Speaker for the Dead, chapter seventeen, part two, in which Mighty Whitey saves the day

We're closing in on the end now.  This is the supposed climax of the book, and then there's a final chapter to pretend to resolve plot points and set up the sequels.  Needless to say, there's very little tension, because it's mostly about Ender giving the Little Ones the Simple Wikipedia version of peaceful nationalist propaganda (irony meter broken) and them instantly realising how much better this way of life is because they're very smart and just needed to be shown the ways of civilisation.

(Content: misogyny, imperialism, racism, death. Fun content: more matriarchy, the most harrowing Garfield story ever.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 331--355

Ender has been negotiated with Star-looker for hours now, but adrenaline is keeping him sharp past midnight, while Ouanda and Ela are getting dozy because I guess the socio-cultural information on the Little Ones, the future of interspecies interactions, the fate of their entire planet, and the impacts this could have for all of humanity's future aren't that exciting.  Ender has been trying to help them figure out cultivation (now that they've started farming, they care about prairie land for the first time, but they don't know how much to claim or cultivate and neither does he because, praise the Jade Emperor, Ender is somehow not an expert in agriculture).

Harder still was the concept of law and government. The wives ruled: to the piggies, it was that simple. But Ender had finally got them to understand that humans made their laws differently, and thathuman laws applied to human problems. To make them understand why humans needed their own laws, Ender had to explain to them human mating patterns.

If that makes the slightest sense to anyone, please let me know.  "We just let our adult females tell us what to do."  "Humans can't do that."  "Why not?"  "Well, unlike your species, human women generally survive pregnancy."  "Oh, heavens!  You can't put them in charge!  Fertility is the mind-killer!"  Is that it?

 Laverne Cox summarises the logical conclusion.

The wives find the idea of adults mating creepy, and the idea of loyalty to your immediate family over the rest of your tribe bafflingly arbitrary.  (They have a point on the latter.)  Regardless, after three hours, they've agreed that Little One law applies to the forest and anyone who enters it, and human law applies within the fence.  Ender brings up the hive queen, whom they expect to rapidly outpace both of them since she doesn't actually have to teach anyone anything and her drones are totally sweet super-labourers.  Star-looker declares that the rest of the forests of Lusitania are theirs to divide up as they see fit, and Ouanda points out that it's considered poor form to graciously gift someone with a neighbouring country you're at war with.

At that moment, Novinha and Quim arrive with Miro's message--they relay what he heard earlier, about the Little Ones' plans to use their mass numbers to conquer the world, and Arrow confirms what Ouanda says, that in any war the winning tribe gets rights to the trees of the fallen (thus improving their gene pool).  They're counting on Ender to prevent this tribe from taking over the world.  Leaf-eater and Human argue about whether the wives should be told what's just been said (Human, naturally, prefers to say nothing, because we're supposed to like him).  Leaf-eater threatens to translate it anyway.

"Stop!" shouted Ender. His voice was far louder than he had ever let it be heard before.  Immediately everyone fell silent; the echo of his shout seemed to linger among the trees. [....] "Tell Shouter that if she lets Leaf-eater translate words that we humans have said among ourselves, then he is a spy. And if she lets him spy on us, we will go home now and you will have nothing from us. I'll take the hive queen to another world to restore her."

In case we thought that all this talking was insufficiently manly (it's been ages since we heard about Ender's rippling white shoulder muscles), he asserts his power through shouting and threats and defines 'spy' to suit his own purposes when, in all likelihood, the Little Ones have never had such a concept before in their history.  (Hard to sneak around a forest and do reconnaissance when literally every tree is sentient and psychic and your enemy.)

On the plus side, Human does raise some counterpoints, arguing that Ender is meddling in Little One affairs (Ender says he only promised not to "try to change you more than is necessary") and that he knows Milagre has basically declared war on their own galactic government, so he finds this hypocritical.

Surely Pizarro, for all his shortcomings, had an easier time of it with Atahualpa.

That is an actual line of text in this book.  That is what our hero is thinking right now because his translator has made some very fast and comprehensive assumptions about human politics based on an incomplete understanding of intergalactic law. Of course Pizarro 'had an easier time of it' you colossal jackwagon; Pizarro was a colonialist warmonger who held a mock trial and then murdered Atahualpa when he got bored of dealing with him.  'For all his shortcomings'?  Who the hell edited this book?  STEP FUCKING ONE: CHECK IF YOUR HERO EMPATHISES WITH A HISTORICAL MONSTER.

