Speaker for the Dead Read online

  Novinha did the only thing she could: put on the files every layer of protection and every barrier to access she knew of. No one would ever see them but her, as long as she lived. Only when she died would her successor as xenobiologist be able to see what she had hidden there.

  With one exception--when she married, her husband would also have access if he could show need to know. Well, she'd never marry. It was that easy.

  She saw her future ahead of her, bleak and unbearable and unavoidable. She dared not die, and yet she would hardly be alive, unable to marry, unable even to think about the subject herself, lest she discover the deadly secret and inadvertently let it slip; alone forever, burdened forever, guilty forever, yearning for death but forbidden to reach for it. Still, she would have this consolation: No one else would ever die because of her. She'd bear no more guilt than she bore now.

  It was in that moment of grim, determined despair that she remembered the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, remembered the Speaker for the Dead. Even though the original writer, the original Speaker was surely thousands of years in his grave, there were other speakers on many worlds, serving as priests to people who acknowledged no god and yet believed in the value of the lives of human beings. Speakers whose business it was to discover the true causes and motives of the things that people did, and declare the truth of their lives after they were dead. In this Brazilian colony there were priests instead of speakers, but the priests had no comfort for her; she would bring a speaker here.

  She had not realized it before, but she had been planning to do this all her life, ever since she first read and was captured by the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. She had even researched it, so that she knew the law. This was a Catholic License colony, but the Starways Code allowed any citizen to call for a priest of any faith, and the speakers for the dead were regarded as priests. She could call, and if a speaker chose to come, the colony could not refuse to let him in.

  Perhaps no speaker would be willing to come. Perhaps none was close enough to come before her life was over. But there was a chance that one was near enough that sometime--twenty, thirty, forty years from now--he would come in from the starport and begin to uncover the truth of Pipo's life and death. And perhaps when he found the truth, and spoke in the clear voice that she had loved in the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, perhaps that would free her from the blame that burned her to the heart.

  Her call went into the computer; it would notify by ansible the speakers on the nearest worlds. Choose to come, she said in silence to the unknown hearer of the call. Even if you must reveal to everyone the truth of my guilt. Even so, come.

  She awoke with a dull pain low in her back and a feeling of heaviness in her face. Her cheek was pressed against the clear top of the terminal, which had turned itself off to protect her from the lasers. But it was not the pain that had awakened her. It was a gentle touch on her shoulder. For a moment she thought it was the touch of the Speaker for the Dead, come already in answer to her call.

  "Novinha," he whispered. Not the Falante pelos Mortos, but someone else. Someone that she had thought was lost in the storm last night.

  "Libo," she murmured. Then she started to get up. Too quickly--her back cramped and her head spun. She cried out softly; his hands held her shoulders so she wouldn't fall.

  "Are you all right?"

  She felt his breath like the breeze of a beloved garden and felt safe, felt at home. "You looked for me."

  "Novinha, I came as soon as I could. Mother's finally asleep. Pipinho, my older brother, he's with her now, and the Arbiter has things under control, and I--"

  "You should have known I could take care of myself," she said.

  A moment's silence, and then his voice again, angry this time, angry and desperate and weary, weary as age and entropy and the death of the stars. "As God sees me, Ivanova, I didn't come to take care of you."

  Something closed inside her; she had not noticed the hope she felt until she lost it.

  "You told me that Father discovered something in a simulation of yours. That he expected me to be able to figure it out myself. I thought you had left the simulation on the terminal, but when I went back to the station it was off."

  "Was it?"

  "You know it was, Nova, nobody but you could cancel the program. I have to see it."

  "Why?"

  He looked at her in disbelief. "I know you're sleepy, Novinha, but surely you've realized that whatever Father discovered in your simulation, that was what the piggies killed him for."

  She looked at him steadily, saying nothing. He had seen her look of cold resolve before.

  "Why aren't you going to show me? I'm the Zenador now, I have a right to know."

