Speaker for the Dead

  Now, though, I realize the females are probably every bit as intelligent as the males, and not varelse at all. The males' negative statements arise from their resentment as bachelors, excluded from the reproductive process and the power structures of the tribe. The pequeninos have been just as careful with us as we have been with them--they haven't let us meet their females or the males who have any real power. We thought we were exploring the heart of pequenino society. Instead, figuratively speaking we must be in the genetic sewer; among the males whose genes have not been judged fit to contribute to the tribe.

  And yet I don't believe it. The pequeninos I've known have all been bright, clever, quick to learn. So quick that I've taught them more about human society, accidently, than I've learned about them after years of trying. If these are their castoffs, then I hope someday they'll judge me worthy to meet the "wives" and the "fathers."

  In the meantime I can't report any of this because, whether I meant to or not, I've clearly violated the rules. Never mind that nobody could possibly have kept the pequeninos from learning anything about us. Never mind that the rules are stupid and counterproductive. I broke them, and if they find out they'll cut off my contact with the pequeninos, which will be even worse than the severely limited contact we now have. So I'm forced into deception and silly subterfuges, like putting these notes in Libo's locked personal files, where even my dear wife wouldn't think to look for them. Here's the information, absolutely vital, that the pequeninos we've studied are all bachelors, and because of the regulations I dare not let the framling xenologers know anything about it. Olha bem, gente, aqui esta: A ciencia, o bicho que se devora a si mesma! (Watch closely, folks, here it is: Science, the ugly little beast that devours itself!)

  --Joao Figueira Alvarez, Secret Notes, published in Demosthenes, "The Integrity of Treason: The Xenologers of Lusitania," Reykjavik Historical Perspectives, 1990:4:1

  Her belly was tight and swollen, and still a month remained before Valentine's daughter was due to be born. It was a constant nuisance, being so large and unbalanced. Always before when she had been preparing to take a history class into sondring, she had been able to do much of the loading of the boat herself. Now she had to rely on her husband's sailors to do it all, and she couldn't even scramble back and forth from wharf to hold--the captain was ordering the stowage to keep the ship in balance. He was doing it well, of course--hadn't Captain Rav taught her, when she first arrived?--but Valentine did not like being forced into a sedentary role.

  It was her fifth sondring; the first had been the occasion of meeting Jakt. She had no thought of marriage. Trondheim was a world like any of the other score that she had visited with her peripatetic younger brother. She would teach, she would study, and after four or five months she would write an extended historical essay, publish it pseudonymously under the name Demosthenes, and then enjoy herself until Ender accepted a call to go speak somewhere else. Usually their work meshed perfectly--he would be called to speak the death of some major person, whose life story would then become the focus of her essay. It was a game they played, pretending to be itinerant professors of this and that, while in actuality they created or transformed the world's identity, for Demosthenes' essay was always seen as definitive.

  She had thought, for a time, that surely someone would realize that Demosthenes wrote essays that suspiciously followed her itinerary, and find her out. But soon she realized that, like the speakers but to a lesser degree, a mythology had grown up about Demosthenes. People believed that Demosthenes was not one individual. Rather, each Demosthenes essay was thought to be the work of a genius writing independently, who then attempted to publish under the Demosthenes rubric; some imagined that the computer automatically submitted the work to an unknown committee of brilliant historians of the age, who decided whether it was worthy of the name. Never mind that no one ever met a scholar to whom such a work had been submitted. Hundreds of "Demosthenes" essays every year were attempted; the computer automatically rejected any that were not written by the real Demosthenes; and still the belief firmly persisted that such a person as Valentine could not possibly exist. After all, Demosthenes had begun as a demagogue on the computer nets back when Earth was fighting the Bugger Wars, three thousand years ago. It could not be the same person now.

  And it's true, thought Valentine. I'm not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.

  She had disliked the pervasiveness of Lutheran thought, especially the so-called Calvinist faction, who seemed to have an answer to every question before it had even been asked. So she conceived the idea of taking a select group of graduate students away from Reykjavik, off to one of the Summer Islands, the equatorial chain where, in the spring, skrika came to spawn and flocks of halkig went crazy with reproductive energy. Her idea was to break the patterns of intellectual rot that were inevitable at every university. The students would eat nothing but the havregrin that grew wild in the sheltered valleys and whatever halkig they had the nerve and wit to kill. When their daily food depended on their own exertion, their attitudes about what mattered and did not matter in history were bound to change.

  The university gave permission, grudgingly; she used her own funds to charter a boat from Jakt, who had just become head of one of the many skrika-catching families. He had a seaman's contempt for university people, calling them skraddare to their faces and worse things behind their backs. He told Valentine that he would have to come back to rescue her starving students within a week. Instead she and her castaways, as they dubbed themselves, lasted the whole time, and thrived, building something of a village and enjoying a burst of creative, unfettered thought that resulted in a noticeable surge of excellent and insightful publications upon their return.

