Speaker for the dead ew-2 Read online

  In spite of herself, she smiled. “The Speaker for the Living.”

  “I've read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, too,” he said. “I can't think of a better place for you to find your name.”

  But she did not trust him yet, did not believe what he seemed to be promising. “I'll want to come here often. All the time.”

  “We lock it up when we go home to bed.”

  “But all the rest of the time. You'll get tired of me. You'll tell me to go away. You'll keep secrets from me. You'll tell me to be quiet and not mention my ideas.”

  “We've only just become friends, and already you think I'm such a liar and cheat, such an impatient oaf.”

  “But you will, everyone does; they all wish I'd go away–”

  Pipo shrugged. “So? Sometime or other everybody wishes everybody would go away. Sometimes I'll wish you would go away. What I'm telling you now is that even at those times, even if I tell you to go away, you don't have to go away.”

  It was the most bafflingly perfect thing that anyone had ever said to her. “That's crazy.”

  “Only one thing. Promise me you'll never try to go out to the pequeninos. Because I can never let you do that, and if somehow you do it anyway, Starways Congress would close down all our work here, forbid any contact with them. Do you promise me? Or everything– my work, your work– it will all be undone.”

  “I promise.”

  “When will you take the test?”

  “Now! Can I begin it now?”

  He laughed gently, then reached out a hand and without looking touched the terminal. It came to life, the first genetic models appearing in the air above the terminal.

  “You had the examination ready,” she said. “You were all set to go! You knew that you'd let me do it all along!”

  He shook his head. “I hoped. I believed in you. I wanted to help you do what you dreamed of doing. As long as it was something good.”

  She would not have been Novinha if she hadn't found one more poisonous thing to say. “I see. You are the judge of dreams.”

  Perhaps he didn't know it was an insult. He only smiled and said, “Faith, hope, and love– these three. But the greatest of these is love.”

  “You don't love me,” she said.

  "Ah," he said. "I am the judge of dreams, and you are the judge of love. Well, I find you guilty of dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams. I only hope that someday you won't declare me innocent of the crime of loving you." He grew reflective for a moment. "I lost a daughter in the Descolada. Maria. She would have been only a few years older than you. "

  “And I remind you of her?”

  “I was thinking that she would have been nothing at all like you.”

  She began the test. It took three days. She passed it, with a score a good deal higher than many a graduate student. In retrospect, however, she would not remember the test because it was the beginning of her career, the end of her childhood, the confirmation of her vocation for her life's work. She would remember the test because it was the beginning of her time in Pipo's Station, where Pipo and Libo and Novinha together formed the first community she belonged to since her parents were put into the earth.

  It was not easy, especially at the beginning. Novinha did not instantly shed her habit of cold confrontation. Pipo understood it, was prepared to bend with her verbal blows. It was much more of a challenge for Libo. The Zenador's Station had been a place where he and his father could be alone together. Now, without anyone asking his consent, a third person had been added, a cold and demanding person, who spoke to him as if he were a child, even though they were the same age. It galled him that she was a full-fledged xenobiologist, with all the adult status that that implied, when he was still an apprentice.

  But he tried to bear it patiently. He was naturally calm, and quiet adhered to him. He was not prone to taking umbrage openly. But Pipo knew his son and saw him burn. After a while even Novinha, insensitive as she was, began to realize that she was provoking Libo more than any normal young man could possibly endure. But instead of easing up on him, she began to regard it as a challenge. How could she force some response from this unnaturally calm, gentle-spirited, beautiful boy?

  “You mean you've been working all these years,” she said one day, “and you don't even know how the piggies reproduce? How do you know they're all males?”

  Libo answered softly. “We explained male and female to them as they learned our languages. They chose to call themselves males. And referred to the other ones, the ones we've never seen, as females.”

  “But for all you know, they reproduce by budding! Or mitosis!”

