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fh_fic2012-01-06 10:00 pm
endsthegame) wrote in fh_fic2012-01-06 10:00 pm
Fic: Speak, Rewind
So, last Christmas (cue the music) or rather, this Christmas, I was sitting at home bored and twiddling my thumbs when suddenly an idea occurred to me:
I wanted to write a new, FH-canon storyline into 'Speaker for the Dead'. Don't ask me why I thought that was a good idea. I still don't. Buuut I started it, got carried away, and now here it is: 22,000 words of AU Speaker for the Dead. Because it still follows the original story to a point, some of the prose within is ganked word-for-word from the book - I'll try to denote this with a different shade of text color where possible. In other places, it's way too interwoven with my own stuff to work (and even some of the shaded stuff isn't 100% Orson. Watch me be anal about it anyway.)
ANYWAY.
Don't expect much more than way too many words of me attempting to write a far superior book - which you all should read - but I hope you enjoy it anyway!
Title: Speak, Rewind
Warning: Some gore within.
Rating: PG-13.
Fandom: Fandom High + Ender's Game/Speaker for the Dead
Much thanks to:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dollpocalypse and mouthy_merc for cheerleading, and the lovely nookiepowered for giving it a thorough beta'ing!
Dedicated to: the lovelymomslilassassin, from whom I've withheld this fic cruelly until it was done.
Spoilers for the entirety of Speaker for the Dead, obviously.
"We're here."
Plikt's voice only barely penetrated Ender's consciousness. He had been... not asleep, but drowsing, the natural result of the meandering thoughts that traveling at relative speeds always brought out in him.
Drowsing. It had been a better escape from being reminded of Valentine's absence than speaking to the girl who took her place on his ship. No offense to Plikt, but it would probably be a few months until her blonde hair and blue eyes stopped reminding him so painfully of the other girl who had once traveled with him, or the tall, blonde, blue-eyed man that she'd married. That she had, inevitably and naturally, chosen over him.
But now Plikt was calling on him to wake, and he opened his eyes.
She sighed at him.
"How long until we land?" he asked, sitting up.
"Just a couple more minutes until we breach atmosphere," Plikt reported, and removed her blonde-blue-eyed-self from his range of vision.
Maybe it would've been easier, he reflected irrationally, if she hadn't had blue eyes, as if she had been made to kick him in the pants in three wholly different ways. But that was the problem about being a middle-aged human being - everything started to remind you of everybody.
"That fast?" he asked. "Why didn't you wake me earlier?"
Plikt shrugged. Her fingers danced over the controls. "It didn't seem necessary," she said. "Besides, you spent three days up and awake. I thought you could use the sleep."
"I told you to wake me an hour before atmosphere," he muttered, running his fingers through his hair.
"You did," Plikt agreed, "I suppose I forgot."
That earned her a crabby look. Of course she hadn't forgotten. What was it with all the people in his life who thought they had to dictate when he ate, drank and slept? Sometimes he wondered if they'd be telling him when to have bowel movements next.
"Also, you get this look every time we make the Park shift," Plikt added. "It's much worse than the look you're giving me now."
Ender released an irritated sigh. "Have you alerted Lusitanian authorities that I'm coming?"
Plikt barked a laugh. "Do you think this little rock even has a Landing Authority?" she asked. "Besides, you're a Speaker and I'm your apprentice. They're not even allowed to turn us away."
Another disadvantage of Plikt: he couldn't speak to Jane directly while she was here. Not that he expected Jane to offer him better courtesies. "Great," he muttered.
"Though there's a little spanner in the works," Plikt noted. "Novinha Ribeira canceled her call for a Speaker."
Of course, the Starways Code said that once Ender had begun his voyage in response to her call, the call could not legally be canceled; still, it changed everything, because instead of eagerly awaiting his arrival for twenty-two years, she would be dreading it, resenting him for coming when she had changed her mind. "Anything to simplify my work," he said.
"Our work," she corrected.
"Don't get uppity," he replied. "You're no Speaker yet."
"And here I thought the whole joy of being a Speaker was that you got to make things up," Plikt said, with the kind of glacial smile they taught all people of the fjords, at least in Ender's experience. "Anyway, it's not all bad. In the intervening years, a few more people have called for a Speaker, and they haven't canceled."
"Who?"
"By the greatest coincidence, they're Novinha's son Miro and Novinha's daughter Ela."
"They couldn't possibly have known Pipo," Ender said, rubbing at his eyes. "Why would they call me to Speak his death?"
"Not Pipo's death," Plikt said, with a shake of her head. "Ela called a Speaker just six weeks ago, to Speak the death of her father. Novinha's husband. Marcos Maria Ribeira, called Marcao. He died of some disease."
Ender sat up. "And the boy?" he asked.
"Miro," she replied. "He called for a Speaker a few years ago, when Pipo's son Libo was murdered."
He squinted at her. "By who?" he asked.
"The piggies," she said, "But I haven't had the chance to read any of the details so far."
Again, the piggies. The plot of this mystery was thickening already. "Well," Ender said, getting up out of his chair. "Then let's see what we can find out."
---
"I've alerted the mayor, Bosquinha," Ender said. The sound of the exit ramp hitting the ground cut off most of the last syllable, and he found himself having to repeat the name. "She should be here any minute now to pick us up."
"Or feed us to the wildlife," Plikt said, peering past him at the herd of animals roaming the grounds not ten feet away. An only slightly longer distance ahead, they could see the first buildings belonging to Milagre, the planet's earliest and only settlement. Most of them were made out of either stone or durable plastic, the kind the first settlers must have brought with them.
Ender snorted. "They look docile enough," he said. "And here I thought you'd come at least partially out of courage and curiosity for the new frontier."
"I came here because here is where you're going, and I think that makes it interesting," Plikt said, walking down the ramp. "Meanwhile, I grow more and more curious why you let me come along in the first place. You don't seem happy to have me."
"Because I'm getting old, and I'll need someone to help me up the stairs," Ender snarked without thought. Or, well, a thought - the answer to her question was simple. He might have had illusions once about his ability to survive out here on his own without companionship, but those had long since been dashed. Like any human being, he now suffered from a certain addiction to human warmth, at least of an emotional nature.
The idea of going entirely alone had frightened him.
But that didn't mean he had to admit to it.
She shook her head, picked a stone on the ground and sat on it. "Valentine mentioned you used to have a third traveling companion," she said.
"Did she?" Ender asked, narrowing his eyes at what he was sure - or at least, hoped he could be sure - was a vehicle moving in their general direction. His tone was dismissive; his question, rhetorical.
Sadly, he had let Plikt in particular come along for a reason: she was smart, and looked at people in ways similar to how he did. With curiosity, distance, and an almost infallible intuition. "This was someone who mattered to you," she said.
Yes. That was definitely a vehicle. "You shouldn't believe everything Valentine tells you," he said.
"She didn't tell me anything more than that," Plikt replied. "But you usually don't act this dismissive of something if it isn't important."
His head swung away, his eyes breaking their near-obsessive fixation on that little moving blip that grew ever bigger. "Oh, and since when are you an expert on me?" he said irritably.
She smiled briefly. "I predicted you'd come here, didn't I?" she said.
Then the noise coming from Mayor Bosquinha's car grew too loud to speak any further, and Ender, pleased by the distraction, turned to the much more important task of questioning her about the settlement and its connection to the aliens known as piggies.
And, of course, the Ribeira family.
---
Much later, he laid in bed in the old plastic colonist building he had been assigned to. The hive queen's voice had come and gone, whispering to him about the difficulties of his analytical mind, and the sunlight that was filling her thoughts now, the consciousness on this planet that reached to her and was so much easier to handle than his was.
This is home, this is home, her thought still echoed in his mind, but it was one he didn't understand, one that frayed easily like the remnants of a dream shortly after waking.
But the hive queen had never understood all the realities, all the factors that worried Ender now. Not just the solid problems of the situation, but the intrinsic one, the one that kept him awake here, now: if the hive queen stayed here, he would have to stay here.
He had accepted Plikt's companionship because he knew that to deny he needed it would be foolishness. But she was a wanderer, like him, and like him, she claimed no attachment to any particular strain of humanity. He didn't know if she would ever feel his disconnect, but he also knew she let nothing tether her.
Besides him, perhaps.
But if this was the hive queen's home, then it would have to be his. He would have to tether himself here, call his three-thousand-year journey to an end, rejoin humanity, for whatever it was here.
And he had no idea how.
It was Jane who stirred him, with snarky comments and witty banter, and once that was over, with information. Cold hard facts that wrote and rewrote the lives of the people here: facts about the world.
"That barrier is the only thing standing between us and the piggies," mused Ender.