  The most obvious result in Reykjavik was that Valentine always had hundreds of applicants for the twenty places in each of three sondrings of the summer. Far more important to her, however, was Jakt. He was not particularly educated, but he was intimately familiar with the lore of Trondheim itself. He could pilot halfway around the equatorial sea without a chart. He knew the drifts of icebergs and where the floes would be thick. He seemed to know where the skrika would be gathered to dance, and how to deploy his hunters to catch them unawares as they flopped ashore from the sea. Weather never seemed to take him by surprise, and Valentine concluded that there was no situation he was not prepared for.

  Except for her. And when the Lutheran minister--not a Calvinist--married them, they both seemed more surprised than happy. Yet they were happy. And for the first time since she left Earth she felt whole, at peace, at home. That's why the baby grew within her. The wandering was over. And she was so grateful to Ender that he had understood this, that without their having to discuss it he had realized that Trondheim was the end of their three-thousand-mile Odyssey, the end of Demosthenes' career; like the ishaxa, she had found a way to root in the ice of this world and draw nourishment that the soil of other lands had not provided.

  The baby kicked hard, taking her from her reverie; she looked around to see Ender coming toward her, walking along the wharf with his duffel slung over his shoulder. She understood at once why he had brought his bag: He meant to go along on the sondring. She wondered whether she was glad of it. Ender was quiet and unobtrusive, but he could not possibly conceal his brilliant understanding of human nature. The average students would overlook him, but the best of them, the ones she hoped would come up with original thought, would inevitably follow the subtle but powerful clues he would inevitably drop. The result would be impressive, she was sure--after all, she owed a great debt to his insights over the years--but it would be Ender's brilliance, not the students'. It would defeat somewhat the purpose of the sondring.

  But she wouldn't tell him no when he asked to come. Truth to tell, she would love to have him along. Much as she loved Jakt, she missed the constant closeness that she and Ender used to have before sh
e married. It would be years before she and Jakt could possibly be as tightly bound together as she and her brother were. Jakt knew it, too, and it caused him some pain; a husband shouldn't have to compete with his brother-in-law for the devotion of his wife.

  "Ho, Val," said Ender.

  "Ho, Ender." Alone on the dock, where no one else could hear, she was free to call him by the childhood name, ignoring the fact that the rest of humanity had turned it into an epithet.

  "What'll you do if the rabbit decides to bounce out during the sondring?"

  She smiled. "Her papa would wrap her in a skrika skin, I would sing her silly Nordic songs, and the students would suddenly have great insights about the impact of reproductive imperatives on history."

  They laughed together for a moment, and suddenly Valentine knew, without noticing why she knew, that Ender did not want to go on the sondring, that he had packed his bag to leave Trondheim, and that he had come, not to invite her along, but to say good-bye. Tears came unbidden to her eyes, and a terrible devastation wrenched at her. He reached out and held her, as he had so many times in the past; this time, though, her belly was between them, and the embrace was awkward and tentative.

  "I thought you meant to stay," she whispered. "You turned down the calls that came."

  "One came that I couldn't turn down."

  "I can have this baby on sondring, but not on another world."

  As she guessed, Ender hadn't meant her to come. "The baby's going to be shockingly blond," said Ender. "She'd look hopelessly out of place on Lusitania. Mostly black Brazilians there."

  So it would be Lusitania. Valentine understood at once why he was going--the piggies' murder of the xenologer was public knowledge now, having been broadcast during the supper hour in Reykjavik. "You're out of your mind."

  "Not really."

  "Do you know what would happen if people realized that the Ender is going to the piggies' world? They'd crucify you!"

  "They'd crucify me here, actually, except that no one but you knows who I am. Promise not to tell."

  "What good can you do there? He'll have been dead for decades before you arrive."

  "My subjects are usually quite cold before I arrive to speak for them. It's the main disadvantage of being itinerant."

  "I never thought to lose you again."

  "But I knew we had lost each other on the day you first loved Jakt."

  "Then you should have told me! I wouldn't have done it!"

  "That's why I didn't tell you. But it isn't true, Val. You would have done it anyway. And I wanted you to. You've never been happier." He put his hands astride her waist. "The Wiggin genes were crying out for continuation. I hope you have a dozen more."

  "It's considered impolite to have more than four, greedy to go past five, and barbaric to have more than six." Even though she joked, she was deciding how best to handle the sondring--let the graduate assistants take it without her, cancel it altogether, or postpone it until Ender left?

  But Ender made the question moot. "Do you think your husband would let one of his boats take me out to the mareld overnight, so I can shuttle to my starship in the morning?"

  His haste was cruel. "If you hadn't needed a ship from Jakt, would you have left me a note on the computer?"

  "I made the decision five minutes ago, and came straight to you."

  "But you already booked passage--that takes planning!"

  "Not if you buy the starship."

  "Why are you in such a hurry? The voyage takes decades--"

  "Twenty-two years."

