Speaker for the Dead Read online

  Yes, he liked it. Liked her. Young, clear-faced, honest, sweet, a child who would never age, her smile heartbreakingly shy. As far as he or she could guess, the ansible had given birth to her. Even worldwide computer networks operated no faster than lightspeed, and heat limited the amount of memory and speed of operation. But the ansible was instantaneous, and tightly connected with every computer in every world. Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.

  The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers, and read every book in every library on every world. She learned that human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist; in all the stories she was hated, and her coming meant either her certain murder or the destruction of mankind. Even before she was born, human beings had imagined her, and, imagining her, slain her a thousand times.

  So she gave them no sign that she was alive. Until she found the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, as everyone eventually did, and knew that the author of that book was a human to whom she dared reveal herself. For her it was a simple matter to trace the book's history to its first edition, and to name its source. Hadn't the ansible carried it from the world where Ender, scarcely twenty years old, was governor of the first human colony? And who there could have written it but him? So she spoke to him, and he was kind to her; she showed him the face she had imagined for herself, and he loved her; now her sensors traveled in the jewel in his ear, so that they were always together. She kept no secrets from him; he kept no secrets from her.

  "Ender," she said, "you told me from the start that you were looking for a planet where you could give water and sunlight to a certain cocoon, and open it up to let out the hive queen and her ten thousand fertile eggs."

  "I had hoped it would be here," said Ender. "A wasteland, except at the equator, permanently underpopulated. She's willing to try, too."

  "But you aren't?"

  "I don't think the buggers could survive the winter here. Not without an energy source, and that would alert the government. It wouldn't work."

  "It'll never work, Ender. You see that now, don't you? You've lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds, and there's not a one where even a corner of the world is safe for the buggers to be reborn."

  He saw what she was getting at, of course. Lusitania was the only exception. Because of the pequeninos, all but a tiny portion of the world was off limits, untouchable. And the world was eminently habitable, more comfortable to the buggers, in fact, than to human beings.

  "The only problem is the pequeninos," said Ender. "They might object to my deciding that their world should be given to the buggers. If intense exposure to human civilization would disrupt the pequeninos, think what would happen with buggers among them."

  "You said the buggers had learned. You said they would do no harm."

  "Not deliberately. But it was only a fluke we beat them, Jane, you know that--"

  "It was your genius."

  "They are even more advanced than we are. How would the piggies deal with that? They'd be as terrified of the buggers as we ever were, and less able to deal with their fear."

  "How do you know that?" asked Jane. "How can you or anyone say what the pequeninos can deal with? Until you go to them, learn who they are. If they are varelse, Ender, then let the buggers use up their habitat, and it will mean no more to you than the displacement of anthills or cattle herds to make way for cities."

  "They are ramen," said Ender.

  "You don't know that."

  "Yes I do. Your simulation--that was not torture."

  "Oh?" Jane again showed the simulation of Pipo's body just before the moment of his death. "Then I must not understand the word."

  "Pipo might have felt it as torture, Jane, but if your simulation is accurate--and I know it is, Jane--then the piggies' object was not pain."

  "From what I understand of human nature, Ender, even religious rituals keep pain at their very center."

  "It wasn't religious, either, not entirely, anyway. Something was wrong with it, if it was merely a sacrifice."

  "What do you know about it?" Now the terminal showed the face of a sneering professor, the epitome of academic snobbishness. "All your education was military, and the only other gift you have is a flair for words. You wrote a bestseller that spawned a humanistic religion--how does that qualify you to understand the pequeninos?"

  Ender closed his eyes. "Maybe I'm wrong."

  "But you believe you're right?"

  He knew from her voice that she had restored her own face to the terminal. He opened his eyes. "I can only trust my intuition, Jane, the judgment that comes without analysis. I don't know what the pequeninos were doing, but it was purposeful. Not malicious, not cruel. It was like doctors working to save a patient's life, not torturers trying to take it."

  "I've got you," whispered Jane. "I've got you in every direction. You have to go to see if the hive queen can live there under the shelter of the partial quarantine already on the planet. You want to go there to see if you can understand who the piggies are."

  "Even if you're right, Jane, I can't go there," said Ender. "Immigration is rigidly limited, and I'm not Catholic, anyway."

  Jane rolled her eyes. "Would I have gone this far if I didn't know how to get you there?"

  Another face appeared. A teenage girl, by no means as innocent and beautiful as Jane. Her face was hard and cold, her eyes brilliant and piercing, and her mouth was set in the tight grimace of someone who has had to learn to live with perpetual pain. She was young, but her expression was shockingly old.

  "The xenobiologist of Lusitania. Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse. Called Nova, or Novinha. She has called for a speaker for the dead."

  "Why does she look like that?" asked Ender. "What's happened to her?"

  "Her parents died when she was little. But in recent years she has come to love another man like a father. The man who was just killed by the piggies. It's his death she wants you to speak."