"It generates an electric field that stimulates any pain-sensitive nerves that come within it," said Jane. "Just touching it makes all your wetware go screwy-- it makes you feel as though somebody were cutting off your fingers with a file."
"Pleasant thought. Are we in a concentration camp? Or a zoo?"
"It all depends on how you look at it," said Jane. "It's the human side of the fence that's connected to the rest of the universe, and the piggy side that's trapped on its home world."
"The difference is that they don't know what they're missing."
"I know," said Jane. "It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born homo sapiens."
Novinha's home, as it turned out, was kept from him. Well, Bosquinha had tried, at least. It took Jane milliseconds to override the restrictions on the maps and feed him the right information. As it turned out, Novinha lived far out of the way, back behind everything. She had chosen actively to be away from it all - Ender was sure it was her who had chosen. Looking at all the data now, it seemed like the pattern of her life. Novinha was not a part of Milagre. She had never seen herself as belonging to the community.
Calling him had been an act of defiance on her part, and then on her children's. For Lusitania was a heavily Catholic settlement, and as a Speaker, he represented another religion, an intrusion on the system of belief that was woven into Milagre.
He would have to go see her. She was the reason he had come, after all - the familiarity of the pain in her eyes, the sympathy he'd felt. Oh, the tales of the piggies had been fanciful enough, the murder they had committed interesting, but he had spent enough time traveling a galaxy meeting strange alien species that the immediate fascination had worn off.
He winced midway into some crack from Jane that she'd meant to obscure the fact she was keeping information from him.
"Thinking about him again?" she asked, sounding almost disappointed. "You humans. With your short lives, you'd think you wouldn't hold on to anything longer than absolutely necessary."
"How I handle my grief is not any of your concern," Ender said testily, and sat up in bed. "Stop trying to unnerve me, Jane."
"I'm not," she said.
He let go of an irritated snort and tossed the covers aside. "I need to see Novinha," he said. "Alert Plikt. Tell her we'll need to find someone to show us the way to the Ribeira household."
---
Olhado Ribeira looked like it hadn't been a day since he'd wandered into Room 204, the year 2011. It was strange, alien almost, to see him like this-- that life was so far away from Ender now, so skillfully pushed from his memories, that it was almost as if Fandom itself had opened the skies above him and dropped a pink elephant on his head simply to mess with him.
Olhado was playing football in the praqa, or rather, he was arbiting a game. With his metal eyes, he could easily stop and rewind any image that had just occurred - perfect to determine who had fouled when, and who was due which penalty.
Plikt noticed Ender's attention, but wisely, she kept her own counsel. She'd slept poorly last night, and so some of the sharpness had vanished out of her eyes. He doubted she'd regale him with too many difficult questions today.
No doubt Ender would be facing a firing squad of questions soon enough, though. He held no illusions about that. "Are you the arbiter here?" he called in stinted Portuguese - accented quite heavily with the flourishes of Castellano Spanish.
"Sometimes," the boy replied.
"Then tell me, arbiter, is it fair to leave a stranger to find his way around without help?" Ender asked. He'd switched back to Stark - he had no interest in taxing his middling Portuguese to its limit.
"Stranger? You mean utlanning, framling, or ramen?"
Utlanning, framling, ramen: Valentine's words, spoken so confidently here as if it had been years since she published her work on the orders of strangeness... but it had been, for them. Ender supposed it was appropriate here. Lusitania might not have counted any utlanning - human strangers from another village - or human framling - strangers from another world, but the debate whether the local aliens were ramen - understandable aliens - or varelse - unknowable aliens - ran hot.
"No, I think I mean infidel."
"O Senhor e descrente?" You're an unbeliever?
"So descredo no incrivel." I only disbelieve the unbelievable.
The boy grinned. "Where do you want to go, Speaker?"
"The house of the Ribeira family."
They bantered back and forth: about truth and lies and willingness to help. Banter, Ender had found, was the language of the multiverse. Even in his time at Fandom, he'd realised as much. If you spoke in fluent witticisms, then you would gain, if not trust, at least the belief that your presence was not entirely unpleasant. That you were 'in on the joke'.
His show of surprise when the boy admitted to being a Ribeira himself worked on the children. It did not work on Plikt, whose blue eyes narrowed at him as he fell into step with the boy.
Yes. There would be questions. A great deal of questions.
But first, he would minister to Novinha and her family. And hope that Olhado's delight in attempting to deceive him would not translate to everyone he met, or already had.
---
"You did well," Plikt observed a few hours later. They were walking back to their impromptu home now; Ender supposed that whatever amnesty she had granted him from her questions was about to come to an end. "You made the children like putty and brought the mother to a nice old boil."
"She's hateful and selfish," Ender replied. He was jittery - a Speaking always did this to him, got him thinking, left him with all these pieces of questions and answers that he was supposed to glue together somehow. "I can't believe she let this happen to her children."
Plikt snorted derisively. "You don't really think that," she said. "You like them. You're not nearly as succesful at secret-keeping as you seem to think you are, Speaker."
Again with the insinuations. Ender had no interest in going into them. "Perhaps I do, but she hates me," he said. "And she's right to do it. Clever. Most people only realise they hate me when I open my mouth and truly speak."
"You recognise something in there," Plikt said, stubborn as she was. "Their family, perhaps? You've just lost your sister - are you looking to replace those familial bonds in your heart?"
Again with the assumptions-- but these did not bother him because they were true. They bothered him because they almost were, but not quite. He had had family - had spent many of the first years of his life in freedom infatuated with the idea, with this thing he could almost grasp.
And then he had had it, for what felt like such a short time. Belonging, family, warmth. Sometimes, it had been nearly unbearable, had made him feel like a stranger in his own body. Other times...
Well, he had holes in his heart, and they were exactly where they belonged - they anchored him to his self, and he had long graduated past trying something foolish like filling them.
"Family isn't something you replace like a bulb in a lamp," Ender said. "I certainly have no inclination to try and replace mine. But thank you for the analysis, Miss Expert."
"You've been avoiding my questions," Plikt said.
"Or maybe you've just been asking the wrong ones," he retorted. "Or maybe some questions are just better left unanswered."
"Says the Speaker for the Dead." Plikt didn't look impressed. Her gaze was cool.
"Who only comes when he's called," Ender reminded her.
"You let me come with you," Plikt reminded, "That's call enough to me. So tell me: What is it that draws you to the Ribeiras? If it isn't family, then what?" Her eyes searched for Ender's. He almost denied her the contact -- but then an irrational annoyance reared itself in his heart. Why should he avoid this? Why should he be the one to cave to her questions? "Loss," she said. "That's it, isn't it? But it's not just Valentine - you were drawn to this before you even left."
Ender blew out a frustrated breath. "You're barking up the wrong tree, Plikt," he said. "Focus on the task at hand."
"Oh, I am," she replied. "Marcao is your task. You are mine."
"Then find another task," he said, and sped up his walking so that she and her tiny legs had to run to keep up.
---
Later that day, Ender visited the local doctor, Navio. Marcao had died of disease, and Ender needed to know what, and how. Well, how he knew, but the wasting disease itself, he'd never heard of. The locals called it the 'Descolada', apparently - the plague itself had only ended a few years ago.
The haul could have been worse, all in all; the only annoying thing was that the answers Ender had gotten were enough for Jane to hijack a terminal simply so she could laugh uproariously.
Of course, it didn't last long - as soon as Plikt crossed the treshold of his temporary house, Jane's image vanished. Plikt didn't come bearing laughter - she came bearing two cups of hot cocoa, one of which she placed in front of Ender, even though she knew he didn't particularly care for it.
"So what have we got?" she asked.
"Marcos' disease," Ender replied. "It was genetic. A defect, caused by a plague some time ago. The Descolada. It made his insides rot - it probably rendered him sterile at a young age."
Plikt's eyebrows flew up. "So Novinha's children weren't Marcos's," she concluded.
"That's logical to you and me," Ender agreed, "But on a devout Catholic colony like this, nobody's even contemplated it. Everyone thinks Novinha simply didn't know about the defect, and that Marcos was lucky - one of the precious few who didn't lose the functionality of their genitals. It's really rather sweet - even the doctor would rather believe that Marcos was a special case." He leaned back in his seat. "No wonder Marcao was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping with another man. It was probably part of their bargain in the beginning that she would not be faithful to him, but six children is rather rubbing his nose in it."
"That's the Catholic Church for you," Plikt said, sipping her own cocoa. "Sure, commit adultry - just don't use contraceptives for it."
"Which leaves us the question of who the actual father was."
Plikt rolled her eyes at him. "We already know that," she said. "It was Libo. It's as clear as day that she was in love with him, and not Marcao."
