Speaker for the Dead, chapter sixteen, part one, in which everyone breaks character

It's so disorienting to have things actually happening in the latter half of the book.  Card mentions in the introduction that his original vision for the novel began with the Speaker arriving to speak Marcos' quite normal non-mysterious death, ordinary Tuesday.  Kinda shows; all the plot is on this end.

(Content: death, violent imagery, victim blaming.  Fun content: depends how into religious doctrine you are.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 277--294

Chapter Sixteen: The Fence

This chapter opens with Bible AU fanfic.  Specifically, it's about John 8:1-11, 'let the one without sin cast the first stone', etc, and it has an interestingly controversial history about whether it's 'real' gospel or not.  You can pick your favourite version of the Bible from a drop-down menu on that site, but here, in Ye Must Love Reapers' translation of San Angelo's writings about Ender's fanfic, we get two different parables about how the rabbi (explicitly not Jesus) reacts.

He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant." 

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

This interpretation doesn't work for me--the rabbi is corrupt, and he argues for the woman to be spared out of mercy, but it wasn't the rabbi's corruption that actually saved her; it was the decision of the crowd based on their agreement with the philosophy that the rabbi suggested.  There's exactly one corrupt person in the community as described, and his power is voluntary.

In the second take, the rabbi waits for everyone else to drop their stones, then grabs one and murders the woman himself.

"Nor am I without sin," he says to the people. "But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it." 

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

Again, we have this confusion between 'community' and 'rabbi'.  The rest of the crowd was completely willing to relent, but the rabbi took sole responsibility as judge/jury/executioner.  This only makes sense in Card's world, where the only people who actually do anything and thus count as 'community' are the protagonists, and everyone else is furniture.

San Angelo concludes by talking about how this illustrates Jesus' daring optimism (expecting people to show mercy while preserving the law') and I wonder just how much harder Card can push the Ender-is-Messiah button.

We catch up with Miro doing a Walk of Despondency because his girlfriend is his sister, his father wasn't his father, his boss was his father, and the Little Ones are Space Dryads.  Hell of a day.  There's some casual sex-shaming when he wonders if Libo and Novinha hooked up inside the Xenobiologist's Station, or "was it more discreet, rutting in the grass like hogs on the fazendas?"  Stay classy, Miro.  He arrives at the gate in the village fence and makes the eminently sensible decision to deal with his pain by living in the woods forever.  (Not that I haven't considered that on long days myself.)

He laid his right hand on the identification box and reached out his left to pull the gate. For a split second he didn't realize what was happening. Then his hand felt like it was on fire, like it was being cut off with a rusty saw, he shouted and pulled his left hand away from the gate. Never since the gate was built had it stayed hot after the box was touched by the Zenador's hand.

The gate then informs him that his authority has been revoked, and he and Ouanda are to hand themselves over to the mayor and be shipped to Trondheim to stand trial.  He panic-mopes that no one will be able to tell the Little Ones what's happened, about how every trace of the colony will be destroyed, instinctively grabs for the gate and gets zapped again.  He waves, hoping to catch the attention of a Little One, but he expects the mayor to arrive shortly since the gate is apparently under observation.  (It isn't.  Their concepts of privacy are so weird.)  Miro starts walking beside the fence and hooting, the sound that he and Ouanda use to call each other in the forest (you remember all the times they've done that before this exact moment, right? Nah) and hoping that it will summon one of the Little Ones out of the woods, even though he's apparently only ever used it to call Ouanda and specifically not one of the Little Ones.  I don't even know.

In THE BISHOP's office, Quim is petulantly receiving the we're-not-having-a-witch-hunt-for-your-mother lecture.  He asserts that Ender is indeed the devil and he's never going home, and when the Bishop points out that Jesus forgave everyone and we can't all have the Blessed Virgin for our moms, Quim similarly tries to cast Catholicism and speaking as inherently opposed:

"Has the church made way here for the speakers for the dead? Should we tear down the Cathedral and use the stones to make an amphitheater where all our dead can be slandered before we lay them in the ground?"

The Bishop shuts him down, puts forth the more reasonable suggestion that Ender should have only told the people personaly involved what he knew and let them decide for themselves what to do.  Quim is unmoved by the evidence that his mother loves him, but the Bishop points out that under Catholic doctrine, if she had confessed, she would have been completely forgiven without ever telling anyone else the truth, and then shuffles Quim off to pray for forgiveness for not showing forgiveness.

For a science fiction classic about an atheist hero relating to an alien species whose 'religion' is scientifically accurate, I don't think this book could possibly spend more time talking about comparative religion.

The Bishop's secretary lets Ender in, and when the Bishop doesn't rise to meet him, Ender kneels and waits.  Eventually the Bishop approaches, holds out his hand for a ring kiss, but Ender doesn't move and eventually the Bishop asks if he's being mocked.  Ender relates that bit of backstory about his parents being "a closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon", which the Bishop finds way too convenient.  He also does the math right quick and determines that the last time it was forbidden to be Catholic anywhere in the galaxy was pre-galactic-colonisation Earth, three millennia earlier, and determines that this means Ender was a Third.  I've increasingly liked the Bishop over the last chapter (apparently the Battle School rules about horrendous adversity magically transforming you into a better person still hold true), but this just feels like extra-gratuitous continuity in order to remind us that this book is definitely a sequel to Ender's Game.