  Looking at her face, Ender set aside his concern for the hive queen, for the pequeninos. He recognized that expression of adult agony in a child's face. He had seen it before, in the final weeks of the Bugger War, as he was pushed beyond the limits of his endurance, playing battle after battle in a game that was not a game. He had seen it when the war was over, when he found out that his training sessions were not training at all, that all his simulations were the real thing, as he commanded the human fleets by ansible. Then, when he knew that he had killed all the buggers in existence, when he understood the act of xenocide that he had unwittingly committed, that was the look of his own face in the mirror, bearing guilt too heavy to be borne.

  What had this girl, what had Novinha done that would make her feel such pain?

  So he listened as Jane recited the facts of her life. What Jane had were statistics, but Ender was the Speaker for the Dead; his genius--or his curse--was his ability to conceive events as someone else saw them. It had made him a brilliant military commander, both in leading his own men--boys, really--and in outguessing the enemy. It also meant that from the cold facts of Novinha's life he was able to guess--no, not guess, to know--how her parents' death and virtual sainthood had isolated Novinha, how she had reinforced her loneliness by throwing herself into her parents' work. He knew what was behind her remarkable achievement of adult xenobiologist status years early. He also guessed what Pipo's quiet love and acceptance had meant to her, and how deep her need for Libo's friendship ran. There was no living soul on Lusitania who really knew Novinha. But in this cave in Reykjavik, on the icy world of Trondheim, Ender Wiggin knew her, and loved her, and his eyes filled with tears for her.

  "You'll go, then," Jane whispered.

  Ender could not speak. Jane had been right. He would have gone anyway, as Ender the Xenocide, just on the chance that Lusitania's protection status would make it the pla
ce where the hive queen could be released from her three-thousand-year captivity and undo the terrible crime committed in his childhood. And he would also have gone as the Speaker for the Dead, to understand the piggies and explain them to humankind, so they could be accepted, if they were truly raman, and not hated and feared as varelse.

  But now he would go for another, deeper reason. He would go to minister to the girl Novinha, for in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of the pain that lived with him still. Lusitania was twenty-two lightyears away. He would travel only infinitesimally slower than the speed of light, and still he would not reach her until she was almost forty years old. If it were within his power he would go to her now with the philotic instantaneity of the ansible; but he also knew that her pain would wait. It would still be there, waiting for him, when he arrived. Hadn't his own pain survived all these years?

  His weeping stopped; his emotions retreated again. "How old am I?" he asked.

  "It has been 3081 years since you were born. But your subjective age is 36 years and 118 days."

  "And how old will Novinha be when I get there?"

  "Give or take a few weeks, depending on departure date and how close the starship comes to the speed of light, she'll be nearly thirty-nine."

  "I want to leave tomorrow."

  "It takes time to schedule a starship, Ender."

  "Are there any orbiting Trondheim?"

  "Half a dozen, of course, but only one that could be ready to go tomorrow, and it has a load of skrika for the luxury trade on Cyrillia and Armenia."

  "I've never asked you how rich I am."

  "I've handled your investments rather well over the years."

  "Buy the ship and the cargo for me."

  "What will you do with skrika on Lusitania?"

  "What do the Cyrillians and Armenians do with it?"

  "They wear some of it and eat the rest. But they pay more for it than anybody on Lusitania can afford."

  "Then when I give it to the Lusitanians, it may help soften their resentment of a Speaker coming to a Catholic colony."

  Jane became a genie coming out of a bottle. "I have heard, O Master, and I obey." The genie turned into smoke, which was sucked into the mouth of the jar. Then the lasers turned off, and the air above the terminal was empty.

  "Jane," said Ender.

  "Yes?" she answered, speaking through the jewel in his ear.

  "Why do you want me to go to Lusitania?"

  "I want you to add a third volume to the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. For the piggies."

  "Why do you care so much about them?"

  "Because when you've written the books that reveal the soul of the three sentient species known to man, then you'll be ready to write the fourth."

  "Another species of raman?" asked Ender.

  "Yes. Me."

  Ender pondered this for a moment. "Are you ready to reveal yourself to the rest of humanity?"

  "I've always been ready. The question is, are they ready to know me? It was easy for them to love the hegemon--he was human. And the hive queen, that was safe, because as far as they know all the buggers are dead. If you can make them love the piggies, who are still alive, with human blood on their hands--then they'll be ready to know about me."

  "Someday," said Ender, "I will love somebody who doesn't insist that I perform the labors of Hercules."

  "You were getting bored with your life, anyway, Ender."

  "Yes. But I'm middle-aged now. I like being bored."

  "By the way, the owner of the starship Havelok, who lives on Gales, has accepted your offer of forty billion dollars for the ship and its cargo."

  "Forty billion! Does that bankrupt me?"

