Lullaby Chapter 3 in which Carl shares his "coping" methods with us

What happens this chapter: Carl buys a model home, builds it, and laments at how everyone is so noisy and he's so much better than them. Also some more stuff about dead babies, depression, and self-harm.

Confession. I forgot this chapter existed until I started reading it. It isn't that it isn't well written or it's a toss off, it's that I blitzed through the book so quickly when I read it as a kid that I missed what it was saying so it didn't stick. Going through again, more slowly, I see what Palahniuk was trying to do. I'm not sure what teenage me thought was going on in this chapter, mostly because she forgot it, but I suspect she came away with something different.

Last chapter, I observed that Carl desperately clung to objectivity and being detail-oriented to avoid actually dealing with his past, and commented on how he wasn't a very trustworthy narrator because he fails to own his own bias. This chapter is basically extrapolating on that. There is a lot of Carl wallowing in his own depression, anger, and smug sense of superiority, which causes me as a reader to feel conflicted. On one hand, dude's got some very real reasons to be a depressed little angst bucket and angry, and I'm sympathetic to that. On the other hand, he's smug and superior and that makes me want to go get the bees.

You have no idea how long I have been holding onto this .gif

I was at work and I noticed a customer holding a copy of Choke, another Palahniuk book. I asked how he liked it, having read it many years ago. He paused, "I really like the writing but... the characters are all so unlikable." I warned him all Palahniuk books were like that. I have to give Palahniuk credit for willingly, knowingly, and repeatedly writing unlikable characters, but it does make them harder to get through without reaching for your handy crate full of bees sometimes.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead. [...] 

These people who need their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics. 

Laughter of the dead comes through every wall. 

I want to take a moment to remind you all that Carl is at least 40, and in fact not a college freshman. The whole chapter is spliced with him hearing his neighbors TV/radio/screaming through the walls and floor and ceiling. He is surrounded and constantly assaulted by noise (his floor and table even rattle from it) throughout this chapter. He literally starts to describe it in terms of war, battle, and assault. 

This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble. 

This isn't about quality. It's about volume.  

This isn't about music. This is about winning.  

You stomp the competition with the bass line. 

You rattle windows. You drop the melody line and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. 

You dominate. This is really about power.

The outside world is literally invading and attacking Carl as he tries to go about his business from his perspective. Any act of creating noise in a public space, is an invasive attack.  

Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. 

Someone's always spraying the air with their mood.

In between Carl lamenting his neighbors being jerks, and how big brother is not watching us but controlling us by filling up all our attention (no really he even uses the phrase "big brother isn't watching. he's singing and dancing" and I nearly took out the bees) he goes about building a model home. He goes to the store, limping, and buys it without seeing the package at all (we're told it was $149). He goes home and meticulously blinds himself to what he's about to build, takes it out of the box in a dark bathroom, puts the box and instructions back in the bag and takes just the pieces out and begins to build. This is something he does regularly, sometimes he trashes the models by screwing something up, sometimes he doesn't. This time he doesn't and he takes us through in minute detail of attention he's pouring into this tiny house. In between building we get glimpses into his past, and how he is (not) coping.

There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. 

You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. [...] 

The truth is, even if you read to your wife and child some night. You read them a lullaby. And the next morning, you wake up but your family doesn't. You lie in bed, still curled against your wife. She's still warm but not breathing. Your daughter's not crying. The house is already hectic with traffic and talk radio and stream pounding through the pipes inside the wall. The truth is you can forget even that day for the moment is takes to make a perfect knot in you tie. 

This I know. This is my life.

This is all spliced with "advice" he wants to give parents of children who have just died. Things like taking up a hobby (such as building meticulously detailed model buildings without instructions), and:

These people with a dead child, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself.

Carl is not just depressed. He's turning his mental distress into physical disability as a coping mechanism. That tiny house he is building in such detail will be set on the ground, he'll take his shoe off, and then he will go Godzilla on its ass. He will stomp it to bits, and injure his foot in the process. His depression, this self-harm, has given him a bad foot as well as an inability to deal with anything for any length of time. 

You might move away, but that's not enough. You'll take up a hobby. You'll bury yourself in work. Change your name. You'll cobble things together. Make order out of chaos. You'll do this each time your foot is healed enough, and you have the money. Organize every detail.

This isn't what a therapist will tell you to do, but it works. 

He blames himself for the death of his wife and child. He can't stand the idea of waking up and facing his own thoughts, let alone his past, and he resents everything and everyone for being able to handle their own. It seems impossible to him. So he sneers at them for refusing to allow themselves to think--because that's the only way they possibly could. Otherwise they would all pack up, move, and assume a new identity every few years. The only reason they can settle down and lead "happy" lives is because no one except for him thinks, because he's just such a special nihilistic little snowflake.

This is the bit where I start screaming THERAPY FOR ALL! Except he's obviously already tried that. Instead he opted for running away and smashing up tiny buildings as often as possible. 

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

The shortcut to closing the door is to bury yourself in the details.

Oh hey look, that sounds a lot like how he approaches his job doesn't it? Carl's entire life is a series of activities for the sole purpose of trying to outrun his own thoughts, and up to the point where we meet him, he's failing.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter six, part one, in which I no longer know what is going on

Totally unrelated news: some very talented friends of mine have produced a web series called YouStar, about a trio of siblings who join forces to win an online music video competition by appealing to the disturbing romantic trends of our time.  It's pretty great and everyone involved is brilliant, and as a bonus, I have some cameo scenes, so if you'd like a mental image and voice to put these Ender posts to, you should definitely watch all of them.

The first three episodes can be found here, and new ones go up on Thursdays.  (My first appearance is episode 3, but start from the beginning or you won't have any idea what's going on and you'll be missing out on their brilliance.  You'll know it's me when you see a low-quality video of a guy in a bowtie spewing the most ridiculously pseudo-academic jargon he can improvise.  They say to write what you know.)

(Content: death, terminal disease, discussed rape of prisoners.  Fun content: did you see that YouStar link?)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 84--97

Chapter Six: Olhado

We have left behind Pipo's incredibly bad science notes in favour of grown-up Libo's notes.  Unfortunately, these are no less awful.  Libo writes of the Little Ones' storytelling, which is almost always about war, and how war seems to be their only form of interaction with other tribes.  Everyone dies, and bafflingly they never seem to have any interest in enemy women "either for rape, murder, or slavery, the traditional human treatment of the wives of fallen soldiers".  It might be three thousand years in the future and humanity might have all but forgotten the concept of war, but that's no reason to stop defaulting to ancient sexism and rape culture-derived assumptions!

Does this mean that there is no genetic exchange between tribes?  Not at all.  The genetic exchanges may be conducted by the females, who may have some system of trading genetic favors.  Given the apparent subservience of the males to the females in piggy society, this could easily be going on without the males having any idea; or it might cause them such shame that they just won't tell us about it.

How could you have 'genetic exchange' that the males don't know about, given that males are presumably the people being exchanged?  I think they're going to notice getting traded.  Is he hypothesising that the women just trade men for an afternoon sometimes, or keep harems, and/or that the 'traded' men are then killed?  Has Libo considered that maybe the reason the Little Ones are so enthusiastic about war is that they consider it the vastly superior alternative to slavery and rape?  That maybe they glorify death in battle because it always carries the implicit notion of "He got honor, and then he got out before the worst could happen"?  (I mean, I'm sure that we're going to find out war is actually part of their reproductive process, but if Libo's not going to go near that idea, he could at least try harder with the theories he has got.  ...Wait, if war does turn out to be part of reproduction, does that mean that all their tales of battle are basically porn?)

Does he know of anything yet that the Little Ones have indicated shame about?  For all that the error of the Lusitanians is supposed to be that they're treating ramen like varelse, it seems to me that their actual mistake here is that they're treating aliens like humans and then aggressively rejecting any motivations that don't come from stereotypes about ancient humanity.

Libo's apprentice is his daughter Ouanda, who apparently took notes on a storytelling session (I guess from memory, since they're not allowed to write things down?) by one warrior speaking of another who brutally slew several of the first one's allies before getting killed himself.  There are various remarks that I suspect might be hints, like the storyteller showing his enemy a handful of grass, and singing a song "of the far country", and then the whole group breaking out into a chant in the Wives' Language, despite there being no women present.  The Little Ones also speak Stark most of the time and slip into Portuguese for emphasis, a pattern they apparently picked up from Libo.  (Why, again, did they teach the aliens two languages when they're trying to avoid contamination--never mind, we're all bored now.)

