Speaker for the Dead

  But the piggies changed the equation. The piggies added great pressure on Miro's side. Usually when the piggies demanded the impossible he had helped her fend them off. But this was not impossible, he did not want them fended off, and so he said nothing. Press her, Human, because you're right and this time Ouanda must bend.

  Feeling herself alone, knowing Miro would not help her, she gave a little ground. "Maybe if we only bring him as far as the edge of the forest."

  "Bring him here," said Human.

  "We can't," she said. "Look at you. Wearing cloth. Making pots. Eating bread."

  Human smiled. "Yes," he said. "All of that. Bring him here."

  "No," said Ouanda.

  Miro flinched, stopping himself from reaching out to her. It was the one thing they had never done--flatly denied a request. Always it was "We can't because" or "I wish we could." But the single word of denial said to them, I will not. I, of myself, refuse.

  Human's smile faded. "Pipo told us that women do not say. Pipo told us that human men and women decide together. So you can't say no unless he says no, too." He looked at Miro. "Do you say no?"

  Miro did not answer. He felt Ouanda's elbow touching him.

  "You don't say nothing," said Human. "You say yes or no."

  Still Miro didn't answer.

  Some of the piggies around them stood up. Miro had no idea what they were doing, but the movement itself, with Miro's intransigent silence as a cue, seemed menacing. Ouanda, who would never be cowed by a threat to herself, bent to the implied threat to Miro. "He says yes," she whispered.

  "He says yes, but for you he stays silent. You say no, but you don't stay silent for him." Human scooped thick mucus out of his mouth with one finger and flipped it onto the ground. "You are nothing."

  Human suddenly fell backward into a somersault, twisted in midmovement, and came up with his back to them, walking away. Immediately the other piggies came to life, moving swiftly toward Human, who led them toward the forest edge farthest from Miro and Ouanda.

  Human stopped abruptly. Another piggy, instead of following him, stood in front of him, blocking his way. It was Leaf-eater. If he or Human spoke, Miro could not hear them or see their mouths move. He did see, though, that Leaf-eater extended his hand to touch Human's belly. The hand stayed there a moment, then Leaf-eater whirled around and scampered off into the bushes like a youngling.

  In a moment the other piggies were also gone.

  "It was a battle," said Miro. "Human and Leaf-eater. They're on opposite sides."

  "Of what?" said Ouanda.

  "I wish I knew. But I can guess. If we bring the Speaker, Human wins. If we don't, Leaf-eater wins."

  "Wins what? Because if we bring the Speaker, he'll betray us, and then we all lose."

  "He won't betray us."

  "Why shouldn't he, if you'd betray me like that?"

  Her voice was a lash, and he almost cried out from the sting of her words. "I betray you!" he whispered. "Eu nao. Jamais." Not me. Never.

  "Father always said, Be united in front of the piggies, never let them see you in disagreement, and you--"

  "And I! I didn't say yes to them. You're the one who said no, you're the one who took a position that you knew I didn't agree with!"

  "Then when we disagree, it's your job to--"

  She stopped. She had only just realized what she was saying. But stopping did not undo what Miro knew she was going to say. It was his job to do what she said until she changed her mind. As if he were her apprentice. "And here I thought we were in this together." He turned and walked away from her, into the forest, back toward Milagre.

  "Miro," she called after him. "Miro, I didn't mean that--"

  He waited for her to catch up, then caught her by the arm and whispered fiercely. "Don't shout! Or don't you care whether the piggies hear us or not? Has the master Zenador decided that we can let them see everything now, even the master disciplining her apprentice?"

  "I'm not the master, I--"

  "That's right, you're not." He turned away from her and started walking again.

  "But Libo was my father, so of course I'm the--"

  "Zenador by blood right," he said. "Blood right, is that it? So what am I by blood right? A drunken wife-beating cretin?" He took her by the arms, gripping her cruelly. "Is that what you want me to be? A little copy of my paizinho?"

  "Let go!"

