Speaker for the Dead

Speaker to turn out to be Catholic. "I thought," said the Bishop, "that you speakers for the dead renounced all religions before taking up your, shall we say, vocation."
      "I don't know what the others do. I don't think there are any rules about it-- certainly there weren't when I became a Speaker."
      Bishop Peregrino knew that Speakers were not supposed to lie, but this one certainly seemed to be evasive. "Speaker Andrew, there isn't a place in all the Hundred Worlds where a Catholic has to conceal his faith, and there hasn't been for three thousand years. That was the great blessing of space travel, that it removed the terrible population restrictions on an overcrowded Earth. Are you telling me that your father lived on Earth three thousand years ago?"
      "I'm telling you that my father saw to it I was baptized a Catholic, and for his sake I did what he never could do in his life. It was for him that I knelt before a Bishop and received his blessing."
      "But it was you that I blessed." And you're still dodging my question. Which implies that my inference about your father's time of life is true, but you don't want to discuss it. Dom Cristão said that there was more to you than met the eye.
      "Good," said the Speaker. "I need the blessing more than my father, since he's dead, and I have many more problems to deal with."
      "Please sit down." The Speaker chose a stool near the far wall. The Bishop sat in his massive chair behind his desk. "I wish you hadn't Spoken today. It came at an inconvenient time."
      "I had no warning that Congress would do this."
      "But you knew that Miro and Ouanda had violated the law. Bosquinha told me."
      "I found out only a few hours before the Speaking. Thank you for not arresting them yet."
      "That's a civil matter." The Bishop brushed it aside, but they both knew that if he had insisted, Bosquinha would have had to obey her orders and arrest them regardless of the Speaker's request. "Your Speaking has caused a great deal of distress."
      "More than usual, I'm afraid."
      "So-- is your responsibility over? Do you inflict the wounds and leave it to others to heal them?"
      "Not wounds, Bishop Peregrino. Surgery. And if I can help to heal the pain afterward, then yes, I stay and help. I have no anesthesia, but I do try for antisepsis."
      "You should have been a priest, you know."
      "Younger sons used to have only two choices. The priesthood or the military. My parents chose the latter course for me."
      "A younger son. Yet you had a sister. And you lived in the time when population controls forbade parents to have more than two children unless the government gave special permission. They called such a child a Third, yes?"
      "You know your history."
      "Were you born on Earth, before starflight?"
      "What concerns us, Bishop Peregrino, is the future of Lusitania, not the biography of a Speaker for the Dead who is plainly only thirty-five years old."
      "The future of Lusitania is my concern, Speaker Andrew, not yours."
      "The future of the humans on Lusitania is your concern, Bishop. I'm concerned with the piggies as well."
      "Let's not compete to see whose concern is greater."
      The secretary opened the door again, and Bosquinha, Dom Cristão, and Dona Cristã  came in. Bosquinha glanced back and forth between the Bishop and the Speaker.
      "There's no blood on the floor, if that's what you're looking for," said the Bishop.
      "I was just estimating the temperature," said Bosquinha.
      "The warmth of mutual respect, I think," said the Speaker. "Not the heat of anger or the ice of hate."
      "The Speaker is a Catholic by baptism, if not by belief," said the Bishop. "I blessed him, and it seems to have made him docile."
      "I've always been respectful of authority," said the Speaker.
      "You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor," the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.
      The Speaker's smile was just as chilly. "And you're the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn't talk to me."
      While the Bishop and the Speaker grinned at each other, the others laughed nervously, sat down, waited.
      "It's your meeting, Speaker," said Bosquinha.
      "Forgive me," said the Speaker. "There's someone else invited. It'll make things much simpler if we wait a few more minutes for her to come."
     
     
     
      Ela found her mother outside the house, not far from the fence. A light breeze that barely rustled the capim had caught her hair