“What’s the story, Dabeet?” asked Valentine.

  “It’s the cats,” said Dabeet.

  “Oh, yes. The pets they kept on the pirate ships.”

  “Cats are never pets,” said Dabeet. “They’re sport killers, and they’re out-hunting the llop.”

  “Housecats taking down the same prey as the llop?” asked Andrew skeptically.

  “They’ve gotten bigger, but no, they go after much smaller prey. All the smaller predators are starving—the E.S. operates four sanctuaries, and half our work is keeping housecats out of them. We have no idea how many species we’ve lost. We’re preserving thirty or so that we know of.”

  “I read that the colony pays a bounty on cats,” said Valentine.

  “Cats reproduce faster than the Tarragonans can kill them,” said Dabeet. “Besides, for everyone bringing us cat heads for the bounty, there’s somebody feeding cats at the back door. If we catch them, they say they’re luring them so they can collect the bounty. How can we disprove the claim?”

  “The cats are wiping out smaller predators,” said Andrew. “But you’re saying that they outcompete the llop.”

  “They harry the herds of the llops’ natural prey. They leap on their backs and ride them, claws dug in. They keep working the claw in, in, in between the vertebrae. About a quarter of the time, their sharp little probes sever the spinal cord and the animal drops. Far more often, the prey animal collapses from blood loss or exhaustion or both.”

  “So they do hunt the big prey animals,” said Andrew.

  “Hunt them, but they don’t eat them. They walk away from the corpse.”

  “Why aren’t the llop following the cats around, eating what they leave?”

  “They won’t eat any prey that cats have touched,” said Dabeet.

  “Have to kill their own?” asked Valentine.

  “No,” said Dabeet. “They have no problem with scavenging. Except when a cat made the kill.”

  “So the cats eat the smaller prey animals, starving out their small and midsize competitors,” said Valentine. “Then they kill the large prey animals and leave the bodies to rot, and the llop won’t touch the carcasses.”

  “Kenneth Argon didn’t have a theory?”

  “About this? It wasn’t a theory; it was a fact. Because they won’t eat cat kills, the llop are about the only major land species in the wild that isn’t affected, one way or another, by Toxoplasma gondii.”

  “The psychoactive protozoan that can only reach adulthood in the gut of a cat,” said Valentine.

  “She’s coaching me,” said Andrew. “She thinks I don’t remember.”

  “I think you never knew,” said Valentine. “You weren’t on Earth long enough.”

  “Incurable, yes?” asked Andrew.

  Dabeet shook his head. “We have several cures that work on some people some of the time. Prevention is the best policy, though. I can assure you that the human population of Tarragona is toxoplasma-free. Because we don’t keep cats indoors, so we don’t share breathing space with cat poo, and the only meat we eat comes from flocks and herds kept in complete cat-free isolation.”

  “So the cats have Toxoplasma gondii,” said Andrew.

  “T. gondii doesn’t kill or damage the cats,” said Dabeet. “It does make them reproduce frantically and hunt incessantly, but since that’s pretty much what cats do even if they don’t have T. gondii, I don’t think the cats are suffering. The toms just get lucky when they’re dating at a higher than normal rate.”

  “What does it do to other animals?” asked Andrew.

  “Despair, more or less,” said Dabeet. “Infected animals lose all fear of cats, or at least they don’t try very hard to get away. With Earth-source animals like mice and rats, it keeps them from going to the effort of trying to run away.”

  Andrew shook his head. “I’ve never seen alien species where Earth-source infections have the same effects.”

  “T. gondii tries all kinds of things, but what works is behavior modification that helps cats succeed as hunters, so they can eat infected meat and get infected, so the protozoa can get into their gut and become mature and reproduce.”

  “The effect on humans?” asked Andrew.

  “It generally raises suicide and depression rates in its human victims,” said Dabeet, “especially women, especially pregnant women and new mothers.”

  “I don’t see how that helps them,” said Andrew.