There's more back-and-forth about what was the right thing to do and who needs blessings and when Ender found out about Miro and Ouanda's Questionable Activities (in the non-making-out, contravention-of-interstellar-law sense of the term) before the Mayor arrives, and then they both go back to being typical jackwagons.

"I've always been respectful of authority," said the Speaker. 

"You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor," the Bishop reminded him. With a smile. 

The Speaker's smile was just as chilly. "And you're the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn't talk to me."

Oh my god Ender you didn't deign to talk to them anyway you just magically intuited everything Jane hadn't gotten around to telling you.  Am I supposed to feel tension?  Because I can't say that people being snippy and giving each other refrigerated smiles is really gripping prose.  I've written scenes like that and I always get huge warning bells in my head because I get bored writing them, and if I'm bored while writing, the reader will be bored while reading.  The Bishop's power is largely by convention and Ender's power is by narrative fiat; I don't care if they like each other.

Ender says they have to wait until Novinha arrives, so we cut to Ela finding Novinha out in the grass by their house.

Her mother had not worn he hair down in many years. It looked strangely free, all the more so because Ela could see how it curled and bent where it had been so long forced into a bun. It was then that she knew that the Speaker was right. Mother would listen to his invitation. [....] Mother is glad, thought Ela, to have it known that Libo was her real husband, that Libo is my true father. Mother is glad, and so am I.

Not that literally letting one's hair down can't be a sign of relaxation and freedom from crushing secrecy, but I'm not sure what makes Ela so sure it's that, and not, say the outward sign of someone who believes they have nothing left to lose and so sees no reason to be bound by social strictures or expectations.  She's an alien biologist; she above all others on the planet has potential now to go full badass Mad Scientist.  In a more interesting book...

Novinha says yes, she'll go, and yes, she'll tell them everything she knows about the Descolada, and says that she never told Ela because Ela was doing better xenobiology on her own:

"You're my apprentice. I have complete access to your files without leaving any footprints. What kind of master would I be if I didn't watch your work?" 

"But--" 

"I also read the files you hid under Quara's name. You've never been a mother, so you didn't know that all the file activities of a child under twelve are reported to the parents every week."

So, to recap, children can hide nothing from parents, apprentices can hide nothing from masters, and Novinha spent twenty-two years trying to hide the secret of the Descolada from everyone but also approvingly watching over her daughter/apprentice as she tried to piece the genetic theory together while also forbidding her access to the Descolada files that she personally didn't fully understand anyway.  I have no adequate words.  This is just a blatant against-character retcon for the sake of making Novinha suddenly seem reasonable now that it's not important to the plot for her to be supremely irrational.

Novinha does still hate Ender and is betrayed that her children trust him so implicitly but not their own mother.  Now, I'm all on-board with hating Ender, but Novinha just admitted that she's been secretly spying on her kids and erratically denying Ela information while putting up a front of disinterest, so I don't think she should be surprised she's not everyone's closest confidante.

Ela is still totally convinced that all the pain is Novinha's fault:

"I love Libo, the way everybody in Milagre loved him. But he was willing to be a hypocrite, and so were you, and without anybody even guessing, the poison of your lies hurt us all."

We went over this a while back, but the only aspect of Libo and Novinha's secret affair that has obviously contributed to harm in the town is that Miro and Ouanda didn't know not to make out.  Everything else is directly attributable to Marcos' abuse, Novinha's neglect, and the disinterest of everyone else in the colony.  That can only be blamed on Novinha if you think that Marcos' abuse and everyone else's disinterest is directly, 100% the inevitable result of Novinha not being nice enough.

"It's easy to tell the truth," said mother softly, "when you don't love anybody." 

"Is that what you think?" said Ela. "I think I know something, Mother. I think you can't possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them. I think the Speaker loved Father. Marcão, I mean. I think he understood him and loved him before he spoke."

Our evidence for this is... look, we'll get back to that.

(Is it weird to anyone else that in the space of two hours all of Novinha's kids have stopped thinking of Marcos as their 'father'?  Libo's literal only contribution to any of them but Miro was genetic.  Sure, if they see this as a good time to reject the idea that the verbal abuser they lived with deserves any familial loyalty, they're welcome to do that, but it's hard not to see this instead as a logical offshoot of Card's obsessive fetish for genetic lines.)

But really, why should we think that Ender loved Marcos?  What did he do that demonstrated this deep and abiding compassion--explain to everyone in town that it was all Novinha's doing?  He gave them context for Marcos' death, but come on, that's the job of journalists and biographers and no one says that their jobs are driven by an all-encompassing love.  The things Ender told us about Marcos were obvious, surface facts (he was burly, he was surly, he fixated on the one time a pretty girl was nice to him) that he found out with about five minutes' "research" from publicly available sources.  The secrets he revealed were scientific facts that Jane worked out in thirty seconds.  None of this required a special love.  If this is going to be Card's core thesis, he's going to need to justify it much more extensively.