Ender's in space again and hasn't got much to do.  I actually kind of like their warp drive, if only because it's so bizarre--the ship makes an instantaneous "Park shift" to high speed, but apparently can't predict how high, so once it's in motion it figures out its velocity and then sets a timer for the appropriate moment to downshift back to normal speeds.  I think that's the first bit of SF I've liked in this book.

He starts from Spanish (he's fluent, obviously) and learns Portuguese, but talking to the ship gets boring after a couple of hours every day.  Apparently Jane can't talk to him while he's in flight, nor can the hive queen, due to the sixteen-hours-per-minute time dilation, which you will recall he only had explained to him yesterday despite this being the twenty-fourth time he's done this exact thing.  After eight days, he's functional in Portuguese and "desperate for human company--he would have been glad to discuss religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship's computer to talk to."  Gettin' tired of your Super Bowl Day WOO SUCK IT CALVINISTS routine here, Card.

The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest of the universe.  Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while the starship remained truly motionless.  No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe the phenomenon.  It was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway[....].  Someday a scientist would discover why the Park shift took almost no energy.  Somewhere, Ender was certain, a terrible price was being paid for human starflight.

If the starship is remaining motionless and moving the universe around it, Futurama-style, wouldn't that prevent two starships from moving at the same time, since each would gain velocity relative to the other one?  Or am I being too Newtonian here?  Someone who understands real physics better than I do, please let me know if this is less stupid than it sounds.  (Not the part about Ender's intuition and his nightmares that every Park jump is fuelled by the death of a distant star--I'm sure that's stupid.  And prescient, somehow.)

Jane explains that Lusitania has no landing authority, just an automated shuttle that takes people down to the surface when needed.  It might not fly often, but do the Little Ones not notice the huge metal sky-boat rocketing out of the clouds when it does come?  We've discussed before how humanity must not have cloaking technology, or else they'd never be so stupid as to approach aliens like they have.  Jane also notes that, since Ender is the Speaker, he literally can't be refused access to the planet, which sounds like a terrible idea, given that there are literally no background checks or overseeing authorities to become a speaker.  Are they even going to check his bags?

Plot twist: Novinha cancelled her call for a speaker five days after she sent it--from Ender's perspective, about six minutes after he went to warp speed.  Starways Code says that you can't cancel a speaker once they're in transit, probably because, to quote Anton Mates a couple of weeks back: "How often do you think Speakers set out for distant planets, and then about seven years into their voyage they get a message saying that they're no longer needed, thanks, the police finally figured out that Mr. Jones was poisoned by his ex-wife because she despised his politics, and a poet in another star system did a really nice eulogy over the ansible for him?" 

But, as a bonus, Novinha's kids Miro and Ela also called for a speaker.  Ela, just a few weeks ago, to speak the death of their father Marcão after he died of some terminal disease.  Miro, four years ago, to speak the death of Libo, who was apparently killed by the Little Ones in exactly the same style as his father.  (Bets that the book will 100% blame Novinha's secrecy for Libo's death in the end?  Ha ha of course it will.)  Officially, contact with the Little Ones is now forbidden, but Ouanda refuses and no one is willing to stop her; they're just going to wait thirty-three years for the scientists from Calicut to arrive and take over.  Y'all, this galaxy is weird.  You could literally train multiple replacements in the time it takes for an expert to fly in to deal with your problem, but they do it anyway.

Bonus plot twist: the hive queen detects another philotic mind on the planet.  Ender seems bizarrely disinterested in this.  It's not the Little Ones, but it knows of them.  She's also super in favour of settling there; it looks totally sweet and woodsy.

We skip over to Ela in church, watching her little brother Grego use a screwdriver to pry rivets out of the plastic pews during the homily, and reflecting on what the consequences would have been when their father was alive, how he would have ultimately put all the blame on Miro.  Grego is a little monster; when a nun tries to stop him from destroying the bench, he tricks her, knees her in the mouth, and she flees, bleeding.  Ela, being a viewpoint character, obviously has darkly poetic thoughts about how the physical sickness that killed their father (weird organ mutations that I'm guessing are another variant on Descolada) lives on as a spiritual sickness in his children, because sure, let's assign a moral value to being afflicted by disease, that's not stupid and terrible.

Ela notes that her mother (Novinha) doesn't help at all by being so obsessed with work and inventing new cereals.  I'm trying to think of any career-focused women in any of the Ender/Shadow novels who aren't chastised for failing to focus on their family, and I'm not coming up with anyone.

Bishop Peregrino starts ranting against the coming Speaker for the Dead ("give him your smiles, but hold back your hearts"), which freaks Ela out because she think he's somehow found out about her request, but her brother Quim (it's short for Joaquim and that'll have to do) explains that someone called a speaker for Pipo decades ago and he arrives that afternoon.  Ela panics further, because she thinks it's too soon for Marcão's death to be spoken and his awfulness to be revealed.  I dunno.

Her other brother Olhado must be important, since the chapter is named for him.  He has electronic eyes, and when he's bored or hiding from reality he switches them off or replays old memories, but to leave church:

Olhado switched his eyes back on and took care of himself, winking metallically at whatever fifteen-year-old semi-virgin he was hoping to horrify today.

I'm not sure I even want to know what Card means by 'semi-virgin'.

Ender and Mayor Bosquinha ride in a hovercar over the grasslands toward Milagre, and I wonder again what happened to the ban on ever letting the Little Ones see human technology. "Good god, man, do you really think that just because we launch shuttles in and out of orbit and sending anti-gravity cars cruising over the hills that you can just go and use a pen in front of them?  We have no choice about the cars; are they supposed to walk the whole afternoon?!"  That's basically how I figure that went down.

Bosquinha doesn't want to talk about the Little Ones, and manages to indicate (intentionally?) that the Bishop has named Ender a "dangerous agent of agnosticism", but notes that the cargo ship full of skrika probably won him friends, as "you'll see plenty of vain women wearing the pelts in the months to come."  I'm now trying to tally any women in any of these books who aren't criticised for some intensely feminine-coded flaw.  I can think of two candidates: Petra, who is of course too masculine, and one in the Shadow books who spends all her time supporting Bean and ends up getting fridged to make him sad.

The mayor instead talks to Ender about local life, such as the useless native grass that can't be turned to thatch because it dissolves in the rain once cut, and the herd animals whose meat has no nutritional value.  But then there's an important moment:

The tone of her voice was heavy with concealed emotion.  Ender knew, then, that the fear of the piggies ran deep. 

"Speaker, I know you're thinking that we're afraid of the piggies.  And perhaps some of us are.  But the feeling most of us have, most of the time, isn't fear at all.  It's hatred.  Loathing."

Ender intuited something, knew it, and was then immediately told he was wrong.  Glory hallelujah praise be to Zalgo.  It's moments like this that make me wonder if our third-person-omniscient narrator is supposed to be unreliable and Ender isn't half as smart or right as he thinks he is.  Wouldn't that be awesome?

Bosquinha goes on about the bishop's theologising and whether the Little Ones are morally vacuous or simply unfallen, but then apologises because she's sure she sounds ridiculous to a speaker.  Ender says nothing, just thinks to himself that religious people always think they sound absurd to nonbelievers, which, in my experience, is also incredibly not true, and then congratulates himself for appreciating sacredness in many forms and how the mayor will have to slowly learn to see the truth about people instead of her assumptions.

He starts by mentioning the local religious order, the Children of the Mind of Christ, and explains that he's heard of them before, when he spoke the death of San Angelo on Moctezuma.  The mayor is shocked, not because Ender has just revealed he's been a speaker for more than two thousand years, but because it's supposed to be a heretical story that the now-sainted man asked for a speaker on his deathbed, afraid people were going to claimed he had performed miracles.  Ender, however, attested the miracles himself, and San Angelo was canonised within a century.

...What?  There had better be more backstory coming, because so far this makes no sense at all.  Speakers are required to tell the truth, so if Ender attested to miracles he must have believed they were real, but Bosquinha implies that he thus "meddle[d] in the affairs of the Church".  Ender just says that "where the followers of San Angelo are, the truth has friends", even though Angelo apparently called Ender to speak his death specifically to refute these miracles.  So either Ender lied or Angelo wanted him to lie, and either way I'm not sure how these people are supposed to be truth's best friends.

Bosquinha sniffed and started the car again.  As Ender intended, her preconceived notions of a speaker for the dead were now shattered.

