“Olhado!” called the Mayor.
The boy turned, waved, then hastily fastened his trousers and began waking others who slept in the tall grass. Bosquinha and the Bishop opened the gate and walked out to meet them.
“Foolish, isn’t it,” said Bosquinha, “but this is the moment when our rebellion seems most real. When I first walk beyond the fence.”
“Why did they spend the night out of doors?” Peregrino wondered aloud. “The gate was open, they could have gone home.”
Bosquinha took a quick census of the group outside the gates. Ouanda and Ela, arm in arm like sisters. Olhado and Quim. Novinha. And there, yes, the Speaker, sitting down, Novinha behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders. They all waited expectantly, saying nothing. Until Ender looked up at them. “We have the treaty,” he said. “It’s a good one.”
Novinha held up a bundle wrapped in leaves. “They wrote it down,” she said. “For you to sign.”
Bosquinha took the bundle. “All the files were restored before midnight,” she said. “Not just the ones we saved in your message queue. Whoever your friend is, Speaker, he’s very good.”
“She,” said the Speaker. “Her name is Jane.”
Now, though, the Bishop and Bosquinha could see what lay on the cleared earth just down the hill from where the Speaker had slept. Now they understood the dark stains on the Speaker’s hands and arms, the spatter marks on his face.
“I would rather have no treaty,” said Bosquinha, “than one you had to kill to get.”
“Wait before you judge,” said the Bishop. “I think the night’s work was more than just what we see before us.”
“Very wise, Father Peregrino,” said the Speaker softly.
“I’ll explain it to you if you want,” said Ouanda. “Ela and I understand it as well as anyone.”
“It was like a sacrament,” said Olhado.
Bosquinha looked at Novinha, uncomprehending. “You let him watch?”
Olhado tapped his eyes. “All the piggies will see it, someday, through my eyes.”
“It wasn’t death,” said Quim. “It was resurrection.”
The Bishop stepped near the tortured corpse and touched the seedling tree growing from the chest cavity. “His name is Human,” said the Speaker.
“And so is yours,” said the Bishop softly. He turned and looked around at the members of his little flock, who had already taken humanity a step further than it had ever gone before. Am I the shepherd, Peregrino asked himself, or the most confused and helpless of the sheep? “Come, all of you. Come with me to the Cathedral. The bells will soon ring for mass.”
The children gathered and prepared to go. Novinha, too, stepped away from her place behind the Speaker. Then she stopped, turned back to him, looked at him with silent invitation in her eyes.
“Soon,” he said. “A moment more.”
She, too, followed the Bishop through the gate and up the hill into the Cathedral.
The mass had barely begun when Peregrino saw the Speaker enter at the back of the Cathedral. He paused a moment, then found Novinha and her family with his eyes. In only a few steps he had taken a place beside her. Where Marcão had sat, those rare times when the whole family came together.
The duties of the service took his attention; a few moments later, when Peregrino could look again, he saw that Grego was now sitting beside the Speaker. Peregrino thought of the terms of the treaty as the girls had explained it to him. Of the meaning of the death of the piggy called Human, and before him, of the deaths of Pipo and Libo. All things coming clear, all things coming together. The young man, Miro, lying paralyzed in bed, with his sister Ouanda tending him. Novinha, the lost one, now found. The fence, its shadow so dark in the minds of all who had lived within its bounds, now still and harmless, invisible, insubstantial.
It was the miracle of the wafer, turned into the flesh of God in his hands. How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.
18
THE HIVE QUEEN
Evolution gave his mother no birth canal and no breasts. So the small creature who would one day be named Human was given no exit from the womb except by the teeth of his mouth. He and his infant siblings devoured their mother’s body. Because Human was strongest and most vigorous, he ate the most and so became even stronger.
Human lived in utter darkness. When his mother was gone, there was nothing to eat but the sweet liquid that flowed on the surface of his world. He did not know yet that the vertical surface was the inside of a great hollow tree, and that the liquid that he ate was the sap of the tree. Nor did he know that the warm creatures that were far larger than himself were older pequeninos, almost ready to leave the darkness of the tree, and that the smaller creatures were younger ones, more recently emerged than himself.
All he really cared about was to eat, to move, and to see the light. For now and then, in rhythms that he could not comprehend, a sudden light came into the darkness. It began each time with a sound, whose source he could not comprehend. Then the tree would shudder slightly; the sap would cease to flow; and all the tree’s energy would be devoted to changing the shape of the trunk in one place, to make an opening that let the light inside. When the light was there, Human moved toward it. When the light was gone, Human lost his sense of direction, and wandered aimlessly in search of liquid to drink.
Until one day, when almost all the other creatures were smaller than himself, and none at all were larger, the light came and he was so strong and swift that he reached the opening before it closed. He bent his body around the curve of the wood of the tree, and for the first time felt the rasp of outer bark under his soft belly. He hardly noticed this new pain, because the light dazzled him. It was not just in one place, but everywhere, and it was not grey but vivid green and yellow. His rapture lasted many seconds. Then he was hungry again, and here on the outside of the mothertree the sap flowed only in the fissures of the bark, where it was hard to reach, and instead of all the other creatures being little ones that he could push aside, they all were larger than himself, and drove him away from the easy feeding places. This was a new thing, a new world, a new life, and he was afraid.
