“I can’t come to you anymore,” said Miro.

  They waited for his explanation.

  “The framlings found out about us. Breaking the law. They sealed the gate.”

  Leaf-eater touched his chin. “Do you know what it was the framlings saw?”

  Miro laughed bitterly. “What didn’t they see? Only one framling ever came with us.”

  “No,” said Human. “The hive queen says it wasn’t the Speaker. The hive queen says they saw it from the sky.”

  The satellites? “What could they see from the sky?”

  “Maybe the hunt,” said Arrow.

  “Maybe the shearing of the cabra,” said Leaf-eater.

  “Maybe the fields of amaranth,” said Cups.

  “All of those,” said Human. “And maybe they saw that the wives have let three hundred twenty children be born since the first amaranth harvest.”

  “Three hundred!”

  “And twenty,” said Mandachuva.

  “They saw that food would be plenty,” said Arrow. “Now we’re sure to win the next war. Our enemies will be planted in huge new forests all over the plain, and the wives will put mother trees in every one of them.”

  Miro felt sick. Is this what all their work and sacrifice was for, to give some transient advantage to one tribe of piggies? Almost he said, Libo didn’t die so you could conquer the world. But his training took over, and he asked a noncommittal question. “Where are all these new children?”

  “None of the little brothers come to us,” explained Human. “We have too much to do, learning from you and teaching all the other brother-houses. We can’t be training little brothers.” Then, proudly, he added, “Of the three hundred, fully half are children of my father, Rooter.”

  Mandachuva nodded gravely. “The wives have great respect for what you have taught us. And they have great hope in the Speaker for the Dead. But what you tell us now, this is very bad. If the framlings hate us, what will we do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Miro. For the moment, his mind was racing to try to cope with all the information they had just told him. Three hundred twenty new babies. A population explosion. And Rooter somehow the father of half of them. Before today Miro would have dismissed the statement of Rooter’s fatherhood as part of the piggies’ totemic belief system. But having seen a tree uproot itself and fall apart in response to singing, he was prepared to question all his old assumptions.

  Yet what good did it do to learn anything now? They’d never let him report again; he couldn’t follow up; he’d be aboard a starship for the next quarter century while someone else did all his work. Or worse, no one else.

  “Don’t be unhappy,” said Human. “You’ll see—the Speaker for the Dead will make it all work out well.”

  “The Speaker. Yes, he’ll make everything work out fine.” The way he did for me and Ouanda. My sister.

  “The hive queen says he’ll teach the framlings to love us—”

  “Teach the framlings,” said Miro. “He’d better do it quickly then. It’s too late for him to save me and Ouanda. They’re arresting us and taking us off planet.”

  “To the stars?” asked Human hopefully.

  “Yes, to the stars, to stand trial! To be punished for helping you. It’ll take us twenty-two years to get there, and they’ll never let us come back.”

  The piggies took a moment to absorb this information. Fine, thought Miro. Let them wonder how the Speaker is going to solve everything for them. I trusted in the Speaker, too, and it didn’t do much for me. The piggies conferred together.

  Human emerged from the group and came closer to the fence. “We’ll hide you.”

  “They’ll never find you in the forest,” said Mandachuva.

  “They have machines that can track me by my smell,” said Miro.

  “Ah. But doesn’t the law forbid them to show us their machines?” asked Human.

  Miro shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. The gate is sealed to me. I can’t cross the fence.”

  The piggies looked at each other.

  “But you have capim right there,” said Arrow.

  Miro looked stupidly at the grass. “So what?” he asked.

  “Chew it,” said Human.

  “Why?” asked Miro.

  “We’ve seen humans chewing capim,” said Leaf-eater. “The other night, on the hillside, we saw the Speaker and some of the robe-humans chewing capim.”

  “And many other times,” said Mandachuva.

  Their impatience with him was frustrating. “What does that have to do with the fence?”

  Again the piggies looked at each other. Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He sat down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. Finally Human gave him a particularly vicious pinch, and when Mandachuva did not respond, they began saying, in males’ language, Ready, Time to go, Now, Ready.

  Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.

  Miro leaped to his feet and began to cry out just as Mandachuva reached the top; by the time he finished his cry, Mandachuva was standing up and dusting himself off.

  “You can’t do that,” said Miro. “It stimulates all the pain nerves in the body. The fence can’t be crossed.”

  “Oh,” said Mandachuva.

  From the other side of the fence, Human was rubbing his thighs together. “He didn’t know,” he said. “The humans don’t know.”

  “It’s an anesthetic,” said Miro. “It stops you from feeling pain.”

  “No,” said Mandachuva. “I feel the pain. Very bad pain. Worst pain in the world.”

  “Rooter says the fence is even worse than dying,” said Human. “Pain in all the places.”

  “But you don’t care,” said Miro.

  “It’s happening to your other self,” said Mandachuva. “It’s happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn’t care. It makes you be your tree self.”

