Speaker for the Dead Read online

  Pipo smiled. "I'm far more worried about what will happen after she takes the test. If she fails, then she'll have very bad problems. And if she passes, then my problems will begin."

  "Why?"

  "Libo will be after me to let him examine early for Zenador. And if he did that, there'd be no reason for me not to go home, curl up, and die."

  "Such a romantic fool you are, Pipo. If there's any man in Milagre who's capable of accepting his thirteen-year-old son as a colleague, it's you."

  After she left, Pipo and Libo worked together, as usual, recording the day's events with the pequeninos. Pipo compared Libo's work, his way of thinking, his insights, his attitudes, with those of the graduate students he had known in university before joining the Lusitania Colony. He might be small, and there might be a lot of theory and knowledge for him yet to learn, but he was already a true scientist in his method, and a humanist at heart. By the time the evening's work was done and they walked home together by the light of Lusitania's large and dazzling moon, Pipo had decided that Libo already deserved to be treated as a colleague, whether he took the examination or not. The tests couldn't measure the things that really counted, anyway.

  And whether she liked it or not, Pipo intended to find out if Novinha had the unmeasurable qualities of a scientist; if she didn't, then he'd see to it she didn't take the test, regardless of how many facts she had memorized.

  Pipo meant to be difficult. Novinha knew how adults acted when they planned not to do things her way, but didn't want a fight or even any nastiness. Of course, of course you can take the test. But there's no reason to rush into it, let's take some time, let me make sure you'll be successful on the first attempt.

  Novinha didn't want to wait. Novinha was ready.

  "I'll jump through any hoops you want," she said.

  His face went cold. Their faces always did. That was all right, coldness was all right, she could freeze them to death. "I don't want you to jump through hoops," he said.

  "The only thing I ask is that you line them up all in a row so I can jump through them quickly. I don't want to be put off for days and days."

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. "You're in such a hurry."

  "I'm ready. The Starways Code allows me to challenge the test at any time. It's between me and the Starways Congress, and I can't find anywhere that it says a xenologer can try to second-guess the Interplanetary Examinations Board."

  "Then you haven't read carefully."

  "The only thing I need to take the test before I'm sixteen is the authorization of my legal guardian. I don't have a legal guardian."

  "On the contrary," said Pipo. "Mayor Bosquinha was your legal guardian from the day of your parents' death."

  "And she agreed I could take the test."

  "Provided you came to me."

  Novinha saw the intense look in his eyes. She didn't know Pipo, so she thought it was the look she had seen in so many eyes, the desire to dominate, to rule her, the desire to cut through her determination and break her independence, the desire to make her submit.

  From ice to fire in an instant. "What do you know about xenobiology! You only go out and talk to the piggies, you don't even begin to understand the workings of genes! Who are you to judge me! Lusitania needs a xenobiologist, and they've been without one for eight years. And you want to make them wait even longer, just so you can be in control!"

  To her surprise, he didn't become flustered, didn't retreat. Nor did he get angry in return. It was as if she hadn't spoken.

  "I see," he said quietly. "It's because of your great love of the people of Lusitania that you wish to become xenobiologist. Seeing the public need, you sacrificed and prepared yourself to enter early into a lifetime of altruistic service."

  It sounded absurd, hearing him say it like that. And it wasn't at all what she felt. "Isn't that a good enough reason?"

  "If it were true, it would be good enough."

  "Are you calling me a liar?"

  "Your own words called you a liar. You spoke of how much they, the people of Lusitania, need you. But you live among us. You've lived among us all your life. Ready to sacrifice for us, and yet you don't feel yourself to be part of this community."

  So he wasn't like the adults who always believed lies as long as they made her seem to be the child they wanted her to be. "Why should I feel like part of the community? I'm not."

  He nodded gravely, as if considering her answer. "What community are you a part of?"

  "The only other communities on Lusitania are the piggies, and you haven't seen me out there with the tree-worshippers."

  "There are many other communities on Lusitania. For instance, you're a student--there's a community of students."

  "Not for me."

  "I know. You have no friends, you have no intimate associates, you go to mass but you never go to confession, you are so completely detached that as far as possible you don't touch the life of this colony, you don't touch the life of the human race at any point. From all the evidence, you live in complete isolation."

  Novinha wasn't prepared for this. He was naming the underlying pain of her life, and she didn't have a strategy devised to cope with it. "If I do, it isn't my fault."

  "I know that. I know where it began, and I know whose fault it was that it continues to this day."

  "Mine?"

  "Mine. And everyone else's. But mine most of all, because I knew what was happening to you and I did nothing at all. Until today."

  "And today you're going to keep me from the one thing that matters to me in my life! Thanks so much for your compassion!"

  Again he nodded solemnly, as if he were accepting and acknowledging her ironic gratitude. "In one sense, Novinha, it doesn't matter that it isn't your fault. Because the town of Milagre is a community, and whether it has treated you badly or not, it must still act as all communities do, to provide the greatest possible happiness for all its members."

  "Which means everybody on Lusitania except me--me and the piggies."

