knack for making people cry, Ela," he answered softly. His voice was a caress. No, stronger, it was like a hand gripping her hand, holding her, steadying her. "Telling the truth makes you cry."
"Sou ingrata, sou ma filha - "
"Yes, you're ungrateful, and a terrible daughter," he said, laughing softly. "Through all these years of chaos and neglect you've held your mother's family together with little help from her, and when you followed her in her career, she wouldn't share the most vital inforination with you; you've earned nothing but love and trust from her and she's replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you're sick of it. You're just about the worst person I've ever known."
She found herself laughing at her own self-condemnation. Childishly, she didn't want to laugh at herself. "Don't patronize me." She tried to put as much contempt into her voice as possible.
He noticed. His eyes went distant and cold. "Don't spit at a friend," he said.
She didn't want him to be distant from her. But she couldn't stop herself from saying, coldly, angrily, "You aren't my friend."
For a moment she was afraid he believed her. Then a smile came to his face. "You wouldn't know a friend if you saw one."
Yes I would, she thought. I see one now. She smiled back at him.
"Ela," he said, "are you a good xenobiologist?"
"Yes."
"You're eighteen years old. You could take the guild tests at sixteen. But you didn't take them."
"Mother wouldn't let me. She said I wasn't ready."
"You don't have to have your mother's permission after you're sixteen."
"An apprentice has to have the permission of her master."
"And now you're eighteen, and you don't even need that."
"She's still Lusitania's xenobiologist. It's still her tab. What if I passed the test, and then she wouldn't let me into the lab until after she was dead?"
"Did she threaten that?"
"She made it clear that I wasn't to take the test."
"Because as soon as you're not an apprentice anymore, if she admits you to the lab as her co-xenobiologist you have full access - "
"To all the working files. To all the locked files."
"So she'd hold her own daughter back from beginning her career, she'd give you a permanent blot on your record - unready for the tests even at age eighteen - just to keep you from reading those files."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Mother's crazy."
"No. Whatever else Novinha is, Ela, she is not crazy."
"Ela ‚ boba mesma, Senhor Falante."
He laughed and lay back in the grama. "Tell me how she's boba, then."
"I'll give you the list. First: She won't allow any investigation of the Descolada. Thirty-four years ago the Descolada nearly destroyed this colony. My grandparents, Os Venerados, Deus os abencoe, they barely managed to stop the Descolada. Apparently the disease agent, the Descolada bodies, are still present - we have to eat a supplement, like an extra vitamin, to keep the plague from striking again. They told you that, didn't they? If you once get it in your system, you'll have to keep that supplement all your life, even if you leave here."
"I knew that, yes."
"She won't let me study the Descolada bodies at all. That's what's in some of the locked files, anyway. She's locked up all of Gusto's and Cida's discoveries about the Descolada bodies. Nothing's available."
The Speaker's eyes narrowed. "So. That's one-third of boba. What's the rest?"
"It's more than a third. Whatever the Descolada body is, it was able to adapt to become a human parasite ten years after the colony was founded. Ten years! If it can adapt once, it can adapt again."
"Maybe she doesn't think so."
"Maybe I ought to have a right to decide that for myself."
He put out a hand, rested it on her knee, calmed her. "I agree with you. But go on. The second reason she's boba."
"She won't allow any theoretical research. No taxonomy. No evolutionary models. If I ever try to do any, she says I obviously don't have enough to do and weighs me down with assignments until she thinks I've given up."
"You haven't given up, I take it."
"That's what xenobiology's for. Oh, yes, fine that she can make a potato that makes maximum use of the ambient nutrients. Wonderful that she made a breed of amaranth that makes the colony protein self-sufficient with only ten acres under cultivation. But that's all molecular juggling."
"It's survival."
"But we don't know anything. It's like swimming on the top of the ocean. You