  "Twenty-two years! What difference would a couple of days make? Couldn't you wait a month to see my baby born?"

  "In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you."

  "Then don't! What are the piggies to you? The buggers are ramen enough for one man's life. Stay, marry as I've married. You opened the stars to colonization, Ender, now stay here and taste the good fruits of your labor!"

  "You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to Calvinism. My labor isn't done yet, and Trondheim isn't my home."

  Valentine felt his words like an accusation: You rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it's not my fault, she wanted to answer--you're the one who's leaving, not me. "Remember how it was," she said, "when we left Peter on Earth and took a decades-long voyage to our first colony, to the world you governed? It was as if he had died. By the time we got there he was old, and we were still young; when we talked by ansible he had become an ancient uncle, the power-ripened Hegemon, the legendary Locke, anyone but our brother."

  "It was an improvement, as I recall." Ender was trying to make things lighter.

  But Valentine took his words perversely. "Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?"

  "I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died."

  "No, Ender, it will be exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me."

  He winced. "You don't mean that."

  "I won't write to you. Why should I? To you it'll be only a week or two. You'd arrive on Lusitania, and the computer would have twenty years of letters for you from a person you left only the week before. The first five years would be grief, the pain of losing you, the loneliness of not having you to talk to--"

  "Jakt is your husband, not me."

  "And then what would I write? Clever, newsy little letters about the baby? She'd be five years old, six, ten, twenty and married, and you wouldn't even know her, wouldn't even care."

  "I'll care."

  "You won't have the chance. I won't write to you until I'm very old, Ender. Until you've gone to Lusitania and then to another place, swallowing the decades in vast gulps. Then I'll send you my memoir. I'll dedicate it to you. To Andrew, my beloved brother. I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn't stay even two weeks when I asked you."

  "Listen to yourself, Val, and then see why I have to leave now, before you tear me to pieces."

  "That's a sophistry you wouldn't tolerate in your students, Ender! I wouldn't have said these things if you weren't leaving like a burglar who was caught in the act! Don't turn the cause around and blame it on me!"

  He answered breathlessly, his words tumbling over each other in his hurry; he was racing to finish his speech before emotion stopped him. "No, you're right, I wanted to hurry because I have a work to do there, and every day here is marking time, and because it hurts me every time I see you and Jakt growing closer and you and me growing more distant, even though I know that it's exactly as it should be, so when I decided to go, I thought that going quickly was better, and I was right; you know I'm right. I never thought you'd hate me for it."

  Now emotion stopped him, and he wept; so did she. "I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart torn out and carried away--"

  And that was the end of speech.

  Rav's first mate took Ender out to the mareld, the great platform on the equatorial sea, where shuttles were launched into space to rendezvous with orbiting starships. They agreed silently that Valentine wouldn't go with him. Instead, she went home with her husband and clung to him through the night. The next day she went on sondring with her students, and cried for Ender only in darkness, when she thought no one could see.

  But her students saw, and the stories circulated about Professor Wiggin's great grief for the departure of her brother, the itinerant speaker. They made of this what students always do--both more and less than reality. But one student, a girl named Plikt, became obsessed with the idea that there was more to the story of Valentine and Andrew Wiggin than anyone had guessed.

  So she began to try to research their story, to trace backward their voyages together among the stars. When Valentine's daughter Syfte was four years old, and her son Ren was two, Plikt came to her. She was a young professor at the university by then, and she showed Valentine her published story. She had cast it as fiction, but Valentine
recognized at once the story of the brother and sister who were the oldest people in the universe, born on Earth before any colonies had been planted on other worlds, and who then wandered from world to world, rootless, searching.

  To Valentine's relief--and, strangely, disappointment--Plikt had not uncovered the fact that Ender was the original Speaker for the Dead, and Valentine was Demosthenes. But she knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on. The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it had really been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.

  "Why did you write this?" Valentine asked her.

  "Isn't it good enough to be its own reason for writing?"

  The twisted answer amused Valentine, but it did not put her off. "What was my brother Andrew to you, that you've done the research to create this?"

  "That's still the wrong question," said Plikt.

  "I seem to be failing some kind of test. Can you give me a hint what question I should ask?"

  "Don't be angry. You should be asking me why I wrote it as fiction instead of biography."

  "Why, then?"

  "Because I discovered that Andrew Wiggin, speaker for the dead, is Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide."

  Even though Ender was four years gone, he was still eighteen years from his destination. Valentine felt sick with dread, thinking of what his life would be like if he was welcomed on Lusitania as the most loathed man in human history.

  "You don't need to be afraid, Professor Wiggin. If I meant to tell, I could have. When I found it out, I realized that he had repented what he did. And such a magnificent penance. It was the original Speaker for the Dead who revealed his act as an unspeakable crime--and so he took the role of speaker, like so many hundreds of others, and acted out the role of his own accuser on twenty worlds."