Speaker for the Dead

  Evacuation Committee. They'll evacuate us and wipe out every trace of our being here. That much is in the rules, but there's more, isn't there? What did they see? How did they find out? Did the Speaker tell them? He's so addicted to truth. I have to explain to the piggies why we won't be coming back, I have to tell them.

  A piggy always watched them, followed them from the moment they entered the forest. Could a piggy be watching now? Miro waved his hand. It was too dark, though. They couldn't possibly see him. Or perhaps they could; no one knew how good the piggies' vision was at night. Whether they saw him or not, they didn't come. And soon it would be too late; if the framlings were watching the gate, they had no doubt already notified Bosquinha, and she'd be on her way, zipping over the grass. She would be oh-so-reluctant to arrest him, but she would do her job, and never mind arguing with her about whether it was good for humans or piggies, either one, to maintain this foolish separation, she wasn't the sort to question the law, she just did what she was told. And he'd surrender, there was no reason to fight, where could he hide inside the fence, out among the cabra herds? But before he gave up, he'd tell the piggies, he had to tell them.

  So he walked along the fence, away from the gate, toward the open grassland directly down the hill from the Cathedral, where no one lived near enough to hear his voice. As he walked, he called. Not words, but a high hooting sound, a cry that he and Ouanda used to call each other's attention when they were separated among the piggies. They'd hear it, they had to hear it, they had to come to him because he couldn't possibly pass the fence. So come, Human, Leaf-eater, Mandachuva, Arrow, Cups, Calendar, anyone, everyone, come and let me tell you that I cannot tell you any more.

  Quim sat miserably on a stool in the Bishop's office.

  "Estevao," the Bishop said quietly, "there'll be a meeting here in a few minutes, but I want to talk to you a minute first."

  "Nothing to talk about," said Quim. "You warned us, and it happened. He's the devil."

  "Estevao, we'll talk for a minute and then you'll go home and sleep."

  "Never going back there."

  "The Master ate with worse sinners than your mother, and forgave them. Are you better than he?"

  "None of the adulteresses he forgave was his mother!"

  "Not everyone's mother can be the Blessed Virgin."

  "Are you on his side, then? Has the Church made way here for the speakers for the dead? Should we tear down the Cathedral and use the stones to make an amphitheater where all our dead can be slandered before we lay them in the ground?"

  A whisper: "I am your Bishop, Estevao, the vicar of Christ on this planet, and you will speak to me with the respect you owe to my office."

  Quim stood there, furious, unspeaking.

  "I think it would have been better if the Speaker had not told these stories publicly. Some things are better learned in privacy, in quiet, so that we need not deal with shocks while an audience watches us. That's why we use the confessional, to shield us from public shame while we wrestle with our private sins. But be fair, Estevao. The Speaker may have told the stories, but the stories all were true. Ne?"

  "E."

  "Now, Estevao, let us think. Before today, did you love your mother?"

  "Yes."

  "And this mother that you loved, had she already committed adultery?"

  "Ten thousand times."

  "I suspect she was not so libidinous as that. But you tell me that you loved her, though she was an adulteress. Isn't she the same person tonight? Has she changed between yesterday and today? Or is it only you who have changed?"

  "What she was yesterday was a lie."

  "Do you mean that because she was ashamed to tell her children that she was an adulteress, she must also have been lying when she cared for you all the years you were growing up, when she trusted you, when she taught you--"

  "She was not exactly a nurturing mother."

  "If she had come to the confessional and won forgiveness for her adultery, then she would never have had to tell you at all. You would have gone to your grave not knowing. It would not have been a lie; because she would have been forgiven, she would not have been an adulteress. Admit the truth, Estevao: You're not angry with her adultery. You're angry because you embarrassed yourself in front of the whole city by trying to defend her."

  "You make me seem like a fool."

  "No one thinks you're a fool. Everyone thinks you're a loyal son. But now, if you're to be a true follower of the Master, you will forgive her and let her see that you love her more than ever, because now you understand her suffering." The Bishop glanced toward the door. "I have a meeting here now, Estevao. Please go into my inner chamber and pray to the Madelena to forgive you for your unforgiving heart."