But Novinha breaks down and embraces her daughter and swears she has always loved her, and Ela reflects on how Ender has finally erased the barriers between them.

"You're thinking about that damnable Speaker even now, aren't you?" whispered her mother. 

"So are you," Ela answered.

I imagine that's a problem a lot of people in this galaxy have during intimate moments.

(There's a very wise proverb: "The best safeword is 'as a white man I think that', because it can kill any mood.")

We'll leave off here for this week, so we won't get around to the Insurmountable Waist-High Fence until next time.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter fifteen, part two, in which Ender is accidentally honest

It's been a week and still I am continually struck by new layers or wrong and terrible in Ender's Speaking.  If, perchance, you are an avid reader but you haven't delved into all the comments on last Sunday's post, enrich yourself by doing so now, because this book is fractally bad and its depths are worth exploring.  (I'll also take a moment to thank all my readers, commenters and silent alike.  Y'all provide me with the drive to keep at this.)  It got to the point where I grabbed Ender's Shadow off the shelf and started flipping through it again, because Shadow has always been my favourite and I've always planned to proceed to it after Speaker for the sake of ending on a high note, but... Card's work is so wretched that I'm struggling with how much more time I want to spend with his creations.  Shadow benefits enormously from its unreliable narrator, because that means that when Bean is being a jackass, the odds are that we're supposed to judge him harshly for it, and when he thinks someone is useless, odds are that he's going to recant later when he grasps their value.  On the other hand, Card has continually proven unworthy of the benefit of the doubt.  A matter to keep considering.

(Content: authoritarian government, anti-Catholic caricature, hypothetical incest. Fun content: Police Chief Broomley Fermentington.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 247--256

(Chapter Fifteen from the start to the Speaking)

The opening dialogue extract is about the fence, and there are several layers to examine in just a few sentences.  Human is asking why the other humans never come to see the Little Ones, and when Miro says no one else is allowed through the Fence of Pain, Human refuses to say whether he's ever touched it, but does say this this is stupid because there's grass on both sides, and that's all we get.  Miro doesn't ask what the grass has to do with it, because that would be plot-relevant, basically.  I still don't understand the rules about what he can and can't say.  He can say that he's the only one allowed through the fence, but not that the others are barred by law, or that they're afraid, or that the interactions between humans and Little Ones are considered very special to humans and so only the Zenadors can meet with them, in the same way that only certain people are allowed to meet the Wives.  What in the world could he possibly reveal about humanity's secrets by saying "What's so special about the grass?" except that we don't know what's so special about the grass?  And on Human's side, after a couple of decades of human-Little One interaction, he must realise that the fence was put there intentionally by humans and they stay inside voluntarily, not because they're caged.  He already thought the humans knew what the grass does (Little Ones use it as an anesthetic) so what harm does he think there would be in explaining that to Miro and seeing what they do?  Gnar.

The chapter proper starts an hour before sunset, when Mayor Bosquinha arrives at THE BISHOP's office and finds the chief COTMOCs, whose titles I will continue to translate as the properly terrifying Reaper and Harrow, already there.  There's some reflection on how much the Bishop sucks, because he thinks of himself as the master of the colony just because they're all gathered in his office, even though the mayor called the meeting.  No one forgot we're supposed to hate the bishop, right?  Cool.

The mayor calls up a holographic projection of a mess of cubes, vaguely pyramidally stacked, mostly red and some blue, which the COTMOCs immediately take as a dire indication even though we'll never actually be told what the colour-coding means.  The Bishop remains confused, and time is short, so the Mayor only takes two full pages to get to the point.  First, we need to discuss chauvinism as a virtue!

"I was very young when I was appointed to be Governor of the new Lusitania Colony. [Young?  I am shocked.] It was a great honor to be chosen, a great trust [....] What the committee apparently overlooked was the fact that I was already suspicious, deceptive, and chauvinistic." 

"These are virtues of yours that we have all come to admire," said Bishop Peregrino. 

Bosquinha smiled. "My chauvinism meant that as soon as Lusitania Colony was mine, I became more loyal to the interests of Lusitania than to the interests of the Hundred Worlds or Starways Congress. [....] We are not a colony [...] We are an experiment. I examined our charter and license and all the Congressional Orders pertaining to us, and I discovered that the normal privacy laws did not apply to us."

You guys, I laughed so hard when I read this the first time.  Normal privacy laws?!  All one-and-a-half of them?  The only thing that surprises me about privacy laws in this universe is that there isn't an executive mandate requiring all teenagers' journals to be broadcast over billboards in a constant stream of awkward earnestness.  Also, it hadn't occurred to me until now, but I note that Lusitania has no democracy whatsoever.  The GoverMayor was appointed by congress and the bureaucracy is run by the church.  This system is begging to fill with corruption until it's pouring out of every window.

The Mayor went on to put a program in place to monitor intrusions, of which she says there have been few over the years, except some predictable spying after Pipo and Libo's deaths.  (Hey, does this mean that Congress grabbed the Descolada files after all, in spite of Novinha's protections, and they've got secret labs around the galaxy researching this doom plague under maximum classification?  Oh, look, it's another premise that would be way more exciting than anything else going on right now: the quest to find the government's labs before someone weaponises this wicked alien DNA-eater.)  The other two incidents have been recent, starting three days earlier:

"When the Speaker for the Dead arrived," said Bishop Peregrino. 