"But then why marry Marcao instead?" Ender asked. "Libo was still single when she did so. It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then to go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning."
"Love makes people do strange things?" Plikt posited. "Or so I've heard, anyway. I've never had any experience in the matter." She looked at Ender. "How about you?"
It was not as strange as it might have seemed to Plikt's young eyes, if outside forces were involved. Yet again, the whole situation reminded Ender of himself, and painful sympathy began to beat in his chest again. Why marry someone she did not like very much, when she loved and laid with another? Why stay with his increasingly unhappy and independent sister and the exhausting demands of the hive queen, when the person he loved went off to war somewhere else?
Because you thought denying yourself something was for the greater good. Because you were used to such denial. Because it seemed like a more natural state to live with such restraint.
Or perhaps he was simply projecting.
Ender sipped his drink, and winced slightly at the artificial taste of the freeze-dried cocoa powder in it. "As the man said, 'Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares'," he quoted.
Plikt frowned at him. "Who?" she asked.
"Just some old playwright," he said. "It doesn't really matter."
"You're still avoiding my questions," Plikt sighed. "How long are you going to keep this up?"
"As long as it pleases me." Ender's cocoa dropped to the desk in front of him, mostly undrunk. "Change into something that covers your ankles, Plikt-- we're going to church."
---
Not since he was a child in the military had Ender felt so clearly that he was in enemy territory.
The enmity began when he reached the top of the hill, a wide, almost flat expanse of lawn and garden immaculately tended. Here is the world of the Church, thought Ender, everything in its place and no weeds allowed. He was aware of the many watching him, but now the robes were black or orange, priests and deacons, their eyes malevolent with authority under threat. What do I steal from you by coming here? Ender asked them silently. But he knew that their hatred was not undeserved. He was a wild herb growing in the well-tended garden; wherever he stepped, disorder threatened, and many lovely flowers would die if he took root and sucked the life from their soil.
Jane chattered at him all the while, but he ignored her. Answering her here, where many would still consider a terminal to be a sacrilege, a way of placing oneself above God, would be a faux-pas from which he might never recover. Plikt's conversation was another thing, though in its own sense, equally frustrating.
"So many priests," she murmured. "How many of them can this one place maintain? They're supposed to be celibate, aren't they?"
He supposed he couldn't begrudge her her cold, somewhat disdainful curiosity. Not only was she a recent convert to humanism, still burning with the desire to espouse her new gospel, but she hailed from a Lutheran world. The priests' celibacy would seem strange to her, or at the very least, foolish.
"They're orthodox," Ender responded quietly. "Every community has its orthodoxies. All equally annoying, all equally necessary - if there isn't some force of conservatism, then the community will soon be swallowed by the onset of change, lost without an identity of its own. My sister wrote about it once, I believe. A long time ago."
On Zanzibar, as a matter of fact - but that was a planet so far away in space and time now that the idea of them being there must've sounded impossible to Plikt, if he'd been inclined to bring it up.
"The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life," Jane quoted at him over the terminal. She used Valentine's voice, and that hurt - stronger than he'd have thought it could.
He supposed that wasn't strange, actually. He had borne a great deal of scorn from religious fanatics during the past few thousand years, but always she had been there, supporting him. And if it hadn't been her, well, Ben had even had his back when he stood up to Jedi fanaticism - making him believe that even in his inability to talk Luke out of anything, he had at least won some kind of victory.
He pulled his coat around himself, and ignored the look that Plikt gave him.
It wasn't long before they reached the man they had come here to see: the Ceifeiro, the abbot of the Filhos da Mente de Cristos, the Children of the Mind of Christ. Ah, his common title would be Dom Cristao - Sir Christian - but Ender had known the progenitor of their order, and he knew that it was a trick, claiming a title that really belonged to anyone of the Christian faith. He chose not to; he called out to the man. "Ceifeiro?"
The man smiled at him - he'd noticed the title Ender had chosen to use. "Yes, I'm the Ceifeiro. And what are you to us-- our infestation of weeds?"
"I try to be a blight wherever I go."
"Beware, then, or the Lord of the Harvest will burn you with the tares."
"I know-- damnation is only a breath away, and there's no hope of getting me to repent."
"The priests do repentance. Our job is teaching the mind. It was good of you to come."
"It was good of you to invite me here. I had been reduced to the crudest sort of bludgeoning in order to get anyone to converse with me at all."
Beside him, Plikt barely repressed a laugh. She knew, of course, as they all did, that the only reason Ender was here was because he'd threatened to bring the Inquisition down on their heads if they didn't let him in.
There was banter, of course. Always banter, even among the religious, though this kind at least held some kind of intellectual challenge. Soon, they'd met the Ceifeiro's wife, the Aradora - the principal of the local school. She was a lovely woman, old but full of life, who smiled and joked her way through the conversation.
But as they spoke, strange things became obvious to Ender. Most importantly, there were the beds. Back when he'd first met the Filhos, centuries ago, one of their chief rules had been this: a husband and wife must share the bed together, but never have sex. It had been San Angelo's way of stirring up nearly unavoidable temptation - he'd hoped that all priests of his order would, with time, leave it and go on to have families.
He asked them about it. Plikt remained mercifully silent - she only commented with her eyes.
"It's the thing our dear San Angelo did not understand, because there was never a true monastery of the order during his life," said the Aradora. "The monastery becomes our family, and to leave it would be as painful as divorce. Once the roots go down, the plant can't come up again without great pain and tearing. So we sleep in separate beds, and we have just enough strength to remain in our beloved order."
She sounded content. Tears came to Ender's eyes unbidden, and he reached up to brush them aside. The Aradora blushed. "Don't weep for us, Speaker Andrew. We have far more joy than suffering."
"My tears weren't for pity, but for beauty," he said quietly. "I don't find your celibacy strange at all." Unlike the woman sitting at his side - he could see Plikt biting down on her lip. He wanted-- he wanted to talk to them. About Valentine, about how she had been as close to him as a wife, but as chaste as a sister, in the wake of everything that had happened. He understood that kind of love as well as he did the other kind, for what degree he understood either at all.
"Is something wrong?" the Aradora asked him. The Ceifeiro reached out to touch his head gently.
"I'm afraid that this voyage has cost me more than any other. I left behind my sister, who traveled with me for many years. She married in Reykjavik. To me, it seems only a week or so since I left her, but I find that I miss her more than I expected. The two of you--"
"Are you telling us that you are also celibate?" asked the Ceifeiro.
"And widowed now as well," whispered the Aradora.
Ender blew out a long breath as he steadied himself. Again, he didn't need to look at Plikt's face to know what she was thinking - Jane put it into words well enough herself, muttering about how if he had a master plan, she certainly didn't get the gist of it. "Widowed for a fair bit longer than that," he said.
Beside him, Plikt sat up, but he refused to elaborate further. Thankfully, the Ceifeiro simply nodded. He did not request any further information, as she would no doubt do, and he almost wanted to hug the man for it.
"You must be so lonely," said the Aradora. "Your sister has found her resting place. Are you looking for one, too?"
"I don't think so," said Ender. "I'm afraid I've imposed on your hospitality too much." He offered them both a smile, then turned his head aside, urging Plikt up with a touch of his hand.
"Speaker Andrew," the Ceifeiro said, raising his voice. "I understand you've given us more trust than we intended. But we deserve that trust, I can assure you - and you have ours in return."
"Ah," whispered Jane, "I see it now. A very clever maneuver on your part, Ender. You're much better at playacting than I ever knew."
Ender's body stilled in its motions. Jane's remark had cut worse than the one about Valentine earlier - rather than working on his sentiments, it made him feel cynical, cheap, and in one instinctive motion he reached up and clicked it off.
It was a movement on his part that was so unusual to Plikt that the girl actually jerked up a little in response, as if he'd thrown a switch on her head instead of his own. But the eyes of the two Filhos softened - they knew the significance of the implant, that it connected Ender to his various feeds and connections, and assumed that he had turned it off as a gesture of faith.
"Please," the Ceifeiro said. "Stay."
Ender sank back into his seat, and Plikt with him.
"We'll tell you about Novinha," the Aradora assured him.
He nodded mutely.
---
"So now we do know what happened," Plikt said, hours later, when they finally emerged from the church.
"Do we?" Ender asked. Jane had remained silent in his ear all this time, even after he'd turned on the interface again - he was a little distracted by it. Thrown, really.
"You said so yourself," she replied. "Novinha found something. Some knowledge about the piggies. And so did Pipo, and it led to his death."
"And she avoided marrying Libo because doing so would give him access to the same information," Ender said. "Yes, that. That, we know. Some sense of duty drove her to do this-- to act to keep Libo from doing whatever he'd think his duty was."