  “It doesn’t,” said Valentine. “But they don’t know that. They just do what they do. If we left suicide victims out for the cats to eat, then it would help T. gondii. But we don’t, so it doesn’t.”

  Andrew and Valentine then fell silent, and Andrew’s eyes closed. Dabeet knew that he was thinking. So he didn’t barge in with the answer.

  “Who told the llops not to eat cat kills?” asked Andrew.

  “Exactly,” said Dabeet. “I think that’s why Ken wouldn’t certify that the llops aren’t sentient. Because not eating cat kills is starving them to death, even as it keeps them from getting infected. How did they know? They have no microscopes, they can’t read our lab reports, they don’t understand spoken English. Or, uh, Starways Common Speech.”

  “All three of us grew up in America,” said Valentine. “It’s English.”

  “And you don’t know if Ken had a theory about this,” said Andrew.

  “I’m certain that he did,” said Dabeet. “He just didn’t tell me.”

  “So you hope that Valentine and I will find out his theory,” said Andrew.

  “I hope you’ll find out that he was a loon,” said Dabeet, “so I can regard his decisions as insane and let this colony of completely uninfected people become self-governing.”

  “What if we find the one llop that speaks fluent Starways Common and he explains that the llop really have a very high civilization, they just don’t make tools or weapons or buildings because it’s so inconvenient to do so without fingers. They construct all their monuments in the shared memory of the tribe.”

  Andrew seemed completely serious. Dabeet didn’t know how to answer such an impossible proposition. He wanted to say: If nobody can see it, and they can’t say it, then the tree fell noiselessly in the forest. They are only sentient, for E.S. purposes, if the E.S. can tell that they say things or make things or remember things.

  The Hive Queens couldn’t talk to humans either—but there was never any doubt they were sentient, because they made machines. That essay by the original Speaker for the Dead had made them out to be beautiful, and sorry about the millions of humans who died as a kind of typographical error. But Dabeet had to make judgments in the real world.

  He had been reasonably good at making such judgments, which is why he had been sent here to deal with this nightmare. But the matter was beyond him, so far at least, which is why he had called for a speaker for the dead, to be another pair of eyes, to be someone who was not official, yet could ask questions. But if he was going to bring up hypothetical nonsense . . .

  “The E.S. has been studying the llop for a century,” said Dabeet, “since before we allowed colonists to come here.”

  “And the E.S. always catches everything?” asked Andrew. With that same unexpressive expression. Yet the question was clearly ironic, so perhaps a completely blank face was Ender Wiggin’s irony face.

  “I’m as skeptical of bureaucracy and bureaucratic science as you are. Maybe more,” said Dabeet. “But there are a lot of very good, rigorous scientists in the E.S., and Ken Argon was one of them. I’ve duplicated and checked their work myself, and had offworld surrogates check it too. Somehow the llop keep themselves uninfected, and they always have.”

  “This cat-kill avoidance began while the pirates still ran things?” asked Valentine.

  “They weren’t scientists, but you don’t survive in a generation ship if you don’t have really good, observant, careful technicians,” said Dabeet. “That’s who first noticed what the llop weren’t eating—anything killed by a cat.”

  “So who killed Ken Argon?” asked Andrew. “Not the cats, not the llop, and not any of the Tarragonans, or your report would have said so.”

  “My report said we had no conclusive proof,” said Dabeet, “but I didn’t absolve anybody. The likeliest thing is that he came in contact with some as-yet-unknown native venomous creature, and the toxin was so lethal it overwhelmed his body. But ‘unknown native venomous creature’ isn’t a report that the E.S. wants to see. Nor do I want that to be my report.”

  “None of the colonists are good with chemicals?”

  “Not that good,” said Dabeet. “Nobody in the whole E.S. recognizes the venom as being from any known species. Nobody can figure out how it’s made or how it works. But Ken had a lot of it in his system when he died. In excruciating agony, after demonstrating that no known anti-venom had any effect.”

