“And it isn't xenobiology.”
“Yes it is! That's part of it, anyway.”
“And what's the rest of it?”
“What you are. What you do. Only you're doing it all wrong, you're doing it stupidly.”
“Xenobiologist and xenologer.”
“They made a stupid mistake when they created a new science to study the piggies. They were a bunch of tired old anthropologists who put on new hats and called themselves Xenologers. But you can't understand the piggies just by watching the way they behave! They came out of a different evolution! You have to understand their genes, what's going on inside their cells. And the other animals' cells, too, because they can't be studied by themselves, nobody lives in isolation.”
Don't lecture me, thought Pipo. Tell me what you feel.
And to provoke her to be more emotional, he whispered, “Except you.”
It worked. From cold and contemptuous she became hot and defensive. “You'll never understand them! But I will!”
“Why do you care about them? What are the piggies to you?”
“You'd never understand. You're a good Catholic.” She said the word with contempt. “It's a book that's on the Index.”
Pipo's face glowed with sudden understanding. “The Hive Queen and the Hegemon.”
“He lived three thousand years ago, whoever he was, the one who called himself the Speaker for the Dead. But he understood the buggers! We wiped them all out, the only other alien race we ever knew, we killed them all, but he understood.”
“And you want to write the story of the piggies the way the original Speaker wrote of the buggers.”
“The way you say it, you make it sound as easy as doing a scholarly paper. You don't know what it was like to write the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. How much agony it was for him to– to imagine himself inside an alien mind– and come out of it filled with love for the great creature we destroyed. He lived at the same time as the worst human being who ever lived, Ender the Xenocide, who destroyed the buggers– and he did his best to undo what Ender did, the Speaker for the Dead tried to raise the dead–”
“But he couldn't.”
“But he did! He made them live again– you'd know it if you had read the book! I don't know about Jesus, I listen to Bishop Peregrino and I don't think there's any power in their priesthood to turn wafers into flesh or forgive a milligram of guilt. But the Speaker for the Dead brought the hive queen back to life.”
“Then where is she?”
“In here! In me!”
He nodded. “And someone else is in you. The Speaker for the Dead. That's who you want to be.”
“It's the only true story I ever heard,” she said. “The only one I care about. Is that what you wanted to hear? That I'm a heretic? And my whole life's work is going to be adding another book to the Index of truths that good Catholics are forbidden to read?”
“What I wanted to hear,” said Pipo softly, “was the name of what you are instead of the name of all the things that you are not. What you are is the hive queen. What you are is the Speaker for the Dead. It's a very small community, small in numbers, but a great-hearted one. So you chose not to be part of the bands of children who group together for the sole purpose of excluding others, and people look at you and say, poor girl, she's so isolated, but you know a secret, you know who you really are. You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there's never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapiens.”
“Now you say I'm not even human? You made me cry like a little girl because you wouldn't let me take the test, you made me humiliate myself, and now you say I'm unhuman?”
“You can take the test.”
The words hung in the air.
“When?” she whispered.
“Tonight. Tomorrow. Begin when you like. I'll stop my work to take you through the tests as quickly as you like.”
“Thank you! Thank you, I–”
“Become the Speaker for the Dead. I'll help you all I can. The law forbids me to take anyone but my apprentice, my son Libo, out to meet the pequeninos. But we'll open our notes to you. Everything we learn, we'll show you. All our guesses and speculation. In return, you also show us all your work, what you find out about the genetic patterns of this world that might help us understand the pequeninos. And when we've learned enough, together, you can write your book, you can become the Speaker. But this time not the Speaker for the Dead. The pequeninos aren't dead.”
In spite of herself, she smiled. “The Speaker for the Living.”
“I've read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, too,” he said. “I can't think of a better place for you to find your name.”
But she did not trust him yet, did not believe what he seemed to be promising. “I'll want to come here often. All the time.”
“We lock it up when we go home to bed.”
“But all the rest of the time. You'll get tired of me. You'll tell me to go away. You'll keep secrets from me. You'll tell me to be quiet and not mention my ideas.”
“We've only just become friends, and already you think I'm such a liar and cheat, such an impatient oaf.”
“But you will, everyone does; they all wish I'd go away–”
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, especially 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.