"Or whatever he felt needed doing." Plikt's eyes fell back on his face, and she was silent for a moment or two. "Does that still sound like your experience?" she asked.
He shot her an irritated look.
But, exhausted and ripped open and worn as he felt, he did not have the energy to avoid her question. "Yes and no," he said. "I understand duty - I've known enough warriors and queens and CEOs with overdeveloped senses of justice to know it intimately. But when my lover decided that duty lay in waging a war, I knew mine lay elsewhere."
"So they left, and you didn't stop them?" Plikt asked.
"They left and I didn't stop them and they died," Ender said. He fixed his eyes on the horizon. "There. Now you've got your answers, and I've got mine. Now can we get back to the topic at hand? We have to find out what information Novinha tried to keep from Libo. We need to go see the piggies."
Plikt gave him a dry look. They were almost at the house, and dusk was starting to set in. "Sure," she said, "but not right now, unless you'd like to scale the fence in the dark."
"I'm in a masochistic mood. There are no ends to what I'm capable of," Ender shot back.
"You're not masochistic, you're morose," Plikt said. "And the best fix for moroseness is a nice drink and a good night's sleep, my mother liked to say."
---
"You know, you're the only grown man I know that thinks milk is 'a nice drink to be drank at supper'," Plikt said, sinking into her seat. She seemed in an upbeat mood, for whatever that was worth - Ender could only hope it meant less questions.
"I like to stay sharp," Ender said, "And alcohol is the devil where it comes to maintaining a healthy set of neurons. You can write that down, while you're working on your treatise on me."
"I'm not," she replied. "I'm about to run some searches for Novinha's files. Unlike you, I actually know how to operate a computer system."
Ender merely sighed, ignoring the playful insult. "Well, please continue," he said. "Because I'd like to know." And he was worried: why hadn't Jane checked in with him yet?
He sipped his milk. He wasn't quite in the bantering mood, but he could still manage enough standoffishness to count. Not that Plikt seemed so put off by it; she merely took a swig of her wine in retaliation and then put it aside, by her interface. "You know, there's something deeply ironic about Novinha's situation," she said. "Almost makes you feel sympathetic."
"Just something?" Ender asked, brow arching. "She worked so hard and made herself so miserable to keep Libo from getting this information. And then the piggies killed him anyway. That's irony distilled, bottled, and sold for more than its worth."
---
Ten and a Thousand Years Ago...
It was the thunk that woke him - the familiar sound of boots hitting the floor. Ender stirred, reflexes tingling, his hand sliding under the covers in search of something to defend himself with. He wouldn't strike out without cause - of course not - but he'd rather be sure he had something on hand.
The glass doors slid open. Not gingerly - not carefully to avoid any noise. That made some of his muscles relax.
Ender let go of the object in his hands and turned over. "I realise it's been a while since we last had this conversation," he said, "but there's a significant difference between 'the balcony' and 'the front door'."
Ben's answering smile was more than a little sheepish. "Jaina dropped me off," he said, sliding his outer robes off his shoulders. "Sorry about that."
Really, Ender supposed, he should have realised it was Ben sooner. Coruscant wasn't exactly the quietest of planets, and the fact that Ben had made enough noise to be noticed at all should've said everything. Clearly, they'd been spending too much time living outside of the city; he wasn't used to these trappings anymore.
"Did you get your hands on your informant-to-be?" Ender asked.
"No." Ben padded over to his end of the bed, dropping a kiss to his cheek. "He vanished, but Jaina's on it - we'll probably be back on his trail in no time." He stepped around the bed, sat down, and began to pull off his boots.
"Tony called," Ender said, and sat up. "Something about a big New Years' Eve bash and lots of models. I didn't care to ask after the details."
"Not even a little bit?" Ben asked, chucking his boot across the room.
"Next time, I'll memorize their bra sizes for you," Ender said, "If that's what you want."
Ben chuckled, and glanced over his shoulder. "Just be sure to check the labels afterwards," he said. "Anyway, I don't think we'll be able to make it - I'll call Tony and apologise."
What did he mean by that? It wasn't that Ender was generally inclined to enjoy Tony's New Years parties - most of the time, he found some quiet corner, or secluded himself in Tony's lab to talk to the man himself as Tony avoided his own party. But the party in question was still two weeks off. It shouldn't be a pain to schedule, all in all.
"We should be back on Calicut by next week," Ender pointed out. "Our next transport out isn't scheduled for another three weeks, and there's a portal."
Ben's response was inaudible due to the removal of his remaining robes. "--ay," he finished. "Um. Dad thinks this problem might turn into a war. We probably shouldn't leave until we have a better idea of what we're up against here."
"You mean what the Jedi are up against," Ender said, watching Ben as he got up to toss his robes in the wardrobe. He was starting to get a bad feeling about this-- something more unsettling than the one he already had, having been on Coruscant for this long already.
Ben shut the wardrobe door. "I still technically am a Jedi," he said, "In the reserves. And I can't just run away without knowing everything's going to work itself out, you know?" He turned around. "Just a few more weeks. I'll run some missions, we'll know more."
"Ben, I have to be on that transport in three weeks," Ender pointed out. "There's been a call for a Speaker on Otaheti."
"So let someone else answer it," Ben said, flopping down on the bed. "You've had like ten calls come in just in the past three weeks. You haven't answered those either."
"We've been on Calicut for six months."
"So you can wait another month."
Ender looked at him for a moment. He'd seen the news coming in too. The attacks. The fleet that kept popping in and out of existence. Rumors of more stirring Sith.
"This isn't going to be over in a month," he said. "You know that."
Ben almost protested that, but Ender could tell by the look on his face he realised that, too. "Yeah," Ben said, more quietly. "I know. But I need to do this, Ender. I just... can't. Not right now."
Of course he couldn't. Ben had already been torn about it the first time around - and despite his assurances at the time, Ender still wasn't so sure he would have come with whole-heartedly if the crisis hadn't been resolved before they left. "Look," he said. "I'll stay here for the next three weeks, but after that I have to go back and catch my transport. It's a two-month flight - and I know Otaheti has a portal. I'll contact you when I get there."
Ben's eyes widened. "But--"
"And then you can hop back aboard our merry train," Ender said, smiling briefly. Not out of any kind of joy - he wasn't looking forward to this. But he also knew that if he stuck around either here or Calicut for much longer, he'd go mad, and this call-- well, it was interesting. "We'll probably be around there for a few months anyway, so you can take your time. Once I'm there, the portal will reconnect, and we'll be able to go back and forth. No harm, no foul."
Besides, Ender thought to himself, they weren't so codependent that they couldn't survive without each other for a period of time. And Ben was a big boy - he could take care of himself for a while.
It would be unpleasant, that was all.
---
"I think I saw something up in the sky!" Plikt sounded almost mad with excitement-- for Plikt's standards, which meant she sounded mildly interested to anyone else's ears. It was morning, and Lusitania's sun had only just risen above the horizon. Ender's consciousness hadn't come to him much quicker than that, either.
"It's called the sun, Plikt," he said. "It's a great big gaseous orb in the sky--"
"No, I mean an object," she snapped, opening the shutters over the window to let more of the sunlight in. "I saw fire, and something glistening in the sky, and then it just disappeared."
Ender frowned. "A ship?" he asked. "I haven't caught anything on our scanners, but they don't reach very far out of the atmosphere anyway."
"Could be," Plikt answered, leaning back against the wall. "But I don't think they've mentioned expecting anyone."
"Maybe another Speaker answered the call by accident, and didn't notice our prior claims," Ender suggested. "Who knows. Someone might have even invented the holy improbable grail of faster-than-light travel while we were out, and they're responding to Ela's call."
"You don't think we would've heard of that through the ansible?" Plikt asked. "I'm sure your sister would've send you a missive about it--"
Ender got up from behind the table, abandoning his half-eaten toast and his half-drunk glass of orange juice. "Valentine doesn't message me any more," he said. "She has more important things on her mind. She made that quite clear when I left."
"That was twenty years ago," Plikt pointed out. "Really? Not a single word?"
"Just like she promised," Ender said. "Have you had any luck accessing Novinha's files so far?"
"She used a very sophisticated encryption code. I haven't gotten near it yet, but I will." She observed Ender with knowing eyes as he moved around the room; he was sure she was coming to some conclusion or another about the way he and Valentine had parted, but if she wanted details, she was fresh out of luck.
She seemed to realise that, too, as the next thing she said was simply, "Where are we going next?"
"What I wanted was to visit the piggies, but I just got a message from Miro that that might... take some time," he said. "Miro and Ouanda being the only ones even allowed near them, I felt it was only in our best interest to wait until we got their permission. So we're going to talk to some of Novinha's brood instead. If nothing else, they might have some clues as to what Novinha has been hiding all this time."