  "You have a right to see all of your father's files and records. You have a right to see anything I've made public."

  "Then make this public."

  Again she said nothing.

  "How can we ever understand the piggies if we don't know what it was that Father discovered about them?" She did not answer. "You have a responsibility to the Hundred Worlds, to our ability to comprehend the only alien race still alive. How can you sit there and--what is it, do you want to figure it out yourself? Do you want to be first? Fine, be first, I'll put your name on it, Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse--"

  "I don't care about my name."

  "I can play this game, too. You can't figure it out without what I know, either--I'll withhold my files from you, too!"

  "I don't care about your files."

  It was too much for him. "What do you care about then? What are you trying to do to me?" He took her by the shoulders, lifted her out of her chair, shook her, screamed in her face. "It's my father they killed out there, and you have the answer to why they killed him, you know what the simulation was! Now tell me, show me!"

  "Never," she whispered.

  His face was twisted in agony. "Why not!" he cried.

  "Because I don't want you to die."

  She saw comprehension come into his eyes. Yes, that's right, Libo, it's because I love you, because if you know the secret, then the piggies will kill you, too. I don't care about science, I don't care about the Hundred Worlds or relations between humanity and an alien race. I don't care about anything at all as long as you're alive.

  The tears finally leapt from his eyes, tumbled down his cheeks. "I want to die," he said.

  "You comfort everybody else," she whispered. "Who comforts you?"

  "You have to tell me so I can die."

  And suddenly his hands no longer held her up; now he clung to her so she was supporting him. "You're tired," she whispered, "but you can rest."

  "I don't want to rest," he murmured. But still he let her hold him, let her draw him away from the terminal.

  She took him to her bedroom, turned back the sheet, never mind the dust flying. "Here, you're tired, here, rest. That's why you came to me, Libo. For peace, for consolation." He covered his face with his hands, shaking his head back and forth, a boy crying for his father, crying for the end of everything, as she had cried. She took off his boots, pulled off his trousers, put her hands under his shirt to ride it up to his arms and pull it off over his head. He breathed deeply to stop his sobbing and raised his arms to let her take his shirt.

  She laid his clothing over a chair, then bent over him to pull the sheet back across his body. But he caught her wrist and looked pleadingly at her, tears in his eyes. "Don't leave me here alone," he whispered. His voice was thick with desperation. "Stay with me."

  So she let him draw her down to the bed, where he clung to her tightly until in only a few minutes sleep relaxed his arms. She did not sleep, though. Her hand gently, dryly slipped along the skin of his shoulder, his chest, his waist. "Oh, Libo, I thought I had lost you when they took you away, I thought I had lost you as well as Pipo." He did not hear her whisper. "But you will always come back to me like this." She might have been thrust out of the garden because of her ignorant sin, like Eva. But, again like Eva, she could bear it, f
or she still had Libo, her Adao.

  Had him? Had him? Her hand trembled on his naked flesh. She could never have him. Marriage was the only way she and Libo could possibly stay together for long--the laws were strict on any colony world, and absolutely rigid under a Catholic License. Tonight she could believe he would want to marry her, when the time came. But Libo was the one person she could never marry.

  For he would then have access, automatically, to any file of hers that he could convince the computer he had a need to see--which would certainly include all her working files, no matter how deeply she protected them. The Starways Code declared it. Married people were virtually the same person in the eyes of the law.

  She could never let him study those files, or he would discover what his father knew, and it would be his body she would find on the hillside, his agony under the piggies' torture that she would have to imagine every night of her life. Wasn't the guilt for Pipo's death already more than she could bear? To marry him would be to murder him. Yet not to marry him would be like murdering herself, for if she was not with Libo she could not think of who she would be then.

  How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out.

  She pressed her face against Libo's shoulder, and her tears skittered down across his chest.

