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"That's what I mean," she said. "They won't have a speaker of their own there. But they still have to let a speaker come, if someone requests it. And Trondheim is the closest world to Lusitania."
"Nobody's called for a speaker."
Plikt tugged at his sleeve. "Why are you here?"
"You know why I came. I spoke the death of Wutan."
"I know you came here with your sister, Valentine. She's a much more popular teacher than you are--she answers questions with answers; you just answer with more questions."
"That's because she knows some answers."
"Speaker, you have to tell me. I tried to find out about you--I was curious. Your name, for one thing, where you came from. Everything's classified. Classified so deep that I can't even find out what the access level is. God himself couldn't look up your life story."
Ender took her by the shoulders, looked down into her eyes. "It's none of your business, that's what the access level is."
"You are more important than anybody guesses, Speaker," she said. "The ansible reports to you before it reports to anybody, doesn't it? And nobody can look up information about you."
"Nobody has ever tried. Why you?"
"I want to be a speaker," she said.
"Go ahead then. The computer will train you. It isn't like a religion--you don't have to memoriz
e any catechism. Now leave me alone." He let go of her with a little shove. She staggered backward as he strode off.
"I want to speak for you," she cried.
"I'm not dead yet!" he shouted back.
"I know you're going to Lusitania! I know you are!"
Then you know more than I do, said Ender silently. But he trembled as he walked, even though the sun was shining and he wore three sweaters to keep out the cold. He hadn't known Plikt had so much emotion in her. Obviously she had come to identify with him. It frightened him to have this girl need something from him so desperately. He had spent years now without making any real connection with anyone but his sister Valentine--her and, of course, the dead that he spoke. All the other people who had meant anything to him in his life were dead. He and Valentine had passed them by centuries ago, worlds ago.
The idea of casting a root into the icy soil of Trondheim repelled him. What did Plikt want from him? It didn't matter; he wouldn't give it. How dare she demand things from him, as if he belonged to her? Ender Wiggin didn't belong to anybody. If she knew who he really was, she would loathe him as the Xenocide; or she would worship him as the savior of mankind--Ender remembered what it was like when people used to do that, too, and he didn't like it much. Even now they knew him only by his role, by the name speaker, talman, falante, spieler, whatever they called the Speaker for the Dead in the language of their city or nation or world.
He didn't want them to know him. He did not belong to them, to the human race. He had another errand, he belonged to someone else. Not human beings. Not the bloody piggies, either. Or so he thought.
3
LIBO
Observed Diet: Primarily macios, the shiny worms that live among merdona vines on the bark of the trees. Sometimes they have been seen to chew capim blades. Sometimes--accidently?--they ingest merdona leaves along with the macios.
We've never seen them eat anything else. Novinha analyzed all three foods--macios, capim blades, and merdona leaves--and the results were surprising. Either the pequeninos don't need many different proteins, or they're hungry all the time. Their diet is seriously lacking in many trace elements. And calcium intake is so low, we wonder whether their bones use calcium the same way ours do.
Pure speculation: Since we can't take tissue samples, our only knowledge of piggy anatomy and physiology is what we were able to glean from our photographs of the vivisected corpse of the piggy called Rooter. Still, there are some obvious anomalies. The piggies' tongues, which are so fantastically agile that they can produce any sound we make, and a lot we can't, must have evolved for some purpose. Probing for insects in tree bark or in nests in the ground, maybe. Whether an ancient ancestral piggy did that, they certainly don't do it now. And the horny pads on their feet and inside their knees allow them to climb trees and cling by their legs alone. Why did that evolve? To escape from some predator? There is no predator on Lusitania large enough to harm them. To cling to the tree while probing for insects in the bark? That fits in with their tongues, but where are the insects? The only insects are the suckflies and the puladors, but they don't bore into the bark and the piggies don't eat them anyway. The macios are large, live on the bark's surface, and can easily be harvested by pulling down the merdona vines; they really don't even have to climb the trees.
Libo's speculation: The tongue and the tree-climbing evolved in a different environment, with a much more varied diet, including insects. But something--an ice age? Migration? A disease?--caused the environment to change. No more barkbugs, etc. Maybe all the big predators were wiped out then. It would explain why there are so few species on Lusitania, despite the very favorable conditions. The cataclysm might have been fairly recent--half a million years ago?--so that evolution hasn't had a chance to differentiate much yet.
It's a tempting hypothesis, since there's no obvious reason in the present environment for piggies to have evolved at all. There's no competition for them. The ecological niche they occupy could be filled by opossums. Why would intelligence ever be an adaptive trait? But inventing a cataclysm to explain why the piggies have such a boring, non-nutritious diet is probably overkill. Ockham's razor cuts this to ribbons.
--Joao Figueira Alvarez, Working Notes 4/14/1948 SC, published posthumously in Philosophical Roots of the Lusitanian Secession, 2010-33-4-1090:40
As soon as Mayor Bosquinha arrived at the Zenador's Station, matters slipped out of Libo's and Novinha's control. Bosquinha was accustomed to taking command, and her attitude did not leave much opportunity for protest, or even for consideration. "You wait here," she said to Libo almost as soon as she had grasped the situation. "As soon as I got your call, I sent the Arbiter to tell your mother."
"We have to bring his body in," said Libo.
"I also called some of the men who live nearby to help with that," she said. "And Bishop Peregrino is preparing a place for him in the Cathedral graveyard."