Bosquinha was amused that the Bishop obviously regarded the Speaker's arrival as such a landmark date that he instantly made such a connection.

Ender's the first outsider to come to the colony in a century and the Bishop publicly declared that he is the servant of the devil; of course he considers it a landmark date.  What the hell else could this possibly mean?  Does the privacy override mean that Bosquina has seen his STAY OUT--BISHOPS ONLY folders where he's photoshopped Ender's face over Jesus and scrawled a big heart with an arrow through it around the border?

There have been two scans since then.  One was obviously Jane, browsing everything relate to the xenologers and xenobiologists at blitzing speed, walking through all security protocols like nothing.  They mull what congressional pull Ender might have.

Dom Crisão nodded wisely. "San Angelo once wrote--in his private journals, which no one but the Children of the Mind ever read--" 

The Bishop turned on him with glee. "So the Children of the Mind do have secret writings of San Angelo!" 

"Not secret," said Dona Cristã. "Merely boring. Anyone can read the journals, but we're the only ones who bother."

I feel like a solid 60% of this book could be summed up with 'fucking Catholics, amirite?' and Card would still have made about the same quality argument.

"What he wrote," said Dom Cristão, "was that Speaker Andrew is older than we know. Older than Starways Congress, and in his own way perhaps more powerful." 

Bishop Peregrino snorted. "He's  boy. Can't be forty years old yet."

I am questioning all of the life choices that led to me reading this book.  Also, oh my god, there has been a religious order of monks reading about the myth of the ancient Speaker Andrew for two thousand years and none of them have bothered conducting the research that it would take to find out that he's Ender Wiggin, which Plikt managed to do in four years based on a hunch while maintaining a full time job as a grad student.

The Mayor calls them out on their derails and explains that there's a scan happening at that very moment, apparently copying all Lusitanian files offworld and priming to delete everything on the colony as soon as it's done.  The Bishop sputters about how this is something Congress would do to worlds "in rebellion", and I wonder what that even means in a galaxy where communications are instant, ships take decades to travel between worlds, and a single yacht with a double-barrelled raygun can destroy a planet in five seconds.  Do they refuse to pay taxes?  What possible use could there be for interplanetary taxes?

The COTMOCs already noticed the intrusion, transferred all their records to other COTMOC monasteries "at great expense" (how, how does the ansible cost anything and how do they get the money to pay for it), but they realise that Congress will probably not allow a digital restoration, so they're now furiously printing hardcopies of the most important stuff.  I wonder what that is, on this tiny single-purpose colony.  We'll never find out, obviously.  The Bishop is furious that he wasn't informed and so couldn't start printing things himself, but the Mayor insists:

"[...] even if we began this morning, when the intrusion started, we could not have printed out more than a hundredth of one percent of the files that we access every day."

What in blazes are they doing on this planet?!  My day job involves cross-comparisons of documentation relating to government programs totalling millions of dollars of resources in action and I could print out all the documents I need to access in the average month in, at best, a morning.  I know printer technology has advanced a lot in the thirty years since this book was published, but these people are three or four millennia ahead of us.

Bosquinha noticed something else important: Ender is invisible; he has no files in Lusitanian memory and so would be immune to congressional action.  The Bishop furiously demands if they're suggesting they email Ender all of their files, and the Mayor says she's already done so:

"It was a high priority transfer, at local speeds, so it runs much faster than the Congressional copying. I am offering you a chance to make a similar transfer, using my highest priority so that it takes precedence over all other local computer usage."

What exactly does "local speeds" mean when interplanetary computer communications are literally instantaneous?  Is it a bandwidth thing?  But they've already said that Ender's files aren't part of Lusitanian memory, so must that not mean that they aren't local and they still have to be beamed offworld?  Or does she just mean that Jane moves all his files to wherever he is but keeps them invisible in local memory?  I'm just saying, Doctor Who has more robust explanations of computer science, and they have clockwork robots.

Reaper excitedly accepts and Harrow sets about queuing emails up via the Mayor's login on the Bishop's terminal, and I'm briefly reminded of the many Dramatic Conference Calls of the Left Behind novels.  Telecommunications are the stuff of real narrative action.  The Bishop also accepts and snarks at anyone who thought that he would put his pride over taking "the only way God has opened for us to preserve the vital records of the Church", so I guess this is the turning point Jane was aiming for where everyone bands together against evil congress, and we realise the Bishop (who keeps leatherbound copies of the Bible so congress can never steal the word of God from him) is actually not necessarily such a bad guy after all.

He smiled. Maliciously, of course.

Enough of this scene.  There's more dramatic organising and prioritising of spreadsheets, then the Mayor mentions that Ender plans to speak Marcos' death that evening, in just a few minutes.  Reaper says he wants to hear the man who spoke San Angelo's death, and the Bishop snarks that he'll send a representative (though as we know from last week he'll actually show up in person).  They leave, and the Mayor, walking alone, wonders what Miro and Ouanda must have done to trigger this kind of action.  She's sharp enough to realise that it has to have been their doing (she sadly misses the possibility that it's a flailing attempt to capture Ender now that he's been lured into a dead end*) but she can't imagine what they've done.