  Her tone was contemptuous, and Libo did not answer quickly. Pipo imagined he could hear his son's thoughts, carefully rephrasing his answer until it was gentle and safe. “I wish our work were more like physical anthropology,” he said. “Then we would be more prepared to apply your research into Lusitania's subcellular life patterns to what we learn about the pequeninos.”

  Novinha looked horrified. “You mean you don't even take tissue samples?”

  Libo blushed slightly, but his voice was still calm when he answered. The boy would have been like this under questioning by the Inquisition, Pipo thought. “It is foolish, I guess,” said Libo, “but we're afraid the pequeninos would wonder why we took pieces of their bodies. If one of them took sick by chance afterward, would they think we caused the illness?”

  “What if you took something they shed naturally? You can learn a lot from a hair.”

  Libo nodded; Pipo, watching from his terminal on the other side of the room, recognized the gesture– Libo had learned it from his father. “Many primitive tribes of Earth believed that sheddings from their bodies contained some of their life and strength. What if the piggies thought we were doing magic against them?”

  “Don't you know their language? I thought some of them spoke Stark, too.” She made no effort to hide her disdain. “Can't you explain what the samples are for?”

  “You're right,” he said quietly. “But if we explained what we'd use the tissue samples for, we might accidently teach them the concepts of biological science a thousand years before they would naturally have reached that point. That's why the law forbids us to explain things like that.”

  Finally, Novinha was abashed. “I didn't realize how tightly you were bound by the doctrine of minimal intervention.”

  Pipo was glad to hear her retreat from her arrogance, but if anything, her humility was worse. The child was so isolated from human contact that she spoke like an excessively formal science book. Pipo wondered if it was already too late to teach her how to be a human being.

  It wasn't. Once she realized that they were excellent at their science, and she knew almost nothing of it, she dropped her aggressive stance and went almost to the opposite extreme. For weeks she spoke to Pipo and Libo only rarely. Instead she studied their reports, trying to grasp the purpose behind what they were doing. Now and then she had a question, and asked; they answered politely and thoroughly.

  Politeness gradually gave way to familiarity. Pipo and Libo began to converse openly in front of her, airing their speculations about why the piggies had developed some of their strange behaviors, what meaning lay behind some of their odd statements, why they remained so maddeningly impenetrable. And since the study of piggies was a very new branch of science, it didn't take long for Novinha to be expert enough, even at second hand, to offer some hypotheses. “After all,” said Pipo, encouraging her, “we're all blind together.”

  Pipo had foreseen what happened next. Libo's carefully cultivated patience had made him seem cold and reserved to others of his age, when Pipo could prevail on him even to attempt to socialize; Novinha's isolation was more flamboyant but no more thorough. Now, however, their common interest in the piggies drew them close– who else could they talk to, when no one but Pipo could even understand their conversations?

  They relaxed t
ogether, laughed themselves to tears over jokes that could not possibly amuse any other Luso. Just as the piggies seemed to name every tree in the forest, Libo playfully named all the furniture in the Zenador's Station, and periodically announced that certain items were in a bad mood and shouldn't be disturbed. “Don't sit on Chair! It's her time of the month again.” They had never seen a piggy female, and the males always seemed to refer to them with almost religious reverence; Novinha wrote a series of mock reports on an imaginary piggy woman called Reverend Mother, who was hilariously bitchy and demanding.

  It was not all laughter. There were problems, worries, and once a time of real fear that they might have done exactly what the Starways Congress had tried so hard to preventmaking radical changes in piggy society. It began with Rooter, of course. Rooter, who persisted in asking challenging, impossible questions, like, “If you have no other city of humans, how can you go to war? There's no honor for you in killing Little Ones.” Pipo babbled something about how humans would never kill pequeninos, Little Ones; but he knew that this wasn't the question Rooter was really asking.

