Pipo shrugged. "So? Sometime or other everybody wishes everybody would go away. Sometimes I'll wish you would go away. What I'm telling you now is that even at those times, even if I tell you to go away, you don't have to go away."
It was the most bafflingly perfect thing that anyone had ever said to her. "That's crazy."
"Only one thing. Promise me you'll never try to go out to the pequeninos. Because I can never let you do that, and if somehow you do it anyway, Starways Congress would close down all our work here, forbid any contact with them. Do you promise me? Or everything--my work, your work--it will all be undone."
"I promise."
"When will you take the test?"
"Now! Can I begin it now?"
He laughed gently, then reached out a hand and without looking touched the terminal. It came to life, the first genetic models appearing in the air above the terminal.
"You had the examination ready," she said. "You were all set to go! You knew that you'd let me do it all along!"
He shook his head. "I hoped. I believed in you. I wanted to help you do what you dreamed of doing. As long as it was something good."
She would not have been Novinha if she hadn't found one more poisonous thing to say. "I see. You are the judge of dreams."
Perhaps he didn't know it was an insult. He only smiled and said, "Faith, hope, and love--these three. But the greatest of these is love."
"You don't love me," she said.
"Ah," he said. "I am the judge of dreams, and you are the judge of love. Well, I find you guilty of dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams. I only hope that someday you won't declare me innocent of the crime of loving you." He grew reflective for a moment. "I lost a daughter in the Descolada. Maria. She would have been only a few years older than you."
"And I remind you of her?"
"I was thinking that she would have been nothing at all like you."
She began the test. It took three days. She passed it, with a score a good deal higher than many a graduate student. In retrospect, however, she would not remember the test because it was the beginning of her career, the end of her childhood, the confirmation of her vocation for her life's work. She would remember the test because it was the beginning of her time in Pipo's Station, where Pipo and Libo and Novinha together formed the first community she belonged to since her parents were put into the earth.
It was not easy, espec
ially at the beginning. Novinha did not instantly shed her habit of cold confrontation. Pipo understood it, was prepared to bend with her verbal blows. It was much more of a challenge for Libo. The Zenador's Station had been a place where he and his father could be alone together. Now, without anyone asking his consent, a third person had been added, a cold and demanding person, who spoke to him as if he were a child, even though they were the same age. It galled him that she was a full-fledged xenobiologist, with all the adult status that that implied, when he was still an apprentice.
But he tried to bear it patiently. He was naturally calm, and quiet adhered to him. He was not prone to taking umbrage openly. But Pipo knew his son and saw him burn. After a while even Novinha, insensitive as she was, began to realize that she was provoking Libo more than any normal young man could possibly endure. But instead of easing up on him, she began to regard it as a challenge. How could she force some response from this unnaturally calm, gentle-spirited, beautiful boy?
"You mean you've been working all these years," she said one day, "and you don't even know how the piggies reproduce? How do you know they're all males?"
Libo answered softly. "We explained male and female to them as they learned our languages. They chose to call themselves males. And referred to the other ones, the ones we've never seen, as females."
"But for all you know, they reproduce by budding! Or mitosis!"
Her tone was contemptuous, and Libo did not answer quickly. Pipo imagined he could hear his son's thoughts, carefully rephrasing his answer until it was gentle and safe. "I wish our work were more like physical anthropology," he said. "Then we would be more prepared to apply your research into Lusitania's subcellular life patterns to what we learn about the pequeninos."
Novinha looked horrified. "You mean you don't even take tissue samples?"
Libo blushed slightly, but his voice was still calm when he answered. The boy would have been like this under questioning by the Inquisition, Pipo thought. "It is foolish, I guess," said Libo, "but we're afraid the pequeninos would wonder why we took pieces of their bodies. If one of them took sick by chance afterward, would they think we caused the illness?"
"What if you took something they shed naturally? You can learn a lot from a hair."
Libo nodded; Pipo, watching from his terminal on the other side of the room, recognized the gesture--Libo had learned it from his father. "Many primitive tribes of Earth believed that sheddings from their bodies contained some of their life and strength. What if the piggies thought we were doing magic against them?"
"Don't you know their language? I thought some of them spoke Stark, too." She made no effort to hide her disdain. "Can't you explain what the samples are for?"
"You're right," he said quietly. "But if we explained what we'd use the tissue samples for, we might accidently teach them concepts of biological science a thousand years before they would naturally have reached that point. That's why the law forbids us to explain things like that."
Finally, Novinha was abashed. "I didn't realize how tightly you were bound by the doctrine of minimal intervention."