It was a very good thing that governments under the Starways Code were forbidden to own any instruments of punishment that might be used for torture. For the first time in her life, Bosquinha felt such fury that she might use such instruments, if she had them.

Moral response: you haven't even asked them yet woman why are you thinking about torture before you've even had a chance to say 'we're in trouble what have you done' you are not fit to lead a samba let alone a colony.

Practical response: Mayor, I don't know if anyone's told you, but your entire village is surrounded by a fence that projects some kind of electromagnetic agony field.  You literally live inside an instrument "that might be used for torture".

Speaking of torture and speaking, next is the part where Ender forces the entire colony listen to him be terrible for fifteen pages.  Skipping ahead:

Speaker for the Dead: p. 270--276

In the aftermath of Ender's echoing jackwagonry, Novinha's children cluster around her (Olhado, Ela, Quara, and Grego wailing that "all my papas are dead").

Ender stood behind the platform, looking at Novinha's family, wishing he could do something to ease their pain. There was always pain after a speaking, because a speaker for the dead did nothing to soften the truth.

Don't blame him; he's just being honest!

Ender knew from the faces that looked up at him as he spoke that he had caused great pain today. He had felt it all himself, as if they had passed their suffering to him.

You know, as much as I love the X-Wing series and the Thrawn books and especially Traitor, I'm generally pretty critical of the Star Wars novels, especially the later series, especially Legacy of the Force, which took everything brilliant about Traitor and burned it down out of panic and reactionary cries for simplistic, objective moral binarism.  Traitor made the New Jedi Order salvageable, and Legacy of the Force made made it irredeemable again.  But even then, in the midst of ruining all that prior authors had earned, there was something they did right: there was a character who thought that he was so empathetic, that he felt other people's pain so intensely, that he was allowed to inflict harm on the innocent and still be the hero.  And that guy was the evil wretch who almost destroyed galactic civilisation, moping all the way about how hard it was and how much he suffered when he hurt people.  The worst dross of Star Wars pulp novels has a sturdier and more nuanced moral core than this award-winning classic.

What I'm saying, Ender, is that if they had "passed their suffering" to you, they wouldn't be getting crushed by it right now.  What you're feeling is what normal humans call 'compassion', and it means nothing unless it drives you to action.

The Mayor comes to meet him, "extremely upset, barely under control at all", to report that his starship has been commandeered by Congress.  Ender immediately guesses that Congress is responding to something Miro and Ouanda have done, and says he won't let them go.

"Let me tell you why you will let them go, why we'll all let them go to stand trial. Because Congress has stripped our files. The computer memory is empty except for the most rudimentary programs that control our power supply, our water, our sewer. Tomorrow now work can be done because we haven't enough power to run any of the factories, to work in the mines, to power the tractors. I have been removed from office. I am now nothing more than the deputy chief of police, to see that the directives of the Lusitanian Evacuation Committee are carried out."

Not to miss the point, but shouldn't the actual chief of police be involved in this conversation as well?  Or, given how excellently they apparently enforce the law on this planet and conduct investigations, is the chief of police's schedule full because the chief is a burlap sack full of inedible grains wearing a cowboy hat and a monocle?

Ender is a bit surprised at the evacuation, and the Mayor explains that the colony is being revoked, and I can't tell if anyone remembers that it'll probably take thirty years or more for ships to arrive (unless Trondheim just happens to have ships on hand to move a few thousand people and their stuff).  Apparently once Miro and Ouanda are en route to Trondheim, Congress will restore access to their necessities.  Ender cracks up hearing that they saved their key files by emailing them to him.  He suggests that, the instant they restore their files from his access, they cut off the ansibles.

"Then we really would be in rebellion. And for what?" 

"For the chance to make Lusitania the best and most important of the Hundred Worlds. [....] Please,this place is too important for the chance to be missed." 

"The chance for what?" 

"To undo what Ender did in the Xenocide three thousand years ago."

'Undo' will remain an overly strong word until such time as Ender learns how to literally resurrect the dead queens.  There's a lot else to say here, but I've said all of it long ago when first asking why Ender didn't just take the hive queen away to an uninhabited planet far from human cities or any other creatures.  The Mayor agrees to try to convince the COTMOCs and the Bishop to properly rebel, and runs off.  Then, briefly, Jane:

"Don't let them sever the ansible connection. [....] I can make them think you've cut off your ansible, but if you really do it then I won't be able to help you."

Ender first accuses her of setting all this in motion, then starts trying to apologise for cutting her off, promising to never do it again, but she doesn't speak again.  He thinks it's enough to know she's still there, still listening.

Ender was surprised to find tears on his cheeks. Tears of relief, he decided. Catharsis. A speaking, a crisis, people's lives in tatters, the future of the colony in doubt. And I cry in relief because an overblown computer program is speaking to me again.

