"Dona Ivanova," he said, "how could you read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagine that its author could bring comfort?"
It was Miro who answered--silent, slow-talking Miro, who leapt into the conversation with a vigor she had not seen in him since he was little. "I've read it," he said, "and the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the tale of the hive queen with deep compassion."
The Speaker smiled sadly. "But he wasn't writing to the buggers, was he? He was writing to humankind, who still celebrated the destruction of the buggers as a great victory. He wrote cruelly, to turn their pride to regret, their joy to grief. And now human beings have completely forgotten that once they hated the buggers, that once they honored and celebrated a name that is now unspeakable--"
"I can say anything," said Ivanova. "His name was Ender, and he destroyed everything he touched." Like me, she did not say.
"Oh? And what do you know of him?" His voice whipped out like a grass-saw, ragged and cruel. "How do you know there wasn't something that he touched kindly? Someone who loved him, who was blessed by his love? Destroyed everything he touched--that's a lie that can't truthfully be said of any human being who ever lived."
"Is that your doctrine, Speaker? Then you don't know much." She was defiant, but still his anger frightened her. She had thought his gentleness was as imperturbable as a confessor's.
And almost immediately the anger faded from his face.
"You can ease your conscience," he said. "Your call started my journey here, but others called for a speaker while I was on the way."
"Oh?" Who else in this benighted city was familiar enough with the Hive Queen and the Hegemon to want a speaker, and independent enough of Bishop Peregrino to dare to call for one? "If that's so, then why are you here in my house?"
"Because I was called to speak the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira, your late husband."
It was an appalling thought. "Him! Who would want to think of him again, now that he's dead!"
The Speaker did not answer. Instead Miro spoke sharply from her bed. "Grego would, for one. The Speaker showed us what we should have known--that the boy is grieving for his father and thinks we all hate him--"
"Cheap psychology," she snapped. "We have therapists of our own, and they aren't worth much either."
Ela's voice came from behind her. "I called for him to speak Father's death, Mother. I thought it would be decades before he came, but I'm glad he's here now, when he can do us some good."
"What good can he do us!"
"He already has, Mother. Grego fell asleep embracing him, and Quara spoke to him."
"Actually," said Miro, "she told him that he stinks."
"Which was probably true," said Ela, "since Greguinho peed all over him."
Miro and Ela burst into laughter at the memory, and the Speaker also smiled. This more than anything else discomposed Novinha--such good cheer had been virtually unfelt in this house since Marcao brought her here a year after Pipo's death. Against her will Novinha remembered her joy when Miro was newly born, and when Ela was little, the first few years of their lives, how Miro babbled about everything, how Ela toddled madly after him through the house, how the children played together and romped in the grass within sight of the piggies' forest just beyond the fence; it was Novinha's delight in the children that
poisoned Marcao, that made him hate them both, because he knew that none of it belonged to him. By the time Quim was born, the house was thick with anger, and he never learned how to laugh freely where his parents might notice. Hearing Miro and Ela laugh together was like the abrupt opening of a thick black curtain; suddenly it was daylight again, when Novinha had forgotten there was any season of the day but night.
How dared this stranger invade her house and tear open all the curtains she had closed!
"I won't have it," she said. "You have no right to pry into my husband's life."
He raised an eyebrow. She knew Starways Code as well as anyone, and so she knew perfectly well that he not only had a right, the law protected him in the pursuit of the true story of the dead.
"Marcao was a miserable man," she persisted, "and telling the truth about him will cause nothing but pain."
"You're quite right that the truth about him will cause nothing but pain, but not because he was a miserable man," said the Speaker. "If I told nothing but what everyone already knows--that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar until the constables sent him home--then I would not cause pain, would I? I'd cause a great deal of satisfaction, because then everyone would be reassured that their view of him was correct all along. He was scum, and so it was all right that they treated him like scum."
"And you think he wasn't?"
"No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."
"If you believe that, then you're younger than you look," said Novinha.
"Am I?" said the Speaker. "It was less than two weeks ago that I first heard your call. I studied you then, and even if you don't remember, Novinha, I remember that as a young girl you were sweet and beautiful and good. You had been lonely before, but Pipo and Libo both knew you and found you worthy of love."
"Pipo was dead."