On the plus side, for once a religious author is writing a religious character being startled that their assumptions about an agnostic were wrong, rather than the reverse.  On the downside, Card is no better equipped to write an agnostic than most fundamentalist Christians are to write an atheist.

Bosquinha's complete non-reaction to Ender saying he was there on Moctezuma two thousand years ago indicates to me that, as we've all been saying, incredibly 'old' people should be very common in this galaxy, so I'm even less sure why Ender's ancientness is still treated as such a big deal, and why it took Plikt four years to work out that Andrew Wiggin is Andrew Wiggin.

That's all I can take for this post; come back next week for Ender's detective work and Olhado's sweet robot eyes.

Lullabye Chapter 2 in which DEAD BABIES. DEAD BABIES EVERYWHERE.

What happens in this chapter: Carl tells us about an ethics question on his journalism exam and about the story he's about to be working on: a five-part series on sudden infant death syndrome.

Right, so: dead babies. What, did you think I was kidding? No, no, this is Palahniuk, the more morbid the better! The chapter opens with Carl talking about a the only question that was on his ethics exam before he graduated from Journalist school. The question was basically this: You're sent to get details on a kid that choked on a Christmas ornament on Christmas eve. You go, get the details, write the story, and your editor is demanding the color of the ornament for the article. Won't run the article without it.

Do you:
Call the grieving parents
Or
Refuse and lose your big shot job?

Carl, being smarter than everyone around him, especially his teachers who wrote the exam, chose neither. He'd call the paramedics! They have that catalogued, obviously. They gave his ethics a D. Carl doesn't go on about what bullshit that is, but the wording of "They gave my ethics a D" has a certain level of  a superiority complex. He's obviously being punished because he outsmarted their test and they were angry. Not because he failed to understand the point of the question. He will continue to miss the point near the end of the chapter and wonder if this was less about ethics and more his teachers trying to warn him, "Are you really sure you want to do this?"

An artist's interpretation of Carl

Carl will then go on to try to tell us how he's TOTES A RELIABLE NARRATOR! 

Instead of ethics, I learned only to tell people what they wanted to hear. I learned to write everything down. [...] And maybe I didn't learn ethics, but I learned to pay attention. No detail is too minor to note.

I definitely trust this man to be honest about what's going on and not be bias as fucking hell in all his writing, I don't know about you. A man who claims everything they do is robotic and they are a perfect machine and therefore obviously rational and what are these feelings you speak of? No no, those are for women, he is a man and has no such thing, so they couldn't possibly cloud his judgement or ability to report on things (spoiler: Yes it can).

We're told about Duncan, Carl's editor who put him on this 5 part "feel good" special about sudden infant death syndrome (more on that in a minute) and, once again, not charitable descriptions.

 The details about Duncan are he's pocked with acne scars and his scalp is brown along the hairline every two weeks when he dyes his gray roots. His computer password is "password."

I want to underline how we're not told "Duncan is like X", we're told "Duncan IS X".  Look at how hard Carl's trying to be a reliable narrator. No, no, he's just giving us the facts about Duncan and letting us form our own opinions! Doesn't matter that he draws attention only to his imperfections, and says absolutely nothing positive. That said, Carl is not supposed to be a kind or generous kind of man. 

Now, back to the dead babies. Or rather, Duncan's pitch for them.

There are so many people with infants, my editor said. It's the type of story that every parent and grandparent is too afraid to read and too afraid not to read. There's really no new information, but the idea was to profile five families that had lost a child. Show how people cope. How people move forward with their lives. ... That angle.

Award bait, basically. Carl tags along with paramedics and gets to see the scene of tragedy of the broken home as the parents tearfully answer the seemingly random questions. He snoops around the nursery with the other paramedic. As he goes through and tells us about the decor (there's a needlepoint saying "Thursday's Child has far to go"), the smell (baby powder), the books laying around (Poems and Rhymes from Around the World) and continues to try and be a machine and report this all in a very robotic way. 

Again, the narrator is trying to prove how reliable he is, but his reaction to wandering around the house of someone who just lost their kid being coolly observing his surroundings (and it is his surroundings, not the parents he notices) is telling. He is supposed to be writing about the people--profiling their family, writing about how they cope, but while he goes into such detail about what the nursery looks like there is no description at all of the parents. He may be able to notice every minor detail, but he chooses not to. He chooses to not even notice the big details of the parents.

This should be telling about his objectivity, and this is caused by his feelings, which we're given no indication on because Carl is so determined to be objective. He's so determined he leaves out his own bias and (actual spoiler) doesn't mention his own child who he lost to crib death 20ish years ago. He at no point shows us his own details or feelings on the subject of being put on this exploitative, award bait story, and why? Because he's never dealt with it, and he refuses to, because that would involve admitting he has feelings, or something like it. He just goes along and starts doing it with no hint to anyone (his editor or the reader) of his own very personal history or experience with it. There are Reasons we don't get this information yet--but it underlines just how unreliable Carl is because dude's got his own issues with refusing to have feelings and hiding behind a front of cold, rational objectivity.

The chapter ends with Carl coming to the previously-mentioned conclusion of "The test was really a warning" because, again, not projecting at all.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter five, in which loving siblings trying to destroy each other

I was researching the relativistic physics from last week's footnote further, and in doing so, noticed that the time dilation effects of travelling at relativistic speeds are all crammed up at the fast end.  What this means is that if we assume humanity can get up to any speed short of lightspeed, Ender's average of 133 years per spaceflight could be on trips that take (from his perspective) a year or two weeks and the speed is still going to be roughly the same (0.99999~ c).  So my conclusion that Card had actually done meaningful math is unfounded, because he could have justified Ender aging ten years or one or fifty with just about exactly the same calculations.  My apologies, folks.  I didn't mean to mislead you about how much science Card actually put in his science fiction.

(Content: dysfunctional family, victim-blaming, emotional abuse.  Fun content: super awkward RPF.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 71--83

Chapter Five: Valentine

I don't keep an actual list, but I think Pipo's notes have to be in my top five worst info-dumps ever.  Not because they're so clunky (Card does a reasonable job of making them sound natural, and at least he found a justification for Pipo to tell the reader directly about the aliens) but because he gives us bits of information with no linkages.  I can't imagine what kinds of conversations they could be having that would let him draw these conclusions and no others.  For example, he let it slip one day that he was Libo's father, and the Little Ones were astonished and impressed:

The conclusion is inescapable.  The pequeninos that we've known so far are not a whole community, or even typical males.  They are either juveniles or old bachelors.  Not a one of them has ever sired any children.  Not a one has even mated, as nearly as we can figure.

HOW?!  How can that possibly be the only conclusion?  How can he possibly have gained inconclusive evidence as to whether any of them have ever mated?  He doesn't even know what mating means for their species!  This is like an investigative RPG with a really inept GM who knows what information they want to feed their players but no idea how to hide it, so everything just comes in the form of rumours ex nihilo.

Pipo concludes (because it's true for all primate societies he knows of) that these Little Ones are powerless outcasts, which explains why they flipflop between speaking of females with worship and total contempt, never defying their wishes but still insulting their intelligence.  (Personally, I think he should have realised that when all the Little Ones showed up wearing fedoras, but I'm not a xenologer.)  He thus discards his theory that the females are nonsentient animals, and concludes that the males he knows are just bitter, which... well, to paraphrase Farnsworth, that theory is less stupid, although he came to it in a profoundly stupid way.

He doesn't quite believe it, though, because he's sure the Little Ones he knows are too smart to just be the least-desirable mates.  And for whatnapple, he says he can't report any of this because it would mean admitting he accidentally revealed information.  Even though he has admitted to revealing information at later times, like, say, chapter one.  So instead he just hides these findings "in Libo's locked personal files, where even my dear wife wouldn't think to look for them", because apparently on Lusitania spouses break each other's trust and privacy six times before breakfast.

Back to Trondheim, to Valentine, eight months pregnant and frustrated that she can't help load the boat for her history class to go on a "söndring", which Google tells me means "difference".  I dunno.  She met Jakt on her first söndring.  They had come to Trondheim like it was any other planet, where Ender would Speak someone's death and she would take a few months to write a history... oh god:

It was a game they played, pretending to be itinerant professors of this and that, while in actually they created or transformed the world's identity, for Demosthenes' essay was always seen as definitive.

I just can't with these people anymore.

