Then she shivered and the nightmare left her mind; she went back to trying to spice and season the pasta so it would taste like something better than amaranth glue.
14
RENEGADES
LEAF-EATER: Human says that when your brothers die, you bury them in the dirt, and then make your houses out of that dirt. (Laughs.)
MIRO: No. We never dig where people are buried.
LEAF-EATER: (becomes rigid with agitation): Then your dead don't do you any good at all!
--Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi, Dialogue Transcripts, 103:0:1969:4:13:111
Ender had thought they might have some trouble getting him through the gate, but Ouanda palmed the box, Miro opened the gate, and the three of them walked through. No challenge. It must be as Ela had implied--no one wanted to get out of the compound, so no serious security was needed. Whether that sugg
ested that people were content to stay in Milagre or that they were afraid of the piggies or that they hated their imprisonment so much that they had to pretend the fence wasn't there, Ender could not begin to guess.
Both Ouanda and Miro were very tense, almost frightened. That was understandable, of course, since they were breaking Congressional rules to let him come. But Ender suspected there was more to it than that. Miro's tension was coupled with eagerness, a sense of hurry; he might be frightened, but he wanted to see what would happen, wanted to go ahead. Ouanda held back, walked a measured step, and her coldness was not just fear but hostility as well. She did not trust him.
So Ender was not surprised when she stepped behind the large tree that grew nearest the gate and waited for Miro and Ender to follow her. Ender saw how Miro looked annoyed for a moment, then controlled himself. His mask of uninvolvement was as cool as a human being could hope for. Ender found himself comparing Miro to the boys he had known in Battle School, sizing him up as a comrade in arms, and thought Miro might have done well there. Ouanda, too, but for different reasons: She held herself responsible for what was happening, even though Ender was an adult and she was much younger. She did not defer to him at all. Whatever she was afraid of, it was not authority.
"Here?" asked Miro blandly.
"Or not at all," said Ouanda.
Ender folded himself to sit at the base of the tree. "This is Rooter's tree, isn't it?" he asked.
They took it calmly--of course--but their momentary pause told him that yes, he had surprised them by knowing something about a past that they surely regarded as their own. I may be a framling here, Ender said silently, but I don't have to be an ignorant one.
"Yes," said Ouanda. "He's the totem they seem to get the most--direction from. Lately--the last seven or eight years. They've never let us see the rituals in which they talk to their ancestors, but it seems to involve drumming on the trees with heavy polished sticks. We hear them at night sometimes."
"Sticks? Made of fallen wood?"
"We assume so. Why?"
"Because they have no stone or metal tools to cut the wood--isn't that right? Besides, if they worship the trees, they couldn't very well cut them down."
"We don't think they worship the trees. It's totemic. They stand for dead ancestors. They--plant them. With the bodies."
Ouanda had wanted to stop, to talk or question him, but Ender had no intention of letting her believe she--or Miro, for that matter--was in charge of this expedition. Ender intended to talk to the piggies himself. He had never prepared for a speaking by letting someone else determine his agenda, and he wasn't going to begin now. Besides, he had information they didn't have. He knew Ela's theory.
"And anywhere else?" he asked. "Do they plant trees at any other time?"
They looked at each other. "Not that we've seen," said Miro.
Ender was not merely curious. He was still thinking of what Ela had told him about reproductive anomalies. "And do the trees also grow by themselves? Are seedlings and saplings scattered through the forest?"
Ouanda shook her head. "We really don't have any evidence of the trees being planted anywhere but in the corpses of the dead. At least, all the trees we know of are quite old, except these three out here."
"Four, if we don't hurry," said Miro.
Ah. Here was the tension between them. Miro's sense of urgency was to save a piggy from being planted at the base of another tree. While Ouanda was concerned about something quite different. They had revealed enough of themselves to him; now he could let her interrogate him. He sat up straight and tipped his head back, to look up into the leaves of the tree above him, the spreading branches, the pale green of photosynthesis that confirmed the convergence, the inevitability of evolution on every world. Here was the center of all of Ela's paradoxes: evolution on this world was obviously well within the pattern that xenobiologists had seen on all the Hundred Worlds, and yet somewhere the pattern had broken down, collapsed. The piggies were one of a few dozen species that had survived the collapse. What was the Descolada, and how had the piggies adapted to it?
He had meant to turn the conversation, to say, Why are we here behind this tree? That would invite Ouanda's questions. But at that moment, his head tilted back, the soft green leaves moving gently in an almost imperceptible breeze, he felt a powerful deja vu. He had looked up into these leaves before. Recently. But that was impossible. There were no large trees on Trondheim, and none grew within the compound of Milagre. Why did the sunlight through the leaves feel so familiar to him?
"Speaker," said Miro.
"Yes," he said, allowing himself to be drawn out of his momentary reverie.