Xenocide

“You can't,” said Peter. “You could more easily kill yourself.”

The ceremony began. This time there was no pomp, no ring to kiss, no homily. Ela and her assistants simply brought several hundred sugar cubes impregnated with the viricide bacterium, and as many vials of solution containing the recolada. They were passed among the congregation, and each of the pequeninos took the sugar cube, dissolved and swallowed it, and then drank off the contents of the vial.

“This is my body which is given for you,” intoned Peter. “This do in remembrance of me.”

“Have you no respect for anything?” asked Ender.

“This is my blood, which I shed for you. Drink in remembrance of me.” Peter smiled. “This is a communion even I can take, unbaptized as I am.”

“I can promise you this,” said Ender. “They haven't invented the baptism yet that can purify you.”

“I'll bet you've been saving up all your life, just to say that to me.” Peter turned to him, so Ender could see the ear in which the jewel had been implanted, linking him to Jane. In case Ender didn't notice what he was pointing out, Peter touched the jewel rather ostentatiously. “Just remember, I have the source of all wisdom here. She'll show you what I'm doing, if you ever care. If you don't forget me the moment I'm gone.”

“I won't forget you,” said Ender.

“You could come along,” said Peter.

“And risk making more like you Outside?”

“I could use the company.”

“I promise you, Peter, you'd soon get as sick of yourself as I am sick of you.”

“Never,” said Peter. “I'm not filled with self-loathing the way you are, you poor guilt-obsessed tool of better, stronger men. And if you won't make more companions for me, why, I'll find my own along the way.”

“I have no doubt of it,” said Ender.

The sugar cubes and vials came to them; they ate, drank.

“The taste of freedom,” said Peter. “Delicious.”

“Is it?” said Ender. “We're killing a species that we never understood.”

“I know what you mean,” said Peter. “It's a lot more fun to destroy an opponent when he's able to understand how thoroughly you defeated him.”

Then, at last, Peter walked away.

Ender stayed through the end of the ceremony, and spoke to many there: Human and Rooter, of course, and Valentine, Ela, Ouanda, and Miro.

He had another visit to make, however. A visit he had made several times before, always to be rebuffed, sent away without a word. This time, though, Novinha came out to speak with him. And instead of being filled with rage and grief, she seemed quite calm.

“I'm much more at peace,” she said. “And I know, for what it's worth, that my rage at you was unrighteous.”

Ender was glad to hear the sentiment, but surprised at the terms she used. When had Novinha ever spoken of righteousness?

“I've come to see that perhaps my boy was fulfilling the purposes of God,” she said. “That you couldn't have stopped him, because God wanted him to go to the pequeninos to set in motion the miracles that have come since then.” She wept. “Miro came to me. Healed,” she said. “Oh, God is merciful after all. And I'll have Quim again in heaven, when I die.”

She's been converted, thought Ender. After all these years of despising the church, of taking part in Catholicism only because there was no other way to be a citizen of Lusitania Colony, these weeks with the Children of the Mind of Christ have converted her. I'm glad of it, he thought. She's speaking to me again.

“Andrew,” she said, “I want us to be together again.”

He reached out to embrace her, wanting to weep with relief and joy, but she recoiled from his touch.

“You don't understand,” she said. “I won't go home with you. This is my home now.”

She was right– he hadn't understood. But now he did. She hadn't just been converted to Catholicism. She had been converted to this order of permanent sacrifice, where only husbands and wives could join, and only together, to take vows of permanent abstinence in the midst of their marriage. “Novinha,” he said, “I haven't the faith or the strength to be one of the Children of the Mind of Christ.”

“When you do,” she said, “I'll be waiting for you here.”

“Is this the only hope I have of being with you?” he whispered. “To forswear loving your body as the only way to have your companionship?”

“Andrew,” she whispered, “I long for you. But my sin for so many years was adultery that my only hope of joy now is to deny the flesh and live in the spirit. I'll do it alone if I must. But with you– oh, Andrew, I miss you.”

And I miss you, he thought. “Like breath itself I miss you,” he whispered. “But don't ask this of me. Live with me as my wife until the last of our youth is spent, and then when desire is slack we can come back here together. I could be happy then.”

“Don't you see?” she said. “I've made a covenant. I've made a promise.”

“You made one to me, too,” he said.

“Should I break a vow to God, so I can keep my vow with you?”

“God would understand.”

“How easily those who never hear his voice declare what he would and would not want.”

“Do you hear his voice these days?”

“I hear his song in my heart, the way the Psalmist did. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

“The twenty-third. While the only song I hear is the twenty-second.”

She smiled wanly. “'Why hast thou forsaken me?'” she quoted.

“And the part about the bulls of Bashan,” said Ender. “I've always felt like I was surrounded by bulls.”

She laughed. “Come to me when you can,” she said. “I'll be here, when you're ready.”

She almost left him then.

“Wait.”

She waited.

“I brought you the viricide and the recolada.”

“Ela's triumph,” she said. “It was beyond me, you know. I cost you nothing, by abandoning my work. My time was past, and she had far surpassed me.” Novinha took the sugar cube, let it melt for a moment, swallowed it.

Then she held the vial up against the last light of evening. “With the red sky, it looks like it's all afire inside.” She drank it– sipped it, really, so that the flavor would linger. Even though, as Ender knew, the taste was bitter, and lingered unpleasantly in the mouth long afterward.

“Can I visit you?”

“Once a month,” she said. Her answer was so quick that he knew she had already considered the question and reached a decision that she had no intention of altering.

“Then once a month I'll visit you,” he said.

“Until you're ready to join me,” she said.

“Until you're ready to return to me,” he answered.

But he knew that she would never bend. Novinha was not a person who could easily change her mind. She had set the bounds of his future.

He should have been resentful, angry. He should have blustered about getting his freedom from a marriage to a woman who refused him. But he couldn't think what he might want his freedom for. Nothing is in my hands now, he realized. No part of the future depends on me. My work, such as it is, is done, and now my only influence on the future is what my children do– such as they are: the monster Peter, the impossibly perfect child Val.

And Miro, Grego, Quara, Ela, Olhado– aren't they my children, too? Can't I also claim to have helped create them, even if they came from Libo's love and Novinha's body, years before I even arrived in this place?

It was full dark when he found young Val, though he couldn't understand why he was even looking for her. She was in Olhado's house, with Plikt; but while Plikt leaned against a shadowed wall, her face inscrutable, young Val was among Olhado's children, playing with them.

Of course she's playing with them, thought Ender. She's still a child herself, however much experience she might have had thrust upon her out of my memories.

But as he stood in the doorway, watching, he realized that she wasn't playing equally with all the children. It was Nimbo who really had her attention. The boy who had been burned, in more ways than one, the night of the mob. The game the children played was simple enough, but it kept them from talking to each other. Still, there was eloquent conversation between Nimbo and young Val. Her smile toward him was warm, not in the ma