Huh, yeah.  That's true, Ender.  It's almost as if other people's enormous pain doesn't actually impact you half as much as you like to tell yourself it does, but you're extremely concerned with whether special individuals still think you're the most important being in the galaxy.  How curious and inexplicable.

Ela is waiting for Ender in his shack.  She's predictably shocked; she thought she had guessed all of her mother's important secrets.  She's especially pained for Miro and Ouanda; Ender says the cruelty was their not knowing for so long, and now they can solve it themselves; Ela grimly suggests that, as an even worse sequel to their mother, her brother will secretly bang his half-sister for the rest of their lives.

Ender asks for help, saying he needs to know immediately how the Descolada works, and so needs Ela to convince Novinha to help him.  He demonstrates that Congress has enacted a computer lockdown, reveals the charges against Miro and Ouanda, and his plan for rebellion.  Though at first Ela said that Novinha wouldn't speak to him, she assures Ender that, for her children, for Miro, she would in fact do anything.

For a moment she sat still. Then a synapse connected somewhere, and she stood up and hurried toward the door. 

She stopped. She came back, embraced him, kissed him on the cheek. "I'm glad you told it all," she said. "I'm glad to know it." 

He kissed her forehead and sent her on her way.

I prefer to think that Ela realised that she had dropped character for a moment and so had to quickly recover by acting like she had, as usual, instantly forgiven him and has no plans to extract recompense for his cruelty.  Ender then flops on his bed and thinks about how he would trade Novinha all her pain in exchange for a child who trusted him as much as Ela trusts her mother to do the right thing.  Ender's making a powerful bid to have his signature move changed from 'Murder everyone who displeases me' to 'Wallow in how awesome I am because I know how much other people overestimate the significance of their pain'.

Next week: Literally everyone forgets how fences work.

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*Oh my god, how great would it be if the Little Ones were actually genetically-engineered and everything on Lusitania was actually a century-long hoax intended to trap the invisible untouchable vagabond Xenocide?  Put him on a planet without the manufacturing capacity to build starships, infect it with a plague that means no one can ever leave lest they kill whole worlds, cut off its ansibles for rebelling, and that goddamn Speaker for the Dead is safely defused with the full support of the general public.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter eight, in which we genre shift to thriller-horror

I wondered, weeks ago, why chapter three was named for Libo instead of Novinha, and now we have the answer: Card was saving her name for this chapter.  Chapter three, of course, was the chapter in which Novinha ruined science, came up with like four terrible plans to protect her boyfriend, and then called Ender to save the day.  Presumably now, twenty-two years later, she'll have a much better showing, right?  (Just kidding; ya'll know how he do.)

(Content: domestic abuse, and if anyone can think of how the hell to summarise Ender's deal in this chapter, please make a suggestion, because it's terrifying.  Fun content: scientists who dare to follow the scientific method, those bastards.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 123--133

Chapter Eight: Dona Ivanova

The notes this week are from Libo again, and again an excerpt from evidence used in some future trial, and also hilarious, because it turns out that the xenologers have been intentionally giving the Little Ones new knowledge since Pipo was still alive.  I almost want to call this a retcon, except I can't off-hand think of any 'Oh no we revealed things' moments that chronologically came after the acrobat incident.  Anyway, Libo is explaining to his daughter how much lying she'll have to do in her reporting as well, to avoid revealing the Prime-Directive-breaking to the other scientists:

When you watch them struggle with a question, knowing that you have the information that could easily resolve their dilemma; when you see them come very near the truth and then for lack of your information retreat from their correct conclusions and return to error--you would not be human if it didn't cause you great anguish.

(Remember, species is decided by vote.)  The one thing I like about this is how much withholding information from other scientists is cast as the exact mirror of withholding it from the Little Ones, which is the least-condescending thing that the book has yet done for them.  I mean, given Card's characterisation of Other Scientists, it's still no compliment, but it's a step up from "What's the deal with all of the not-raping?"

And for every framling scientist who is longing for the truth, there are ten petty-minded descabeçados [headless ones] who despise knowledge, who never think of an original hypothesis, whose only labor is to prey on the writings of the true scientists in order to catch tiny errors or contradictions or lapses in method.

Like, fuck peer-reviewers, am I right?  'Rigour', pah.  'Reproducible results', double-pfeh!  Science isn't about constantly re-checking and re-testing and investigating apparent contradictions in order to smelt through masses of data in order to identify the common and reliable truths of the processes of the universe!  Science is about writing things down.

And let's not forget that these xenologers on other worlds have zero ability to actually test any of their hypotheses; if they study Little Ones, literally the only thing they can do all day is re-read the reports of the xenologers of Lusitania and try to link facts together in new ways.  Once they've come up with an "original hypothesis", the only way they can test it is by checking whether it matches all existing data, and asking the Lusitanians to find a way to test it more directly.  They're all detectives who are never allowed to leave their desks, and Libo is criticising them for noticing contradictions.

Given that Card is not and has never been a scientist, and given how logic-free some of his writing has proven to be, it's hard not to read this more as an attack on critics of art (as compared to those great creators, the authors) than on insufficiently-creative scientists.