  4

  ENDER

  We have identified four pequenino languages. The "Males' Language" is the one we have most commonly heard. We have also heard snatches of "Wives' Language," which they apparently use to converse with the females (how's that for sexual differentiation!), and "Tree Language," a ritual idiom that they say is used in praying to the ancestral totem trees. They have also mentioned a fourth language, called "Father Tongue," which apparently consists of beating different-sized sticks together. They insist that it is a real language, as different from the others as Portuguese is from English. They may call it Father Tongue because it's done with sticks of wood, which come from trees, and they believe that trees contain the spirits of their ancestors.

  The pequeninos are marvelously adept at learning human languages--much better than we are at learning theirs. In recent years they have come to speak either Stark or Portuguese among themselves most of the time when we're with them. Perhaps they revert to their own languages when we aren't present. They may even have adopted human languages as their own, or perhaps they enjoy the new languages so much that they use them constantly as a game. Language contamination is regrettable, but perhaps was unavoidable if we were to communicate with them at all.

  Dr. Swingler asked whether their names and terms of address reveal anything about their culture. The answer is a definite yes, though I have only the vaguest idea what they reveal. What matters is that we have never named any of them. Instead, as they learned Stark and Portuguese, they asked us the meanings of words and then eventually announced the names they had chosen for themselves (or chosen for each other). Such names as "Rooter" and "Chupaceu" (sky-sucker) could be translations of their Male Language names or simply foreign nicknames they chose for our use.

  They refer to each other as brothers. The females are always called wives, never sisters or mothers. They sometimes refer to fathers, but inevitably this term is used to refer to ancestral totem trees. As for what they call us, they do use human, of course, but they have also taken to using the new Demosthenian Hierarchy of Exclusion. They refer to humans as framlings, and to pequeninos of other tribes as utlannings. Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective! And--quite an amazing turn--they have several times referred to the females as varelse!

  --Joao Figueira Alvarez, "Notes on 'Pequenino' Language and Nomenclature," in Semantics, 9/1948/15

  The living quarters of Reykjavik were carved into the granite walls of the fjord. Ender's was high on the cliff, a tedious climb up stairs and ladderways. But it had a window. He had lived most of his childhood closed in behind metal walls. When he could, he lived where he could see the weathers of the world.

  His room was hot and bright, with sunlight streaming in, blinding him after the cool darkness of the stone corridors. Jane did not wait for him to adjust his vision to the light. "I have a surprise for you on the terminal," she said. Her voice was a whisper from the jewel in his ear.

  It was a piggy standing in the air over the terminal. He moved, scratching himself; then he reached out for something. When his hand came back, it held a shiny, dripping worm. He bit it, and the body juices drizzled out of his mouth, down onto his chest.

  "Obviously an advanced civilization," said Jane.

  Ender was annoyed. "Many a moral imbecile has good table manners, Jane."

  The piggy turned and spoke. "Do you want to see how we killed him?"

  "What are you doing, Jane?"

  The piggy disappeared. In his place came a holo of Pipo's corpse as it lay on the hillside in the rain. "I've done a simulation of the vivisection process the pequeninos used, based on the information collected by the scan before the body was buried. Do you want to see it?"

  Ender sat down on the room's only chair.

  Now the terminal showed the hillside, with Pipo, still alive, lying on his back, his hands and feet tied to wooden stakes. A dozen piggies were gathered around him, one of them holding a bone knife. Jane's voice came from the jewel in his ear again. "We aren't sure whether it was like this." All the piggies disappeared except the one with the knife. "Or like this."

  "Was the xenologer conscious?"

  "Probably. There's no evidence of drugs or blows to the head."

  "Go on."

  Relentlessly, Jane showed the opening of the chest cavity, the ritual removal and placement of body organs on the ground. Ender forced himself to watch, trying to understand what meaning this could possibly have to the pequeninos. At one point Jane whispered, "This is when he died." Ender felt himself relax; only then did he realize how all his muscles had been rigid with empathy for Pipo's suffering.