Later, when he learned language, he would remember the journey from darkness into light, and he would call it the passage from the first life to the second, from the life of darkness to the half-lit life.
—Speaker for the Dead, The Life of Human, 1:1–5
Miro decided to leave Lusitania. Take the Speaker’s starship and go to Trondheim after all. Perhaps at his trial he could persuade the Hundred Worlds not to go to war against Lusitania. At worst, he could become a martyr, to stir people’s hearts, to be remembered, to stand for something. Whatever happened to him, it would be better than staying here.
In the first few days after he climbed the fence, Miro recovered rapidly. He gained some control and feeling in his arms and legs. Enough to take shuffling steps, like an old man. Enough to move his arms and hands. Enough to end the humiliation of his mother having to clean his body. But then his progress slowed and stopped. “Here it is,” said Navio. “We have reached the level of permanent damage. You are so lucky, Miro, you can walk, you can talk, you are a whole man. You are no more limited than, say, a very healthy man who is a hundred years old. I would rather tell you that your body would be as it was before you climbed the fence, that you would have all the vigor and control of a twenty-year-old. But I’m very glad that I don’t have to tell you that you will be bedridden all your life, diapered and catheterized, able to do nothing more than listen to soft music and wonder where your body went.”
So I’m grateful, Miro thought. As my fingers curl into a useless club on the ends of my arms, as I hear my own speech sounding thick and unintelligible, my voice unable to modulate properly, then I will be glad that I am like a hundred-year-old man, that I can look forward to eighty more years of life as a centegenarian.
Once it was clear that he did not nee
d constant attention, the family scattered and went about their business. These days were too exciting for them to stay home with a crippled brother, son, friend. He understood completely. He did not want them to stay home with him. He wanted to be with them. His work was unfinished. Now, at long last, all the fences, all the rules were gone. Now he could ask the piggies the questions that had so long puzzled him.
He tried at first to work through Ouanda. She came to him every morning and evening and made her reports on the terminal in the front room of the Ribeira house. He read her reports, asked her questions, listened to her stories. And she very seriously memorized the questions he wanted her to ask the piggies. After a few days of this, however, he noticed that in the evening she would indeed have the answers to Miro’s questions. But there was no follow-up, no exploration of meaning. Her real attention was devoted to her own work. And Miro stopped giving her questions to ask for him. He lied and told her that he was far more interested in what she was doing, that her avenues of exploration were the most important.
The truth was that he hated seeing Ouanda. For him, the revelation that she was his sister was painful, terrible, but he knew that if the decision were his alone, he would cast aside the incest tabu, marry her and live in the forest with the piggies if need be. Ouanda, however, was a believer, a belonger. She couldn’t possibly violate the only universal human law. She grieved when she learned that Miro was her brother, but she immediately began to separate herself from him, to forget the touches, the kisses, the whispers, the promises, the teasing, the laughter . . .
Better if he forgot them, too. But he could not. Every time he saw her, it hurt him to see how reserved she was, how polite and kind she was. He was her brother, he was crippled, she would be good to him. But the love was gone.
Uncharitably, he compared Ouanda to his own mother, who had loved her lover regardless of the barriers between them. But Mother’s lover had been a whole man, an able man, not this useless carcass.
So Miro stayed home and studied the file reports of everybody else’s work. It was torture to know what they were doing, that he could not take part in it; but it was better than doing nothing, or watching the tedious vids on the terminal, or listening to music. He could type, slowly, by aiming his hand so the stiffest of his fingers, the index finger, touched exactly one key. It wasn’t fast enough to enter any meaningful data, or even to write memos, but he could call up other people’s public files and read what they were doing. He could maintain some connection with the vital work that had suddenly blossomed on Lusitania, with the opening of the gate.
Ouanda was working with the piggies on a lexicon of the Males’ and Wives’ Languages, complete with a phonetic spelling system so they could write their language down. Quim was helping her, but Miro knew that he had his own purpose: He intended to be a missionary to the pequeninos in other tribes, taking them the Gospels before they ever saw the Hive Queen and the Hegemon; he intended to translate at least some of the scripture and speak to the piggies in their own language. All this work with piggy language and culture was very good, very important, preserve the past, prepare to communicate with other tribes, but Miro knew that it could easily be done by Dom Cristão’s scholars, who now ventured forth in their monkish robes and quietly asked questions of the piggies and answered their questions ably and powerfully. Ouanda was allowing herself to become redundant, Miro believed.
