

  “You tested them?”

  “Not a one had any of the genetic deformations. You can bet that Dona Ivanova was looking over my shoulder the whole time. We zeroed in immediately on the problem genes and cleared each of the children, bim bim bim, just like that.”

  “None of them had it? Not even a recessive tendency?”

  “Graças a Deus,” said the doctor. “Who would ever have married them if they had had the poisoned genes? As it was, I can’t understand how Marcão’s own genetic defect went undiscovered.”

  “Are genetic scans routine here?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. But we had a great plague some thirty years ago. Dona Ivanova’s own parents, the Venerado Gusto and the Venerada Cida, they conducted a detailed genetic scan of every man, woman, and child in the colony. It’s how they found the cure. And their computer comparisons would definitely have turned up this particular defect—that’s how I found out what it was when Marcão died. I’d never heard of the disease, but the computer had it on file,”

  “And Os Venerados didn’t find it?”

  “Apparently not, or they would surely have told Marcos. And even if they hadn’t told him, Ivanova herself should have found it.”

  “Maybe she did,” said Ender.

  Navio laughed aloud. “Impossible. No woman in her right mind would deliberately bear the children of a man with a genetic defect like that. Marcão was surely in constant agony for many years. You don’t wish that on your own children. No, Ivanova may be eccentric, but she’s not insane.”

  Jane was quite amused. When Ender got home, she made her image appear above his terminal just so she could laugh uproariously.

  “He can’t help it,” said Ender. “In a devout Catholic colony like this, dealing with the Biologista, one of the most respected people here, of course he doesn’t think to question his basic premises.”

  “Don’t apologize for him,” said Jane. “I don’t expect wetware to work as logically as software. But you can’t ask me not to be amused.”

  “In a way it’s rather sweet of him,” said Ender. “He’d rather believe that Marcão’s disease was different from every other recorded case. He’d rather believe that somehow Ivanova’s parents didn’t notice that Marcos had the disease, and so she married him in ignorance, even though Ockham’s razor decrees that we believe the simplest explanation: Marcão’s decay progressed like every other, testes first, and all of Novinha’s children were sired by someone else. No wonder Marcão was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping with another man. It was probably part of their bargain in the beginning that she would not be faithful to him. But six children is rather rubbing his nose in it.”

  “The delicious contradictions of religious life,” said Jane. “She deliberately set out to commit adultery—but she would never dream of using a contraceptive.”

  “Have you scanned the children’s genetic pattern to find the most likely father?”

  “You mean you haven’t guessed?”

  “I’ve guessed, but I want to make sure the clinical evidence doesn’t disprove the obvious answer.”

  “It was Libo, of course. What a dog! He sired six children on Novinha, and four more on his own wife.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Ender, “is why Novinha didn’t marry Libo in the first place. It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then to go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning.”

  “Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.”

  Miro carefully picked his way through the forest. He recognized trees now and then, or thought he did—no human could ever have the piggies’ knack for naming every single tree in the woods. But then, humans didn’t worship the trees as totems of their ancestors, either.

  Miro had deliberately chosen a longer way to reach the piggies’ log house. Ever since Libo accepted Miro as a second apprentice, to work with him alongside Libo’s daughter, Ouanda, he had taught them that they must never form a path leading from Milagre to the piggies’ home. Someday, Libo warned them, there may be trouble between human and piggy; we will make no path to guide a pogrom to its destination. So today Miro walked the far side of the creek, along the top of the high bank.

  Sure enough, a piggy soon appeared in the near distance, watching him. That was how Libo reasoned out, years ago, that the females must live somewhere in that direction; the males always kept a watch on the Zenadors when they went too near. And, as Libo had insisted, Miro made no effort to move any farther in the forbidden direction. His curiosity dampened whenever he remembered what Libo’s body looked like when he and Ouanda found it. Libo had not been quite dead yet; his eyes were open and moving. He only died when both Miro and Ouanda knelt at either side of him, each holding a blood-covered hand. Ah, Libo, your blood still pumped when your heart lay naked in your open chest. If only you could have spoken to us, one word to tell us why they killed you.

  The bank became low again, and Libo crossed the brook by running lightly on the moss-covered stones. In a few more minutes he was there, coming into the small clearing from the east.

  Ouanda was already there, teaching them how to churn the cream of cabra milk to make a sort of butter. She had been experimenting with the process for the past several weeks before she got it right. It would have been easier if she could have had some help from Mother, or even Ela, since they knew so much more about the chemical properties of cabra milk, but cooperating with the Biologista was out of the question. Os Venerados had discovered thirty years ago that cabra milk was nutritionally useless to humans. Therefore any investigation of how to process it for storage could only be for the piggies’ benefit. Miro and Ouanda could not risk anything that might let it be known they were breaking the law and actively intervening in the piggies’ way of life.

  The younger piggies took to butter-churning with delight—they had made a dance out of kneading the cabra bladders and were singing now, a nonsensical song that mixed Stark, Portuguese, and two of the piggies’ own languages into a hopeless but hilarious muddle. Miro tried to sort out the languages. He recognized Males’ Language, of course, and also a few fragments of Tree Language, the language they used to speak to their totem trees; Miro recognized it only by its sound; even Libo hadn’t been able to translate a single word. It all sounded like ms and bs and gs, with no detectable di
fference among the vowels.

  The piggy who had been shadowing Miro in the woods now emerged and greeted the others with a loud hooting sound. The dancing went on, but the song stopped immediately. Mandachuva detached himself from the group around Ouanda and came to meet Miro at the clearing’s edge.

  “Welcome, I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire.” That was, of course, an extravagantly precise translation of Miro’s name into Stark. Mandachuva loved translating names back and forth between Portuguese and Stark, even though Miro and Ouanda had both explained that their names didn’t really mean anything at all, and it was only coincidence if they sounded like words. But Mandachuva enjoyed his language games, as so many piggies did, and so Miro answered to I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire, just as Ouanda patiently answered to Vaga, which was Portugese for “wander,” the Stark word that most sounded like “Ouanda.”

  Mandachuva was a puzzling case. He was the oldest of the piggies. Pipo had known him, and wrote of him as though he were the most prestigious of the piggies. Libo, too, seemed to think of him as a leader. Wasn’t his name a slangy Portugese term for “boss”? Yet to Miro and Ouanda, it seemed as though Mandachuva was the least powerful and prestigious of the piggies. No one seemed to consult him on anything; he was the one piggy who always had free time to converse with the Zenadors, because he was almost never engaged in an important task.

  Still, he was the piggy who gave the most information to the Zenadors. Miro couldn’t begin to guess whether he had lost his prestige because of his information-sharing, or shared information with the humans to make up for his low prestige among the piggies. It didn’t even matter. The fact was that Miro liked Mandachuva. He thought of the old piggy as his friend.

  “Has the woman forced you to eat that foul-smelling paste?” asked Miro.

  “Pure garbage, she says. Even the baby cabras cry when they have to suck a teat,” Mandachuva giggled.

  “If you leave that as a gift for the ladyfolk, they’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Still, we must, we must,” said Mandachuva, sighing. “They have to see everything, the prying macios!”