  "The xenobiologist is very important to a colony, especially one like this, surrounded by a fence that forever limits our growth. Our xenobiologist must find ways to grow more protein and carbohydrate per hectare, which means genetically altering the Earthborn corn and potatoes to make--"

  "To make maximum use of the nutrients available in the Lusitanian environment. Do you think I'm planning to take the examination without knowing what my life's work would be?"

  "Your life's work, to devote yourself to improving the lives of people you despise."

  Now Novinha saw the trap that he had laid for her. Too late; it had sprung. "So you think that a xenobiologist can't do her work unless she loves the people who use the things she makes?"

  "I don't care whether you love us or not. What I have to know is what you really want. Why you're so passionate to do this."

  "Basic psychology. My parents died in this work, and so I'm trying to step into their role."

  "Maybe," said Pipo. "And maybe not. What I want to know, Novinha, what I must know before I'll let you take the test, is what community you do belong to."

  "You said it yourself! I don't belong to any."

  "Impossible. Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn't belong to. I am this and this and this, but definitely not that and that and that. All your definitions are negative. I could make an infinite list of the things you are not. But a person who really believes she doesn't belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad."

  "That's me, insane to the root."

  "Not insane. Driven by a sense of purpose that is frightening. If you take this test you'll pass it. But before I let you take it I have to know: Who will you become when you pass? What do you believe in, what are you part of, what do you care about, what do you love?"

  "Nobody in this or any other world."

  "I don't believe you."

  "
I've never known a good man or woman in the world except my parents and they're dead! And even they--nobody understands anything."

  "You."

  "I'm part of anything, aren't I? But nobody understands anybody, not even you, pretending to be so wise and compassionate but you're only getting me to cry like this because you have the power to stop me from doing what I want to do--"

  "And it isn't xenobiology."

  "Yes it is! That's part of it, anyway."

  "And what's the rest of it?"

  "What you are. What you do. Only you're doing it all wrong, you're doing it stupidly."

  "Xenobiologist and xenologer."

  "They made a stupid mistake when they created a new science to study the piggies. They were a bunch of tired old anthropologists who put on new hats and called themselves xenologers. But you can't understand the piggies just by watching the way they behave! They came out of a different evolution! You have to understand their genes, what's going on inside their cells. And the other animals' cells, too, because they can't be studied by themselves, nothing lives in isolation--"

  Don't lecture me, thought Pipo. Tell me what you feel. And to provoke her to be more emotional, he whispered, "Except you."

  It worked. From cold and contemptuous she became hot and defensive. "You'll never understand them! But I will!"

  "Why do you care about them? What are the piggies to you?"

  "You'd never understand. You're a good Catholic." She said the word with contempt. "It's a book that's on the Index."

  Pipo's face glowed with sudden understanding. "The Hive Queen and the Hegemon."

  "He lived three thousand years ago, whoever he was, the one who called himself the Speaker for the Dead. But he understood the buggers! We wiped them all out, the only other alien race we ever knew, we killed them all, but he understood."

  "And you want to write the story of the pequeninos the way the original Speaker wrote of the buggers."

  "The way you say it, you make it sound as easy as doing a scholarly paper. You don't know what it was like to write the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. How much agony it was for him to--to imagine himself inside an alien mind--and come out of it filled with love for the great creature we destroyed. He lived at the same time as the worst human being who ever lived, Ender the Xenocide, who destroyed the buggers--and he did his best to undo what Ender did, the Speaker for the Dead tried to raise the dead--"

  "But he couldn't."

  "But he did! He made them live again--you'd know it if you had read the book! I don't know about Jesus, I listen to Bishop Peregrino and I don't think there's any power in their priesthood to turn wafers into flesh or forgive a milligram of guilt. But the Speaker for the Dead brought the hive queen back to life."

  "Then where is she?"

  "In here! In me!"

  He nodded. "And someone else is in you. The Speaker for the Dead. That's who you want to be."

  "It's the only true story I ever heard," she said. "The only one I care about. Is that what you wanted to hear? That I'm a heretic? And my whole life's work is going to be adding another book to the Index of truths that good Catholics are forbidden to read."

  "What I wanted to hear," said Pipo softly, "was the name of what you are instead of the name of all the things that you are not. What you are is the hive queen. What you are is the Speaker for the Dead. It's a very small community, small in numbers, but a great-hearted one. So you chose not to be part of the bands of children who group together for the sole purpose of excluding others, and people look at you and say, poor girl, she's so isolated, but you know a secret, you know who you really are. You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there's never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapiens."

  "Now you say I'm not even human? You made me cry like a little girl because you wouldn't let me take the test, you made me humiliate myself, and now you say I'm unhuman?"

  "You can take the test."

  The words hung in the air.

  "When?" she whispered.

  "Tonight. Tomorrow. Begin when you like. I'll stop my work to take you through the tests as quickly as you like."

  "Thank you! Thank you, I--"

  "Become the Speaker for the Dead. I'll help you all I can. The law forbids me to take anyone but my apprentice, my son Libo, out to meet the pequeninos. But we'll open our notes to you. Everything we learn, we'll show you. All our guesses and speculation. In return, you also show us all your work, what you find out about the genetic patterns of this world that might help us understand the pequeninos. And when we've learned enough, together, you can write your book, you can become the Speaker. But this time not the Speaker for the Dead. The pequeninos aren't dead."

  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, espec
ially 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?"