But maybe the best part is what information Pipo and Libo started sharing:

That means you can't even mention a piggy whose name is derived from cultural contamination: "Cups" would tell them that we have taught them rudimentary pottery-making.  "Calendar" and "Reaper" are obvious.  And God himself couldn't save us if they learned Arrow's name.

Yup.  That's how that's gone down.  Pipo and Libo, xenologer academics, have taught the Little Ones pottery, archery, farming, and time-keeping.  And they think it's a much better and safer idea to keep these things quiet rather than indicate that the Little Ones might have invented any of these things themselves.  In a society built mostly of secrets and places humans aren't allowed to go, they figured never mentioning that they had given the Little Ones calendars was easier than saying "Oh, and they must be trusting us more because today I overheard one of them talking about a holy day coming up and they've revealed they do in fact have a calendar after all!"

But more to the point: WHY.  The Little Ones are low-tech, but they also have no need to be otherwise.  They have no predators and they don't hunt large animals, so they have no use for archery except war--did Pipo and Libo learn/teach how to make bows so they could defend themselves better against the other tribes?  (What if the close-contact murder is actually vital to the genetic exchange in their wars?  It would be awful but also kind of perfect if they gave the Little Ones bows and arrows for combat and the entire species died out in ten years because they were killing in a non-reproductive manner.  Card would have to be on board with that; we know how he feels about non-reproductive genetic exchange.)

The Little Ones also don't have any reason to farm that we know of, so why reaping?  Agricultural revolutions completely reshape societies if they take effect at all.  And wouldn't the satellites notice if the Little Ones started farming and were able to support a much larger population?  We don't even understand their current nutritional needs and yet they adopted farming and yet they haven't done anything with it in twenty years?

This book is an amazing exercise guide for critical thinking skills.

Novinha is finishing up in her lab at the end of the day, stalling before going home, chastising herself for not being a better parent, never seeing her youngest children except when they're asleep in bed.  She thinks she should be happy Marcão is gone, thinks that "all our reasons expired four years" ago, and wonders why she never thought of leaving him, even if they couldn't get divorced.  She's still aching from the final time he beat her, three weeks ago.

The pain in her hip flared even as she thought of it.  She nodded in satisfaction.  It's no more than I deserve, and I'll be sorry when it heals.

So, Novinha is obviously horrifically emotionally and mentally damaged, in ways that are pretty normal for abuse survivors: she's internalised the idea that she deserved to be hurt (she keeps using the phrase "no worse than I deserve"), even though she hated him.  I wait to see whether she gets corrected or if Card determines that she really did 'deserve' to be hurt for her sins.  As she approaches her home (having bid a rather poetic good-bye to her plants), she sees all the lights are on and grows immediately suspicious.

Olhado is uploading/downloading memories when she arrives, and she thinks a bit about the ones she wishes she could delete and could replace, and how it's her fault, her curse, that Olhado lost his eyes instead of being "the best, the healthiest, the wholest of my children", which I hope will be explained because: what?  Olhado tells her that the Speaker has arrived, and she panics as Ela shows up with cafezinhos in the kitchen.  Olhado and Ela try to tell their mother that Ender is italicised-"good", unlike what the bishop claimed, but she takes silent pride in being unshakable, and reflects on how it's not her fault Libo is dead, since she kept her secret all those years.  She sits, and Ender, still a ninja, reaches in and is already pouring before she notices him.

"Desculpa-me,"she whispered. Forgive me. "Trouxe o senhor tantos quilômetros--" 

"We don't measure starflight in kilometers, Dona Ivanova. We measure it in years." His words were an accusation, but his voice spoke of wistfulness, even forgiveness, even consolation. I could be seduced by that voice. That voice is a liar.

Look, y'all, I'm doing my best, but I cannot speak and I can barely imagine how to turn those two sentences into an accusation while expressing wistfulness but allowing for forgiveness and offering consolation.  Like, two, maybe, and I would sound like a twit to anyone except maybe someone very emotionally damaged who was just happy I wasn't brimming with evil.

Novinha apologises for having called him away twenty-two years, and Ender just says he hasn't noticed it yet, then he springs the passive-aggression on the abuse victim he's supposedly come to help:

"For me it was only a week ago that I left my sister.  She was the only kin of mine left alive.  Her daughter wasn't born yet, and now she's probably through with college, married, perhaps with children of her own.  I'll never know her.  But I know your children, Dona Ivanova." [....] 

"In only a few hours you think you know them?" 

"Better than you do, Dona Ivanova."

Everyone gasps, though Novinha privately thinks he might be right, but more importantly how does Ender judge this?  He knows literally nothing about Dona Ivanova; he invented a bond with little Novinha and then arrived here and learned nothing about the family before coming to see them.  He has literally no evidence on which to judge how well she understands her children.  He then turns to walk out, and Novinha snaps at him to come back, but he proceeds to her bedroom, where Miro and Quim are arguing.  Novinha is startled to see Miro smiling, but it vanishes when he sees her, which stings more.  She tries to ignore it and tell Ender again to leave, saying he has no death to speak, saying that as a foolish girl she imagined the original Speaker would come and console her.

"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 [....] "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."