  Looking more miserable than angry, Quim passed through the curtain behind the Bishop's desk.

  The Bishop's secretary opened the other door and let the Speaker for the Dead into the chamber. The Bishop did not rise. To his surprise, the Speaker knelt and bowed his head. It was an act that Catholics did only in a public presentation to the Bishop, and Peregrino could not think what the Speaker meant by this. Yet the man knelt there, waiting, and so the Bishop arose from his chair, walked to him, and held out his ring to be kissed. Even then the Speaker waited, until finally Peregrino said, "I bless you, my son, even though I'm not sure whether you mock me with this obeisance."

  Head still bowed, the Speaker said, "There's no mockery in me." Then he looked up at Peregrino. "My father was a Catholic. He pretended not to be, for the sake of convenience, but he never forgave himself for his faithlessness."

  "You were baptized?"

  "My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it." The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. "Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in."

  Peregrino was skeptical. It was too elegant a gesture, for the Speaker to turn out to be Catholic. "I thought," said the Bishop, "that you speakers for the dead renounced all religions before taking up your, shall we say, vocation."

  "I don't know what the others do. I don't think there are any rules about it--certainly there weren't when I became a speaker."

  Bishop Peregrino knew that speakers were not supposed to lie, but this one certainly seemed to be evasive. "Speaker Andrew, there isn't a place in all the Hundred Worlds where a Catholic has to conceal his faith, and there hasn't been for three thousand years. That was the great blessing of space travel, that it removed the terrible population restrictions on an overcrowded Earth. Are you telling me that your father lived on Earth three thousand years ago?"

  "I'm telling you that my father saw to it I was baptized a Catholic, and for his sake I did what he never could do in his life. It was for him that I knelt before a bishop and received his blessing."

  "But it was you that I blessed." And you're still dodging my question. Which implies that my inference about your father's time of life is true, but you don't want to discuss it. Dom Cristao said that there was more to you than met the eye.

  "Good," said the Speaker. "I need the blessing more than my father, since he's dead, and I have many more problems to deal with."

  "Please sit down." The Speaker chose a stool near the far wall. The Bishop sat in his massive chair behind his desk. "I wish you hadn't spoken today. It came at an inconvenient time."

  "I had no warning that Congress would do this."

  "But you knew that Miro and Ouanda had violated the law. Bosquinha told me."

  "I found out only a few hours before the speaking. Thank you for not arresting them yet."

  "That's a civil matter." The Bishop brushed it aside, but they both knew that if he had insisted, Bosquinha would have had to obey her orders and arrest them regardless of the Speaker's request. "Your speaking has caused a great deal of distress."
br />   "More than usual, I'm afraid."

  "So--is your responsibility over? Do you inflict the wounds and leave it to others to heal them?"

  "Not wounds, Bishop Peregrino. Surgery. And if I can help to heal the pain afterward, then yes, I stay and help. I have no anesthesia, but I do try for antisepsis."

  "You should have been a priest, you know."

  "Younger sons used to have only two choices. The priesthood or the military. My parents chose the latter course for me."

  "A younger son. Yet you had a sister. And you lived in the time when population controls forbade parents to have more than two children unless the government gave special permission. They called such a child a Third, yes?"

  "You know your history."

  "Were you born on Earth, before starflight?"

  "What concerns us, Bishop Peregrino, is the future of Lusitania, not the biography of a speaker for the dead who is plainly only thirty-five years old."

  "The future of Lusitania is my concern, Speaker Andrew, not yours."

  "The future of the humans on Lusitania is your concern, Bishop. I'm concerned with the pequeninos as well."

  "Let's not compete to see whose concern is greater."

  The secretary opened the door again, and Bosquinha, Dom Cristao, and Dona Crista came in. Bosquinha glanced back and forth between the Bishop and the Speaker.

  "There's no blood on the floor, if that's what you're looking for," said the Bishop.

