Speaker for the Dead

by Orson Scott Card

  "You have found so much, Plikt, and understood so little."

  "I understand everything! Read what I wrote--that was understanding!"

  Valentine told herself that since Plikt knew so much, she might as well know more. But it was rage, not reason, that drove Valentine to tell what she had never told anyone before. "Plikt, my brother didn't imitate the original Speaker for the Dead. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon."

  When Plikt realized that Valentine was telling the truth, it overwhelmed her. For all these years she had regarded Andrew Wiggin as her subject matter, and the original Speaker for the Dead as her inspiration. To find that they were the same person struck her dumb for half an hour.

  Then she and Valentine talked and confided and came to trust each other until Valentine invited Plikt to be the tutor of her children and her collaborator in writing and teaching. Jakt was surprised at the new addition to the household, but in time Valentine told him the secrets Plikt had uncovered through research or provoked out of her. It became the family legend, and as soon as the children were old enough to be discreet, they were told the marvelous stories of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr.

  The years passed, the family prospered, and Valentine's pain at Ender's loss became pride in him and finally a powerful anticipation. She was eager for him to arrive on Lusitania, to solve the dilemma of the piggies, to fulfil his apparent destiny as the apostle to the ramen. It was Plikt, the good Lutheran, who taught Valentine to conceive of Ender's life in religious terms; the powerful stability of her family life and the miracle of each of her five children combined to instill in her the emotions, if not the doctrines, of faith.

  It was bound to affect the children, too. The tale of Uncle Ender, because they could never mention it to outsiders, took on supernatural overtones. Syfte, the eldest daughter, was particularly intrigued, and even when she turned twenty, and rationality overpowered the primitive, childish adoration of Uncle Ender, she was still obsessed with him. He was a creature out of legend, and yet he still lived, and on a world not impossibly far away.

  She did not tell her mother and father, but she did confide in her former tutor. "Someday, Plikt, I'll meet him. I'll meet him and help him in his work."

  "What makes you think he'll need help? Your help, anyway?" Plikt was always a skeptic until her student had earned her belief.

  "He didn't do it alone the first time, either, did he?" And Syfte's dreams turned outward, away from the ice of Trondheim, to the distant planet where Ender Wiggin had not yet set foot. People of Lusitania, you little know what a great man will walk on your earth and take up your burden. And I will join him, in due time, even though it will be a generation late. Be ready for me, too, Lusitania.

  On his starship, Ender Wiggin had no notion of the freight of other people's dreams he carried with him. It had been only days since he left Valentine weeping on the dock. To him, Syfte had no name; she was a swelling in Valentine's belly, and nothing more. He was only beginning to feel the pain of losing Valentine--a pain she had long since got over. And his thoughts were far from his unknown nieces and nephews on a world of ice.

  It was a lonely, tortured young girl named Novinha that he thought of, wondering what the twenty-two years of his voyage were doing to her, and whom she would have become by the time they met. For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

  6

  OLHADO

  Their only intercourse with other tribes seems to be warfare. When they tell stories to each other (usually during rainy weather), it almost always deals with battles and heroes. The ending is always death, for heroes and cowards alike. If the stories are any guideline, piggies don't expect to live through war. And they never, ever, give the slightest hint of interest in the enemy females, either for rape, murder, or slavery, the traditional human treatment of the wives of fallen soldiers.

  Does this mean that there is no genetic exchange between tribes? Not at all. The genetic exchanges may be conducted by the females, who may have some system of trading genetic favors. Given the apparent utter subservience of the males to the females in piggy society, this could easily be going on without the males having any idea; or it might cause them such shame that they just won't tell us about it.

  What they want to tell us about is battle. A typical description, from my daughter Ouanda's notes of 2:21 last year, during a session of storytelling inside the log house:

  PIGGY (speaking Stark): He killed three of the brothers without taking a wound. I have never seen such a strong and fearless warrior. Blood was high on his arms, and the stick in his hand was splintered and covered with the brains of my brothers. He knew he was honorable, even though the rest of the battle went against his feeble tribe. Dei honra! Eu Ihe dei! (I gave honor! I gave it to him!)

  (Other piggies click their tongues and squeak.)

  PIGGY: I hooked him to the ground. He was powerful in his struggles until I showed him the grass in my hand. Then he opened his mouth and hummed the strange songs of the far country. Nunca sera pau no mao da gente! (He will never be a stick in our hands!) (At this point they joined in singing a song in the Wives' Language, one of the longest passages yet heard.)

  (Note that this is a common pattern among them, to speak primarily in Stark, then switch into Portuguese at the moment of climax and conclusion. On reflection, we have realized that we do the same thing, falling into our native Portuguese at the most emotional moments.)

  This account of battle may not seem so unusual until you hear enough stories to realize that they always end with the hero's death. Apparently they have no taste for light comedy.

