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.
“We didn't want to bring you out here.” Miro said it firmly, and with his body so oriented toward Ouanda's that Ender understood that in fact Miro had wanted to bring him out here, but was including himself in Ouanda's reluctance in order to show her that he was one with her. You are in love with each other, Ender said silently. And tonight, if I speak Marcdo's death tonight, I will have to tell you that you're brother and sister. I have to drive the wedge of the incest tabu between you. And you will surely hate me.
“You're going to see– some–” Ouanda could not bring herself to say it.
Miro smiled. “We call them Questionable Activities. They began with Pipo, accidentally. But Libo did it deliberately, and we are continuing his work. It is careful, gradual. We didn't just discard the Congressional rules about this. But there were crises, and we had to help. A few years ago, for instance, the piggies were running short of macios, the bark worms they mostly lived on then–”
“You're going to tell him that first?” asked Ouanda.
Ah, thought Ender. It isn't as important to her to maintain the illusion of solidarity as it is to him.
“He's here partly to Speak Libo's death,” said Miro. “And this was what happened right before.”
“We have no evidence of a causal relationship–”
“Let me discover causal relationships,” said Ender quietly. “Tell me what happened when the piggies got hungry.”
"It was the wives who were hungry, they said. " Miro ignored Ouanda's anxiety. "You see, the males gather food for the females and the young, and so there wasn't enough to go around. They kept hinting about how they would have to go to war. About how they would probably all die. " Miro shook his head. "They seemed almost happy about it."
Ouanda stood up. “He hasn't even promised. Hasn't promised anything.”
“What do you want me to promise?” asked Ender.
“Not to– let any of this–”
“Not to tell on you?” asked Ender.
She nodded, though she plainly resented the childish phrase.
“I won't promise any such thing,” said Ender. “My business is telling.”
She whirled on Miro. “You see!”
Miro in turn looked frightened. “You can't tell. They'll seal the gate. They'll never let us through!”
“And you'd have to find another line of work?” asked Ender.
Ouanda looked at him with contempt. “Is that all you think xenology is? A job? That's another intelligent species there in the woods. Ramen, not varelse, and they must be known.”
Ender did not answer, but his gaze did not leave her face.
“It's like the Hive Queen and the Hegemon,” said Miro. “The piggies, they're like the buggers. Only smaller, weaker, more primitive. We need to study them, yes, but that isn't enough. You can study beasts and not care a bit when one of them drops dead or gets eaten up, but these are– they're like us. We can't just study their hunger, observe their destruction in war, we know them, we–”
“Love them,” said Ender.
“Yes!” said Ouanda defiantly.
“But if you left them, if you weren't here at all, they wouldn't disappear, would they?”
“No,” said Miro.
“I told you he'd be just like the committee,” said Ouanda.
Ender ignored her. “What would it cost them if you left?”