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"Another moral transformation, is that it?" asked the Bishop. "Just as you did today in your speaking, making us see Marcos Ribeira again and again, each time in a new light, now you want us to think the piggies are noble? Very well, they're noble. But I won't rebel against Congress, with all the suffering such a thing would cause, just so our scientists can teach the piggies how to make refrigerators."
"Please," said Novinha.
They looked at her expectantly.
"You say that they stripped our files? They read them all?"
"Yes," said Bosquinha.
"Then they know everything that I have in my files. About the Descolada."
"Yes," said Bosquinha.
Novinha folded her hands in her lap. "There won't be any evacuation."
"I didn't think so," said Ender. "That's why I asked Ela to bring you."
"Why won't there be an evacuation?" asked Bosquinha.
"Because of the Descolada."
"Nonsense," said the Bishop. "Your parents found a cure for that."
"They didn't cure it," said Novinha. "They controlled it. They stopped it from becoming active."
"That's right," said Bosquinha. "That's why we put the additives in the water. The Colador."
"Every human being on Lusitania, except perhaps the Speaker, who may not have caught it yet, is a carrier of the Descolada."
"The additive isn't expensive," said the Bishop. "But perhaps they might isolate us. I can see that they might do that."
"There's nowhere isolated enough," said Novinha. "The Descolada is infinitely variable. It attacks any kind of genetic material. The additive can be given to humans. But can they give additives to every blade of grass? To every bird? To every fish? To every bit of plankton in the sea?"
"They can all catch it?" asked Bosquinha. "I didn't know that."
"I didn't tell anybody," said Novinha. "But I built the protection into every plant that I developed. The amaranth, the potatoes, everything--the challenge wasn't making the protein usable, the challenge was to get the organisms to produce their own Descolada blockers."
Bosquinha was appalled. "So anywhere we go--"
"We can trigger the complete destruction of the biosphere."
"And you kept this a secret?" asked Dom Cristao.
"There was no need to tell it. No one had ever left Lusitania, and no one was planning to go." Novinha looked at her hands in her lap. "Something in the information had caused the piggies to kill Pipo. I kept it secret so no one else would know. But now, what Ela has learned over the last few years, and what the Speaker has said tonight--now I know what it was that Pipo learned. The Descolada doesn't just split the genetic molecules and prevent them from reforming or duplicating. It also encourages them to bond with completely foreign genetic molecules. Ela did the work on this against my will. All the native life on Lusitania thrives in plant-and-animal pairs. The cabra with the capim. The watersnakes with the grama. The suckflies with the reeds. The xingadora bird with the tropeco vines. And the piggies with the trees of the forest."
"You're saying that one becomes the other?" Dom Cristao was at once fascinated and repelled.
"The piggies may be unique in that, in transforming from the corpse of a piggy into a tree," said Novinha. "But perhaps the cabras become fertilized from the pollen of the capim. Perhaps the flies are hatched from the tassels of the river reeds. It should be studied. I should have been studying it all these years."
"And now they'll know this?" asked Dom Cristao. "From your files?"
"Not right away. But sometime in the next ten or twenty years. Before any other framlings get here, they'll know," said Novinha.
"I'm not a scientist," said the Bishop. "Everyone else seems to understand except me. What does this have to do with the evacuation?"
Bosquinha fidgeted with her hands. "They can't take us off Lusitania," she said. "Anywhere they took us, we'd carry the Descolada with us, and it would kill everything. There aren't enough xenobiologists in the Hundred Worlds to save even a single planet from devastation. By the time they get here, they'll know that we can't leave."
"Well, then," said the Bishop. "That solves our problem. If we tell them now, they won't even send a fleet to evacuate us."