Card does finally address the whole 'all of these essays are written by Demosthenes' thing by saying that people believe Demosthenes to be a name taken up by a series of individuals, in the same way that there are many Speakers for the Dead.  There are theories that some secret council of wise historians reviews sufficiently brilliant writings that are submitted to them and judge if they are worthy of the Demosthenes pseudonym.  Apparently no one, despite relativistic travel occurring on a near-daily basis, believes that maybe one author could be skipping around space writing things periodically, and no one is correlating the trail of publications with the travels of the Wiggin siblings.  I mean, Ender the Xenocide is supposedly the name everyone knows and hates, but no one has tried to investigate where he actually ended up in life?  Did he fake his death a few millennia ago?

Everyone in this galaxy is a colossal twit.

At least Val notes that each world changes her as well, and none more than Trondheim.  To get away from all those goddamn Lutherans and Calvinists, she decided to start taking groups of students on camping trips, to live off the land and have intellectual debates in the woods.

Her idea was to break the patterns of intellectual rot that were inevitable at every university. [....]  When their daily food depended on their own exertion, their attitudes about what mattered and did not matter in history were bound to change.

This is... weirdly Maoist for Card, but okay.  First principles, away from the taint of books, not completely out of the ordinary.  She hired a boat from Jakt, who fully expected to have to rescue the lot of them within a week, but they did well, built a little village, and produced a mess of brilliant publications on their return.  Valentine keeps taking more students camping, and gets to know Jakt: not much education, but he's very Close To The Earth and knows the sea and ice and the skrika, which are apparently seal-like, given the way they're described flopping onto the beaches.  (Y'all will recall that Ender just bought a starship full of skrika, of which Jane said some would be eaten and some would be worn.  I assumed it was, like, a plant, and now I'm assuming she meant they'd be divided into meat and fur, but I'm enjoying the idea that they chew the fur and wear the meat.)

So Jakt and Valentine were married (by a "Lutheran minister--not a Calvinist" because Card has some serious anti-Calvin grudge apparently) and she rapidly got impregnated and she's due very soon, so they must have been there for almost a year, if not two.  (I went back and Ender did indeed say he hadn't spent more than six months on any world except Trondheim.)  She has rooted, and she's grateful that Ender understands their wandering is over, so clearly nothing can possibly go wrong and they will all be happy forever.

Ender arrives, and she sees his bag and thinks he's intending to come camping with them, which she notes will kind of defeat the purpose, because Ender's incredible brilliance will infect the other students and the revelations they come to will be the ones he hints at, not their own.  I'll give Card this--he's so dedicated to first principles that he's even stopped approving of Ender teaching other people.  (Sometimes.  Teaching his own classes is still okay.  And telling everyone what the lives of dead people really meant.  Look, I don't know anymore.)

They greet each other, and joke about whether it'll be okay if Valentine has her kid while camping (yes, because her father will Nordic at her and wrap her in furs), and then out of nowhere Valentine intuits that Ender is leaving Trondheim.

"I can have this baby on söndring, but not on another world." 

As she guessed, Ender hadn't meant her to come.  "The baby's going to be shockingly blond," said Ender.  "She'd look hopelessly out of place on Lusitania.  Mostly black Brazilians there."

Oh god.  I mean, okay, well done on keeping human diversity in the future, Card, but what this means is that lily-white Ender is leaving behind the peaceful world of blonds to go to an all-black planet and teach them how to empathise with the humanoid beings they think are actually just mindless savages.  Given that we've already established that the Portuguese flavouring here was inspired by Card's missionary work... this just got so much more uncomfortable.  I know it's a science fiction standard to have people basically interchangeable according to their planet, but that is the opposite of a good reason to make everyone black on Bad Colonialist Science World.

They argue a bit over whether things could have been any different, once Valentine met Jakt, given that wife and husband are (assuming all goes well) inevitably going to be emotionally closer than siblings.  Plus Card needed to get his reproduction fetish in there somewhere:

"The Wiggin genes were crying out for continuation.  I hope you have a dozen more." 

"It's considered impolite to have more than four, greedy to go past five, and barbaric to have more than six."

Somehow, Valentine saw Ender with his bag on his back and intuited that he was leaving the planet, but she's still shocked that he's leaving today, which I feel just highlights how much the magic intuition of these characters isn't 'extrapolation from small details to a comprehensive whole' but 'direct line to the author'.  They might as well have all their brilliance come to them in dream sequences.  Anyway, when he reveals that he wants one of Jakt's boats to the spaceport so he can leave in the morning, Valentine quickly turns furious.

"Why are you in such a hurry?  The voyage takes decades--" 

"Twenty-two years." 

"Twenty-two years!  What difference would a couple of days make?  Couldn't you wait a month to see my baby born?" 

"In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you."

In other words, "This is going to be really hard on one of us, so I've decided it should be you".  Ender is a magnificent example of what it looks like one someone has enough empathy to understand other people's emotions but not enough to actually care.  Valentine says Ender's done enough by redeeming the formics' memory and should just relax and stay and marry (Ender notes that he'd have to put up with obnoxious Calvinist proselytising), and reminds him of what it was like after their first trip, when they talked to 70-year-old Peter back home.

"It was an improvement, as I recall."  Ender was trying to make things lighter. 

But Valentine took his words perversely.  "Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?" 

"I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died." 

"No, Ender, it will be exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me."

These are supposed to be incredibly closely-bonded deeply-empathetic siblings and they talk like dysfunctional co-dependents with a blood feud.  It's realistic dialogue for completely different, intentionally awful characters, but these two are supposed to be the most enlightened beings in the galaxy.

Valentine, whom y'all will recall was rejected from Battle School for being too gentle, informs Ender that she won't even write to him for the twenty years he's in space, won't tell him about her daughter growing up, won't speak to him until she's old and she writes her memoir and dedicates it to him.

"To Andrew, my beloved brother.  I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn't stay even two weeks when I asked you." 

They rant at each other further.  Valentine says she's only being cruel because Ender is sneaking away like a burglar in the night, so it's his fault and he can't turn it around on her.  Which... I can't even decide who's doing more victim-blaming here, but I'm pretty sure they're both neck-deep in it.  It is a fantastic idea for them to get the hell away from each other.

Ender admits that he's rushing because he thought it would hurt less, and says it hurts him to see Valentine growing closer to Jakt and further from him even though he knows that's the way things should be (love is zero-sum, I guess, so growing closer to Jakt while staying close to Ender is nonsense), and eventually he tumbles to a halt and they just hug and weep and he leaves.  Valentine goes on the söndring and fails to fully hide her sorrow from her students, and the students wonder if there's some untold story there, so the girl named Duty Plikt starts to investigate.

Her research somehow takes four years, even though we have no indication that it's more complicated than getting access to a series of passenger manifests.  Valentine's daughter Syfte is four and her son Ren is two when Plikt confronts her with a short story she's published, about the oldest people in the universe, a brother and sister and how they finally parted.  Plikt has written Real Person Fic about Valentine and Ender.  She's apparently missed some details, but on the plus side she hasn't decided there was some kind of terrifying Lannister-esque sex going on.

...She knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on,  The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it really had been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.

Note that Card himself developed his writing skills as a playwright and editor, so I wonder if he's making sort of an in-joke here, saying that he knows what he's written doesn't look like polished stories normally do because he's made something more realistic.  I'm not asserting that's what he did, but writers talking about writing are worth keeping an eye on.

Valentine tries to step lightly around the issues, but then Plikt reveals that she knows Andrew Wiggin is Ender the Xenocide.  Val freaks, but Plikt assures her that if she meant to reveal it, she would have already.  She's endlessly delighted that, once the Speaker for the Dead revealed Ender's crime, Ender took up the mantle of Speaker himself and travelled the worlds as penance.  (Not to beat a dead civilisation, but the fact that everyone thinks HQ&H is absolute fact based on no evidence continues to baffle me.)

"Plikt, mybrother didn't imitate the original Speaker for the Dead.  He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon." 

When Plikt realized that Valentine was telling the truth, it overwhelmed her.  For all these years she had regarded Andrew Wiggin as her subject matter, and the original Speaker for the Dead as her inspiration.  To find that they were the same person struck her dumb for half an hour.

Does Card not get tired of telling us how casually Ender and Valentine transform and revolutionise everything they touch?  I'm bored.  How is Card not bored?  Ender could make a fricking BLT and no one could ever eat a sandwich again without writing a ballad and ending a war and reuniting with an estranged relative.  Valentine invites Plikt to be her co-writer and tutor to her children.

It became the family legend, and as soon as the children were old enough to be discreet, they were told the marvelous stories of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr.