(Actual line from wikipedia, at the end of the introduction: "modern Peruvians look askance at Pizarro, considering him the force behind the destruction of their indigenous culture, language, and religion".  You don't say.)

Ender explains that they hope not to actually fight other humans, and if they do, the point will be to win the right to star travel for the Little Ones.

"We have set aside our humanness to become ramen with you. [....] Human and piggy and hive queen, here on Lusitania, will be one. All humans. All buggers. All piggies."

Human considers this, and then waxes poetic about the Little Ones' lifestyle, their histories of war (their oldest fathertrees are the heroes of the war that started their forest; their "houses are made of the cowards"), and they've been increasingly excited about their prospects for global domination over the last few years (Human says ten, which doesn't match the timeline, but what else is new for Card).  Asking them to abruptly give up those dreams is hard, he insists.

"Your dream is a good one", said Ender.  "It's the desire of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control."

If Card keeps telling me what the fundamental desires of all living creatures are, I'm going to have to declare him raman.  If things like 'ownership of the universe' or 'endless grandchildren' were really universal desires, he probably wouldn't need to tell us as much quite so frequently or persistently.

I'm torn on how much of Ender's further arguments to share, because on the one hand it's like the word of the day on Sesame Street is 'imperialism', but on the other, I did sign up to examine what the hell is going on in this book for my many confusingly-devoted readers.

• Ender points out that humans have given them technology instead of conquering them, and thus modelled the idea that it's possible to make other people greater without making yourself weaker.
• Human counters with the idea that strength is relative and thus if all the tribes gain technology at the same rate, none of them have really gained anything.
• Ender walks through the idea that it's possible to bring glory to your fathertree without killing any of the other fathertrees in the forest, and (once Human buys into this), argues that the lines dividing 'in my tribe' and 'not in my tribe' are arbitrary, and therefore the best way to own the universe and maximise your glory is to bring everyone into your tribe.

"If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, than that is what the tribe is. [....] We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe." 

Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation.

This is, by a wide margin, the best morality that Card espouses in his books.  (The Ender's Shadow series ends up in the same direction, most explicitly when Bean analyses Peter's work and says that he's also trying to make every human on Earth see themselves as one 'tribe'.)  And yet it's rather hollow in the larger context, given that Ender considering everyone to be 'in his tribe' hasn't stopped him from violating the rights and privacy of anyone or leveraging threats of his illegitimate government power against people for the last few days, even when there was nothing at immediate stake to his knowledge.  It hasn't caused him to respect the customs or privacy of the Little Ones, or stayed his hand from meddling in their society (except when Ouanda and Ela wanted to fritter away their time saving the lives of alien women, what nonsense that was).

And out here in the real world, I don't think this is the brilliant breakthrough Card imagines it is either.  Just look at him: he wrote this book about thirty years ago; about a decade ago he wrote another series with the same 'one tribe' aesop, and yet he's also practically a spokesperson for sexism, racism, and homophobia camouflaged under religious beliefs and legalistic vagueness.  Orson Scott Card, who wrote a fanfic about Barack Obama declaring himself Emperor of the United States and oppressing white people--Orson Scott Card, who just barely didn't declare himself the potentially-insurgent enemy of any government that would dare to support same-sex marriage*--this man opines on how much people just don't understand the idea of 'one universal tribe'.

Beyond simply hypocrisy, I think this illustrates the weakness of Card's quick-and-easy all-one-tribe system, which is that it doesn't necessarily mean anything.  Ender declares that they're all ramen together, all one tribe, and then declares that humans won't recognise Little Ones' laws outside the forest and vice-versa, and leverages his technological advantages to dictate terms and demand apologies for ritualistic empty threats, but none of that can actually be used against his unilateral declaration that he's on their side and they're all equal.

And ultimately it doesn't matter if he declares everyone 'one tribe' or not, because within the tribe it's still very easy to declare that those people are our enemies for whatever other reason--they want the wrong rights or they support the wrong way of doing things.  And this is, I think, the ultimate reason why privileged people are so desperate to explain how they're being oppressed--if you can say you're provoked, you can go to war with a clear conscience.  (Spoilers: that's exactly what the final treaty says.)