The real work with the piggies, as Miro saw it, was being done by Ender and a few key technicians from Bosquinha’s services department. They were laying pipe from the river to the mothertree’s clearing, to bring water to them. They were setting up electricity and teaching the brothers how to use a computer terminal. In the meantime, they were teaching them very primitive means of agriculture and trying to domesticate cabras to pull plows. It was confusing, the different levels of technology that were coming to the piggies all at once, but Ender had discussed it with Miro, explaining that he wanted the piggies to see quick, dramatic, immediate results from their treaty. Running water, a computer connection with a holographic terminal that let them read anything in the library, electric lights at night. But all this was still magic, completely dependent on human society. At the same time, Ender was trying to keep them self-sufficient, inventive, resourceful. The dazzle of electricity would make myths that would spread through the world from tribe to tribe, but it would be no more than rumor for many, many years. It was the wooden plow, the scythe, the harrow, the amaranth seed that would make the real changes, that would allow piggy population to increase tenfold wherever they went. And those could be transmitted from place to place with a handful of seeds in a cabra-skin pouch and the memory of how the work was done.
This was the work that Miro longed to be part of. But what good were his clubbed hands and shuffling step in the amaranth fields? Of what use was he sitting at a loom, weaving cabra wool? He couldn’t even talk well enough to teach.
Ela was working on developing new strains of Earthborn plants and even small animals and insects, new species that could resist the Descolada, even neutralize it. Mother was helping her with advice, but little more, for she was working on the most vital and secret project of them all. Again, it was Ender who came to Miro and told him what only his family and Ouanda knew: that the hive queen lived, that she was being restored as soon as Novinha found a way for her to resist the Descolada, her and all the buggers that would be born to her. As soon as it was ready, the hive queen would be revived.
And Miro would not be part of that, either. For the first time, humans and two alien races, living together as ramen on the same world, and Miro wasn’t part of any of it. He was less human than the piggies were. He couldn’t speak or use his hands half so well. He had stopped being a tool-using, language-speaking animal. He was varelse now. They only kept him as a pet.
He wanted to go away. Better yet, he wanted to disappear, to go away even from himself.
But not right now. There was a new puzzle that only he knew about, and so only he could solve. His terminal was behaving very strangely.
He noticed it the first week after he recovered from total paralysis. He was scanning some of Ouanda’s files and realized that without doing anything special, he had accessed confidential files. They were protected with several layers, he had no idea what the passwords were, and yet a simple, routine scan had brought the information forward. It was her speculations on pequenino evolution and their probable pre-Descolada society and life patterns. The sort of thing that as recently as two weeks ago she would have talked about, argued about with Miro. Now she kept it confidential and never discussed it with him at all.
Miro didn’t tell her he had seen the files, but he did steer conversations toward the subject and drew her out; she talked about her ideas willingly enough, once Miro showed his interest. Sometimes it was almost like old times. Except that he would hear the sound of his own slurred voice and keep most of his opinions to himself, merely listening to her, letting things he would have argued with pass right by. Still, seeing her confidential files allowed him to penetrate to what she was really interested in.
But how had he seen them?
It happened again and again. Files of Ela’s, Mother’s, Dom Cristão’s. As the piggies began to play with their new terminal, Miro was able to watch them in an echo mode that he had never seen the terminal use before—it enabled him to watch all their computer transactions and then make some suggestions, change things a little. He took particular delight in guessing what the piggies were really trying to do and helping them, surreptitiously, to do it. But how had he got such unorthodox, powerful access to the machine?
The terminal was learning to accommodate itself to him, too. Instead of long code sequences, he only had to begin a sequence and the machine would obey his instructions. Finally he did not even have to log on. He touched the keyboard and the terminal displayed a list of all the activities he usually engaged in, then scanned through them. He could touch a key and it would go directly to the
activity he wanted, skipping dozens of preliminaries, saving him many painful minutes of typing one character at a time.
At first he thought that Olhado had created the new program for him, or perhaps someone in the Mayor’s office. But Olhado only looked blankly at what the terminal was doing and said, “Bacâna,” that’s great. And when he sent a message to the Mayor, she never got it. Instead, the Speaker for the Dead came to visit him.
“So your terminal is being helpful,” said Ender.
Miro didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to think why the Mayor had sent the Speaker to answer his note.
“The Mayor didn’t get your message,” said Ender. “I did. And it’s better if you don’t mention to anybody else what your terminal is doing.”
“Why?” asked Miro. That was one word he could say without slurring too much.
“Because it isn’t a new program helping you. It’s a person.”
Miro laughed. No human being could be as quick as the program that was helping him. It was faster, in fact, than most programs he had worked with before, and very resourceful and intuitive; faster than a human, but smarter than a program.
“It’s an old friend of mine, I think. At least, she was the one who told me about your message and suggested that I let you know that discretion was a good idea. You see, she’s a bit shy. She doesn’t make many friends.”
“How many?”
“At the present moment, exactly two. For a few thousand years before now, exactly one.”
“Not human,” said Miro.
“Raman,” said Ender. “More human than most humans. We’ve loved each other for a long time, helped each other, depended on each other. But in the last few weeks, since I got here, we’ve drifted apart. I’m—involved more in the lives of people around me. Your family.”
“Mother.”
“Yes. Your mother, your brothers and sisters, the work with the piggies, the work for the hive queen. My friend and I used to talk to each other constantly. I don’t have time now. We’ve hurt each other’s feeling sometimes. She’s lonely, and so I think she’s chosen another companion.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 73