Okay then.  Savior, prophet, and martyr.  Card has declared Ender is Jesus.  That's just canon now.  Good to be on the same page.  Plikt doesn't quite convert Valentine to Lutheranism, but teaches her to appreciate the stability of family life and her five children (so, an "impolite" number but not yet "greedy" according to her earlier assessment), and to understand Ender's destiny in religious terms, as "apostle to the ramen".  The stories of Ender of course have mythic power to the kids, and Syfte grows up to aspire to join him on Lusitania and help him.

"What makes you think he'll need help?  Your help, anyway?"  Plikt was always a skeptic until her student had earned her belief.

Conventional teaching and parenting might say that children need the support and belief of their adult guardians in order to have the courage to chase their dreams, but I'm guessing Plikt also read How I Totally Saved The World Through Consistent Child Abuse by Col. H. Graff.

"He didn't do it alone the first time, either, did he?"

Oh my god.  Syfte actually noticed that Ender's successes have always been incredibly dependent on the other people supporting him--Valentine, yes, but she'd be right if she meant Alai and Petra and Bean and Dink and Bustopher--and she fully expects him to need help again, and to save worlds with him, even if it'll take her twenty-two years to catch up.

Syfte is my new favourite.

She's still worshipful, but she would be, given the stories she was raised on.  For Ender, it's only a week or two later, and the pain of losing Valentine is fresh, but the chapter ends with him thinking of Novinha, wondering what she'll be like when he arrives, "for he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at the time of your deepest sorrow."  I'll be looking forward to seeing if that 'wives and husbands are always closer than anyone else' holds true for Ender and Novinha, 'cause I'm guessing not so much.

Lullaby, Chapter 1

I said before that Lullaby had a linear storyline, but that isn't quite true. It is linear by Palahniuk's standard. It bounces between two points in time, but follows those two threads without jumping around on them too much. The two threads follow the past, and the present.Well, "present". This chapter opens with speculation on the subject.

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.  

Even play-by-play descriptions on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. 

Even sound and light can only go so fast. 

Another problem is the teller. The who, what, where, when, and why of the reporter.

I speculated at the end of the last chapter about how reliable our narrator is, apparently forgetting who wrote this book. Of course Carl isn't a reliable narrator--he's an actual character, so everything he tells us are things that happened to him.  He can pretend this is Helen's story, but it won't read like it, because he's going to be shoving himself at us even as he tries to matter-of-factly tell us what happened, and as he himself points out, he's telling us after the fact. Even the most honest person is going to make mistakes and remember things just a little bit differently than they actually were. The narration goes on to tell us that the whole book is being written on the road, from similar diners in different towns as they try to chase down the most recent "miracle".

Now, this is the danger of picking a book I've read before (but long ago, and I blitzed through it). Reading it now, it is painfully apparent who these two characters be alluded to next are supposed to be, but I'm not sure to a first time reader if it would be in another three chapters. So, compromise: I'll out one of them.

The miracle that is described is "The Flying Virgin". A young white* woman with dirty bare feet, an Indian cotton skirt, denim halter top, and dreadlocks is literally flying around (no plane, tragically no jetpack).  She sprays "STOP HAVING BABIES" in insect fogger in the sky, then accidentally flashes the crowd before blowing a few kisses, flashing some peace signs, and flying off. This woman is Mona, Helen's secretary from last chapter.

I'll get to the blatant cultural appropriation this character has going on in a moment, but first (I can't believe I'm saying this) I want to concentrate on her junk.

And there's a bush of brown hair under her arm. The moment before she starts writing, a gust of wind lifts her skirt, and the Flying Virgin's not wearing any panties. Between her legs, she's shaved.

I want to concentrate on her junk because the author so desperately wants us to. Palahniuk was very deliberate in showing us her junk, but first, in showing us that it's the only thing she shaved. Last chapter Mona was described in vaguely infantile terms (sucking on her crystal like a baby with a soother) and in this chapter she is described as seeming pretentious and clueless. She mixes and matches different cultures with little to no knowledge about what they mean and wears them as a statement, divorced of their context. You know at this point she's eventually going to talk about how Native American's are, like, sooo spiritual and isn't that like super cool?  And you're right, she will! Mona seems to think she's doing good, or at least is trying to, but is just steeped so far in her own white privilege that she can't see it. The general response to her will be people rolling their eyes at her affectionately. Oh, look at her, she thinks she's an activist!

Or... that would have been my read of her, if not for the unfortunate up-skirt here which underlines how she's unshaven where people can see it--but where only her boyfriend can see it, she's shaved. I think this is meant to underline both her hypocrisy, but also to make her "fake". Now, I am speculating on what I think Palahniuk is trying to communicate by having her shaved; these are not my feelings on women shaving what ever the hell they want. I see Palahniuk as writing this with a sneer: "Look at how hard she's trying. Look at how she bought all the accessories but in the end is just doing it all to please a man. Look at how she tries to be a child of the Earth but shaves like some sort of plastic Barbie". My general motto being "Do what ever you want so long as no one is getting hurt in ways they didn't consent to", this sort of judgement seeping in from the sides of the pages makes me uncomfortable. The random use of a woman's genitals, and the state of hair they have, as a quick character building thing is also telling of how the author (and this is the author, not the narrator) sees women. Which would not shock me usually, but Palahniuk is gay, so his investment in women's genitals took me by surprise.

Moving on, and wrapping up, Carl reports on people freaking out over the miracle (the can of insect fogger is being sent to the Vatican) in a way that again, feels almost like a sneer.  He goes on to say that this wasn't a miracle: it was magic, and he and Sarge (his travel companion, an older man) aren't chasing after these miracles for religious reasons or to witness anything. They're witch hunters! Hey, it's a fun hook, I'll give him that. We then swerve back to Carl insisting this story is about Helen.

Still, this isn't a story about here and now. Me, the Sarge, the Flying Virgin. Helen Hoover Boyle. What I'm writing is the story of how we met. How we got here. 

All of this judgement, largely aimed at women and common, blue collared folk isn't surprising, in a book that is supposedly about a woman but narrated by a man and concentrates on his feelings seems... typical. I am not sure if this is supposed to be Carl's privilege seeping in, or if it's Palahniuk's, but it's there and it's loud.

Tune in next Thursday for chapter 2!



*I assume white, given the character, but I can't seem to confirm it. However given the fact that this book is written by a white man who is encouraging me to challenge his narrator's bias, I'm going to assume from the lack of mention that she is. Carl is a journalist, and journalists never say "A young white woman" but they definitely would say "A young (any other ethnicity) woman" and another news article is reference about her, featuring a description that lacks race, so I feel this is a safe assumption.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter four, in which Ender only has secret friends

The vagaries of an uncaring universe are such that there was not a Lullaby post on Thursday after all.  Look to the future Thursday the 23rd, when the blogqueen's majesty may shine forth.

(Content: discussion of Transatlantic slavery, racism.  Fun content: Space math, Spanish is newer than you think.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 56--70

Chapter Four: Ender

More of Pipo's notes, this time discussing languages, and they're especially whatnappley this week.  The Little Ones apparently have four of their own, the common Males' Language, the less-common Wives' Language used to speak with females ("how's that for sexual differentiation!" Pipo notes, because he's a tool, and also doesn't seem interested in how the females speak to each other), the Tree Language used for prayers to totem trees, and the Father Tongue, drumming sticks together.  Pipo offhandedly notes that they believe the trees contain the spirits of their ancestors, which I'm sure isn't a massive hint about the secret life-cycle of aliens.  (Also, females are only "wives", never sisters or daughters, and "fathers" is only used for ancestor trees.  Foreshadow foreshadow!)

He acknowledges that the Little Ones are incredibly good at learning human languages, much better than humans are at learning theirs, and they speak Stark or Portuguese most of them time when humans are around and maybe even when they're not.  

Language contamination is regrettable, but perhaps was unavoidable if we were to communicate with them at all.

Actually, yeah, if they're so petrified about cultural contamination, why did they teach the Little Ones human languages at all?  Why didn't they devote themselves to speaking Males' or something?  ...What's that?  Because it would be inconvenient for the other characters and also this book is hilariously colonialist?  Well, I'm pretty sure they could still let Ender take part by having himself spend a week becoming a fluent poet in all four Little One languages, but... if you say so, voice of the bloody obvious.