Just a note: first the mayor wasn't shocked Ender could be two thousand years old, and now Novinha suggests that the Speaker might have lived three thousand years, and yet literally no one except Plikt (who needed four years to entertain the notion) actually considers how far into ancient times people might have come forward in this galaxy.  Speaking of scientists who lack creative thought and curiosity.

I do like this exchange as far as it can be taken as a commentary on scripture, and the changing meanings of old writing, the way people might look at something today and see a story completely different from the way it might have struck its original audience.  Again, a very weird thing to hear from the keyboard of Orson Scott Card, given that he's the worst kind of fundamentalist and bigot.

Novinha mentions the Speaker's target, Ender, a person who ruined everything he touched, and Ender snaps for a moment, "his voice whipped out like a grass-saw, ragged and cruel", to say that everyone touches something kindly and to say a person destroyed everything they touched is "a lie that can't truthfully be said of any human being who ever lived", and I am abruptly and uncomfortably aware that Marcos is going to get a post-mortem redemption arc.

Ender says that while Novinha called him first, others have called speakers since then, so it's not all on her conscience, and she wonders who else could know enough about speakers to have done so.  She's shocked to learn someone called a speaker for Marcos, that anyone would miss him, and Miro speaks up:

"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."

Wait, they do have therapists?  No.  Not buying it.  The last time we saw anyone with anything approaching therapeutic qualifications they were Valentine's school guidance counsellor.  The planet should have therapists, among many other things, but I just don't believe for a moment that Card's universe contains therapists.  At some point, someone would go to one.

Miro and Ela start laughing about Grego soaking Ender's pants, and Novinha has a montage of flashbacks, the joy of Miro and Ela as small children, Marcos' slow growing hatred, the way everything was ruined by the time Quim was born and he never got a happy childhood.  Marcos' rage grew "because he knew none of it belonged to him", foreshadow, clunk.  Novinha's response to this flash of cheer is of course to retreat to rage that anyone would interrupt the quiet gloom she's created, and try to throw Ender out again, though she knows the law protects his quest for TRUUUUUUTHHHHH.

"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 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. [....] 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."

There's some back and forth about whether Novinha is really hating Marcos or herself, how recently Ender studied her younger self, how Pipo loved her, et cetera, but I'd rather focus on the above.  There is this cultural notion we have with empathising with the worst people.  Empathising with good people is obvious and admirable, but empathising with villains is the mark of A Great Heart.  You may notice that in that dichotomy, no one ever gets around to empathising with the middle ground.  The neutrals, the people who are just trying to get on with their day, they're not part of the consideration.  You have to be a hero or a monster before anyone cares about anyone caring.

So let me provide an advance alternative interpretation--I'm guessing it's alternative, I'm guessing this isn't what Ender is going to say, although if I'm wrong about that I will be 1) impressed and 2) irritated that my blog hasn't won the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Marcos' truth is the story of no one stopping him.  Marcos is an abuser and apparently everyone knows and no one has ever done a thing to intervene.  They know that he beats Novinha, but the police don't stop him, they know that Grego is practically feral but they don't help him, they don't try to draw Novinha--daughter of Os Venerados, sole master of shaping and reshaping life for their alien world, bringer of potato vodka--out of her abusive home and into a shelter, or haul Marcos out of his house and into a jail cell.  They do have cops, apparently, cops who will kick him out of the bars but not stop him from nearly murdering his wife.  And for two decades they have watched him grow more terrible and violent and watched him damage his family and they have done nothing, because it was easier to pretend everything was okay.  It's the same gross neglect that they inflicted on Novinha until she became xenobiologists, but extended four times as long and harming five or six children instead of one.  How's that for a truth that would make the people of Milagre uncomfortable and shake their assurances that they did the right thing by gossiping about how awful Marcos was?

But yeah, I can't wait to hear Ender explain that Marcos' had a secret kindness that redeems him.

Novinha tries again to throw Ender out of the house and yells at him in Portuguese, and we get another grammar lesson about how rude she was with her pronoun forms, and yet Ender's response in the same overly-familiar Portuguese tones was instead kind and intimate: "Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee".  Wait, what?  He walked into her house, got all her children on his side, told her that she's too cruel to herself and to the memory of her abusive husband, and then told her he would plant a garden in her fertile ground?!  That is the creepiest fucking thing I have read in months.

Oh, and then Quara wakes up crying and Novinha hears Ender go into her room and soothe her with a Nordic lullaby.  Forget it.  This is just a straight-up horror flick now.  Next morning he's going to be wearing Marcos' skin like a snuggie.

Novinha falls asleep, and when she wakes again in the night she hears her children gathered in the living room, Miro and Ela and Quim and Olhado, laughing together, and she dreams that Libo is among them, alive, her true husband, foreshadow, clunk.  She fears that Ender will, in repairing her family, learn her secrets and reveal them and Miro will die like Libo did, because apparently she's in denial that keeping her secret didn't protect him.  I'm not clear if Ender ever actually left the house or if he just moved in.  Regardless, that's the merciful end of this chapter.  Next week: science investigation, Ender is a jackwagon, and in a shocking twist teenage xenologers make bad decisions.