  Then Miro remembered a detail that had been lost in the grotesquerie of Libo’s death. The dead man’s mouth had been filled with a wad of capim. So had the mouth of every piggy that had died. Anesthetic. The death looked like hideous torture, but pain was not the purpose of it. They used an anesthetic. It had nothing to do with pain.

  “So,” said Mandachuva. “Chew the grass, and come with us. We’ll hide you.”

  “Ouanda,” said Miro.

  “Oh, I’ll go get her,” said Mandachuva.

  “You don’t know where she lives.”

  “Yes I do,” said Mandachuva.

  “We do this many times a year,” said Human. “We know where everybody lives.”

  “But no one has ever seen you,” said Miro.

  “We’re very secret,” said Mandachuva. “Besides, nobody is looking for us.”

  Miro imagined dozens of piggies creeping about in Milagre in the middle of the night. No guard was kept. Only a few people had business that took them out in the darkness. And the piggies were small, small enough to duck down in the capim and disappear completely. No wonder they knew about metal and machines, despite all the rules designed to keep them from learning about them. No doubt they had seen the mines, had watched the shuttle land, had seen the kilns firing the bricks, had watched the fazendeiros plowing and planting the human-specific amaranth. No wonder they had known what to ask for.

  How stupid of us, to think we could cut them off from our culture. They kept far more secrets from us than we could possibly keep from them. So much for cultural superiority.

  Miro pulled up his own blade of capim.

  “No,” said Mandachuva, taking the blade from his hands. “You don’t get the root part. If you take the root part, it doesn’t do you any good.” He threw away Miro’s blade and tore off his own, about ten centimeters above the base. Then he folded it and handed it to Miro, who began to chew it.

  Mandachuva pinched and poked him.

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Miro. “Go get Ouanda. They could arrest her any minute. Go. Now. Go on.”

  Mandachuva looked at the others and, seeing some invisible signal of consent, jogged off along the fenceline toward the slopes of Vila Alta, where Ouanda lived.

  Miro chewed a little more. He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda. Forget the rules, all the rules. They had no power over him once he left the human enclave and entered the piggies’ forest. He would become a renegade, as they already accused him of being, and he and Ouanda could leave behind all the insane rules of human behavior and live as they wanted to, and raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies, from the forest life; something new in the Hundred Worlds, and Congress would be powerless to stop them.

  He ran at the fence and seized it with both hands. The pain was no less than before, but now he didn’t care, he scrambled up to the top. But with each new handhold the pain grew more intense, and he began to care, he began to care very much about the pain, he began to realize that the capim had no anesthetic effect on him at all, but by this time he was already at the top of the fence. The pain was maddening; he couldn’t think; momentum carried him above the top and as he balanced there his head passed through the vertical field of the fence. All the pain possible to his body came to his brain at once, as if every part of him were on fire.

  The Little Ones watched in horror as their friend hung there atop the fence, his head and torso on one side, his hips and legs on the other. At once they cried out, reached for him, tried to pull him down. Since they had not chewed capim, they dared not touch the fence.

  Hearing their cries, Mandachuva ran back. Enough of the anesthetic remained in his body that he could climb up and push the heavy human body over the top. Miro landed with a bone-crushing thump on the ground, his arm still touching the fence. The piggies pulled him away. His face was frozen in a rictus of agony.

  “Quick!” shouted Leaf-eater. “Before he dies, we have to plant him!”

  “No!” Human answered, pushing Leaf-eater away from Miro’s frozen body. “We don’t know if he’s dying! The pain is just an illusion, you know that, he doesn’t have a wound, the pain should go away—”

  “It isn’t going away,” said Arrow. “Look at him.”

  Miro’s fists were clenched, his legs were doubled under him, and his spine and neck were arched backward. Though he was breathing in short, hard pants, his face seemed to grow even tighter with pain.

  “Before he dies,” said Leaf-eater. “We have to give him root.”

  “Go get Ouanda,” said Human. He turned to face Mandachuva. “Now! Go get her and tell her Miro is dying. Tell her the gate is sealed and Miro is on this side of it and he’s dying.”

  Mandachuva took off at a run.

  The secretary opened the door, but not until he actually saw Novinha did Ender allow himself to feel relief. When he sent Ela for her, he was sure that she would come; but as they waited so many long minutes for her arrival, he began to doubt his understanding of her. There had been no need to doubt. She was the woman that he thought she was. He noticed that her hair was down and windblown, and for the first time since he came to Lusitania, Ender saw in her face a clear image of the girl who in her anguish had summoned him less than two weeks, more than twenty years ago.

  She looked tense, worried, but Ender knew her anxiety was because of her present situation, coming into the Bishop’s own chambers so shortly after the disclosure of her transgressions. If Ela told her about the danger to Miro, that, too, might be part of her tension. All this was transient; Ender could see in her face, in the relaxation of her movement, in the steadiness of her gaze, that the end of her long deception was indeed the gift he had hoped, had believed it would be. I did not come to hurt you, Novinha, and I’m glad to see that my speaking has brought you better things than shame.