  He shoved her away. "Your apprentice thinks you were a fool today," said Miro. "Your apprentice thinks you should have trusted his judgment of the Speaker, and your apprentice thinks you should have trusted his assessment of how serious the piggies were about this, because you were stupidly wrong about both matters, and you may just have cost Human his life."

  It was an unspeakable accusation, but it was exactly what they both feared, that Human would end up now as Rooter had, as others had over the years, disemboweled, with a seedling growing out of his corpse.

  Miro knew he had spoken unfairly, knew that she would not be wrong to rage against him. He had no right to blame her when neither of them could possibly have known what the stakes might have been for Human until it was too late.

  Ouanda did not rage, however. Instead, she calmed herself visibly, drawing even breaths and blanking her face. Miro followed her example and did the same. "What matters," said Ouanda, "is to make the best of it. The executions have always been at night. If we're to have a hope of vindicating Human, we have to get the Speaker here this afternoon, before dark."

  Miro nodded. "Yes," he said. "And I'm sorry."

  "I'm sorry too," she said.

  "Since we don't know what we're doing, it's nobody's fault when we do things wrong."

  "I only wish that I believed a right choice were possible."

  Ela sat on a rock and bathed her feet in the water while she waited for the Speaker for the Dead. The fence was only a few meters away, running along the top of the steel grillwork that blocked the people from swimming under it. As if anyone wanted to try. Most people in Milagre pretended the fence wasn't there. Never came near it. That was why she had asked the Speaker to meet her here. Even though the day was warm and school was out, children didn't swim here at Vila Ultima, where the fence came to the river and the forest came nearly to the fence. Only the soapmakers and potters and brickmakers came here, and they left again when the day's work was over. She could say what she had to say, without fear of anyone overhearing or interrupting.

  She didn't have to wait long. The Speaker rowed up the river in a small boat, just like one of the farside farmers, who had no use for roads. The skin of his back was shockingly white; even the few Lusos who were light-complected enough to be called loiros were much darker-skinned. His whiteness made him seem weak and slight. But then she saw how quickly the boat moved against the current; how accurately the oars were placed each time at just the right depth, with a long, smooth pull; how tightly wrapped in skin his muscles were. She felt a moment's stab of grief, and then realized that it was grief for her father, despite the depth of her hatred for him; she had not realized until this moment that she loved anything about him, but she grieved for the strength of his shoulders and back, for the sweat that made his brown skin dazzle like glass in the sunlight.

  No, she said silently, I don't grieve for your death, Cao. I grieve that you were not more like the Speaker, who has no connection with us and yet has given us more good gifts in three days than you in your whole life; I grieve that your beautiful body was so worm-eaten inside.

  The Speaker saw her and skimmed the boat to shore, where she waited. She waded in the reeds and muck to help him pull the boat aground.

  "Sorry to get you muddy," he said. "But I haven't used my body in a couple of weeks, and the water invited me--"

  "You row well," she said.

  "The world I came from, Trondheim, was mostly ice and water. A bit of rock here and there, some soil, but anyone who couldn't row was more crippled than if he couldn't walk."

  "That's where you were born?"


  "No. Where I last spoke, though." He sat on the grama, facing the water.

  She sat beside him. "Mother's angry at you."

  His lips made a little half-smile. "She told me."

  Without thinking, Ela immediately began to justify her mother. "You tried to read her files."

  "I read her files. Most of them. All but the ones that mattered."

  "I know, Quim told me." She caught herself feeling just a little triumphant that Mother's protection system had bested him. Then she remembered that she was not on Mother's side in this. That she had been trying for years to get Mother to open those very files to her. But momentum carried her on, saying things she didn't mean to say. "Olhado's sitting in the house with his eyes shut off and music blasting into his ears. Very upset."

  "Yes, well, he thinks I betrayed him."

  "Didn't you?" That was not what she meant to say.

  "I'm a speaker for the dead. I tell the truth, when I speak at all, and I don't keep away from other people's secrets."

  "I know. That's why I called for a speaker. You don't have any respect for anybody."