Human agrees to try to sell the wives on this philosophy, and Ender agrees to make exactly the same treaty with every forest of Little Ones on the planet and to restore the hive queen and let her make her own treaties.  for the final matter, Ender gets around to asking about the third life and why they killed Pipo and Libo. Human confirms that the first life is their infancy in/on the mothertree, the second life are the standard-issue Little Ones, and the third life is tree.  Ender explains that humans don't have a tree life, and that the afterlife of the Bible is an immaterial thing, entirely different.  It still takes Human a remarkably long time to work out that this means they straight-up murdered Libo and Pipo.

Revelation: the Little Ones mark momentous honors by planting someone.  Pipo and Mandachuva jointly made a biological breakthrough (I still don't grasp exactly what), and Libo and Leaf-eater worked out forest agriculture, and therefore in each case one of them had to be ritually planted.  Pipo and Libo each refused to eviscerate their pal, and therefore had to be eviscerated themselves.  (Leaf-eater and Mandachuva both have emotional breakdowns.)  I feel like we covered a lot of this ground a while back, but the extra twist is that this treaty is an equally momentous occasion, and therefore under forest law either Ender has to cut open Human or Human has to cut Ender before the end of the day.  Human now understands and therefore won't cut Ender, but he does demand to be given "the honor of the third life".

Ender agrees, although Ouanda is horrified because being the shocked female is her only remaining job.  Human sends them away with Arrow while he explains human biology, and as they leave, they hear an eruption of wailing from the wives.  Ouanda and Novinha take some solace in it, while Ender reflects on how much more emotional pain he will go through cutting open Human, since "to Ender himself he would be taking away the only part of Human's life that Ender understood".  Now, if I were in his place, I would feel some kind of creeped-out gut reaction too, absolutely, but it reads to me like Ender feels there's something still intellectually or morally wrong with the act, and I don't understand why, except to try to upsell the angst factor because "Once again, he thought, I must kill, though I promised that I never would again".

Novinha pulls the 'I can't see in the dark' tactic to justify taking Ender by the arm, and they both laugh as Ela chastises Olhado for not realising it's a ploy to hold hand.  Novinha tells Ender that he'll be able to do what's needed, not because he's "cold and ruthless", but "compassionate enough [...] to put the hot iron into the wound when that's the only way to heal it".  Novinha is only a genius xenobiologist, so I suppose she wouldn't have been taught that cauterisation was a gratuitously hideous practice that was used throughout Europe for centuries mostly because everyone forgot how ligature works.  Like, the metaphor does approximately work, but it mostly makes me think that there's probably a better solution.  (Traditional empty threats: completely unacceptable.  Eviscerating a person to validate a treaty: well, what're you gonna do?)

Ender wakes up lying in the grass with his head in Novinha's lap.  A bunch of Little Ones have emerged from the woods, led by Human, including several that Ouanda doesn't recognise ("from other brother-houses" which, apparently, have been permanently retconned in).  They carry the printout of The Hive-Queen and the Hegemon that Miro brought them years ago, which he conveniently printed single-sided, such that they've used the blank sides to write up their treaty.  Ouanda mutters that they never taught them to write, but having learned how to read**, they figured out the writing aspect themselves and improvised some ink.

The written version has some additions: the humans have to have the same terms in their treaties with every forest, any inter-species disputes will be settled by the third party (i.e., the hive queen will adjudicate if humans and Little Ones ever have a conflict), forests that have signed the treaty won't go to war unless they are physically attacked by non-treaty Little Ones, and humans and Little Ones are forbidden to 'plant' each other, with the exception of Ender slicing up Human.

Human insists it's a great honor, even if it feels wrong to him, and says that all his life he has known Ender would be the one to understand him and to plant him.  (Star-looker signed the contract, and Human relays her words, that she was named for always staring at the night sky but until Ender arrived she hadn't known what she was waiting for.)  Basically, they love him and they have always loved him and they wish they could all cling to his nipples or something.  Ender silently (very silently) thinks about how much hope has been placed in him even though everyone else has done the hard and important work.  Now let us never speak of that blasphemy again.

They pass the treaty to Ouanda and go to Rooter's tree, which opens up to let Human climb inside and talk to his father for a while.  (A sweet moment for Father's Day, I guess?  Make sure to call your dad if he's not a terrible person or a psychic tree.)  They clear the space for Human's tree, so that he and Rooter will approximately flank the gate to Milagre, and Novinha sidles up to quietly observe that he signed the contract "Ender Wiggin".