---
Continued in part two!
I wanted to write a new, FH-canon storyline into 'Speaker for the Dead'. Don't ask me why I thought that was a good idea. I still don't. Buuut I started it, got carried away, and now here it is: 22,000 words of AU Speaker for the Dead. Because it still follows the original story to a point, some of the prose within is ganked word-for-word from the book - I'll try to denote this with a different shade of text color where possible. In other places, it's way too interwoven with my own stuff to work (and even some of the shaded stuff isn't 100% Orson. Watch me be anal about it anyway.)
ANYWAY.
Don't expect much more than way too many words of me attempting to write a far superior book - which you all should read - but I hope you enjoy it anyway!
Title: Speak, Rewind
Warning: Some gore within.
Rating: PG-13.
Fandom: Fandom High + Ender's Game/Speaker for the Dead
Much thanks to:
dollpocalypse and mouthy_merc for cheerleading, and the lovely nookiepowered for giving it a thorough beta'ing!Dedicated to: the lovely
momslilassassin, from whom I've withheld this fic cruelly until it was done.Spoilers for the entirety of Speaker for the Dead, obviously.
"We're here."
Plikt's voice only barely penetrated Ender's consciousness. He had been... not asleep, but drowsing, the natural result of the meandering thoughts that traveling at relative speeds always brought out in him.
Drowsing. It had been a better escape from being reminded of Valentine's absence than speaking to the girl who took her place on his ship. No offense to Plikt, but it would probably be a few months until her blonde hair and blue eyes stopped reminding him so painfully of the other girl who had once traveled with him, or the tall, blonde, blue-eyed man that she'd married. That she had, inevitably and naturally, chosen over him.
But now Plikt was calling on him to wake, and he opened his eyes.
She sighed at him.
"How long until we land?" he asked, sitting up.
"Just a couple more minutes until we breach atmosphere," Plikt reported, and removed her blonde-blue-eyed-self from his range of vision.
Maybe it would've been easier, he reflected irrationally, if she hadn't had blue eyes, as if she had been made to kick him in the pants in three wholly different ways. But that was the problem about being a middle-aged human being - everything started to remind you of everybody.
"That fast?" he asked. "Why didn't you wake me earlier?"
Plikt shrugged. Her fingers danced over the controls. "It didn't seem necessary," she said. "Besides, you spent three days up and awake. I thought you could use the sleep."
"I told you to wake me an hour before atmosphere," he muttered, running his fingers through his hair.
"You did," Plikt agreed, "I suppose I forgot."
That earned her a crabby look. Of course she hadn't forgotten. What was it with all the people in his life who thought they had to dictate when he ate, drank and slept? Sometimes he wondered if they'd be telling him when to have bowel movements next.
"Also, you get this look every time we make the Park shift," Plikt added. "It's much worse than the look you're giving me now."
Ender released an irritated sigh. "Have you alerted Lusitanian authorities that I'm coming?"
Plikt barked a laugh. "Do you think this little rock even has a Landing Authority?" she asked. "Besides, you're a Speaker and I'm your apprentice. They're not even allowed to turn us away."
Another disadvantage of Plikt: he couldn't speak to Jane directly while she was here. Not that he expected Jane to offer him better courtesies. "Great," he muttered.
"Though there's a little spanner in the works," Plikt noted. "Novinha Ribeira canceled her call for a Speaker."
Of course, the Starways Code said that once Ender had begun his voyage in response to her call, the call could not legally be canceled; still, it changed everything, because instead of eagerly awaiting his arrival for twenty-two years, she would be dreading it, resenting him for coming when she had changed her mind. "Anything to simplify my work," he said.
"Our work," she corrected.
"Don't get uppity," he replied. "You're no Speaker yet."
"And here I thought the whole joy of being a Speaker was that you got to make things up," Plikt said, with the kind of glacial smile they taught all people of the fjords, at least in Ender's experience. "Anyway, it's not all bad. In the intervening years, a few more people have called for a Speaker, and they haven't canceled."
"Who?"
"By the greatest coincidence, they're Novinha's son Miro and Novinha's daughter Ela."
"They couldn't possibly have known Pipo," Ender said, rubbing at his eyes. "Why would they call me to Speak his death?"
"Not Pipo's death," Plikt said, with a shake of her head. "Ela called a Speaker just six weeks ago, to Speak the death of her father. Novinha's husband. Marcos Maria Ribeira, called Marcao. He died of some disease."
Ender sat up. "And the boy?" he asked.
"Miro," she replied. "He called for a Speaker a few years ago, when Pipo's son Libo was murdered."
He squinted at her. "By who?" he asked.
"The piggies," she said, "But I haven't had the chance to read any of the details so far."
Again, the piggies. The plot of this mystery was thickening already. "Well," Ender said, getting up out of his chair. "Then let's see what we can find out."
---
"I've alerted the mayor, Bosquinha," Ender said. The sound of the exit ramp hitting the ground cut off most of the last syllable, and he found himself having to repeat the name. "She should be here any minute now to pick us up."
"Or feed us to the wildlife," Plikt said, peering past him at the herd of animals roaming the grounds not ten feet away. An only slightly longer distance ahead, they could see the first buildings belonging to Milagre, the planet's earliest and only settlement. Most of them were made out of either stone or durable plastic, the kind the first settlers must have brought with them.
Ender snorted. "They look docile enough," he said. "And here I thought you'd come at least partially out of courage and curiosity for the new frontier."
"I came here because here is where you're going, and I think that makes it interesting," Plikt said, walking down the ramp. "Meanwhile, I grow more and more curious why you let me come along in the first place. You don't seem happy to have me."
"Because I'm getting old, and I'll need someone to help me up the stairs," Ender snarked without thought. Or, well, a thought - the answer to her question was simple. He might have had illusions once about his ability to survive out here on his own without companionship, but those had long since been dashed. Like any human being, he now suffered from a certain addiction to human warmth, at least of an emotional nature.
The idea of going entirely alone had frightened him.
But that didn't mean he had to admit to it.
She shook her head, picked a stone on the ground and sat on it. "Valentine mentioned you used to have a third traveling companion," she said.
"Did she?" Ender asked, narrowing his eyes at what he was sure - or at least, hoped he could be sure - was a vehicle moving in their general direction. His tone was dismissive; his question, rhetorical.
Sadly, he had let Plikt in particular come along for a reason: she was smart, and looked at people in ways similar to how he did. With curiosity, distance, and an almost infallible intuition. "This was someone who mattered to you," she said.
Yes. That was definitely a vehicle. "You shouldn't believe everything Valentine tells you," he said.
"She didn't tell me anything more than that," Plikt replied. "But you usually don't act this dismissive of something if it isn't important."
His head swung away, his eyes breaking their near-obsessive fixation on that little moving blip that grew ever bigger. "Oh, and since when are you an expert on me?" he said irritably.
She smiled briefly. "I predicted you'd come here, didn't I?" she said.
Then the noise coming from Mayor Bosquinha's car grew too loud to speak any further, and Ender, pleased by the distraction, turned to the much more important task of questioning her about the settlement and its connection to the aliens known as piggies.
And, of course, the Ribeira family.
---
Much later, he laid in bed in the old plastic colonist building he had been assigned to. The hive queen's voice had come and gone, whispering to him about the difficulties of his analytical mind, and the sunlight that was filling her thoughts now, the consciousness on this planet that reached to her and was so much easier to handle than his was.
This is home, this is home, her thought still echoed in his mind, but it was one he didn't understand, one that frayed easily like the remnants of a dream shortly after waking.
But the hive queen had never understood all the realities, all the factors that worried Ender now. Not just the solid problems of the situation, but the intrinsic one, the one that kept him awake here, now: if the hive queen stayed here, he would have to stay here.
He had accepted Plikt's companionship because he knew that to deny he needed it would be foolishness. But she was a wanderer, like him, and like him, she claimed no attachment to any particular strain of humanity. He didn't know if she would ever feel his disconnect, but he also knew she let nothing tether her.
Besides him, perhaps.
But if this was the hive queen's home, then it would have to be his. He would have to tether himself here, call his three-thousand-year journey to an end, rejoin humanity, for whatever it was here.
And he had no idea how.
It was Jane who stirred him, with snarky comments and witty banter, and once that was over, with information. Cold hard facts that wrote and rewrote the lives of the people here: facts about the world.
"That barrier is the only thing standing between us and the piggies," mused Ender.
"It generates an electric field that stimulates any pain-sensitive nerves that come within it," said Jane. "Just touching it makes all your wetware go screwy-- it makes you feel as though somebody were cutting off your fingers with a file."
