Now I fear that I've told you more than you ever wanted to know about how Speaker for the Dead came to be. A writer's life is boring indeed. I write stories about people who take risks, who reach out and change the world. But when it comes to my life, it mostly consists of hanging around at home, writing when I have to, playing computer games or watching TV whenever I can get away with it. My real life is being with my wife, with my children; going to church and teaching my Sunday school class; keeping in touch with my family and friends; and, the primary duty of every father, turning off lights throughout the house and muttering about how I'm the only one who seems to care about turning them off because I'm the one who has to change the lousy light bulbs. I doubt that there's much of a story in that.
But I hope that in the lives of Ender Wiggin, Novinha, Miro, Ela, Human, Jane, the hive queen, and so many others in this book, you will find stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart. That's the transaction that counts more than bestseller lists, royalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in.
Orson Scott Card
Greensboro, North Carolina
29 March 1991
SOME PEOPLE OF
LUSITANIA COLONY
Xenologers (Zenadores)
Pipo (Joao Figueira Alvarez) Libo (Liberdade Gracas a Deus Figueira de Medici) Miro (Marcos Vladimir Ribeira von Hesse) Ouanda (Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi) Xenobiologists (Biologistas)
Gusto (Vladimir Tiago Gussman) Cida (Ekaterina Maria Aparecida do Norte von Hesse-Gussman) Novinha (Ivanova Santa Catarina von Hesse) Ela (Ekaterina Elanora Ribeira von Hesse) Governor
Bosquinha (Faria Lima Maria do Bosque) Bishop
Peregrino (Armao Cebola)
Abbot and Principal of the Monastery Dom Cristao (Amai a Tudomundo Para Que Deus vos Ame Cristao) Dona Crista (Detestai o Pecado e Fazei o Direito Crista)
*All dates are expressed as years after adoption of the Starways Code.
PRONOUNCING FOREIGN NAMES
Three human languages are used by characters in this book. Stark, since it originated as English, is represented as English in the book. The Nordic spoken on Trondheim evolved from Swedish. Portuguese is the native language of Lusitania. On every world, however, schoolchildren are taught Stark from the beginning.
The Portuguese language, while unusually beautiful when spoken aloud, is very difficult for readers who are accustomed to English to sound out from the written letters. Even if you aren't planning to read this book aloud, you may be more comfortable if you have a general idea of how the Portuguese names and phrases are pronounced.
Consonants: Single consonants are pronounced more or less as they are in English, with the addition of c, which always sounds like ss. Exceptions are j, which is pronounced like the z in azure, as is g when followed by e or i; and the initial r and double rr, which are pronounced somewhere between the American h and the Yiddish ch.
Vowels: Single vowels are pronounced more or less as follows: a as in father, e as in get, i like the ee in fee, o as in throne, and u like the oo in toot. (This is a gross oversimplification, since there are really two distinct a sounds, neither of which is really like the a in father, three meaning-changing ways to pronounce e--e, e, and the quick e at the end of a word--and three meaning-changing ways to pronounce o--o, o, and the quick o at the ends of words. But it's close enough to get you through this book.) Consonant combinations: The combination lh is pronounced like the lli in William; nh, like the ni in onion. The combination ch is always pronounced like the English sh. The combination qu, when followed by e or i, is pronounced like the English k; when followed by a, o, or u, like the English qu; the same pattern is followed by gu. Thus Quara is pronounced KWAH-rah, while Figueira is pronounced fee-GAY-rah.
Vowel combinations: The combination ou is pronounced like the ow in throw; ai, like igh in high; ei, like eigh in weigh. The combination eu is not found in English; it is pronounced as a very quick combination of the e in get and the u in put.
Nasal vowels: A vowel or vowel combination with a tilde--usually ao and a--or the combination am at the end of a word are all nasalized. That is, they are pronounced as if the vowel were going to end with the English ng sound, only the ng is never quite closed. In addition, the syllable with a tilde is always stressed, so that the name Marcao is pronounced mah-KOWNG. (Syllables with ^ and ' accent marks are also stressed.) If I told you that when t comes before the i sound it's pronounced like the English ch, and d follows the same pattern to sound like the English j, or if I mentioned that x always sounds like sh except when it sounds like z, you might well give up entirely, so I won't.
PROLOGUE
In the year 1830, after the formation of Starways Congress, a robot scout ship sent a report by ansible: The planet it was investigating was well within the parameters for human life. The nearest planet with any kind of population pressure was Baia; Starways Congress granted them the exploration license.
So it was that the first humans to see the new world were Portuguese by language, Brazilian by culture, and Catholic by creed. In the year 1886 they disembarked from their shuttle, crossed themselves, and named the planet Lusitania--the ancient name of Portugal. They set about cataloguing the flora and fauna. Five days later they realized that the little forest-dwelling animals that they had called porquinhos--piggies--were not animals at all.
For the first time since the Xenocide of the Buggers by the monstrous Ender, humans had found intelligent alien life. The piggies were technologically primitive, but they used tools and built houses and spoke a language. "It is another chance God has given us," declared Archcardinal Pio of Baia. "We can be redeemed for the destruction of the buggers."
The members of Starways Congress worshipped many gods, or none, but they agreed with the Archcardinal. Lusitania would be settled from Baia, and therefore under Catholic License, as tradition demanded. But the colony could never spread beyond a limited area or exceed a limited population. And it was bound, above all, by one law: The piggies were not to be disturbed.
1
PIPO
Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence.
Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.