  “So a guy that the whole colony wants dead, gets dead, but he’s killed by a venom that nobody in the colony could possibly make. Or find.” Valentine had her blank face on. Maybe it was her historian face. Or maybe it was her “Is everybody really this stupid?” face.

  Her observation hung in the air, because Dabeet couldn’t dispute what she had said, or even respond to the implication that Ken’s death had been murder.

  “I’m glad you brought us here,” said Andrew. “Because we’re super smart.”

  “So am I,” said Dabeet.

  “I know,” said Andrew. “We all have the test scores to prove it.”

  Dabeet shook his head. He had meant, “So am I glad I brought you,” not, “So am I super smart.” But he’d roll with the misunderstanding. “Now you’re making fun of me,” said Dabeet, “because back when we first met, I was still proud of my test scores.”

  “Now you’re not?” asked Andrew.

  “I had a friend who told me that being good on tests means nothing, because with a test, you always know that there’s a desired answer. Even if it’s a supposedly no-win test, that’s the desired answer: ‘This can’t be done.’ With real-world problems, the ones that matter, you can’t be sure whether there’s an answer or not, because nobody made up the problem and gave it to you in order for you to show how quickly you can find the expected answer, if ever.”

  “So we can’t guess what the testmakers meant, because there were no testmakers,” said Valentine.

  “Well, except,” said Dabeet with a sigh.

  “Except what?” asked Valentine.

  “Except God,” said Dabeet. And then, at Valentine’s raised eyebrow: “I was being facetious.”

  “Let’s just suppose that this is a test question given to us by God,” said Valentine. “Does he want us to find an answer, or to not find an answer?”

  “Or does he want us to find an answer if we do, or not find one if we don’t,” said Dabeet. How quickly theological speculation became an angels-dancing-on-pinheads discussion. “I bring up God because that’s what I keep hearing from Tarragonans. ‘What does God mean by this?’ A lot of true believers here.”

  “Catholic?”

  “No religion is given official recognition on an outpost that doesn’t have continuing status,” said Dabeet, “but yes, of course, Catalunya was part of Spain during the Inquisition. Any non-Catholic genes were eliminated in the sixteenth century.”

  They laughed at his little joke, which he appreciated, because it showed that they didn’t think he meant it.

  “What I’m wondering,” said Andrew, “is whether there’s anything to be gained by letting us go out and hunt with the llops.”

  “They mostly ignore us,” said Dabeet. “It’s safe enough, unless you try to interfere. Then you get nipped a little.”

  “Those neck-slicing jaws can ‘nip’?” asked Valentine.

  “They bite off smaller pieces,” said Dabeet.

  This time no laugh.

  “A joke,” said Dabeet.

  “Can’t wait till we think it’s funny,” said Valentine.

  * * *

  Dabeet did not want to go with Andrew Wiggin to “hunt with the llop,” since he wasn’t sure the llop understood the difference between eco-tourist and prey. Whatever happened to the speaker for the dead among the llop would be recorded by the system of ambient cameras that one of Ken Argon’s predecessors had set up all through the woodland where the nearest troop of llop gave birth and took care of their young. Ken had called it their homeland, which was one of the signs that he was going native—or crazy. But there were thousands of hours of video showing Ken walking among the llop, talking to them, touching them, and it was certainly true that none of it showed any of the llop acting in a hostile manner toward him. But much of the video had been deleted before Dabeet arrived—a clear breach of protocol, reason enough to sack Ken if that had been Dabeet’s purpose in coming to Catalunya.

  Ken had never admitted that he deleted the video, but he had also never denied it. He said things like, “Isn’t it possible there was an intermittent short in the wiring? Or some kind of periodic atmospheric interference with the radio frequencies?” Yes, of course both things were possible. But Dabeet had technicians look into both issues, and, more important, Dabeet had also examined the deletions. There was no way to tell for sure. But no deletion began or ended while Ken was present with the llop on camera. Since Ken spent so much time with the llop, it was not likely that none of the breaks would come when he was there. To Dabeet, there was no chance that Ken was not responsible for the deletions. And to cement this likelihood into certainty was the fact that any intermittent short or atmospheric interference ceased completely when Dabeet arrived.