"Pleasant thought. Are we in a concentration camp? Or a zoo?"
"It all depends on how you look at it," said Jane. "It's the human side of the fence that's connected to the rest of the universe, and the piggy side that's trapped on its home world."
"The difference is that they don't know what they're missing."
"I know," said Jane. "It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born homo sapiens."
Novinha's home, as it turned out, was kept from him. Well, Bosquinha had tried, at least. It took Jane milliseconds to override the restrictions on the maps and feed him the right information. As it turned out, Novinha lived far out of the way, back behind everything. She had chosen actively to be away from it all - Ender was sure it was her who had chosen. Looking at all the data now, it seemed like the pattern of her life. Novinha was not a part of Milagre. She had never seen herself as belonging to the community.
Calling him had been an act of defiance on her part, and then on her children's. For Lusitania was a heavily Catholic settlement, and as a Speaker, he represented another religion, an intrusion on the system of belief that was woven into Milagre.
He would have to go see her. She was the reason he had come, after all - the familiarity of the pain in her eyes, the sympathy he'd felt. Oh, the tales of the piggies had been fanciful enough, the murder they had committed interesting, but he had spent enough time traveling a galaxy meeting strange alien species that the immediate fascination had worn off.
He winced midway into some crack from Jane that she'd meant to obscure the fact she was keeping information from him.
"Thinking about him again?" she asked, sounding almost disappointed. "You humans. With your short lives, you'd think you wouldn't hold on to anything longer than absolutely necessary."
"How I handle my grief is not any of your concern," Ender said testily, and sat up in bed. "Stop trying to unnerve me, Jane."
"I'm not," she said.
He let go of an irritated snort and tossed the covers aside. "I need to see Novinha," he said. "Alert Plikt. Tell her we'll need to find someone to show us the way to the Ribeira household."
---
Olhado Ribeira looked like it hadn't been a day since he'd wandered into Room 204, the year 2011. It was strange, alien almost, to see him like this-- that life was so far away from Ender now, so skillfully pushed from his memories, that it was almost as if Fandom itself had opened the skies above him and dropped a pink elephant on his head simply to mess with him.
Olhado was playing football in the praqa, or rather, he was arbiting a game. With his metal eyes, he could easily stop and rewind any image that had just occurred - perfect to determine who had fouled when, and who was due which penalty.
Plikt noticed Ender's attention, but wisely, she kept her own counsel. She'd slept poorly last night, and so some of the sharpness had vanished out of her eyes. He doubted she'd regale him with too many difficult questions today.
No doubt Ender would be facing a firing squad of questions soon enough, though. He held no illusions about that. "Are you the arbiter here?" he called in stinted Portuguese - accented quite heavily with the flourishes of Castellano Spanish.
"Sometimes," the boy replied.
"Then tell me, arbiter, is it fair to leave a stranger to find his way around without help?" Ender asked. He'd switched back to Stark - he had no interest in taxing his middling Portuguese to its limit.
"Stranger? You mean utlanning, framling, or ramen?"
Utlanning, framling, ramen: Valentine's words, spoken so confidently here as if it had been years since she published her work on the orders of strangeness... but it had been, for them. Ender supposed it was appropriate here. Lusitania might not have counted any utlanning - human strangers from another village - or human framling - strangers from another world, but the debate whether the local aliens were ramen - understandable aliens - or varelse - unknowable aliens - ran hot.
"No, I think I mean infidel."
"O Senhor e descrente?" You're an unbeliever?
"So descredo no incrivel." I only disbelieve the unbelievable.
The boy grinned. "Where do you want to go, Speaker?"
"The house of the Ribeira family."
They bantered back and forth: about truth and lies and willingness to help. Banter, Ender had found, was the language of the multiverse. Even in his time at Fandom, he'd realised as much. If you spoke in fluent witticisms, then you would gain, if not trust, at least the belief that your presence was not entirely unpleasant. That you were 'in on the joke'.
His show of surprise when the boy admitted to being a Ribeira himself worked on the children. It did not work on Plikt, whose blue eyes narrowed at him as he fell into step with the boy.
Yes. There would be questions. A great deal of questions.
But first, he would minister to Novinha and her family. And hope that Olhado's delight in attempting to deceive him would not translate to everyone he met, or already had.
---
"You did well," Plikt observed a few hours later. They were walking back to their impromptu home now; Ender supposed that whatever amnesty she had granted him from her questions was about to come to an end. "You made the children like putty and brought the mother to a nice old boil."
"She's hateful and selfish," Ender replied. He was jittery - a Speaking always did this to him, got him thinking, left him with all these pieces of questions and answers that he was supposed to glue together somehow. "I can't believe she let this happen to her children."
Plikt snorted derisively. "You don't really think that," she said. "You like them. You're not nearly as succesful at secret-keeping as you seem to think you are, Speaker."
Again with the insinuations. Ender had no interest in going into them. "Perhaps I do, but she hates me," he said. "And she's right to do it. Clever. Most people only realise they hate me when I open my mouth and truly speak."
"You recognise something in there," Plikt said, stubborn as she was. "Their family, perhaps? You've just lost your sister - are you looking to replace those familial bonds in your heart?"
Again with the assumptions-- but these did not bother him because they were true. They bothered him because they almost were, but not quite. He had had family - had spent many of the first years of his life in freedom infatuated with the idea, with this thing he could almost grasp.
And then he had had it, for what felt like such a short time. Belonging, family, warmth. Sometimes, it had been nearly unbearable, had made him feel like a stranger in his own body. Other times...
Well, he had holes in his heart, and they were exactly where they belonged - they anchored him to his self, and he had long graduated past trying something foolish like filling them.
"Family isn't something you replace like a bulb in a lamp," Ender said. "I certainly have no inclination to try and replace mine. But thank you for the analysis, Miss Expert."
"You've been avoiding my questions," Plikt said.
"Or maybe you've just been asking the wrong ones," he retorted. "Or maybe some questions are just better left unanswered."
"Says the Speaker for the Dead." Plikt didn't look impressed. Her gaze was cool.
"Who only comes when he's called," Ender reminded her.
"You let me come with you," Plikt reminded, "That's call enough to me. So tell me: What is it that draws you to the Ribeiras? If it isn't family, then what?" Her eyes searched for Ender's. He almost denied her the contact -- but then an irrational annoyance reared itself in his heart. Why should he avoid this? Why should he be the one to cave to her questions? "Loss," she said. "That's it, isn't it? But it's not just Valentine - you were drawn to this before you even left."
Ender blew out a frustrated breath. "You're barking up the wrong tree, Plikt," he said. "Focus on the task at hand."
"Oh, I am," she replied. "Marcao is your task. You are mine."
"Then find another task," he said, and sped up his walking so that she and her tiny legs had to run to keep up.
---
Later that day, Ender visited the local doctor, Navio. Marcao had died of disease, and Ender needed to know what, and how. Well, how he knew, but the wasting disease itself, he'd never heard of. The locals called it the 'Descolada', apparently - the plague itself had only ended a few years ago.
The haul could have been worse, all in all; the only annoying thing was that the answers Ender had gotten were enough for Jane to hijack a terminal simply so she could laugh uproariously.
Of course, it didn't last long - as soon as Plikt crossed the treshold of his temporary house, Jane's image vanished. Plikt didn't come bearing laughter - she came bearing two cups of hot cocoa, one of which she placed in front of Ender, even though she knew he didn't particularly care for it.
"So what have we got?" she asked.
"Marcos' disease," Ender replied. "It was genetic. A defect, caused by a plague some time ago. The Descolada. It made his insides rot - it probably rendered him sterile at a young age."
Plikt's eyebrows flew up. "So Novinha's children weren't Marcos's," she concluded.
"That's logical to you and me," Ender agreed, "But on a devout Catholic colony like this, nobody's even contemplated it. Everyone thinks Novinha simply didn't know about the defect, and that Marcos was lucky - one of the precious few who didn't lose the functionality of their genitals. It's really rather sweet - even the doctor would rather believe that Marcos was a special case." He leaned back in his seat. "No wonder Marcao was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping with another man. It was probably part of their bargain in the beginning that she would not be faithful to him, but six children is rather rubbing his nose in it."
"That's the Catholic Church for you," Plikt said, sipping her own cocoa. "Sure, commit adultry - just don't use contraceptives for it."
"Which leaves us the question of who the actual father was."
Plikt rolled her eyes at him. "We already know that," she said. "It was Libo. It's as clear as day that she was in love with him, and not Marcao."
"But then why marry Marcao instead?" Ender asked. "Libo was still single when she did so. It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then to go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning."