  Pipo had known for years that the piggies knew the concept of war, but for days after that Libo and Novinha argued heatedly about whether Rooter's question proved that the piggies regarded war as desirable or merely unavoidable. There were other bits of information from Rooter, some important, some not– and many whose importance was impossible to judge. In a way, Rooter himself was proof of the wisdom of the policy that forbade the xenologers to ask questions that would reveal human expectations, and therefore human practices. Rooter's questions invariably gave them more answers than they got from his answers to their own questions.

  The last information Rooter gave them, though, was not in a question. It was a guess, spoken to Libo privately, when Pipo was off with some of the others examining the way they built their log house. “I know I know,” said Rooter, “I know why Pipo is still alive. Your women are too stupid to know that he is wise.”

  Libo struggled to make sense of this seeming non sequitur. What did Rooter think, that if human women were smarter, they would kill Pipo? The talk of killing was disturbing– this was obviously an important matter, and Libo did not know how to handle it alone. Yet he couldn't call Pipo to help, since Rooter obviously wanted to discuss it where Pipo couldn't hear.

  When Libo didn't answer, Rooter persisted. “Your women, they are weak and stupid. I told the others this, and they said I could ask you. Your women don't see Pipo's wisdom. Is this true?”

  Rooter seemed very agitated; he was breathing heavily, and he kept pulling hairs from his arms, four and five at a time. Libo had to answer, somehow. “Most women don't know him,” he said.

  “Then how will they know if he should die?” asked Rooter. Then, suddenly, he went very still and spoke very loudly. “You are cabras!”

  Only then did Pipo come into view, wondering what the shouting was about. He saw at once that Libo was desperately out of his depth. Yet Pipo had no notion what the conversation was even about– how could he help? All he knew was that Rooter was saying humans– or at least Pipo and Libo– were somehow like the large beasts that grazed in herds on the prairie. Pipo couldn't even tell if Rooter was angry or happy.

  “You are cabras! You decide!” He pointed at Libo and then at Pipo. “Your women don't choose your honor, you do! Just like in battle, but all the time!”

  Pipo had no idea what Rooter was talking about, but he could see that all the pequeninos were motionless as stumps, waiting for him– or Libo– to answer. It was plain Libo was too frightened by Rooter's strange behavior to dare any response at all. In this case, Pipo could see no point but to tell the truth; it was, after all, a relatively obvious and trivial bit of information about human society. It was against the rules that the Starways Congress had established for him, but failing to answer would be even more damaging, and so Pipo went ahead.

  “Women and men decide together, or they decide for themselves,” said Pipo. “One doesn't decide for the other.”

  It was apparently what all the piggies had been waiting for. “Cabras,” they said, over and over; they ran to Rooter, hooting and whistling. They picked him up and rushed him off into the woods. Pipo tried to follow, but two of the piggies stopped him and shook their heads. It was a human gesture they had learned long before, but it held stronger meaning for the piggies. It was absolutely forbidden for Pipo to follow. They were going to the women, and that was the one place the piggies had told them they could never go.

  On the way home, Libo reported how the difficulty began.

  “Do you know what Rooter said? He said our women were weak and stupid.”

  “That's because he's never met Mayor Bosquinha. Or your mother, for that matter.”

  Libo laughed, because his mother, Conceicao, ruled the archives as if it were an ancient estacao in the wild mato– if you entered her domain, you were utterly subject to her law. As he laughed, he felt something slip away, some idea that was important– what were we talking about? The conversation went on; Libo had forgotten, and soon he even forgot that he had forgotten.

  That night they heard the drumming sound that Pipo and Libo believed was part of some sort of celebration. It didn't happen all that often, like beating on great drums with heavy sticks. Tonight, though, the celebration seemed to go on forever. Pipo and Libo speculated that perhaps the human example of sexual equality had somehow given the male pequeninos some hope of liberation. “I think this may qualify as a serious modification of piggy behavior,” Pipo said gravely. “If we find that we've caused real change, I'm going to have to report it, and Congress will probably direct that human contact with piggies be cut off for a while. Years, perhaps.” It was a sobering thought– that doing their job faithfully might lead Starways Congress to forbid them to do their job at all.

