She took him to her bedroom, turned back the sheet, never mind the dust flying. "Here, you're tired, here, rest. That's why you came to me, Libo. For peace, for consolation." He covered his face with his hands, shaking his head back and forth, a boy crying for his father, crying for the end of everything, as she had cried. She took off his boots, pulled off his trousers, put her hands under his shirt to ride it up to his arms and pull it off over his head. He breathed deeply to stop his sobbing and raised his arms to let her take his shirt.
She laid his clothing over a chair, then bent over him to pull the sheet back across his body. But he caught her wrist and looked pleadingly at her, tears in his eyes. "Don't leave me here alone," he whispered. His voice was thick with desperation. "Stay with me."
So she let him draw her down to the bed, where he clung to her tightly until in only a few minutes sleep relaxed his arms. She did not sleep, though. Her hand gently, dryly slipped along the skin of his shoulder, his chest, his waist. "Oh, Libo, I thought I had lost you when they took you away, I thought I had lost you as well as Pipo." He did not hear her whisper. "But you will always come back to me like this." She might have been thrust out of the garden because of her ignorant sin, like Eva. But, again like Eva, she could bear it, f
or she still had Libo, her Adao.
Had him? Had him? Her hand trembled on his naked flesh. She could never have him. Marriage was the only way she and Libo could possibly stay together for long--the laws were strict on any colony world, and absolutely rigid under a Catholic License. Tonight she could believe he would want to marry her, when the time came. But Libo was the one person she could never marry.
For he would then have access, automatically, to any file of hers that he could convince the computer he had a need to see--which would certainly include all her working files, no matter how deeply she protected them. The Starways Code declared it. Married people were virtually the same person in the eyes of the law.
She could never let him study those files, or he would discover what his father knew, and it would be his body she would find on the hillside, his agony under the piggies' torture that she would have to imagine every night of her life. Wasn't the guilt for Pipo's death already more than she could bear? To marry him would be to murder him. Yet not to marry him would be like murdering herself, for if she was not with Libo she could not think of who she would be then.
How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out.
She pressed her face against Libo's shoulder, and her tears skittered down across his chest.
4
ENDER
We have identified four pequenino languages. The "Males' Language" is the one we have most commonly heard. We have also heard snatches of "Wives' Language," which they apparently use to converse with the females (how's that for sexual differentiation!), and "Tree Language," a ritual idiom that they say is used in praying to the ancestral totem trees. They have also mentioned a fourth language, called "Father Tongue," which apparently consists of beating different-sized sticks together. They insist that it is a real language, as different from the others as Portuguese is from English. They may call it Father Tongue because it's done with sticks of wood, which come from trees, and they believe that trees contain the spirits of their ancestors.
The pequeninos are marvelously adept at learning human languages--much better than we are at learning theirs. In recent years they have come to speak either Stark or Portuguese among themselves most of the time when we're with them. Perhaps they revert to their own languages when we aren't present. They may even have adopted human languages as their own, or perhaps they enjoy the new languages so much that they use them constantly as a game. Language contamination is regrettable, but perhaps was unavoidable if we were to communicate with them at all.
Dr. Swingler asked whether their names and terms of address reveal anything about their culture. The answer is a definite yes, though I have only the vaguest idea what they reveal. What matters is that we have never named any of them. Instead, as they learned Stark and Portuguese, they asked us the meanings of words and then eventually announced the names they had chosen for themselves (or chosen for each other). Such names as "Rooter" and "Chupaceu" (sky-sucker) could be translations of their Male Language names or simply foreign nicknames they chose for our use.
They refer to each other as brothers. The females are always called wives, never sisters or mothers. They sometimes refer to fathers, but inevitably this term is used to refer to ancestral totem trees. As for what they call us, they do use human, of course, but they have also taken to using the new Demosthenian Hierarchy of Exclusion. They refer to humans as framlings, and to pequeninos of other tribes as utlannings. Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective! And--quite an amazing turn--they have several times referred to the females as varelse!
--Joao Figueira Alvarez, "Notes on 'Pequenino' Language and Nomenclature," in Semantics, 9/1948/15
The living quarters of Reykjavik were carved into the granite walls of the fjord. Ender's was high on the cliff, a tedious climb up stairs and ladderways. But it had a window. He had lived most of his childhood closed in behind metal walls. When he could, he lived where he could see the weathers of the world.
His room was hot and bright, with sunlight streaming in, blinding him after the cool darkness of the stone corridors. Jane did not wait for him to adjust his vision to the light. "I have a surprise for you on the terminal," she said. Her voice was a whisper from the jewel in his ear.
It was a piggy standing in the air over the terminal. He moved, scratching himself; then he reached out for something. When his hand came back, it held a shiny, dripping worm. He bit it, and the body juices drizzled out of his mouth, down onto his chest.
"Obviously an advanced civilization," said Jane.
Ender was annoyed. "Many a moral imbecile has good table manners, Jane."
The piggy turned and spoke. "Do you want to see how we killed him?"
"What are you doing, Jane?"
The piggy disappeared. In his place came a holo of Pipo's corpse as it lay on the hillside in the rain. "I've done a simulation of the vivisection process the pequeninos used, based on the information collected by the scan before the body was buried. Do you want to see it?"
Ender sat down on the room's only chair.
Now the terminal showed the hillside, with Pipo, still alive, lying on his back, his hands and feet tied to wooden stakes. A dozen piggies were gathered around him, one of them holding a bone knife. Jane's voice came from the jewel in his ear again. "We aren't sure whether it was like this." All the piggies disappeared except the one with the knife. "Or like this."
"Was the xenologer conscious?"
"Probably. There's no evidence of drugs or blows to the head."
"Go on."
Relentlessly, Jane showed the opening of the chest cavity, the ritual removal and placement of body organs on the ground. Ender forced himself to watch, trying to understand what meaning this could possibly have to the pequeninos. At one point Jane whispered, "This is when he died." Ender felt himself relax; only then did he realize how all his muscles had been rigid with empathy for Pipo's suffering.