Speaker for the dead

“We want you to grow, to travel among the stars. Here on Lusitania we want you to be strong and powerful, with hundreds and thousands of brothers and wives. We want to teach you to grow many kinds of plants and raise many different animals. Ela and Novinha, these two women, will work all the days of their lives to develop more plants that can live here in Lusitania, and every good thing that they make, they'll give to you. So you can grow. But why does a single piggy in any other forest have to die, just so you can have these gifts? And why would it hurt you in any way, if we also gave the same gifts to them?”

“If they become just as strong as we are, then what have we gained?”

What am I expecting this brother to do, thought Ender. His people have always measured themselves against the other tribes. Their forest isn't fifty hectares or five hundred– it's either larger or smaller than the forest of the tribe to the west or the south. What I have to do now is the work of a generation: I have to teach him a new way of conceiving the stature of his own people. “Is Rooter great?” asked Ender.

“I say he is,” said Human. “He's my father. His tree isn't the oldest or thickest, but no father that we remember has ever had so many children so quickly after he was planted.”

“So in a way, all the children that he fathered are still part of him. The more children he fathers, the greater he becomes.” Human nodded slowly. “And the more you accomplish in your life, the greater you make your father, is that true?”

“If his children do well, then yes, it's a great honor to the fathertree.”

“Do you have to kill all the other great trees in order for your father to be great?”

“That's different,” said Human. “All the other great trees are fathers of the tribe. And the lesser trees are still brothers.” Yet Ender could see that Human was uncertain now. He was resisting Ender's ideas because they were strange, not because they were wrong or incomprehensible. He was begi

“Look at the wives,” said Ender. “They have no children. They can never be great the way that your father is great.”

“Speaker, you know that they're the greatest of all. The whole tribe obeys them. When they rule us well, the tribe prospers; when the tribe becomes many, then the wives are also made strong–”

“Even though not a single one of you is their own child.”

“How could we be?” asked Human.

“And yet you add to their greatness. Even though they aren't your mother or your father, they still grow when you grow.”

“We're all the same tribe.”

“But why are you the same tribe? You have different fathers, different mothers.”

“Because we are the tribe! We live here in the forest, we–”

“If another piggy came here from another tribe, and asked you to let him stay and be a brother–”

“We would never make him a fathertree!”

“But you tried to make Pipo and Libo fathertrees.”

Human was breathing heavily. “I see,” he said. “They were part of the tribe. From the sky, but we made them brothers and tried to make them fathers. The tribe is whatever we believe it is. If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, then that is what the tribe is. Even though some of the oldest trees here came from warriors of two different tribes, fallen in battle. We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe.”

Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation.

Human walked behind Ender, leaned against him, the weight of the young piggy pressed against his back. Ender felt Human's breath on his cheek, and then their cheeks were pressed together, both of them looking in the same direction. All at once Ender understood: “You see what I see,” said Ender.

“You humans grow by making us part of you, humans and piggies and buggers, ramen together. Then we are one tribe, and our greatness is your greatness, and yours is ours.” Ender could feel Human's body trembling with the strength of the idea. “You say to us, we must see all other tribes the same way. As one tribe, our tribe all together, so that we grow by making them grow.”

“You could send teachers,” said Ender. “Brothers to the other tribes, who could pass into their third life in the other forests and have children there.”

“This is a strange and difficult thing to ask of the wives,” said Human. “Maybe an impossible thing. Their minds don't work the way a brother's mind works. A brother can think of many different things. But a wife thinks of only one thing: what is good for the tribe, and at the root of that, what is good for the children and the little mothers.”

“Can you make them understand this?” asked Ender.

“Better than you could,” said Human. “But probably not. Probably I'll fail.”

“I don't think you'll fail,” said Ender.

“You came here tonight to make a covenant between us, the piggies of this tribe, and you, the humans who live on this world. The humans outside Lusitania won't care about our covenant, and the piggies outside ths forest won't care about it.”

“We want to make the same covenant with all of them.”

“And in this covenant, you humans promise to teach us everything.”

“As quickly as you can understand it.”

“Any question we ask.”

“If we know the answer.”

“When! If! These aren't words in a covenant! Give me straight answers now, Speaker for the Dead.” Human stood up, pushed away from Ender, walked around in front of him, bent down a little to look at Ender from above. “Promise to teach us everything that you know!”

“We promise that.”

“And you also promise to restore the hive queen to help us.”

“I'll restore the hive queen. You'll have to make your own covenant with her. She doesn't obey human law.”

“You promise to restore the hive queen, whether she helps us or not.”

“Yes.”

“You promise to obey our law when you come into our forest. And you agree that the prairie land that we need will also be under our law.”

“Yes.”

“And you will go to war against all the other humans in all the stars of the sky to protect us and let us also travel in the stars?”

“We already have.”

Human relaxed, stepped back, squatted in his old position. He drew with his finger in the dirt. “Now, what you want from us,” said Human. “We will obey human law in your city, and also in the prairie land that you need.”

“Yes,” said Ender.

“And you don't want us to go to war,” said Human.

“That's right.”

“And that's all?”

“One more thing,” said Ender.

“What you ask is already impossible,” said Human. “You might as well ask more.”

“The third life,” said Ender. “When does it begin? When you kill a piggy and he grows into a tree, is that right?”

“The first life is within the mothertree, where we never see the light, and where we eat blindly the meat of our mother's body and the sap of the mothertree. The second life is when we live in the shade of the forest, the half-light, ru

“Humans don't have the third life.”

Human looked at him, puzzled.

“When we die, even if you plant us, nothing grows. There's no tree. We never drink from the sun. When we die, we're dead.”

Human looked at Ouanda. “But the other book you gave us. It talked all the time about living after death and being born again.”

“Not as a tree,” said Ender. “Not as anything you can touch or feel. Or talk to. Or get answers from.”