  He looked annoyed. "Why did you invite me here?" he asked.

  This was working out all wrong. She was talking to him as if she were against him, as if she weren't grateful for what he had already done for the family. She was talking to him like the enemy. Has Quim taken over my mind, so that I say things I don't mean?

  "You invited me to this place on the river. The rest of your family isn't speaking to me, and then I get a message from you. To complain about my breaches of privacy? To tell me I don't respect anybody?"

  "No," she said miserably. "This isn't how it was supposed to go."

  "Didn't it occur to you that I would hardly choose to be a speaker if I had no respect for people?"

  In frustration she let the words burst out. "I wish you had broken into all her files! I wish you had taken every one of her secrets and published them through all the Hundred Worlds!" There were tears in her eyes; she couldn't think why.

  "I see. She doesn't let you see those files, either."

  "Sou aprendiz dela, nao sou? E porque choro, diga-me! O senhor tem o jeito."

  "I don't have any knack for making people cry, Ela," he answered softly. His voice was a caress. No, stronger, it was like a hand gripping her hand, holding her, steadying her. "Telling the truth makes you cry."

  "Sou ingrata, sou ma filha--"

  "Yes, you're ungrateful, and a terrible daughter," he said, laughing softly. "Through all these years of chaos and neglect you've held your mother's family together with little help from her, and when you followed her in her career, she wouldn't share the most vital information with you; you've earned nothing but love and trust from her and she's replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you're sick of it. You're just about the worst person I've ever known."

  She found herself laughing at her own self-condemnation. Childishly, she didn't want to laugh at herself. "Don't patronize me." She tried to put as much contempt into her voice as possible.

  He noticed. His eyes went distant and cold. "Don't spit at a friend," he said.

  She didn't want him to be distant from her. But she couldn't stop herself from saying, coldly, angrily, "You aren't my friend."

  For a moment she was afraid he believed her. Then a smile came to his face. "You wouldn't know a friend if you saw one."

  Yes I would, she thought. I see one now. She smiled back at him.

  "Ela," he said, "are you a good xenobiologist?"

  "Yes."

  "You're eighteen years old. You could take the guild tests at sixteen. But you didn't take them."

  "Mother wouldn't let me. She said I wasn't ready."

  "You don't have to have your mother's permission after you're sixteen."

  "An apprentice has to have the permission of her master."

  "And now you're eighteen, and you don't even need that."

  "She's still Lusitania's xenobiologist. It's still her lab. What if I passed the test, and then she wouldn't let me into the lab until after she was dead?"

  "Did she threaten that?"

  "She made it clear that I wasn't to take the test."

  "Because as soon as you're not an apprentice anymore, if she admits you to the lab as her co-xenobiologist you have full access--"

  "To all the working files. To all the locked files."

  "So she'd hold her own daughter back from beginning her career, she'd give you a permanent blot on your record--unready for the tests even at age eighteen--just to keep you from reading those files."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Mother's crazy."

  "No. Whatever else Novinha is, Ela, she is not crazy."

  "Ela e boba mesma, Senhor Falante."

  He laughed and lay back in the grama. "Tell me how she's boba, then."

  "I'll give you the list. First: She won't allow any investigation of the Descolada. Thirty-four years ago the Descolada nearly destroyed this colony. My grandparents, Os Venerados, Deus os abencoe, they barely managed to stop the Descolada. Apparently the disease agent, the Descolada bodies, are still present--we have to eat a supplement, like an extra vitamin, to keep the plague from striking again. They told you that, didn't they? If you once get it in your system, you'll have to keep that supplement all your life, even if you leave here."

  "I knew that, yes."

  "She won't let me study the Descolada bodies at all. That's what's in some of the locked files, anyway. She's locked up all of Gusto's and Cida's discoveries about the Descolada bodies. Nothing's available."

  The Speaker's eyes narrowed. "So. That's one-third of boba. What's the rest?"

