Xenocide (Ender's Saga 3)

"Em nome do Pai e do Filho e do Espirito Santo," said Ela. "Amem."

"Amem," whispered Quara.

Then Ela embraced her sister and they wept together in the night.

Valentine was surprised to find that the Mayor and the Bishop were the only other people at the emergency meeting. Why was she there? She had no constituency, no claim to authority.

Mayor Kovano Zeljezo pulled up a chair for her. All the furniture in the Bishop's private chamber was elegant, but the chairs were designed to be painful. The seat was so shallow from front to back that to sit at all, you had to keep your buttocks right up against the back. And the back itself was ramrod straight, with no allowances at all for the shape of the human spine, and it rose so high that your head was pushed forward. If you sat on one for any length of time, the chair would force you to bend forward, to lean your arms on your knees.

Perhaps that was the point, thought Valentine. Chairs that make you bow in the presence of God.

Or perhaps it was even more subtle. The chairs were designed to make you so physically uncomfortable that you longed for a less corporeal existence. Punish the flesh so you'll prefer to live in the spirit.

"You look puzzled," said Bishop Peregrino.

"I can see why the two of you would confer in an emergency," said Valentine. "Did you need me to take notes?"

"Sweet humility," said Peregrino. "But we have read your writings, my daughter, and we would be fools not to seek out your wisdom in a time of trouble."

"Whatever wisdom I have I'll give you," said Valentine, "but I wouldn't hope for much."

With that, Mayor Kovano plunged into the subject of the meeting. "There are many long-term problems," he said, "but we won't have much chance to solve those if we don't solve the immediate one. Last night there was some kind of quarrel at the Ribeira house--"

"Why must our finest minds be grouped in our most unstable family?" murmured the Bishop.

"They aren't the most unstable family, Bishop Peregrino," said Valentine. "They're merely the family whose inner quakings cause the most perturbation at the surface. Other families suffer much worse turmoil, but you never notice because they don't matter so much to the colony."

The Bishop nodded sagely, but Valentine suspected that he was annoyed at being corrected on so trivial a point. Only it wasn't trivial, she knew. If the Bishop and the Mayor started thinking that the Ribeira family was more unstable than in fact it was, they might lose trust in Ela or Miro or Novinha, all of whom were absolutely essential if Lusitania were to survive the coming crises. For that matter, even the most immature ones, Quara and Grego, might be needed. They had already lost Quim, probably the best of them all. It would be foolish to throw the others away as well; yet if the colony's leaders were to start misjudging the Ribeiras as a group, they would soon misjudge them as individuals, too.

"Last night," Mayor Kovano continued, "the family dispersed, and as far as we know, few of them are speaking to any of the others. I tried to find Novinha, and only recently learned that she has taken refuge with the Children of the Mind of Christ and won't see or speak to anyone. Ela tells me that her mother has put a seal on all the files in the xenobiology laboratory, so that work there has come to an absolute standstill this morning. Quara is with Ela, believe it or not. The boy Miro is outside the perimeter somewhere. Olhado is at home and his wife says he has turned his eyes off, which is his way of withdrawing from life."

"So far," said Peregrino, "it sounds like they're all taking Father Estevao's death very badly. I must visit with them and help them."

"All of these are perfectly acceptable grief responses," said Kovano, "and I wouldn't have called this meeting if this were all. As you say, Your Grace, you would deal with this as their spiritual leader, without any need for me."

"Grego," said Valentine, realizing who had not been accounted for in Kovano's list.

"Exactly," said Kovano. "His response was to go into a bar--several bars, before the night was over--and tell every half-drunk paranoid bigot in Milagre--of which we have our fair share--that the piggies have murdered Father Quim in cold blood."

"Que Deus nos abencoe," murmured Bishop Peregrino.

"One of the bars had a disturbance," said Kovano. "Windows shattered, chairs broken, two men hospitalized."

"A brawl?" asked the Bishop.

"Not really. Just anger vented in general."

"So they got it out of their system."

"I hope so," said Kovano. "But it seemed only to stop when the sun came up. And when the constable arrived."

"Constable?" asked Valentine. "Just one?"

"He heads a volunteer police force," said Kovano. "Like the volunteer fire brigade. Two-hour patrols. We woke some up. It took twenty of them to quiet things down. We only have about fifty on the whole force, usually with only four on duty at any one time. They usually spend the night walking around telling each other jokes. And some of the off-duty police were among the ones trashing the bar."

"So you're saying they're not terribly reliable in an emergency."

"They behaved splendidly last night," said Kovano. "The ones who were on duty, I mean."