"Yes."
"That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right."
Miro didn't like hearing this woman leap to conclusions about his mother. "She's nothing like you."
"Of course not." She leaned forward in her seat. "Well, have you decided?"
"Decided what?"
"Are we working together or did you just unplug yourself from thirty years of human history for nothing?"
"What do you want from me?"
"Stories, of course. Facts I can get from the computer."
"Stories about what?"
"You. The piggies. You and the piggies. This whole business with the Lusitania Fleet began with you and the piggies, after all. It was because you interfered with them that--"
"We helped them!"
"Oh, did I use the wrong word again?"
Miro glared at her. But even as he did, he knew that she was right--he was being oversensitive. The word interfered, when used in a scientific context, was almost value-neutral. It merely meant that he had introduced change into the culture he was studying. And if it did have a negative connotation, it was that he had lost his scientific perspective--he had stopped studying the pequeninos and started treating them as friends. Of that he was surely guilty. No, not guilty--he was proud of having made that transition. "Go on," he said.
"All this began because you broke the law and piggies started growing amaranth."
"Not anymore."
"Yes, that's ironic, isn't it? The descolada virus has gotten in and killed every strain of amaranth that your sister developed for them. So your interference was in vain."
"No it wasn't," said Miro. "They're learning."
"Yes, I know. More to the point, they're choosing. What to learn, what to do. You brought them freedom. I approve wholeheartedly of what you decided to do. But my job is to write about you to the people out there in the Hundred Worlds and the colonies, and they won't necessarily see things that way. So what I need from you is the story of how and why you broke the law and interfered with the piggies, and why the government and people of Lusitania rebelled against Congress rather than send you off to be tried and punished for your crimes."
"Andrew already told you that story."
"And I've already written about it, in larger terms. Now I need the personal things. I want to be able to let other people know these so-called piggies as people. And you, too. I have to let them know you as a person. If it's possible, it would be nice if I could bring them to like you. Then the Lusitania Fleet will look like what it is--a monstrous overreaction to a threat that never existed."
"The fleet is xenocide."
"So I've said in my propaganda," said Valentine.
He couldn't bear her self-certainty. He couldn't bear her unshakable faith in herself. So he had to contradict her, and the only way he could was to blurt out ideas that he had not yet thought out completely. Ideas that were still only half-formed doubts in his mind. "The fleet is also self-defense."
It had the desired effect--it stopped her lecture and even made her raise her eyebrows, questioning him. The trouble was, now he had to explain what he meant.
"The descolada," he said. "It's the most dangerous form of life anywhere."
"The answer to that is quarantine. Not sending a fleet armed with the M.D. Device, so they have the capacity to turn Lusitania and everybody on it into microscopic interstellar dust."
"You're so sure you're right?"
"I'm sure that it's wrong for Starways Congress even to contemplate obliterating another sentient species."
"The piggies can't live without the descolada," said Miro, "and if the descolada ever spreads to another planet, it will destroy all life there. It will."
It was a pleasure to see that Valentine was capable of looking puzzled. "But I thought the virus was contained. It was your grandparents who found a way to stop it, to make it dormant in human beings."