  "I was just estimating the temperature," said Bosquinha.

  "The warmth of mutual respect, I think," said the Speaker. "Not the heat of anger or the ice of hate."

  "The Speaker is a Catholic by baptism, if not by belief," said the Bishop. "I blessed him, and it seems to have made him docile."

  "I've always been respectful of authority," said the Speaker.

  "You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor," the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.

  The Speaker's smile was just as chilly. "And you're the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn't talk to me."

  While the Bishop and the Speaker grinned at each other, the others laughed nervously, sat down, waited.

  "It's your meeting, Speaker," said Bosquinha.

  "Forgive me," said the Speaker. "There's someone else invited. It'll make things much simpler if we wait a few more minutes for her to come."

  Ela found her mother outside the house, not far from the fence. A light breeze that barely rustled the capim had caught her hair and tossed it lightly. It took a moment for Ela to realize why this was so startling. Her mother had not worn her hair down in many years. It looked strangely free, all the more so because Ela could see how it curled and bent where it had been so long forced into a bun. It was then that she knew that the Speaker was right. Mother would listen to his invitation. Whatever shame or pain tonight's speaking might have caused her, it led her now to stand out in the open, in the dusk just after sunset, looking toward the piggies' hill. Or perhaps she was looking at the fence. Perhaps remembering a man who met her here, or somewhere else in the capim, so that unobserved they could love each other. Always in hiding, always in secret. Mother is glad, thought Ela, to have it known that Libo was her real husband, that Libo is my true father. Mother is glad, and so am I.

  Mother did not turn to look at her, though she surely could hear Ela's approach through the noisy grass. Ela stopped a few steps away.

  "Mother," she said.

  "Not a herd of cabra, then," said Mother. "You're so noisy, Ela."

  "The Speaker. Wants your help."

  "Does he."

  Ela explained what the Speaker had told her. Mother did not turn around. When Ela was finished, Mother waited a moment, and then turned to walk over the shoulder of the hill. Ela ran after her, caught up with her. "Mother," said Ela. "Mother, are you going to tell him about the Descolada?"

  "Yes."

  "Why now? After all these years? Why wouldn't you tell me?"

  "Because you did better work on your own, without my help."

  "You know what I was doing?"

  "You're my apprentice. I have complete access to your files without leaving any footprints. What kind of master would I be if I didn't watch your work?"

  "But--"

  "I also read the files you hid under Quara's name. You've never been a mother, so you didn't know that all the file activities of a child under twelve are reported to the parents every week. Quara was doing some remarkable research. I'm glad you're coming with me. When I tell the Speaker, I'll be telling you, too."

  "You're going the wrong way," said Ela.

  Mother stopped. "Isn't the Speaker's house near the praca?"

  "The meeting is in the Bishop's chambers."

  For the first time Mother faced Ela directly. "What are you and the Speaker trying to do to me?"

  "We're trying to save Miro," said Ela. "And Lusitania Colony, if we can."

  "Taking me to the spider's lair--"

  "The Bishop has to be on our side or--"

  "Our side! So when you say we, you mean you and the Speaker, is that it? Do you think I haven't noticed that? All my children, one by one, he's seduced you all--"

  "He hasn't seduced anybody!"

  "He seduced you with his way of knowing just what you want to hear, of--"

  "He's no flatterer," said Ela. "He doesn't tell us what we want. He tells us what we know is true. He didn't win our affection, Mother, he won our trust."

  "Whatever he gets from you, you never gave it to me."

  "We wanted to."

  Ela did not bend this time before her mother's piercing, demanding glare. It was her mother, instead, who bent, who looked away and then looked back with tears in her eyes. "I wanted to tell you." Mother wasn't talking about her files. "When I saw how you hated him, I wanted to say, He's not your father, your father is a good, kind man--"

  "Who didn't have the courage to tell us himself."

  Rage came into Mother's eyes. "He wanted to. I wouldn't let him."

