Speaker for the dead

The other piggies were rejoicing, dancing. Leaf-eater and Mandachuva took the knives from Ender's hands and jammed them into the ground on either side of Human's head. Ender could not join their celebration. He was covered with blood and reeked with the stench of the body he had butchered. On all fours he crawled from the body, up the hill to a place where he didn't have to see it. Novinha followed him. Exhausted, spent, all of them, from the work and the emotions of the day. They said nothing, did nothing, but fell into the thick capim, each one leaning or lying on someone else, seeking relief at last in sleep, as the piggies danced away up the hill into the woods.

Bosquinha and Bishop Peregrino made their way to the gate before the sun was up, to watch for the Speaker's return from the forest. They were there a full ten minutes before they saw a movement much nearer than the forest's edge. It was a boy, sleepily voiding his bladder into a bush.

“Olhado!” called the Mayor.

The boy turned, waved, then hastily fastened his trousers and began waking others who slept in the tall grass. Bosquinha and the Bishop opened the gate and walked out to meet them.

“Foolish, isn't it,” said Bosquinha, “but this is the moment when our rebellion seems most real. When I first walk beyond the fence.”

“Why did they spend the night out of doors?” Peregrino wondered aloud. “The gate was open, they could have gone home.”

Bosquinha took a quick census of the group outside the gates. Ouanda and Ela, arm in arm like sisters. Olhado and Quim. Novinha. And there, yes, the Speaker, sitting down, Novinha behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders. They all waited expectantly, saying nothing. Until Ender looked up at them. “We have the treaty,” he said. “It's a good one.”

Novinha held up a bundle wrapped in leaves. “They wrote it down,” she said. “For you to sign.”

Bosquinha took the bundle. “All the files were restored before midnight,” she said. “Not just the ones we saved in your message queue. Whoever your friend is, Speaker, he's very good.”

“She,” said the Speaker. “Her name is Jane.”

Now, though, the Bishop and Bosquinha could see what lay on the cleared earth just down the hill from where the Speaker had slept. Now they understood the dark stains on the Speaker's hands and arms, the spatter marks on his face.

“I would rather have no treaty,” said Bosquinha, “than one you had to kill to get.”

“Wait before you judge,” said the Bishop. “I think the night's work was more than just what we see before us.”

“Very wise, Father Peregrino,” said the Speaker softly.

“I'll explain it to you if you want,” said Ouanda. “Ela and I understand it as well as anyone.”

“It was like a sacrament,” said Olhado.

Bosquinha looked at Novinha, uncomprehending. “You let him watch?”

Olhado tapped his eyes. “All the piggies will see it, someday, through my eyes.”

“It wasn't death,” said Quim. “It was resurrection.”

The Bishop stepped near the tortured corpse and touched the seedling tree growing from the chest cavity. “His name is Human,” said the Speaker.

“And so is yours,” said the Bishop softly. He turned and looked around at the members of his little flock, who had already taken humanity a step further than it had ever gone before. Am I the shepherd, Peregrino asked himself, or the most confused and helpless of the sheep? “Come, all of you. Come with me to the Cathedral. The bells will soon ring for mass.”

The children gathered and prepared to go. Novinha, too, stepped away from her place behind the Speaker. Then she stopped, turned back to him, looked at him with silent invitation in her eyes.

“Soon,” he said. “A moment more.”

She, too, followed the Bishop through the gate and up the hill into the Cathedral.

The mass had barely begun when Peregrino saw the Speaker enter at the back of the Cathedral. He paused a moment, then found Novinha and her family with his eyes. In only a few steps he had taken a place beside her. Where Marc o had sat, those rare times when the whole family came together.

The duties of the service took his attention; a few moments later, when Peregrino could look again, he saw that Grego was now sitting beside the Speaker. Peregrino thought of the terms of the treaty as the girls had explained it to him. Of the meaning of the death of the piggy called Human, and before him, of the deaths of Pipo and Libo. All things coming clear, all things coming together. The young man, Miro, lying paralyzed in bed, with his sister Ouanda tending him. Novinha, the lost one, now found. The fence, its shadow so dark in the minds of all who had lived within its bounds, now still and harmless, invisible, insubstantial.

It was the miracle of the wafer, turned into the flesh of God in his hands. How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

Chapter 18

The Hive Queen

Evolution gave his mother no birth canal and no breasts. So the small creature who would one day be named Human was given no exit from the womb except by the teeth of his mouth. He and his infant siblings devoured their mother's body. Because Human was strongest and most vigorous, he ate the most and so became even stronger.

Human lived in utter darkness. When his mother was gone, there was nothing to eat but the sweet liquid that flowed on the surface of his world. He did not know yet that the vertical surface was the inside of a great hollow tree, and that the liquid that he ate was the sap of the tree. Nor did he know that the warm creatures that were far larger than himself were older piggies, almost ready to leave the darkness of the tree, and that the smaller creatures were younger ones, more recently emerged than himself.

All he really cared about was to eat, to move, and to see the light. For now and then, in rhythms that he could not comprehend, a sudden light came into the darkness, It began each time with a sound, whose source he could not comprehend. Then the tree would shudder slightly; the sap would cease to flow; and all the tree's energy would be devoted to changing the shape of the trunk in one place, to make an opening that let the light inside. When the light was there, Human moved toward it. When the light was gone, Human lost his sense of direction, and wandered aimlessly in search of liquid to drink.

Until one day, when almost all the other creatures were smaller than himself, and none at all were larger, the light came and he was so strong and swift that he reached the opening before it closed. He bent his body around the curve of the wood of the tree, and for the first time felt the rasp of outer bark under his soft belly. He hardly noticed this new pain, because the light dazzled him. It was not just in one place, but everywhere, and it was not grey but vivid green and yellow. His rapture lasted many seconds. Then he was hungry again, and here on the outside of the mothertree the sap flowed only in the fissures of the bark, where it was hard to reach, and instead of all the other creatures being little ones that he could push aside, they all were larger than himself, and drove him away from the easy feeding places. This was a new thing, a new world, a new life, and he was afraid.

Later, when he learned language, he would remember the journey from darkness into light, and he would call it the passage from the first life to the second, from the life of darkness to the half-lit life.

– Speaker for the Dead, The Life of Human, 1:1-5

Miro decided to leave Lusitania. Take the Speaker's starship and go to Trondheim after all. Perhaps at his trial he could persuade the Hundred Worlds not to go to war against Lusitania. At worst, he could become a martyr, to stir people's hearts, to be remembered, to stand for something. Whatever happened to him, it would be better than staying here.