  In the morning Novinha walked with them to the gate in the high fence that separated the human city from the slopes leading up to the forest hills where the piggies lived. Because Pipo and Libo were still trying to reassure each other that neither of them could have done any differently, Novinha walked on ahead and got to the gate first. When the others arrived, she pointed to a patch of freshly cleared red earth only thirty meters or so up the hill from the gate. “That's new,” she said. “And there's something in it.”

  Pipo opened the gate, and Libo, being younger, ran on ahead to investigate. He stopped at the edge of the cleared patch and went completely rigid, staring down at whatever lay there. Pipo, seeing him, also stopped, and Novinha, suddenly frightened for Libo, ignored the regulation and ran through the gate. Libo's head rocked backward and he dropped to his knees; he clutched his tight-curled hair and cried out in terrible remorse.

  Rooter lay spread-eagled in the cleared dirt. He had been eviscerated, and not carelessly: Each organ had been cleanly separated, and the strands and filaments of his limbs had also been pulled out and spread in a symmetrical pattern on the drying soil. Everything still had some connection to the body– nothing had been completely severed.

  Libo's agonized crying was almost hysterical. Novinha knelt by him and held him, rocked him, tried to soothe him. Pipo methodically took out his small camera and took pictures from every angle so the computer could analyze it in detail later.

  “He was still alive when they did this,” Libo said, when he had calmed enough to speak. Even so, he had to say the words slowly, carefully, as if he were a foreigner just learning to speak. “There's so much blood on the ground, spattered so far– his heart had to be beating when they opened him up.”

  “We'll discuss it later,” said Pipo.

  Now the thing Libo had forgotten yesterday came back to him with cruel clarity. “It's what Rooter said about the women. They decide when the men should die. He told me that, and I–” He stopped himself. Of course he did nothing. The law required him to do nothing. And at that moment he decided that he hated the law. If the law meant allowing this to be done to Rooter, then the law had no understa
nding. Rooter was a person. You don't stand by and let this happen to a person just because you're studying him.

  “They didn't dishonor him,” said Novinha. “If there's one thing that's certain, it's the love that they have for trees. See?” Out of the center of his chest cavity, which was otherwise empty now, a very small seedling sprouted. “They planted a tree to mark his burial spot.”

  “Now we know why they name all their trees,” said Libo bitterly. “They planted them as grave markers for the piggies they tortured to death.”

  “This is a very large forest,” Pipo said calmly. “Please confine your hypotheses to what is at least remotely possible.” They were calmed by his quiet, reasoned tone, his insistence that even now they behave as scientists.

  “What should we do?” asked Novinha.

  "We should get you back inside the perimeter immediately, " said Pipo. "It's forbidden for you to come out here."

  “But I meant– with the body– what should we do?”

  “Nothing,” said Pipo. “The piggies have done what piggies do, for whatever reason piggies do it.” He helped Libo to his feet.

  Libo had trouble standing for a moment; he leaned on both of them for his first few steps. “What did I say?” he whispered. “I don't even know what it is I said that killed him.”

  “It wasn't you,” said Pipo. “It was me.”

  “What, do you think you own them?” demanded Novinha. “Do you think their world revolves around you? The piggies did it, for whatever reason they have. It's plain enough this isn't the first time– they were too deft at the vivisection for this to be the first time.”

  Pipo took it with black humor. “We're losing our wits, Libo. Novinha isn't supposed to know anything about xenology.”

  “You're right,” said Libo. “Whatever may have triggered this, it's something they've done before. A custom.” He was trying to sound calm.

  "But that's even worse, isn't it?" said Novinha. "It's their custom to gut each other alive. " She looked at the other trees of the forest that began at the top of the hill and wondered how many of them were rooted in blood.