Pipo notes that the Little Ones also named themselves, things like Rooter or Chupaćeu ("Sky-sucker") as they learned human vocabulary, and so he doesn't know if those are translations of their native names or nicknames or what, and Buddha only knows why he hasn't asked.  This contamination thing is so inconsistent I can barely care enough to try to sort it out.  Like: apparently they've already also learned Demosthenes' Hierarchy of Exclusion, which we know was published maybe a month ago, so what the hell, did Pipo bring them reading materials?  Does he typically keep them up to date on linguistic fads from around the galaxy?  But this is really an excuse for Card to indulge himself: the Little Ones consider us framlings, and--

Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective!  And--quite an amazing turn--they have several times referred to the females as varelse!

ARE YOU NOT ALLOWED TO ASK THE QUESTION "WHY", PIPO?  What is your job, man!?  How do you--why would--

The brilliance of writing these things as notes at the beginning of chapters instead of actually writing the scenes with Pipo is not just that it lets him spread worldbuilding infodumps out over the course of the book, but also that the book quickly moves on to other scenes before the reader has the chance to realise that there is no conceivable plausible way these xenologer conversations could ever have happened.  Pipo taught them Stark and Portuguese and raman and varelse on purpose but can't say "That's not how I would use the term 'raman'; what do you mean to convey?"  If he's not able to say "I think you're misusing that word", how did he teach them languages in the first place?!

I've reached some kind of threshold where the terrible writing in this book is actually soothing: it is my rock, a constant anchor in the storm of an uncertain life.  Let's get back to Ender.

Ender is of course in his apartment in the fjord, and he's enjoying his window, having grown up in the Battle School where there were no windows or scenery.  (You know, they spent a bajillion dollars building it, it's got forcefield doors in the gym for no apparent reason, and no one considered putting wallscreens around the school to show images of home and remind the kids of what they're supposed to grow up to protect?)

As soon as he gets back, Jane whispers in his ear.  Jane is the internet.  Skipping ahead briefly:

Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.  The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers, and read every book in every library on every world.  She learned that human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist; in all the stories she was hated, and her coming meant either her certain murder or the destruction of mankind.  Even before she was born human beings had imagined her, and, imagining her, slain her a thousand times.

Jane sees Skynet as a cautionary tale from the other side, and I think this is the first idea I've actually liked in his book.  And then, naturally, she kept herself secret until she found The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and traced it back to Ender, the one person she trusted enough to reveal herself.  (She's made a holographic avatar as well, of course, an immortal child.  Ender's probably not supposed to be creepy in appreciating that.)

Jane gives Ender holographic hypotheticals about how Pipo died--she might be the first person to imagine it might have been a lone killer and not a tribe-approved execution.  She's a bit crude and immature, provoking Ender by sarcastically calling the worm-munching Little Ones an advanced civilisation, so Ender can point out that "Many a moral imbecile has good table manners".  Ender declares that the situation is "worse than it ever was with the buggers", because all of those videos showed cleaner kills, and I'd just like to point out that the first formic attack on Earth apparently burned down China just for starters, so maybe Ender is a little hypoerbolic here.  I mean, I'm sure he means 'it's going to be hard to convince people to empathise with these aliens after seeing this kind of murder', but it's not like humans have a good track record of empathising with other humans after a war (or anything remotely resembling war), so this just feels like "Oh golly, this season's villain is way scarier than last season's villain".

"Another incident like this, and there'll be an outcry for quarantine.  For replacing Milagre with a military garrison whose sole purpose is to keep the piggies ever from acquiring a technology to let them get off the planet."

Won't the military garrison be equipped with technology that would let them get off the planet?  I'm pretty sure I've seen that movie before.  Or those books.  Animorphs.  Other people read Animorphs, right?  Seerow's Kindness?  Jane, tell him about Seerow's Kindness.  This is another case where spy satellites would do a much better job than people.

"And the new xenologer is only a boy.  Pipo's son.  Libo.  Short for Liberdade Graças a Deus Figueira de Medici." 

"Liberdade.  Liberty?" 

"I didn't know you spoke Portuguese." 

"It's like Spanish.  I spoke the deaths of Zacatecas and San Angelo, remember?" 

"On the planet Moctezuma.  That was two thousand years ago."

Fun fact: Spanish isn't much more than a thousand years old; it split off from Latin sometime in the 700s.  Good thing language stopped evolving as soon as humanity developed spaceflight, eh?  (Except for Stark; we invented Stark, and then it stopped evolving too.)

Ender can tell Jane is trying to get him to go to Lusitania, and half-heartedly arguing he needs to settle down--apparently Valentine got married and pregnant.  Jane tempts him with some Biblical allusions, Satan offering Jesus rulership of the world, but she quickly moves on to the real temptation: to restore the name of Ender Wiggin to love and honor instead of hatred as the Xenocide.  Ender is still focused on the egg.

"I had hoped it would be here," said Ender.  "A wasteland, except at the equator, permanently underpopulated.  She's willing to try, too." 

"But you aren't?" 

"I don't think the buggers could survive the winter here.  Not without an energy source, and that would alert the government.  It wouldn't work."

Jane says that Ender has now lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds and sees now that the formics wouldn't be safe on any of them*.  Ender says the formics can't live on Lusitania, insists that the Little Ones would be even more terrified of them than us, because they're more advanced than humans, and I feel like Ender is forgetting the formics aren't going to hatch strapped to fusion reactors and Ecstatic Shields, but sure, let's just go with the genius primitives being inherently afraid of smart people.

"How can you or anyone say what the pequeninos can deal with?  Until you go to them, learn who they are.  If they are varelse, Ender, then let the buggers use up their habitat, and it will mean no more to you than the displacement of anthills or cattle herds to make way for cities."

I feel like I'm missing something colossal here where people think that something being foreign is different from it being sapient or valuable.  The 'varelse' excuse made some sense for the formics--they didn't understand they were killing people and so didn't think it was any more immoral than humans would think of breaking an enemy's weapon.  But that wasn't about foreignness except to the extent that foreignness prevented understanding.  "I don't understand you, so I don't understand why this is wrong" is enormously different from "I don't understand you, therefore this isn't wrong".

The terrifying thing here is that this is now getting really fucking close to slavery apologetics.  When Europeans built the entire industry of North America on the genocide of indigenous peoples here and the chattel slavery of Africans, they put a metric fuckton of effort into pseudoscientific papers and theology and literature all designed to explain that the brown people were not really human, they just looked like it.  The case, essentially, was that because they were only mimicking humanity, it wasn't immoral to slaughter them at will.  And the case that the orders of foreignness apparently makes is that this means genocide and slavery weren't immoral as long as they were conducted by people who truly believed that propaganda.  And here's Jane, telling Ender that if the Little Ones are varelse, and not people we can relate to, then there is no immorality in wiping them out to make room for the formics.

But Ender is our compassionate hero, right?  Ender will have the comeback here, explaining to Jane that to meet a varelse is to lack certainty about what is moral and what is not--it is not simply a license to assume that they are automatons incapable of relating to our morality.  The formics were considered varelse as well, and now they're thought of as ramen.  Transition is possible and therefore desirable.  Varelse means be careful, not careless.

"They are ramen," said Ender.

Fuck you, Ender.

He goes on to insist that Pipo's death wasn't torture--it was too careful, too sacred, like they were trying to save his life, not kill him.  Jane is relentless, and finally someone points out that Ender's sole qualification to understanding everyone everywhere is that he "wrote a bestseller".

"I can only trust my intuition, Jane, the judgment that comes without analysis."

First principles!  Geniuses in sealed boxes!  (Though, as I think this blog shows, Card has good reason to hate analytical perspectives.)

Jane says she's got him cornered, that he either has to go to understand the Little Ones or to settle the formics, but both personal and altruistic goals point to Lusitania, and he's allowed to go, despite the Catholic License, because Novinha has requested a Speaker.  Ender looks at her holographic face, recognises the same weary pain that he saw in himself when he realised he had committed xenocide, and wonders what she's done to bring that on.  Speaker Scanner activated!

...His genius--or his curse--was his ability to conceive events as someone else saw them.  It had made him a brilliant military commander, both in leading his own men--boys, really-and in outguessing the enemy.  It also meant that from the cold facts of Novinha's life he was able to guess--no, not guess, to know--how her parents' death and virtual sainthood had isolated Novinha, how she had reinforced her loneliness by throwing herself into her parents' work. [....] There was no living soul on Lusitania who really knew Novinha.  But in this cave in Reyjavik, on the icy world of Trondheim, Ender Wiggin knew her, and loved her, and his eyes filled with tears for her.

