walked directly to Ender. Her eyes were narrow and angry. "You stink!" she said firmly. Then she marched out of the room toward the back of the house.
Miro barely suppressed his laughter, and Ela smiled. Ender raised his eyebrows as if to say, You win some, you lose some.
Olhado seemed to hear his unspoken words. From his chair by the terminal, the metal-eyed boy said softly, "You win with her, too. It's the most she's said to anyone outside the family in months."
But I'm not outside the family, Ender said silently. Didn't you notice? I'm in the family now, whether you like it or not. Whether I like it or not.
After a while Grego's sobbing stopped. He was asleep. Ender carried him to his bed; Quara was already asleep on the other side of the small room. Ela helped Ender strip off Grego's urine-soaked pants and put looser underwear on him - her touch was gentle and deft, and Grego did not waken.
Back in the front room Miro eyed Ender clinically. "Well, Speaker, you have a choice. My pants will be tight on you and too short in the crotch, but Father's would fall right off."
It took Ender a moment to remember. Grego's urine had long since dried. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I can change when I get home."
"Mother won't be home for another hour. You came to see her, didn't you? We can have your pants clean by then."
"Your pants, then," said Ender. "I'll take my chances with the crotch."
Chapter 8
Dona Ivanova
It means a life of constant deception. You will go out and discover something, something vital, and then when you get back to the station you'll write up a completely innocuous report, one which mentions nothing that we learned through cultural contamination.
You're too young to understand what torture this is. Father and I began doing this because we couldn't bear to withhold knowledge from the piggies. You will discover, as I have, that it is no less painful to withhold knowledge from your fellow scientists. When you watch them struggle with a question, knowing that you have the information that could easily resolve their dilemma; when you see them come very near the truth and then for lack of your information retreat from their correct conclusions and return to error - you would not be human if it didn't cause you great anguish.
You must remind yourselves, always: It is their law, their choice. They are the ones who built the wall between themselves and the truth, and they would only punish us if we let them know how easily and thoroughly that wall has been breached. And for every framling scientist who is longing for the truth, there are ten petty-minded descabeqados [headless ones] who despise knowledge, who never think of an original hypothesis, whose only labor is to prey on the writings of the true scientists in order to catch tiny errors or contradictions or lapses in method. These suckflies will pore over every report you make, and if you are careless even once they will catch you.
That means you can't even mention a piggy whose name is derived from cultural contamination: "Cups" would tell them that we have taught them rudimentary potterymaking. "Calendar" and "Reaper" are obvious. And God himself couldn't save us if they learned Arrow's name.
- Memo from Liberdade Figueira de Medici to Ouanda Figueira Mucumbi and Miro Ribeira von Hesse, retrieved from Lustanian files by Congressional order and introduced as evidence in the Trial In Absentia of the Xenologers of Lusitania on Charges of Treason and Malfeasance
Novinha lingered in the Biologista's Station even though her meaningful work was finished more than an hour ago. The cloned potato plants were all thriving in nutrient solution; now it would be a matter of making daily observations to see which of her genetic alterations would produce the hardiest plant with the most useful root.
If I have nothing to do, why don't I go home? She had no answer for the question. Her children needed her, that was certain; she did them no kindness by leaving early each morning and coming home only after the little ones were asleep. And yet even now, knowing she should go back, she sat staring at the laboratory, seeing nothing, doing nothing, being nothing.
She thought of going home, and could not imagine why she felt no joy at the prospect. After all, she reminded herself, Marc o is dead. He died three weeks ago.