  --Liberdade Figueira de Medici, "Report on Intertribal Patterns of Lusitanian Aborigines" in Cross-Cultural Transactions, 1964:12:40

  There wasn't much to do during interstellar flight. Once the course was charted and the ship had made the Park shift, the only task was to calculate how near to lightspeed the ship was traveling. The shipboard computer figured the exact velocity and then determined how long, in subjective time, the voyage should continue before making the Park shift back to a manageable sublight speed. Like a stopwatch, thought Ender. Click it on, click it off, and the race is over.

  The ship's computers were bright enough to help him get the hang of the switch from his fluent Spanish to Portuguese. It was easy enough to speak, but so many consonants were left out that understanding it was hard.

  Speaking Portuguese with the slow-witted ship's computer became maddening after an hour or two each day. On every other voyage, Val had been there. Not that they had always talked--Val and Ender knew each other so well that there was often nothing to say. But without her there, Ender grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to.

  Even the hive queen was no help. Her thoughts were instantaneous; bound, not to synapses, but to philotes that were untouched by the relativistic effects of lightspeed. She passed sixteen hours for every minute of Ender's time--the differential was too great for him to receive any kind of communication from her. If she were not in a cocoon, she would have thousands of individual buggers, each doing its own task and passing to her vast memory its experiences. But now all she had were her memories, and in his eight days of captivity, Ender began to understand her eagerness to be delivered.

  By the time the eight days passed, he was doing fairly well at speaking Portuguese directly instead of translating from Spanish whenever he wanted to say anything. He was also desperate for human company--he would have been glad to discuss religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship's computer to talk to.

  The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest of the universe. Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while the starship re
mained truly motionless. No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe the phenomenon. It was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway; the ansible had been developed half by accident, and along with it the Park Instantaneity Principle. It may not be comprehensible, but it worked.

  The windows of the starship instantly filled with stars as light became visible again in all directions. Someday a scientist would discover why the Park shift took almost no energy. Somewhere, Ender was certain, a terrible price was being paid for human starflight. He had dreamed once of a star winking out every time a starship made the Park shift. Jane assured him that it wasn't so, but he knew that most stars were invisible to us; a trillion of them could disappear and we'd not know it. For thousands of years we would continue to see the photons that had already been launched before the star disappeared. By the time we could see the galaxy go blank, it would be far too late to amend our course.

  "Sitting there in paranoid fantasy," said Jane.

  "You can't read minds," said Ender.

  "You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It's your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness."

  "Have you alerted Lusitanian authorities that I'm coming?"

  "It's a very small colony. There's no Landing Authority because hardly anybody goes there. There's an orbiting shuttle that automatically takes people up and down to a laughable little shuttleport."

  "No clearance from Immigration?"

  "You're a speaker. They can't turn you away. Besides, Immigration consists of the Governor, who is also the Mayor, since the city and the colony are identical. Her name is Faria Lima Maria do Bosque, called Bosquinha, and she sends you greetings and wishes you would go away, since they've got trouble enough without a prophet of agnosticism going around annoying good Catholics."

  "She said that?"

  "Actually, not to you--Bishop Peregrino said it to her, and she agreed. But it's her job to agree. If you tell her that Catholics are all idolatrous, superstitious fools, she'll probably sigh and say, I hope you can keep those opinions to yourself."

  "You're stalling," said Ender. "What is it you think I don't want to hear?"

  "Novinha canceled her call for a speaker. Five days after she sent it."

  Of course, the Starways Code said that once Ender had begun his voyage in response to her call, the call could not legally be canceled; still, it changed everything, because instead of eagerly awaiting his arrival for twenty-two years, she would be dreading it, resenting him for coming when she had changed her mind. He had expected to be received by her as a welcome friend. Now she would be even more hostile than the Catholic establishment. "Anything to simplify my work," he said.

  "Well, it's not all bad, Andrew. You see, in the intervening years, a couple of other people have called for a speaker, and they haven't canceled."

  "Who?"

  "By the most fascinating coincidence, they are Novinha's son Miro and Novinha's daughter Ela."

  "They couldn't possibly have known Pipo. Why would they call me to speak his death?"

  "Oh, no, not Pipo's death. Ela called for a Speaker only six weeks ago, to speak the death of her father, Novinha's husband, Marcos Maria Ribeira, called Marcao. He keeled over in a bar. Not from alcohol--he had a disease. He died of terminal rot."

  "I worry about you, Jane, consumed with compassion the way you are."

  "Compassion is what you're good at. I'm better at complex searches through organized data structures."

  "And the boy--what's his name?"

  "Miro. He called for a Speaker four years ago. For the death of Pipo's son, Libo."

  "Libo couldn't be older than forty--"

  "He was helped along to an early death. He was xenologer, you see--or Zenador, as they say in Portuguese."

  "The piggies--"

  "Exactly like his father's death. The organs placed exactly the same. Three piggies have been executed the same way while you were en route, though farther from the gate. But they plant trees in the middle of the piggy corpses--no such honor for the dead humans."

