Speaker for the Dead

said the words of extreme unction, the same words he had whispered over Libo's corpse on the hillside five years ago.

15
     
    Speaking
     
     
      HUMAN: Why don't any of the other humans ever come see us?
      MIRO: We're the only ones allowed to come through the gate.
      HUMAN: Why don't they just climb over the fence?
      MIRO: Haven't any of you ever touched the fence? (Human does not answer.) It's very painful to touch the fence. To pass over the fence would be like every part of your body hurting as bad as possible, all at once.
      HUMAN: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?
     
      --Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi, Dialogue Transcripts, 103:0:1970:1:1:5
     
      The sun was only an hour from the horizon when Mayor Bosquinha climbed the stairs to Bishop Peregrino's private office in the Cathedral. Dom and Dona Cristães were already there, looking grave. Bishop Peregrino, however, looked pleased with himself. He always enjoyed it when all the political and religious leadership of Milagre was gathered under his roof. Never mind that Bosquinha was the one who called the meeting, and then she offered to have it at the Cathedral because she was the one with the skimmer. Peregrino liked the feeling that he was somehow the master of Lusitania Colony. Well, by the end of this meeting it would be plain to them all that no one in this room was the master of anything. Bosquinha greeted them all. She did not sit down in the offered chair, however. Instead she sat before the Bishop's own terminal, logged in, and ran the program she had prepared. In the air above the terminal there appeared several layers of tiny cubes. The highest layer had only a few cubes; most of the layers had many, many more. More than half the layers, starting with the highest, were colored red; the rest were blue.
      "Very pretty," said Bishop Peregrino.
      Bosquinha looked over at Dom Cristao. "Do you recognize the model?"
      He shook his head. "But I think I know what this meeting is about."
      Dona Cristã  leaned forward on her chair. "Is there any safe place where we can hide the things we want to keep?"
      Bishop Peregrino's expression of detached amusement vanished from his face. "I don't know what this meeting is about."
      Bosquinha turned around on her stool to face him. "I was very young when I was appointed to be Governor of the new Lusitania Colony. It was a great honor to be chosen, a great trust. I had studied government of communities and social systems since my childhood, and I had done well in my short career in Oporto. What the committee apparently overlooked was the fact that I was already suspicious, deceptive, and chauvinistic."
      "These are virtues of yours that we have all come to admire," said Bishop Peregrino.
      Bosquinha smiled. "My chauvinism meant that as soon as Lusitania Colony was mine, I became more loyal to the interests of Lusitania than to the interests of the Hundred Worlds or Starways Congress. My deceptiveness led me to pretend to the committee that on the contrary, I had the best interests of Congress at heart at all times. And my suspicion led me to believe that Congress was not likely to give Lusitania anything remotely like independent and equal status among the Hundred Worlds."
      "Of course not," said Bishop Peregrino. "We are a colony."
      "We are not a colony," said Bosquinha. "We are an experiment. I examined our charter and license and all the Congressional Orders pertaining to us, and I discovered that the normal privacy laws did not apply to us. I discovered that the committee had the power of unlimited access to all the memory files of every person and institution on Lusitania."
      The Bishop began to look angry. "Do you mean that the committee has the right to look at the confidential files of the Church?"
      "Ah," said Bosquinha. "A fellow chauvinist."
      "The Church has some rights under the Starways Code."
      "Don't be angry with me ."
      "You never told me."
      "If I had told you, you would have protested, and they would have pretended to back down, and then I couldn't have done what I did."
      "Which is?"
      "This program. It monitors all ansible-initiated accesses to any files in Lusitania Colony."
      Dom Cristao chuckled. "You're not supposed to do that."
      "I know. As I said, I have many secret vices. But my program never found any major intrusion-- oh, a few files each time the piggies killed one of our xenologers, that was to be expected-- but