"I never went to the priests to confess," she said, "because I knew they would despise me for my sin. Yet when you named all my sins today, I could bear it because I knew you didn't despise me. I couldn't understand why, though, until now."

I understand why Novinha would think everyone would despise her, because that's the kind of thing despair and depression makes you think, but really, she cheated on her abusive husband and thus Ender isn't going to challenge the idea that she's a monster no one but the Xenocide could ever empathise with?  Most of Milagre doesn't even know the worst things she did (hiding scientific information that has prevented any progress in researching Descolada, so that everything on the planet is a world-killing bioweapon that can't be defused or defended against, and incidentally preventing Libo from having any hope of understanding why his father died, potentially contributing to his own death).  I don't hate Novinha (as an individual, rather than a character), and I've murdered zero people.

Ender and Human have more poignant discussions about how much they are brothers, and Human asks Ender to write another biography, "the Life of Human", to go with HQ&H.  He agrees, and tries to clear the others away, but they all have their reasons to stay (Olhado is recording everything as evidence for the other tribes, Ela is a scientist, and Quim compares it to Mary staying at the crucifixion).  Ender does the necessary surgery with Mandachuva and Leaf-eater's guidance about what organs go where, and they take root quickly, turning into a tiny sapling in minutes.  When Ender is finished, the other Little Ones are dancing, but he just crawls away up the hill and collapses in the grass, and Novinha's family follows.

The mayor and THE BISHOP arrive shortly before sunrise to find them all asleep in the grass.  Ender reports they have a treaty; the mayor reports that Jane has restored all their files.  Then she notices what a literally bloody mess he is, and sees Human's corpse down the hill.

"I would rather have no treaty," said Bosquinha, "than one you had to kill to get." 

"Wait before you judge," said the Bishop. "I think the night's work was more than just what we see before us."

I understand now, at last.  Bishop Peregrino is the comic relief.  Dude feared/hated the Little Ones, hated Ender until about twelve hours earlier, knows nothing about the Science Mystery, knows only the brutal aspects of Little One death rituals, and yet his dialogue (as it has been for the last few chapters) consists largely of 'I bet this Speaker guy is secretly awesome'.

The Bishop surveys the corpse/sapling:

"His name is Human," said the Speaker. 

"And so is yours," said the Bishop softly. [....] Am I the shepherd, Peregrino asked himself, or the most confused and helpless of the sheep?

Immediately bored of exploring this possible epiphany, the Bishop declares that it will soon be time for mass, and leads them all away--Novinha silently asks Ender to come along, but he asks for a moment more, hopefully to wash up.  When he does arrive at the cathedral, shortly after the beginning of mass, he quickly finds the family and takes the spot where Marcos used to sit.  The Bishop mulls a bunch of poetic facts and reversals (Ouanda isn't there, she's caring for her brother Miro; Grego is sitting happily with Ender; "Novinha, the lost one, now found", whatever he thinks that means; and the all-important fence now harmless) and concludes that it's the same miracle as transubstantiation:

How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

Which I'm pretty sure is heretical.

Next week: A Very Special Episode of ableism with Miro and Jane.

---

*So it turns out there's a section of his website called "Quotes in Context" (no link, but easy to find) that is meant to explain how his completely reasonable views have been viciously misrepresented, and it's hilarious.  Like, the line "I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn" wasn't Card talking, we must see, it was Card writing a hypothetical future person who decides to overthrow and remake the government for recognising same-sex marriages without their express permission.  This is the adult bigot equivalent of blaming a broken lamp on his imaginary friend, and it cracks me up.

**It occurs to me that, while the book has treated Miro and Ouanda bringing them HQ&H and the New Testament as a big deal because of the philosophies inside, the simple introduction of the written word was a vastly bigger and altogether separate undertaking.  I mean, it takes humans years to learn to read effectively, young or old.  Miro and Ouanda only had a few hours a week to spend with them.  How did they even have time to teach them how to read?  (Stark is supposed to have gotten rid of a lot of the confusing parts of English, like silent-GH or whatever, but I'm skeptical that means they can teach them how to read a two alien biographies and Christian scripture in less time than it takes to get an online liquor handling license).