  Mine was such a healing presence, thought Dabeet more than once. All kinds of strange things stopped happening.

  Dabeet still thought that he should offer to go with Andrew. But then there was always the chance that Andrew would accept the offer. For all Dabeet knew, that might have been Andrew’s entire purpose in going to the llop immediately—so that Dabeet would come with him. This would free Valentine to do what was almost certainly the real purpose of their coming to Catalunya—talking to the people of Tarragona about Ken Argon’s death. Dabeet needed to be with her to cut off any line of questioning that would stir up trouble.

  “Of course you can’t come with me,” said Valentine cheerfully. “That would defeat the purpose.”

  “Provoking a new wave of agitation and unrest would defeat my purpose.”

  “I’m so glad you told me. Now I will carefully refrain from provoking agitation and unrest, whether in the form of a wave or surge or tsunami.”

  Dabeet knew she was toying with him. She was acting out the part of the clever rebel who disarms the unimaginative bureaucratic clod who stands in the way of her noble purpose. He had watched many popular or highly esteemed vids during his voyages between worlds—enough to recognize the cliches.

  But I’m not an unimaginative bureaucratic clod.

  No, I’m a somewhat imaginative one. But imaginative enough to keep control of this situation?

  Dabeet almost laughed aloud—but didn’t, because the two office workers who were within earshot in the E.S. building would have been curious, and the less curiosity people directed toward Dabeet, the better. It was precisely the image of bureaucratic clod that Dabeet had cultivated in Tarragona, so that the people wouldn’t feel threatened by him. There was no chance that they’d like him, because he represented the authority that was keeping them from full participation in Starways Congress. But on the extremely likely chance that Ken Argon had been murdered by one of the Tarragonans, Dabeet thought it was prudent to avoid provoking unnecessary levels of hostility, or creating any sense of urgency about his removal from authority.

  That was why Dabeet had been sent here, wasn’t it? To remove himself from authority. His orders had mentioned—which meant that they insisted—that the E.S.’s only goal was to get Catalunya off their books. “We are not in the business of administering colonies beyond the earliest stages, but MinCol doesn’t want Catalunya either, not as long as the sentience issue is unresolved. We hope that you will quickly resolve that issue and that your recommendation will allow us to put Tarragona into continuing status followed as quickly as possible by independent membership in Congress.”

  There was nothing in those orders about solving the mystery of the death of Ken Argon. But until Ken’s death was explained, and the perpetrators, if any, brought to justice, this colony would not be ready to take its place among the civilized worlds.

  This is still a pirate colony, Dabeet often told himself. Even though the last pirates had abandoned the colony of Fancy decades before the E.S. arrived, there was enough lore that appealed to the Catalan settlers that they had adopted the pirate mystique. Such tourists as came here usually did so in order to see the ruins of Fancy, and the locals made sure there were plenty of “artifacts” available to sell to the piraticles, as these tourists were called in Tarragona—whenever the piraticles were not present to hear them.

  Valentine also refused to wear any kind of recording device—or at least, any such device that could be read or copied by Dabeet’s people. Since Valentine was a serious historian—though it bothered Dabeet that she would not tell him any of her titles, or the name or names under which she had published them—she would need to have recordings in order to cite them as independently verifiable sources. Everything she did would be on record—but Dabeet had already ascertained that despite his absolutely top clearance in the E.S., he did not have any access to electronic data belonging to either Andrew or Valentine Wiggin. Whatever authority protected them, it was far above Dabeet’s pay grade even to ask for an exemption.

  After all, he had invited them here, hadn’t he? Why would he think he could control or even observe the actions of a speaker for the dead? Or, for that matter, his “just another tourist” sister?

  “I won’t attempt to force my company on you,” said Dabeet. “I’m sure you believe that my presence would keep anyone from talking freely to you.”

  She smiled benignly and said nothing.

  “But these streets and roads are not safe for you,” said Dabeet.