I am distressed by the proportion of the Ender chapters so far which have been devoted entirely to telling us how awesome Ender is.  Even Ender's Game wasn't this egregious.  But at last he decides to go, if for no other reason than to help Novinha, even though she'll be thirty-nine by the time he arrives.  He wants to leave tomorrow.  In a flash of realism, Jane points out that starships take time to schedule.  The only one in orbit is a cargo ship intended to delivery high-priced skrika (it's a food and jewelry--really) to Cyrillia.

"I've never asked you how rich I am." 

"I've handled your investments rather well over the years." 

"Buy the ship and cargo for me." [....] 

"[The owner] has accepted your offer of forty billions dollars for the ship and its cargo." 

"Forty billion!  Does that bankrupt me?" 

"A drop in the bucket."

Jane has also nullified all the crew's contracts and bought them passage on other ships, since she can pilot the Havelok herself.  Let's just note that Ender won't arrive on Lusitania for twenty-two years, so it makes basically no difference whether he leaves tomorrow or weeks or months from now, so this whole thing is just an exercise in Ender being super-privileged and wealthy and his whims becoming fact.

Ender realises that Valentine won't come with him, and doesn't even intend to ask--she's married to a guy named Jakt, "lord of a hundred fishing vessels", expecting a baby, and they apparently have great conversations every day and love the ice floes.  How long have they been on Trondheim?  Ten years/three millennia travelling the galaxy and in a handful of months she met a guy, got married, and got pregnant?  Better than fridging her, but... really, Card?

The queen in her egg has been listening in this whole time as well, permanently psychically linked to Ender, and realises that leaving Valentine behind will cost him.  They discuss whether it's possible that the formics could settle on Lusitania, and Ender finally gets around to saying he won't destroy the Little Ones for the sake of the formics (though it's not clear to me if he would if he thought they were varelse).

In another fit of terrible science, the queen asserts that she experiences time objectively because of her philotic attunement, and so from her perspective it has been three thousand years that Ender has been on his quest--how does Ender not know that?  She didn't think it was worth mentioning after the first two millennia?  But she urges him faster, and Ender says that while people condemn the Xenocide publicly, not that many people really believe his book is true.  (Consistency, what?)

< In all our life, you are the first person we've known who wasn't ourself.  We never had to be understanding because we always understood.  Now that we are just this single self, you are the only eyes and arms and legs we have.  Forgive us if we are impatient. [....] We know who killed us, and it wasn't you.> 

It was me. 

<You were a tool.> 

It was me. 

<We forgive you.> 

When you walk on the face of a world again, then I can be forgiven.

I want to like this, I really do, mechanically I love the writing sometimes, but seriously, I don't care if Ender forgives himself or not.  He didn't know he was killing them all, but he never questioned the war, he never questioned murder as a solution, and I don't see any indication that he thinks he did anything wrong now.  His regrets are based in irrationality--he doesn't think "I wish I could go back and challenge the need for the invasion", he just wishes he hadn't been involved, that things had magically worked out differently.  Sorrow without any need to change.  It's a great excuse to have everyone tell your angsty protagonist how wonderful he is over and over again, but I got more of that than I needed from fanfiction as a teenager, thanks.

Next week: Valentine again at last!  Grand farewell?  The last bit of reasonable perspective we'll get?  We'll find out!

---

*So Ender has lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds.  Let's be generous and assume that doesn't include Earth, since Earth was presumably not in the running for the new formic colony.  The latest is Trondheim.  The first was whichever world he found her on.  That means twenty-three interstellar flights of indeterminate length, adding up to about 3058 years, which means about 133 years skipped per flight.  Twenty-four worlds in ten years also means a new world every five months, including travel time (and Ender mentioned earlier he's never spent more than six months on a world, so Card must have done that much math at least).  I don't think we have enough information to determine the probable parameters of flight lengths, so I'm going to be lazy and assume an average of three months in space.  The velocity necessary for a time dilation of 133 years in 3 months means... 99.99982-ish % the speed of light.  Average.  (99.99968% if it's a four-month flight from Ender's perspective.)  Again, that's average, which means incorporating acceleration and deceleration requires the peak speed to be way, way faster, but I admit I'm honestly impressed/startled Card fit the story to these calculations.  This is the most care he's shown in anything so far.  (I haven't done the math to determine what happens if some of these flights are longer, or what happens if he stays on more than a few planets for 5-6 months each, or if planets are more or less than 133 light-years away.  Moctezuma was 2000 years ago and 15 worlds ago, if anyone wants to math harder.)

Speaker for the Dead, chapter three, in which Novinha ruins science over her boyfriend

I wondered why this chapter was named for Libo, given that it's 100% Novinha's point of view, but in time I realised that it was all about him.  Novinha does eventually get a chapter named for her, much later in the book; I wait in anticipation to discover why Card saved it for then.  In the meantime, buckle up, because it's time for a woman to make bad decisions because of her unscientific emotions.

(Content: sexism, invasion of privacy.  Fun content: Gwen DeMarco knows what's up.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 41--55

Chapter Three: Libo

This chapter opens with some of Pipo's working notes on the Little Ones' diet (primarily worms, with occasional leaves that might just be sort of recreational snacks), which lacks in a lot of proteins, trace elements, and calcium, leading Pipo to hypothesise about whether their bones use calcium differently from humans.  The only things they know about actual physiology are from the photos of Rooter's corpse (which, as others have noted, he shouldn't have had, since it meant taking a camera beyond the perimeter).  Their complicated tongues and climbing spikes also have no clear evolutionary purpose; Libo suggests maybe they evolved elsewhere and were forced to migrate by some catastrophe.

There's no competition for them.  The ecological niche they occupy could be filled by opossums.  Why would intelligence ever be an adaptive trait?  But inventing a cataclysm to explain why the piggies have such a boring, non-nutritious diet is probably overkill.  Ockham's razor cuts this to ribbons.

SCIENCE MYSTERY!  I don't, offhand, have any theories for this either, unless it's some kind of guided evolution by a further biological overmind force, but then we'd just have to explain where that overmind came from.  'God as first cause' is not a useful system of thought.

So now Pipo is dead and Mayor Bosquinha arrives to take charge of the situation; she's already got the bishop preparing a place in the graveyard.  Libo insists he needs to be there to help photograph the body for all forensic purposes, but the mayor reminds them both that they should be writing their reports immediately, which is followed by maybe the stupidest use of the ansible ever:

The computer had already been alerted, and their reports went out by ansible even as they wrote them, mistakes and corrections and all.  On all the Hundred Worlds the people most involved in xenology read each word as Libo or Novinha typed it in.  Many others were given instantaneous computer-written summaries of what had happened.  Twenty-two lightyears away, Andrew Wiggin learned the Xenologer João Figueira "Pipo" Alvarez had been murdered by the piggies, and told his students about it even before the men had brought Pipo's body through the gate into Milagre.

For what possible reason could it make sense to literally beam these reports out letter-by-letter?  I understand Card is trying to convey urgency here, like old movies where vital plot-changing messages get telegraphed out beep-by-beep, but there isn't any urgency.  Everyone else in the galaxy who cares is light-years away; they could literally raise children in the time it would take to get to Lusitania.  Plus you've got Libo and Novinha stumbling over words as they go, no second draft, no proofing, no double-checking with each other to see if they misremember details.  The ansible is so expensive that sitcoms are a big deal, but not so expensive that they can wait for spellcheck?

Also: it occurs to me at this point to wonder who the other xenologers in the galaxy are.  Of course there will be some people who spend time pouring over Pipo's reports and becoming experts on the Little Ones as well, but logically, the majority of xenologers will be students of the better-known alien species: the formics.  The formics who left their cities empty of all but their bodies three thousand years ago.  Why do they need this update at midnight rather than, say, the next morning when Libo and Novinha could read over their first drafts again?

His report done, Libo was at once surrounded by Authority.

Not legitimate authority, like super-geniuses and generals who intuited which enemy ship to shoot first seventy years earlier, but false, harmful authority, like bishops and elected officials.  Bishop Peregrino 'comforts' Libo by telling him the Little Ones are probably just soulless beasts, but by nodding along Libo manages to ditch him quickly.  Dom Cristão asks questions, helping them find stability in scientific analysis, but Novinha falls silent because she knows what happened, and she's terrified that if anyone else sees the data from which Pipo got his revelation, they'll end up dead too.