  "It's more than a third. Whatever the Descolada body is, it was able to adapt to become a human parasite ten years after the colony was founded. Ten years! If it can adapt once, it can adapt again."

  "Maybe she doesn't think so."

  "Maybe I ought to have a right to decide that for myself."

  He put out a hand, rested it on her knee, calmed her. "I agree with you. But go on. The second reason she's boba."

  "She won't allow any theoretical research. No taxonomy. No evolutionary models. If I ever try to do any, she says I obviously don't have enough to do and weighs me down with assignments until she thinks I've given up."

  "You haven't given up, I take it."

  "That's what xenobiology's for. Oh, yes, fine that she can make a potato that makes maximum use of the ambient nutrients. Wonderful that she made a breed of amaranth that makes the colony protein self-sufficient with only ten acres under cultivation. But that's all molecular juggling."

  "It's survival."

  "But we don't know anything. It's like swimming on the top of the ocean. You get very comfortable, you can move around a little, but you don't know if there are sharks down there! We could be surrounded by sharks and she doesn't want to find out."

  "Third thing?"

  "She won't exchange information with the Zenadors. Period. Nothing. And that really is crazy. We can't leave the fenced area. That means that we don't have a single tree we can study. We know absolutely nothing about the flora and fauna of this world except what happened to be included inside the fence. One herd of cabra and a bunch of capim grass, and then a slightly different riverside ecology, and that's everything. Nothing about the kinds of animals in the forest, no information exchange at all. We don't tell them anything, and if they send us data we erase the files unread. It's like she built this wall around us that nothing could get through. Nothing gets in, nothing goes out."

  "Maybe she has reasons."

  "Of course she has reasons. Crazy people always have reasons. For one thing, she hated Libo. Hated him. She wouldn't let Miro talk about him, wouldn't let us play with his children--China and I were best friends for years and she wouldn't let me bring her home or go to her house after school. And when Miro apprenticed to him, she didn't speak to him or set h
is place at the table for a year."

  She could see that the Speaker doubted her; he thought she was exaggerating.

  "I mean one year. The day he went to the Zenador's Station for the first time as Libo's apprentice, he came home and she didn't speak to him, not a word, and when he sat down to dinner she removed the plate from in front of his face, just cleaned up his silverware as if he weren't there. He sat there through the entire meal, just looking at her. Until Father got angry at him for being rude and told him to leave the room."

  "What did he do, move out?"

  "No. You don't know Miro!" Ela laughed bitterly. "He doesn't fight, but he doesn't give up, either. He never answered Father's abuse, never. In all my life I don't remember hearing him answer anger with anger. And Mother--well, he came home every night from the Zenador's Station and sat down where a plate was set, and every night Mother took up his plate and silverware, and he sat there till Father made him leave. Of course, within a week Father was yelling at him to get out as soon as Mother reached for his plate. Father loved it, the bastard, he thought it was great, he hated Miro so much, and finally Mother was on his side against Miro."

  "Who gave in?"

  "Nobody gave in." Ela looked at the river, realizing how terrible this all sounded, realizing that she was shaming her family in front of a stranger. But he wasn't a stranger, was he? Because Quara was talking again, and Olhado was involved in things again, and Grego, for just a short time, Grego had been almost a normal boy. He wasn't a stranger.

  "How did it end?" asked the Speaker.

  "It ended when the piggies killed Libo. That's how much Mother hated the man. When he died she celebrated by forgiving her son. That night when Miro came home, it was after dinner was over, it was late at night. A terrible night, everybody was so afraid, the piggies seemed so awful, and everybody loved Libo so much--except Mother, of course. Mother waited up for Miro. He came in and went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, and Mother put a plate down in front of him, put food on the plate. Didn't say a word. He ate it, too. Not a word about it. As if the year before hadn't happened. I woke up in the middle of the night because I could hear Miro throwing up and crying in the bathroom. I don't think anybody else heard, and I didn't go to him because I didn't think he wanted anybody to hear him. Now I think I should have gone, but I was afraid. There were such terrible things in my family."