  Novinha stood for a moment, looking at the Bishop. Not defiantly, but politely, with dignity; he responded the same way, quietly offering her a seat. Dom Cristão started to rise from his stool, but she shook her head, smiled, took another stool near the wall. Near Ender. Ela came and stood behind and beside her mother, so she was also partly behind Ender. Like a daughter standing between her parents, thought Ender, then he thrust the thought away from him and refused to think of it anymore. There were far more important matters at hand.

  “I see,” said Bosquinha, “that you intend this meeting to be an interesting one.”

  “I think Congress decided that already,” said Dona Cristã.

  “Your son is accused,” Bishop Peregrino began, “of crimes against—”

  “I know what he’s accused of,” said Novinha. “I didn’t know until tonight, when Ela told me, but I’m not surprised. My daughter Elanora has also been defying some rules her master set for her. Both of them have a higher allegiance to their own conscience than to the rules others set down for them. It’s a failing, if your object is to maintain order, but if your goal is to learn and adapt, it’s a virtue.”

  “Your son isn’t on trial here,” said Dom Cristão.

  “I asked you to meet together,” said Ender, “because a decision must be made. Whether or not to comply with the orders given us by Starways Congress.”

  “We don’t have much choice,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  “There are many choices,” said Ender, “and many reasons for choosing. You already made one choice—when you found your files being stripped, you decided to try to save them, and you decided to trust them with me, a stranger. Your trust was not misplaced—I’ll return your files to you whenever you ask, unread, unaltered.”

  “Thank you,” said Dona Cristã. “But we did that before we knew the gravity of the charge.”

  “They’re going to evacuate us,” said Dom Cristão.

  “They control everything,” said Bishop Peregrino.

  “I already told him that,” said Bosquinha.

  “They don’t control everything,” said Ender. “They only control you through the ansible connection.”

  “We can’t cut off the ansible,” said Bishop Peregrino. “That is our only connection with the Vatican.”

  “I don’t suggest cutting off the ansible. I only tell you what I can do. And when I tell you this, I am trusting you the way you trusted me. Because if you repeat this to anyone, the cost to me—and to someone else, whom I love and depend on—would be immeasurable.”

  He looked at each of them, and each in turn nodded acquiescence.

  “I have a friend whose control over ansible communications among all the Hundred Worlds is complete—and completely unsuspected. I’m the only one who knows what she can do. And she has told me that when I ask her to, she can make it seem to all the framlings that we here on Lusitania have cut off our ansible connection. And yet we will have the ability to send guarded messages if we want to—to the Vatican, to the offices of your order. We can read distant records, intercept distant communications. In short, we will have eyes and they will be blind.”

  “Cutting off the ansible, or even seeming to, would be an act of rebellion. Of war.” Bosquinha was saying it as harshly as possible, but Ender could see that the idea appealed to her, though she was resisting it with all her might. “I will say, though, that if we were insane enough to decide on war, what the Speaker is offering us is a clear advantage. We’d need any advantage we could get—if we were mad enough to rebel.”

  “We have nothing to gain by rebellion,” said the Bishop, “and everything to lose. I grieve for the tragedy it would be to send Miro and Ouanda to stand trial on another world, especially because they are so young. But the court will no doubt take that into account and treat them with mercy. And by complying with the orders of the committee, we will save this community much suffering.”

  “Don’t you think that having to evacuate this world will also cause them suffering?” asked Ender.

  “Yes. Yes, it will. But a law was broken, and the penalty must be paid.”

  “What if the law was based on a misunderstanding, and the penalty is far out of proportion to the sin?”

  “We can’t be the judges of that,” said the Bishop.

  “We are the judges of that. If we go along with Congressional orders, then we’re saying that the law is good and the punishment is just. And it may be that at the end of this meeting you’ll decide exactly that. But there are some things you must know before you can make your decision. Some of those things I can tell you, and some of those things only Ela and Novinha can tell you. You shouldn’t make your decision until you know all that we know.”

  “I’m always glad to know as much as possible,” said the Bishop. “Of course, the final decision is Bosquinha’s, not mine—”

  “The final decision belongs to all of you together, the civil and religious and intellectual leadership of Lusitania. If any one of you decides against rebellion, rebellion is impossible. Without the Church’s support, Bosquinha can’t lead. Without civil support, the Church has no power.”

  “We have no power,” said Dom Cristão. “Only opinions.”

  “Every adult in Lusitania looks to you for wisdom and fairmindedness.”

  “You forget a fourth power,” said Bishop Peregrino. “Yourself.”

  “I’m a framling here.”

  “A most extraordinary framling,” said the Bishop. “In your four days here you have captured the soul of this people in a way I feared and foretold. Now you counsel rebellion that could cost us everything. You are as dangerous as Satan. And yet here you are, submitting to our authority as if you weren’t free to get on the shuttle and leave here when the starship returns to Trondheim with our two young criminals aboard.”