Orson Card - Speaker for the Dead

"The hive queen says he'll teach the framlings to love us."

"Teach the framlings," said Miro. "He'd better do it quickly then. It's too late for him to save me and Ouanda. They're arresting us and taking us off planet."

"To the stars?" asked Human hopefully.

"Yes, to the stars, to stand trial! To be punished for helping you. It'll take us twenty-two years to get there, and they'll never let us come back."

The piggies took a moment to absorb this information. Fine, thought Miro. Let them wonder how the Speaker is going to solve everything for them. I trusted in the Speaker, too, and it didn't do much for me. The piggies conferred together.

Human emerged from the group and came closer to the fence. "We'll hide you."

"They'll never find you in the forest," said Mandachuva.

"They have machines that can track me by my smell," said Miro.

"Ah. But doesn't the law forbid them to show us their machines?" asked Human.

Miro shook his head. "It doesn't matter. The gate is sealed to me. I can't cross the fence."

The piggies looked at each other.

"But you have capim right there," said Arrow.

Miro looked stupidly at the grass. "So what?" he asked.

"Chew it," said Human.

"Why?" asked Miro.

"We've seen humans chewing capim," said Leaf-eater. "The other night, on the hillside, we saw the Speaker and some of the robe-humans chewing capim."

"And many other times," said Mandachuva.

Their impatience with him was frustrating. "What does that have to do with the fence?"

Again the piggies looked at each other. Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He sat down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. Finally Human gave him a particularly vicious pinch, and when Mandachuva did not respond, they began saying, in males' language, Ready, Time to go, Now, Ready.

Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.

Miro leaped to his feet and began to cry out just as Mandachuva reached the top; by the time he finished his cry, Mandachuva was standing up and dusting himself off.

"You can't do that," said Miro. "It stimulates all the pain nerves in the body. The fence can't be crossed."

"Oh," said Mandachuva.

From the other side of the fence, Human was rubbing his thighs together. "He didn't know," he said. "The humans don't know."

"It's an anesthetic," said Miro. "It stops you from feeling pain."

"No," said Mandachuva. "I feel the pain. Very bad pain. Worst pain in the world."

"Rooter says the fence is even worse than dying," said Human. "Pain in all the places."

"But you don't care," said Miro.

"It's happening to your other self," said Mandachuva. "It's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self."

Then Miro remembered a detail that had been lost in the grotesquerie of Libo's death. The dead man's mouth had been filled with a wad of capim. So had the mouth of every piggy that had died. Anesthetic. The death looked like hideous torture, but pain was not the purpose of it. They used an anesthetic. It had nothing to do with pain.

"So," said Mandachuva. "Chew the grass, and come with us. We'll hide you."

"Ouanda," said Miro.

"Oh, I'll go get her," said Mandachuva.

"You don't know where she lives."

"Yes I do," said Mandachuva.

"We do this many times a year," said Human. "We know where everybody lives."

"But no one has ever seen you," said Miro.

"We're very secret," said Mandachuva. "Besides, nobody is looking for us."

Miro imagined dozens of piggies creeping about in Milagre in the middle of the night. No guard was kept. Only a few people had business that took them out in the darkness. And the piggies were small, small enough to duck down in the capim and disappear completely. No wonder they knew about metal and machines, despite all the rules designed to keep them from learning about them. No doubt they had seen the mines, had watched the shuttle land, had seen the kilns firing the bricks, had watched the fazendeiros plowing and planting the human-specific amaranth. No wonder they had known what to ask for.

How stupid of us, to think we could cut them off from our culture. They kept far more secrets from us than we could possibly keep from them. So much for cultural superiority.

Miro pulled up his own blade of capim.

"No," said Mandachuva, taking the blade from his hands. "You don't get the root part. If you take the root part, it doesn't do you any good." He threw away Miro's blade and tore off his own, about ten centimeters above the base. Then he folded it and handed it to Miro, who began to chew it.

Mandachuva pinched and poked him.

"Don't worry about that," said Miro. "Go get Ouanda. They could arrest her any minute. Go. Now. Go on."

Mandachuva looked at the others and, seeing some invisible signal of consent, jogged off along the fenceline toward the slopes of Vila Alta, where Ouanda lived.

Miro chewed a little more. He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn't care. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda. Forget the rules, all the rules. They had no power over him once he left the human enclave and entered the piggies' forest. He would become a renegade, as they already accused him of being, and he and Ouanda could leave behind all the insane rules of human behavior and live as they wanted to, and raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies, from the forest life; something new in the Hundred Worlds, and Congress would be powerless to stop them.

He ran at the fence and seized it with both hands. The pain was no less than before, but now he didn't care, he scrambled up to the top. But with each new handhold the pain grew more intense, and he began to care, he began to care very much about the pain, he began to realize that the capim had no anesthetic effect on him at all, but by this time he was already at the top of the fence. The pain was maddening; he couldn't think; momentum carried him above the top and as he balanced there his head passed through the vertical field of the fence. All the pain possible to his body came to his brain at once, as if every part of him were on fire.

The Little Ones watched in horror as their friend hung there atop the fence, his head and torso on one side, his hips and legs on the other. At once they cried out, reached for him, tried to pull him down. Since they had not chewed capim, they dared not touch the fence.

Hearing their cries, Mandachuva ran back. Enough of the anesthetic remained in his body that he could climb up and push the heavy human body over the top. Miro landed with a bone-crushing thump on the ground, his arm still touching the fence. The piggies pulled him away. His face was frozen in a rictus of agony.

"Quick!" shouted Leaf-eater. "Before he dies, we have to plant him!"

"No!" Human answered, pushing Leaf-eater away from Miro's frozen body. "We don't know if he's dying! The pain is just an illusion, you know that, he doesn't have a wound, the pain should go away--"

"It isn't going away," said Arrow. "Look at him."

Miro's fists were clenched, his legs were doubled under him, and his spine and neck were arched backward. Though he was breathing in short, hard pants, his face seemed to grow even tighter with pain.

"Before he dies," said Leaf-eater. "We have to give him root."

"Go get Ouanda," said Human. He turned to face Mandachuva. "Now! Go get her and tell her Miro is dying. Tell her the gate is sealed and Miro is on this side of it and he's dying."