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By the time the eight days passed, he was doing fairly well at speaking Portuguese directly instead of translating from Spanish whenever he wanted to say anything. He was also desperate for human company--he would have been glad to discuss religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship's computer to talk to.
The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest of the universe. Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while the starship re
mained truly motionless. No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe the phenomenon. It was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway; the ansible had been developed half by accident, and along with it the Park Instantaneity Principle. It may not be comprehensible, but it worked.
The windows of the starship instantly filled with stars as light became visible again in all directions. Someday a scientist would discover why the Park shift took almost no energy. Somewhere, Ender was certain, a terrible price was being paid for human starflight. He had dreamed once of a star winking out every time a starship made the Park shift. Jane assured him that it wasn't so, but he knew that most stars were invisible to us; a trillion of them could disappear and we'd not know it. For thousands of years we would continue to see the photons that had already been launched before the star disappeared. By the time we could see the galaxy go blank, it would be far too late to amend our course.
"Sitting there in paranoid fantasy," said Jane.
"You can't read minds," said Ender.
"You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It's your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness."
"Have you alerted Lusitanian authorities that I'm coming?"
"It's a very small colony. There's no Landing Authority because hardly anybody goes there. There's an orbiting shuttle that automatically takes people up and down to a laughable little shuttleport."
"No clearance from Immigration?"
"You're a speaker. They can't turn you away. Besides, Immigration consists of the Governor, who is also the Mayor, since the city and the colony are identical. Her name is Faria Lima Maria do Bosque, called Bosquinha, and she sends you greetings and wishes you would go away, since they've got trouble enough without a prophet of agnosticism going around annoying good Catholics."
"She said that?"
"Actually, not to you--Bishop Peregrino said it to her, and she agreed. But it's her job to agree. If you tell her that Catholics are all idolatrous, superstitious fools, she'll probably sigh and say, I hope you can keep those opinions to yourself."
"You're stalling," said Ender. "What is it you think I don't want to hear?"
"Novinha canceled her call for a speaker. Five days after she sent it."
Of course, the Starways Code said that once Ender had begun his voyage in response to her call, the call could not legally be canceled; still, it changed everything, because instead of eagerly awaiting his arrival for twenty-two years, she would be dreading it, resenting him for coming when she had changed her mind. He had expected to be received by her as a welcome friend. Now she would be even more hostile than the Catholic establishment. "Anything to simplify my work," he said.
"Well, it's not all bad, Andrew. You see, in the intervening years, a couple of other people have called for a speaker, and they haven't canceled."
"Who?"
"By the most fascinating coincidence, they are Novinha's son Miro and Novinha's daughter Ela."
"They couldn't possibly have known Pipo. Why would they call me to speak his death?"
"Oh, no, not Pipo's death. Ela called for a Speaker only six weeks ago, to speak the death of her father, Novinha's husband, Marcos Maria Ribeira, called Marcao. He keeled over in a bar. Not from alcohol--he had a disease. He died of terminal rot."
"I worry about you, Jane, consumed with compassion the way you are."
"Compassion is what you're good at. I'm better at complex searches through organized data structures."
"And the boy--what's his name?"
"Miro. He called for a Speaker four years ago. For the death of Pipo's son, Libo."
"Libo couldn't be older than forty--"
"He was helped along to an early death. He was xenologer, you see--or Zenador, as they say in Portuguese."
"The piggies--"
"Exactly like his father's death. The organs placed exactly the same. Three piggies have been executed the same way while you were en route, though farther from the gate. But they plant trees in the middle of the piggy corpses--no such honor for the dead humans."
Both xenologers murdered by the piggies, a generation apart. "What has the Starways Council decided?"