"Love makes people do strange things?" Plikt posited. "Or so I've heard, anyway. I've never had any experience in the matter." She looked at Ender. "How about you?"
It was not as strange as it might have seemed to Plikt's young eyes, if outside forces were involved. Yet again, the whole situation reminded Ender of himself, and painful sympathy began to beat in his chest again. Why marry someone she did not like very much, when she loved and laid with another? Why stay with his increasingly unhappy and independent sister and the exhausting demands of the hive queen, when the person he loved went off to war somewhere else?
Because you thought denying yourself something was for the greater good. Because you were used to such denial. Because it seemed like a more natural state to live with such restraint.
Or perhaps he was simply projecting.
Ender sipped his drink, and winced slightly at the artificial taste of the freeze-dried cocoa powder in it. "As the man said, 'Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares'," he quoted.
Plikt frowned at him. "Who?" she asked.
"Just some old playwright," he said. "It doesn't really matter."
"You're still avoiding my questions," Plikt sighed. "How long are you going to keep this up?"
"As long as it pleases me." Ender's cocoa dropped to the desk in front of him, mostly undrunk. "Change into something that covers your ankles, Plikt-- we're going to church."
---
Not since he was a child in the military had Ender felt so clearly that he was in enemy territory.
The enmity began when he reached the top of the hill, a wide, almost flat expanse of lawn and garden immaculately tended. Here is the world of the Church, thought Ender, everything in its place and no weeds allowed. He was aware of the many watching him, but now the robes were black or orange, priests and deacons, their eyes malevolent with authority under threat. What do I steal from you by coming here? Ender asked them silently. But he knew that their hatred was not undeserved. He was a wild herb growing in the well-tended garden; wherever he stepped, disorder threatened, and many lovely flowers would die if he took root and sucked the life from their soil.
Jane chattered at him all the while, but he ignored her. Answering her here, where many would still consider a terminal to be a sacrilege, a way of placing oneself above God, would be a faux-pas from which he might never recover. Plikt's conversation was another thing, though in its own sense, equally frustrating.
"So many priests," she murmured. "How many of them can this one place maintain? They're supposed to be celibate, aren't they?"
He supposed he couldn't begrudge her her cold, somewhat disdainful curiosity. Not only was she a recent convert to humanism, still burning with the desire to espouse her new gospel, but she hailed from a Lutheran world. The priests' celibacy would seem strange to her, or at the very least, foolish.
"They're orthodox," Ender responded quietly. "Every community has its orthodoxies. All equally annoying, all equally necessary - if there isn't some force of conservatism, then the community will soon be swallowed by the onset of change, lost without an identity of its own. My sister wrote about it once, I believe. A long time ago."
On Zanzibar, as a matter of fact - but that was a planet so far away in space and time now that the idea of them being there must've sounded impossible to Plikt, if he'd been inclined to bring it up.
"The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life," Jane quoted at him over the terminal. She used Valentine's voice, and that hurt - stronger than he'd have thought it could.
He supposed that wasn't strange, actually. He had borne a great deal of scorn from religious fanatics during the past few thousand years, but always she had been there, supporting him. And if it hadn't been her, well, Ben had even had his back when he stood up to Jedi fanaticism - making him believe that even in his inability to talk Luke out of anything, he had at least won some kind of victory.
He pulled his coat around himself, and ignored the look that Plikt gave him.
It wasn't long before they reached the man they had come here to see: the Ceifeiro, the abbot of the Filhos da Mente de Cristos, the Children of the Mind of Christ. Ah, his common title would be Dom Cristao - Sir Christian - but Ender had known the progenitor of their order, and he knew that it was a trick, claiming a title that really belonged to anyone of the Christian faith. He chose not to; he called out to the man. "Ceifeiro?"
The man smiled at him - he'd noticed the title Ender had chosen to use. "Yes, I'm the Ceifeiro. And what are you to us-- our infestation of weeds?"
"I try to be a blight wherever I go."
"Beware, then, or the Lord of the Harvest will burn you with the tares."
"I know-- damnation is only a breath away, and there's no hope of getting me to repent."
"The priests do repentance. Our job is teaching the mind. It was good of you to come."
"It was good of you to invite me here. I had been reduced to the crudest sort of bludgeoning in order to get anyone to converse with me at all."
Beside him, Plikt barely repressed a laugh. She knew, of course, as they all did, that the only reason Ender was here was because he'd threatened to bring the Inquisition down on their heads if they didn't let him in.
There was banter, of course. Always banter, even among the religious, though this kind at least held some kind of intellectual challenge. Soon, they'd met the Ceifeiro's wife, the Aradora - the principal of the local school. She was a lovely woman, old but full of life, who smiled and joked her way through the conversation.
But as they spoke, strange things became obvious to Ender. Most importantly, there were the beds. Back when he'd first met the Filhos, centuries ago, one of their chief rules had been this: a husband and wife must share the bed together, but never have sex. It had been San Angelo's way of stirring up nearly unavoidable temptation - he'd hoped that all priests of his order would, with time, leave it and go on to have families.
He asked them about it. Plikt remained mercifully silent - she only commented with her eyes.
"It's the thing our dear San Angelo did not understand, because there was never a true monastery of the order during his life," said the Aradora. "The monastery becomes our family, and to leave it would be as painful as divorce. Once the roots go down, the plant can't come up again without great pain and tearing. So we sleep in separate beds, and we have just enough strength to remain in our beloved order."
She sounded content. Tears came to Ender's eyes unbidden, and he reached up to brush them aside. The Aradora blushed. "Don't weep for us, Speaker Andrew. We have far more joy than suffering."
"My tears weren't for pity, but for beauty," he said quietly. "I don't find your celibacy strange at all." Unlike the woman sitting at his side - he could see Plikt biting down on her lip. He wanted-- he wanted to talk to them. About Valentine, about how she had been as close to him as a wife, but as chaste as a sister, in the wake of everything that had happened. He understood that kind of love as well as he did the other kind, for what degree he understood either at all.
"Is something wrong?" the Aradora asked him. The Ceifeiro reached out to touch his head gently.
"I'm afraid that this voyage has cost me more than any other. I left behind my sister, who traveled with me for many years. She married in Reykjavik. To me, it seems only a week or so since I left her, but I find that I miss her more than I expected. The two of you--"
"Are you telling us that you are also celibate?" asked the Ceifeiro.
"And widowed now as well," whispered the Aradora.
Ender blew out a long breath as he steadied himself. Again, he didn't need to look at Plikt's face to know what she was thinking - Jane put it into words well enough herself, muttering about how if he had a master plan, she certainly didn't get the gist of it. "Widowed for a fair bit longer than that," he said.
Beside him, Plikt sat up, but he refused to elaborate further. Thankfully, the Ceifeiro simply nodded. He did not request any further information, as she would no doubt do, and he almost wanted to hug the man for it.
"You must be so lonely," said the Aradora. "Your sister has found her resting place. Are you looking for one, too?"
"I don't think so," said Ender. "I'm afraid I've imposed on your hospitality too much." He offered them both a smile, then turned his head aside, urging Plikt up with a touch of his hand.
"Speaker Andrew," the Ceifeiro said, raising his voice. "I understand you've given us more trust than we intended. But we deserve that trust, I can assure you - and you have ours in return."
"Ah," whispered Jane, "I see it now. A very clever maneuver on your part, Ender. You're much better at playacting than I ever knew."
Ender's body stilled in its motions. Jane's remark had cut worse than the one about Valentine earlier - rather than working on his sentiments, it made him feel cynical, cheap, and in one instinctive motion he reached up and clicked it off.
It was a movement on his part that was so unusual to Plikt that the girl actually jerked up a little in response, as if he'd thrown a switch on her head instead of his own. But the eyes of the two Filhos softened - they knew the significance of the implant, that it connected Ender to his various feeds and connections, and assumed that he had turned it off as a gesture of faith.
"Please," the Ceifeiro said. "Stay."
Ender sank back into his seat, and Plikt with him.
"We'll tell you about Novinha," the Aradora assured him.
He nodded mutely.
---
"So now we do know what happened," Plikt said, hours later, when they finally emerged from the church.
"Do we?" Ender asked. Jane had remained silent in his ear all this time, even after he'd turned on the interface again - he was a little distracted by it. Thrown, really.
"You said so yourself," she replied. "Novinha found something. Some knowledge about the piggies. And so did Pipo, and it led to his death."
"And she avoided marrying Libo because doing so would give him access to the same information," Ender said. "Yes, that. That, we know. Some sense of duty drove her to do this-- to act to keep Libo from doing whatever he'd think his duty was."
"Or whatever he felt needed doing." Plikt's eyes fell back on his face, and she was silent for a moment or two. "Does that still sound like your experience?" she asked.
