Speaker for the dead

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?”

“Without doubt.”

“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 piggies. 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 piggies 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 piggies 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 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 all 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 piggy reappeared in its natural form, not the devilish one Jane had faked. “Come,” said the piggy 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 piggy 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?

Yes, he liked it. Liked her. Young, clear-faced, honest, sweet, a child who would never age, her smile heartbreakingly shy. 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 co

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 piggies, 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.