Speaker for the Dead (Ender's Saga, #2) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,132
You also broke the law!" The Bishop half-rose from his chair.
Bosquinha reached forward, gestured to settle the Bishop's ire. "The intrusion in our files began long before this afternoon. The Congressional Order couldn't possibly be related to his infraction."
"I broke the law," said Ender, "because the piggies were asking for me. Demanding, in fact, to see me. They had seen the shuttle land. They knew that I was here. And, for good or ill, they had read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon."
"They gave the piggies that book?" said the Bishop.
"They also gave them the New Testament," said Ender. "But surely you won't be surprised to learn that the piggies found much in common between themselves and the hive queen. Let me tell you what the piggies said. They begged me to convince all the Hundred Worlds to end the rules that keep them isolated here. You see, the piggies don't think of the fence the way we do. We see it as a way of protecting their culture from human influence and corruption. They see it as a way of keeping them from learning all the wonderful secrets that we know. They imagine our ships going from star to star, colonizing them, filling them up. And five or ten thousand years from now, when they finally learn all that we refuse to teach them, they'll emerge into space to find all the worlds filled up. No place for them at all. They think of our fence as a form of species murder. We will keep them on Lusitania like animals in a zoo, while we go out and take all the rest of the universe."
"That's nonsense," said Dom Cristão. "That isn't our intention at all."
"Isn't it?" Ender retorted. "Why are we so anxious to keep them from any influence from our culture? It isn't just in the interest of science. It isn't just good xenological procedure. Remember, please, that our discovery of the ansible, of starflight, of partial gravity control, even of the weapon we used to destroy the buggers-- all of them came as a direct result of our contact with the buggers. We learned most of the technology from the machines they left behind from their first foray into Earth's star system. We were using those machines long before we understood them. Some of them, like the philotic slope, we don't even understand now. We are in space precisely because of the impact of a devastatingly superior culture. And yet in only a few generations, we took their machines, surpassed them, and destroyed them. That's what our fence means-- we're afraid the piggies will do the same to us. And they know that's what it means. They know it, and they hate it."
"We aren't afraid of them," said the Bishop. "They're savages, for heaven's sake--"
"That's how we looked to the buggers, too," said Ender. "But to Pipo and Libo and Ouanda and Miro, the piggies have never looked like savages. They're different from us, yes, far more different than framlings. But they're still people. Ramen, not varelse. So when Libo saw that the piggies were in danger of starving, that they were preparing to go to war in order to cut down the population, he didn't act like a scientist. He didn't observe their war and take notes on the death and suffering. He acted like a Christian. He got experimental amaranth that Novinha had rejected for human use because it was too closely akin to Lusitanian biochemistry, and he taught the piggies how to plant it and harvest it and prepare it as food. I have no doubt that the rise in piggy population and the fields of amaranth are what the Starways Congress saw. Not a willful violation of the law, but an act of compassion and love."
"How can you call such disobedience a Christian act?" said the Bishop.
"What man of you is there, when his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?"
"The devil can quote scripture to suit his own purpose," said the Bishop.
"I'm not the devil," said Ender, "and neither are the piggies. Their babies were dying of hunger, and Libo gave them food and saved their lives."
"And look what they did to him!"
"Yes, let's look what they did to him. They put him to death. Exactly the way they put to death their own most honored citizens. Shouldn't that have told us something?"
"It told us that they're dangerous and have no conscience," said the Bishop.