  "I'll tell you something, Mother. I loved Libo, the way everybody in Milagre loved him. But he was willing to be a hypocrite, and so were you, and without anybody even guessing, the poison of your lies hurt us all. I don't blame you, Mother, or him. But I thank God for the Speaker. He was willing to tell us the truth, and it set us free."

  "It's easy to tell the truth," said Mother softly, "when you don't love anybody."

  "Is that what you think?" said Ela. "I think I know something, Mother. I think you can't possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them. I think the Speaker loved Father. Marcao, I mean. I think he understood him and loved him before he spoke."

  Mother didn't answer, because she knew that it was true.

  "And I know he loves Grego, and Quara, and Olhado. And Miro, and even Quim. And me. I know he loves me. And when he shows me that he loves me, I know it's true because he never lies to anybody."

  Tears came out of Mother's eyes and drifted down her cheeks.

  "I have lied to you and everybody else," Mother said. Her voice sounded weak and strained. "But you have to believe me anyway. When I tell you that I love you."

  Ela embraced her mother, and for the first time in years she felt warmth in her mother's response. Because the lies between them now were gone. The Speaker had erased the barrier, and there was no reason to be tentative and cautious anymore.

  "You're thinking about that damnable Speaker even now, aren't you?" whispered her mother.

  "So are you," Ela answered.

  Both their bodies shook with Mother's laugh. "Yes." Then she stopped laughing and pulled away, looked Ela in the eyes. "Will he always come between us?"

  "Yes," said Ela. "Like a bridge he'll come between us, not a wall."

  Miro saw the piggies when they were halfway down the hillside toward the fence. They were so silent in the forest, but the piggies had no great skill in moving through the capim--it rustled loudly as they ran. Or perhaps in coming to answer Miro's c
all they felt no need to conceal themselves. As they came nearer, Miro recognized them. Arrow, Human, Mandachuva, Leaf-eater, Cups. He did not call out to them, nor did they speak when they arrived. Instead they stood behind the fence opposite him and regarded him silently. No Zenador had ever called the piggies to the fence before. By their stillness they showed their anxiety.

  "I can't come to you anymore," said Miro.

  They waited for his explanation.

  "The framlings found out about us. Breaking the law. They sealed the gate."

  Leaf-eater touched his chin. "Do you know what it was the framlings saw?"

  Miro laughed bitterly. "What didn't they see? Only one framling ever came with us."

  "No," said Human. "The hive queen says it wasn't the Speaker. The hive queen says they saw it from the sky."

  The satellites? "What could they see from the sky?"

  "Maybe the hunt," said Arrow.

  "Maybe the shearing of the cabra," said Leaf-eater.

  "Maybe the fields of amaranth," said Cups.

  "All of those," said Human. "And maybe they saw that the wives have let three hundred twenty children be born since the first amaranth harvest."

  "Three hundred!"

  "And twenty," said Mandachuva.

  "They saw that food would be plenty," said Arrow. "Now we're sure to win the next war. Our enemies will be planted in huge new forests all over the plain, and the wives will put mother trees in every one of them."

  Miro felt sick. Is this what all their work and sacrifice was for, to give some transient advantage to one tribe of piggies? Almost he said, Libo didn't die so you could conquer the world. But his training took over, and he asked a noncommittal question. "Where are all these new children?"

  "None of the little brothers come to us," explained Human. "We have too much to do, learning from you and teaching all the other brother-houses. We can't be training little brothers." Then, proudly, he added, "Of the three hundred, fully half are children of my father, Rooter."

  Mandachuva nodded gravely. "The wives have great respect for what you have taught us. And they have great hope in the Speaker for the Dead. But what you tell us now, this is very bad. If the framlings hate us, what will we do?"

  "I don't know," said Miro. For the moment, his mind was racing to try to cope with all the information they had just told him. Three hundred twenty new babies. A population explosion. And Rooter somehow the father of half of them. Before today Miro would have dismissed the statement of Rooter's fatherhood as part of the piggies' totemic belief system. But having seen a tree uproot itself and fall apart in response to singing, he was prepared to question all his old assumptions.