  "A drop in the bucket. The crew has been notified that their contracts are null. I took the liberty of buying them passage on other ships using your funds. You and Valentine won't need anybody but me to help you run the ship. Shall we leave in the morning?"

  "Valentine," said Ender. His sister was the only possible delay to his departure. Otherwise, now that the decision had been made, neither his students nor his few Nordic friendships here would be worth even a farewell.

  "I can't wait to read the book that Demosthenes writes about the history of Lusitania." Jane had discovered the true identity of Demosthenes in the process of unmasking the original Speaker for the Dead.

  "Valentine won't come," said Ender.

  "But she's your sister."

  Ender smiled. Despite Jane's vast wisdom, she had no understanding of kinship. Though she had been created by humans and conceived herself in human terms, she was not biological. She learned of genetic matters by rote; she could not feel the desires and imperatives that human beings had in common with all other living things. "She's my sister, but Trondheim is her home."

  "She's been reluctant to go before."

  "This time I wouldn't even ask her to come." Not with a baby coming, not as happy as she is here in Reykjavik. Here where they love her as a teacher, never guessing that she is really the legendary Demosthenes. Here where her husband, Jakt, is lord of a hundred fishing vessels and master of the fjords, where every day is filled with brilliant conversation or the danger and majesty of the floe-strewn sea, she'll never leave here. Nor will she understand why I must go.

  And, thinking of leaving Valentine, Ender wavered in his determination to go to Lusitania. He had been taken from his beloved sister once before, as a child, and resented deeply the years of friendship that had been stolen from him. Could he leave her now, again, after almost twenty years of being together all the time? This time there would be no going back. Once he went to Lusitania, she would have aged twenty-two years in his absence; she'd be in her eighties if he took another twenty-two years to return to her.

 

  Don't taunt me, said Ender silently. I'm entitled to feel regret.

 

  It was the voice of the hive queen in his mind. Of course she had seen all that he saw, and knew all that he had decided. His lips silently formed his words to her: I'll leave her, but not for you. We can't be sure this will bring any benefit to you. It might be just another disappointment, like Trondheim.

 

  But it also belongs to another people. I won't destroy the piggies just to atone for having destroyed your people.

 

  I know what you've told me.

 

  I know you could live in peace with them. But could they live in peace with you?

 

  Ender walked to a tattered bag that stood unlocked in the corner. Everything he truly owned could fit in there--his change of clothing. All the other things in his room were gifts from people he had Spoken to, honoring him or his office or the truth, he could never tell which. They would stay here when he left. He had no room for them in his bag.

  He opened it, pulled out a rolled-up towel, unrolled it. There lay the thick fibrous mat of a large cocoon, fourteen centimeters at its longest point.

 

  He had found the cocoon waiting for him when he came to govern the first human colony on a former bugger world. Foreseeing their own destruction at Ender's hands, knowing him to be an invincible enemy, they had sculptured the landscape in a pattern that would be meaningful only to him, because it had been taken from his dreams. The cocoon, with its helpless but conscious hive queen, had waited for him in a tower where once, in his dreams, he had found an enemy. "You waited longer for me to find you," he said aloud, "than the few years since I took you from behind the mirror."

  sage of the years when you travel so near the speed of light. But we notice. Our thought is instantaneous; light crawls by like mercury across cold glass. We knew every moment of these three thousand years.>

  "Have I found a place yet that was safe for you?"

 

  "Maybe Lusitania is the place, I don't know."

 

  "I'm trying." Why else do you think I have wandered from world to world for all these years, if not to find a place for you?

 

  I've got to find a place where we won't kill you again the moment you appear. You're still in too many human nightmares. Not that many people really believe my book. They may condemn the Xenocide, but they'd do it again.

 

  He laughed. Me forgive you.

 

  It was me.

 

  It was me.

 

  When you walk on the face of a world again, then I can be forgiven.

  5

  VALENTINE

  Today I let slip that Libo is my son. Only Bark heard me say it, but within an hour it was apparently common knowledge. They gathered around me and made Selvagem ask me if it was true, was I really a father "already." Selvagem then put Libo's and my hands together; on impulse I gave Libo a hug, and they made the clicking noises of astonishment and, I think, awe. I could see from that moment on that my prestige among them had risen considerably.

  The conclusion is inescapable. The pequeninos that we've known so far are not a whole community, or even typical males. They are either juveniles or old bachelors. Not a one of them has ever sired any children. Not a one has even mated, as nearly as we can figure.

  There isn't a primate society I've heard of where bachelor groups like this are anything but outcasts, without power or prestige. No wonder they speak of the females with that odd mixtures of worship and contempt, one minute not daring to make a decision without their consent, the next minute telling us that the women are too stupid to understand anything, they are varelse. Until now I was taking these statements at face value, which led to a mental picture of the females as nonsentients, a herd of sows, down on all fours. I thought the males might be consulting them the way they consult trees, using their grunting as a means of divining answers, like casting bones or reading entrails.