He shot her an irritated look.
But, exhausted and ripped open and worn as he felt, he did not have the energy to avoid her question. "Yes and no," he said. "I understand duty - I've known enough warriors and queens and CEOs with overdeveloped senses of justice to know it intimately. But when my lover decided that duty lay in waging a war, I knew mine lay elsewhere."
"So they left, and you didn't stop them?" Plikt asked.
"They left and I didn't stop them and they died," Ender said. He fixed his eyes on the horizon. "There. Now you've got your answers, and I've got mine. Now can we get back to the topic at hand? We have to find out what information Novinha tried to keep from Libo. We need to go see the piggies."
Plikt gave him a dry look. They were almost at the house, and dusk was starting to set in. "Sure," she said, "but not right now, unless you'd like to scale the fence in the dark."
"I'm in a masochistic mood. There are no ends to what I'm capable of," Ender shot back.
"You're not masochistic, you're morose," Plikt said. "And the best fix for moroseness is a nice drink and a good night's sleep, my mother liked to say."
---
"You know, you're the only grown man I know that thinks milk is 'a nice drink to be drank at supper'," Plikt said, sinking into her seat. She seemed in an upbeat mood, for whatever that was worth - Ender could only hope it meant less questions.
"I like to stay sharp," Ender said, "And alcohol is the devil where it comes to maintaining a healthy set of neurons. You can write that down, while you're working on your treatise on me."
"I'm not," she replied. "I'm about to run some searches for Novinha's files. Unlike you, I actually know how to operate a computer system."
Ender merely sighed, ignoring the playful insult. "Well, please continue," he said. "Because I'd like to know." And he was worried: why hadn't Jane checked in with him yet?
He sipped his milk. He wasn't quite in the bantering mood, but he could still manage enough standoffishness to count. Not that Plikt seemed so put off by it; she merely took a swig of her wine in retaliation and then put it aside, by her interface. "You know, there's something deeply ironic about Novinha's situation," she said. "Almost makes you feel sympathetic."
"Just something?" Ender asked, brow arching. "She worked so hard and made herself so miserable to keep Libo from getting this information. And then the piggies killed him anyway. That's irony distilled, bottled, and sold for more than its worth."
---
Ten and a Thousand Years Ago...
It was the thunk that woke him - the familiar sound of boots hitting the floor. Ender stirred, reflexes tingling, his hand sliding under the covers in search of something to defend himself with. He wouldn't strike out without cause - of course not - but he'd rather be sure he had something on hand.
The glass doors slid open. Not gingerly - not carefully to avoid any noise. That made some of his muscles relax.
Ender let go of the object in his hands and turned over. "I realise it's been a while since we last had this conversation," he said, "but there's a significant difference between 'the balcony' and 'the front door'."
Ben's answering smile was more than a little sheepish. "Jaina dropped me off," he said, sliding his outer robes off his shoulders. "Sorry about that."
Really, Ender supposed, he should have realised it was Ben sooner. Coruscant wasn't exactly the quietest of planets, and the fact that Ben had made enough noise to be noticed at all should've said everything. Clearly, they'd been spending too much time living outside of the city; he wasn't used to these trappings anymore.
"Did you get your hands on your informant-to-be?" Ender asked.
"No." Ben padded over to his end of the bed, dropping a kiss to his cheek. "He vanished, but Jaina's on it - we'll probably be back on his trail in no time." He stepped around the bed, sat down, and began to pull off his boots.
"Tony called," Ender said, and sat up. "Something about a big New Years' Eve bash and lots of models. I didn't care to ask after the details."
"Not even a little bit?" Ben asked, chucking his boot across the room.
"Next time, I'll memorize their bra sizes for you," Ender said, "If that's what you want."
Ben chuckled, and glanced over his shoulder. "Just be sure to check the labels afterwards," he said. "Anyway, I don't think we'll be able to make it - I'll call Tony and apologise."
What did he mean by that? It wasn't that Ender was generally inclined to enjoy Tony's New Years parties - most of the time, he found some quiet corner, or secluded himself in Tony's lab to talk to the man himself as Tony avoided his own party. But the party in question was still two weeks off. It shouldn't be a pain to schedule, all in all.
"We should be back on Calicut by next week," Ender pointed out. "Our next transport out isn't scheduled for another three weeks, and there's a portal."
Ben's response was inaudible due to the removal of his remaining robes. "--ay," he finished. "Um. Dad thinks this problem might turn into a war. We probably shouldn't leave until we have a better idea of what we're up against here."
"You mean what the Jedi are up against," Ender said, watching Ben as he got up to toss his robes in the wardrobe. He was starting to get a bad feeling about this-- something more unsettling than the one he already had, having been on Coruscant for this long already.
Ben shut the wardrobe door. "I still technically am a Jedi," he said, "In the reserves. And I can't just run away without knowing everything's going to work itself out, you know?" He turned around. "Just a few more weeks. I'll run some missions, we'll know more."
"Ben, I have to be on that transport in three weeks," Ender pointed out. "There's been a call for a Speaker on Otaheti."
"So let someone else answer it," Ben said, flopping down on the bed. "You've had like ten calls come in just in the past three weeks. You haven't answered those either."
"We've been on Calicut for six months."
"So you can wait another month."
Ender looked at him for a moment. He'd seen the news coming in too. The attacks. The fleet that kept popping in and out of existence. Rumors of more stirring Sith.
"This isn't going to be over in a month," he said. "You know that."
Ben almost protested that, but Ender could tell by the look on his face he realised that, too. "Yeah," Ben said, more quietly. "I know. But I need to do this, Ender. I just... can't. Not right now."
Of course he couldn't. Ben had already been torn about it the first time around - and despite his assurances at the time, Ender still wasn't so sure he would have come with whole-heartedly if the crisis hadn't been resolved before they left. "Look," he said. "I'll stay here for the next three weeks, but after that I have to go back and catch my transport. It's a two-month flight - and I know Otaheti has a portal. I'll contact you when I get there."
Ben's eyes widened. "But--"
"And then you can hop back aboard our merry train," Ender said, smiling briefly. Not out of any kind of joy - he wasn't looking forward to this. But he also knew that if he stuck around either here or Calicut for much longer, he'd go mad, and this call-- well, it was interesting. "We'll probably be around there for a few months anyway, so you can take your time. Once I'm there, the portal will reconnect, and we'll be able to go back and forth. No harm, no foul."
Besides, Ender thought to himself, they weren't so codependent that they couldn't survive without each other for a period of time. And Ben was a big boy - he could take care of himself for a while.
It would be unpleasant, that was all.
---
"I think I saw something up in the sky!" Plikt sounded almost mad with excitement-- for Plikt's standards, which meant she sounded mildly interested to anyone else's ears. It was morning, and Lusitania's sun had only just risen above the horizon. Ender's consciousness hadn't come to him much quicker than that, either.
"It's called the sun, Plikt," he said. "It's a great big gaseous orb in the sky--"
"No, I mean an object," she snapped, opening the shutters over the window to let more of the sunlight in. "I saw fire, and something glistening in the sky, and then it just disappeared."
Ender frowned. "A ship?" he asked. "I haven't caught anything on our scanners, but they don't reach very far out of the atmosphere anyway."
"Could be," Plikt answered, leaning back against the wall. "But I don't think they've mentioned expecting anyone."
"Maybe another Speaker answered the call by accident, and didn't notice our prior claims," Ender suggested. "Who knows. Someone might have even invented the holy improbable grail of faster-than-light travel while we were out, and they're responding to Ela's call."
"You don't think we would've heard of that through the ansible?" Plikt asked. "I'm sure your sister would've send you a missive about it--"
Ender got up from behind the table, abandoning his half-eaten toast and his half-drunk glass of orange juice. "Valentine doesn't message me any more," he said. "She has more important things on her mind. She made that quite clear when I left."
"That was twenty years ago," Plikt pointed out. "Really? Not a single word?"
"Just like she promised," Ender said. "Have you had any luck accessing Novinha's files so far?"
"She used a very sophisticated encryption code. I haven't gotten near it yet, but I will." She observed Ender with knowing eyes as he moved around the room; he was sure she was coming to some conclusion or another about the way he and Valentine had parted, but if she wanted details, she was fresh out of luck.
She seemed to realise that, too, as the next thing she said was simply, "Where are we going next?"
"What I wanted was to visit the piggies, but I just got a message from Miro that that might... take some time," he said. "Miro and Ouanda being the only ones even allowed near them, I felt it was only in our best interest to wait until we got their permission. So we're going to talk to some of Novinha's brood instead. If nothing else, they might have some clues as to what Novinha has been hiding all this time."
---
Continued in part two!