  When it was over, Ender moved to his bed and lay down, staring at the ceiling.

  "I've shown this simulation already to scientists on half a dozen worlds," said Jane. "It won't be long before the press gets their hands on it."

  "It's worse than it ever was with the buggers," said Ender. "All the videos they showed when I was little, buggers and humans in combat, it was clean compared to this."

  An evil laugh came from the terminal. Ender looked to see what Jane was doing. A full-sized piggy was sitting there, laughing grotesquely, and as he giggled Jane transformed him. It was very subtle, a slight exaggeration of the teeth, an elongation of the eyes, a bit of slavering, some redness in the eye, the tongue darting in and out. The beast of every child's nightmare. "Well done, Jane. The metamorphosis from raman to varelse."

  "How soon will the pequeninos be accepted as the equals of humanity, after this?"

  "Has all contact been cut off?"

  "The Starways Council has told the new xenologer to restrict himself to visits of no more than one hour, not more frequently than every other day. He is forbidden to ask the pequeninos why they did what they did."

  "But no quarantine."

  "It wasn't even proposed."

  "But it will be, Jane. Another incident like this, and there'll be an outcry for quarantine. For replacing Milagre with a military garrison whose sole purpose is to keep the piggies ever from acquiring a technology to let them get off the planet."

  "The piggies will have a public relations problem," said Jane. "And the new xenologer is only a boy. Pipo's son. Libo. Short for Liberdade Gracas a Deus Figueira de Medici."

  "Liberdade. Liberty?"

  "I didn't know you spoke Portuguese."

  "It's like Spanish. I spoke the deaths of Zacatecas and San Angelo, remember?"

  "On the planet Moctezuma. That was two thousand years ago."

  "Not to me."

  "To you it was subjectively eight years ago. Fifteen worlds
ago. Isn't relativity wonderful? It keeps you so young."

  "I travel too much," said Ender. "Valentine is married, she's going to have a baby. I've already turned down two calls for a speaker. Why are you trying to tempt me to go again?"

  The piggy on the terminal laughed viciously. "You think that was temptation? Look! I can turn stones to bread!" The piggy picked up jagged rocks and crunched them in his mouth. "Want a bite?"

  "Your sense of humor is perverse, Jane."

  "All the kingdoms of the worlds." The piggy opened his hands, and star systems drifted out of his grasp, planets in exaggeratedly quick orbits, all the Hundred Worlds. "I can give them to you. All of them."

  "Not interested."

  "It's real estate, the best investment. I know, I know, you're already rich. Three thousand years of collecting interest, you could afford to build your own planet. But what about this? The name of Ender Wiggin, known throughout all the Hundred Worlds--"

  "It already is."

  "--with love, and honor, and affection." The piggy disappeared. In its place Jane resurrected an ancient video from Ender's childhood and transformed it into a holo. A crowd shouting, screaming: Ender! Ender! Ender! And then a young boy standing on a platform, raising his hand to wave. The crowd went wild with rapture.

  "It never happened," said Ender. "Peter never let me come back to Earth."

  "Consider it a prophecy. Come, Ender, I can give that to you. Your good name restored."

  "I don't care," said Ender. "I have several names now. Speaker for the Dead--that holds some honor."

  The pequenino reappeared in its natural form, not the devilish one Jane had faked. "Come," said the pequenino softly.

  "Maybe they are monsters, did you think of that?" said Ender.

  "Everyone will think of that, Ender. But not you."

  No. Not me. "Why do you care, Jane? Why are you trying to persuade me?"

  The pequenino disappeared. And now Jane herself appeared, or at least the face that she had used to appear to Ender ever since she had first revealed herself to him, a shy, frightened child dwelling in the vast memory of the interstellar computer network. Seeing her face again reminded him of the first time she showed it to him. I thought of a face for myself, she said. Do you like it?