The men who carried Pipo's body away return, and show a strange amount of reverence to Libo, now recognising him as Zenador.  No real authority (obvs), but he's important--"his work was the whole reason for the colony's existence, wasn't it?"  Which: I don't know if Card is particularly familiar with scientific outposts in remote locations here on Earth, but I don't think even half of them have their own monastery.  Nothing we know about this colony is optimised for science.  They only have two people actually studying the Little Ones!  They have a trailer-sized Zenador's Station and no other research support staff beyond one medievalesque 'apprentice'!  They have no satellites or surveillance!  They went for a decade without xenobiologists!  THIS COLONY WAS BADLY WRITTEN!

"We'll not harm the piggies," he said, "or even call it murder.  We don't know what Father did to provoke them, I'll try to understand that later, what matters now is that whatever they did undoubtedly seemed right to them.  We're the strangers here, we must have violated some--taboo, some law--but Father was always prepared for this, he always knew it was a possibility.  Tell them that he died with the honor of a soldier in the field, a pilot in his ship, he died doing his job."

Pretty solid woobification.  Novinha has to look away, and instead meets the eyes of Marcos "Marcão" Ribeira, whom she defended from accusations of bullying (when he was the real victim) years earlier.  Marcos has a pretty good 'brooding bad boy' image going, with the rain-plastered hair in his face and the mud and blood from carrying Pipo.  Novinha hasn't thought of him in years, but it occurs to her that he might think of her as the only person who ever stood up for him.  (For a colony of thousands, there are a remarkable number of people here who have zero social connections.)

Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her; it was so different that it was not even the same event.  Her mind connected this with the piggies' murder of Pipo, and it seemed very important, it seemed to verge on explaining what had happened, but then the thought slipped away in a flurry of conversation and activity...

Novinha 'intuits' something vitally important to the thematic premise of the book, then gets distracted by shiny objects.  (My guess at this point is that, as the Little Ones kill smart people in order to reproduce, and whatever Pipo said to them convinced them that they wanted his brain, so they tried to pregniscerate him.)  The Arbiter (judge, it seems) explains that Libo's family is staying with him now, and takes him away, not extending the invitation to Novinha because no one likes Novinha.  There're a lot of odd mental tangents for Novinha in this chapter, but some moments are good:

Now she felt the magnitude f Pipo's loss.  The mutilated corpse on the hillside was not his death, it was merely his death's debris.  Death itself was the empty place in her life.  Pipo had been a rock in a storm, so solid and strong that she and Libo, sheltered together in his lee, had not even known the storm existed.  Now he was gone, and the storm had them, would carry them whatever way it would.

The mayor is still there, uploading all of Pipo's remaining data to the ansible for other xenologers to try to figure out what the hell is going on, but Novinha knows it was her data that caused it all, and she stares at the hologram of Little One DNA, trying to yank the truth from it.  In time she sinks out of her analytical mindset and into guilt, accusing herself of having killed him by finding this biological anomaly.  The mayor finally notices her distress and acknowledges that Pipo was "like a father" to her, but Novinha has reached that kind of self-destructive guilt where she feels she doesn't deserve to be comforted.  The mayor takes her to her home, where the mayor's husband manages to coax some food into her and then gets her to bed, which I note only because it's the sole example of a nurturing man I can recall in all of Card's books I've read.

She wakes not long after, uses the Mayor's home terminal to remotely log off from the Zenador's Station, and then walks out through the early morning to the Biologista's Station, her home-on-paper, though she hasn't slept there in months, maybe years, only ever coming to use the lab.  She purges the lab: destroys every sample and note on cell structures that led to Pipo's discovery and death.

Even though it had been the focus of her life, even though it had been her identity for many years, she would destroy it as she herself should be punished, destroyed, obliterated.

Reason #36 why teenagers aren't generally given sole responsibility for all scientific inquiry and conduct in vitally important fields.  I do think this is a realistic sort of teenager move for Novinha--but practically nothing else about her prior to now has been normal or realistic for her age, and Libo is the same age but immediately took up the mantle of merciful and responsible decision-making authority after finding the shredded body of his father, so... still actually kind of sexist here.

The computer stopped her.  "Working notes on xenobiological research may not be erased," it reported. [....]  The sacredness of knowledge was deeper in her soul than any catechism.  She was caught in a paradox.  Knowledge had killed Pipo; to erase that knowledge would kill her parents again, kill what they had left for her.

(That is not a paradox oh my god Card this isn't difficult.  A paradox is a statement that contradicts itself.  This is just two undesirable options.)

Novinha realises that she can keep the data secret herself, remain xenobiologist but refrain from sharing the data, keep it sealed behind security systems so that no one but her eventual successor can find it.

With one exception--when she married, her husband would also have access if he could show need to know.  Well, she'd never marry.  It was that easy.

Just so's we're clear: scientists do not have a right to keep scientific findings secret from their spouses (I'm going to assume it's spouses and not just wives having no privacy from their husbands).  No one has a problem with this?  'Need to know' is a thoroughly subjective concept, and why should a spouse have that right when apparently other scientists don't?  I just--WHO WROTE THESE LAWS?!

Despairing over her bleak, lonely future stretching out ahead of her, Novinha decides even she won't think about what it is that Pipo discovered, lest she figure it out and tell someone else and get them killed.  But then, for some reason, she decides that some day she does want people to know, and so she will call for a Speaker, who might arrive decades from now and determine the truth about Pipo's life and death.

See whatnapple above.  Welcome back, whatnapple.  You're doing an important job.

This is a scientific problem and she is a scientist but her solution is to hermit away, cut off all contact, cut off the part of her work she is most passionate about, and summon a priest to make a decades-long trek to hopefully sort out what's actually happened here.  This is a terrible plan that makes no sense and even if it works it will lead to exactly the conclusion that she is supposedly purging her lab specifically to avoid ever occurring!

And though she hasn't said as much, she is doing this for Libo.  She doesn't care about anyone else; she doesn't know anyone else.  She was good at her job and she helped her boyfriend's father make some discovery that he was killed for understanding, so she's ditching her job and protectively ditching her boyfriend forever more to punish herself for daring to science.  What am I even reading?  (I suppose it could have been even worse: the revelation could have come from looking at an alien apple that the Little Ones had forbidden them to study.)

She awakens flopped over her keyboard, with Libo whispering in her ear.  She thinks he's come to comfort her and gets defensive, but he remembers what she said about the simulation that spurred Pipo charging out into the night, and he wants to see it.  She tries to play dumb, but he's not buying it, and accuses her of wanting credit for the discovery, but she makes it clear she doesn't care.  Libo is furious, but all she will say is that she doesn't want him to die.

She saw comprehension come into his eyes.  Yes, that's right, Libo, it's because I love you, because if you know the secret, then the piggies will kill you, too.  I don't care about science, I don't care about the Hundred Worlds or relations between humanity and an alien race.  I don't care anything at all as long as you're alive.

Well, that sort of makes what I said earlier redundant.  Okay then.  Anyway, he's an emotional mess, so she takes him to her bedroom, half-disrobes him, tucks him in, and lies with him while he falls asleep.   And then--oh fuck, Card went there after all.

She might have been thrust out of the garden because of her ignorant sin, like Eva.  But, again like Eva, she could bear it, for she still had Libo, her Adão.

And then she realises again that she can't marry him or he'd have access to her data whether she approved it or not: "The Starways Code declared it.  Married people were virtually the same person in the eyes of the law."  This isn't even some kind of hardcore-Space-Catholic oddity, this is secular interstellar law.  Card is playing this like a soap opera when it's screaming to be a dystopia.  "Oh no, I mustn't marry my true love or I fear his sciencelust will lead him to his doom!  Also we aren't allowed to live together unless we get married if we get married I literally have no right to privacy because I'm only half a person!"

Now, I'm not an engineer, so I can't be sure what kind of storage media they're using, but if she's counting on a Speaker to one day come and solve all the mysteries, why not ansible out all her data to the Speaker Index or whatever repository lets her request one to come to Lusitania, and/or beam it all out to some secret dropbox with tons of security where no one will ever think to look for it, and then--stay with me here, because this is where it gets technical--delete all the local copies of that information by crushing them with a hammer?  (The best kind of hacker is the kind that brings their own axe.)  If she can't bear to destroy all the data but doesn't dare let Libo have it, why not give it to someone else?  You're already planning to do that, Novinha, so this would just speed the process up.  No?  You're a female character in a Card novel and required to make bad decisions?  Okay then.  Sorry to hear about that.  Let me know if I can get you anything.

Next week: Ender's girlfriend is literally the internet, because he's the only person special enough to deserve her.  No, really.  This is my serious face.

And come back Thursday for Lullaby, chapter one!