  Both xenologers murdered by the piggies, a generation apart. "What has the Starways Council decided?"

  "It's very tricky. They keep vacillating. They haven't certified either of Libo's apprentices as xenologer. One is Libo's daughter, Ouanda. And the other is Miro, the one who called for a speaker."

  "Do they maintain contact with the piggies?"

  "Officially, no. There's some controversy about this. After Libo died, the Council forbade contact more frequently than once a month. But Libo's daughter categorically refused to obey the order."

  "And they didn't remove her?"

  "The majority for cutting back on contact with the piggies was paper thin. There was no majority for censuring her. At the same time, they worry that Miro and Ouanda are so young. Two years ago a party of scientists was dispatched from Calicut. They should be here to take over supervision of piggy affairs in only thirty-three more years."

  "Do they have any idea this time why the piggies killed the xenologer?"

  "None at all. But that's why you're here, isn't it?"

  The answer would have been easy, except that the hive queen nudged him gently in the back of his mind. Ender could feel her like wind through the leaves of a tree, a rustling, a gentle movement, and sunlight. Yes, he was here to speak for the dead. But he was also here to bring the dead back to life.

 

  The hive queen was making the enormous effort to speak to him during near lightspeed flight.

 

  The piggies? They think the way you do?

 

  The hive queen withdrew, and Ender was left to ponder the thought that with Lusitania he may have bitten off more than he could chew.

  Bishop Peregrino delivered the homily himself. That was always a bad sign. Never an exciting speaker, he had become so convoluted and parenthetical that half the time Ela couldn't even understand what he was talking about. Quim pretended he could understand, of course, because as far as he was concerned the bishop could do no wrong. But little Grego made no attempt to seem interested. Even when Sister Esquecimento was roving the aisle, with her needle-sharp nails and cruel grip, Grego fearlessly performed whatever mischief entered his head.

  Today he was prying the rivets out of the back of the plastic bench in front of them. It bothered Ela how strong he was--a six-year-old shouldn't be able to work a screwdriver under the lip of a heat-sealed rivet. Ela wasn't sure she could do it.

  If Father were here, of course, his long arm would snake out and gently, oh so gently, take the screwdriver out of Grego's hand. He would whisper, "Where did you get this?" and Grego would look at him with wide and innocent eyes. Later, when the family got home from mass, Father would rage at Miro for leaving tools around, calling him terrible names and blaming him for all the troubles of the family. Miro would bear it in silence. Ela would busy herself with preparation for the evening meal. Quim would sit uselessly in the corner, massaging the rosary and murmuring his useless little prayers. Olhado was the lucky one, with his electronic eyes--he simply turned them off or played back some favorite scene from the past and paid no attention. Quara went off and cowered in the corner. And little Grego stood there triumphantly, his hand clutching Father's pantleg, watching as the blame for everything he did was poured out on Miro's head.

  Ela shuddered as the scene played itself out in her memory. If it had ended there, it would have been bearable. But then Miro would leave, and they would eat, and then--

  Sister Esquecimento's spidery fingers leapt out; her fingernails dug into Grego's arm. Instantly, Grego dropped the screwdriver. Of course it was supposed to clatter on the floor, but Sister Esquecimento was no fool. She bent quickly and caught it in her other hand. Grego grinned. Her face
was only inches from his knee. Ela saw what he had in mind, reached out to try to stop him, but too late--he brought his knee up sharply into Sister Esquecimento's mouth.

  She gasped from the pain and let go of Grego's arm. He snatched the screwdriver out of her slackened hand. Holding a hand to her bleeding mouth, she fled down the aisle. Grego resumed his demolition work.

  Father is dead, Ela reminded herself. The words sounded like music in her mind. Father is dead, but he's still here, because he left his monstrous little legacy behind. The poison he put in us all is still ripening, and eventually it will kill us all. When he died his liver was only two inches long, and his spleen could not be found. Strange fatty organs had grown in their places. There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we're even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father's soul.

  Maybe it would be different if Mother tried to make it better. But she cared about nothing but microscopes and genetically enhanced cereals, or whatever she was working on now.

  ". . . so-called Speaker for the Dead! But there is only One who can speak for the dead, and that is Sagrado Cristo . . ."

  Bishop Peregrino's words caught her attention. What was he saying about a speaker for the dead? He couldn't possibly know she had called for one--

  ". . . the law requires us to treat him with courtesy, but not with belief! The truth is not to be found in the speculations and hypotheses of unspiritual men, but in the teachings and traditions of Mother Church. So when he walks among you, give him your smiles, but hold back your hearts!"

  Why was he giving this warning? The nearest planet was Trondheim, twenty-two lightyears away, and it wasn't likely there'd be a speaker there. It would be decades till a speaker arrived, if one came at all. She leaned over Quara to ask Quim--he would have been listening. "What's this about a Speaker for the Dead?" she whispered.