Speaker for the Dead

communities do, to provide the greatest possible happiness for all its members."
      "Which means everybody on Lusitania except me-- me and the piggies."
      "The xenobiologist is very important to a colony, especially one like this, surrounded by a fence that forever limits our growth. Our xenobiologist must find ways to grow more protein and carbohydrate per hectare, which means genetically altering the Earthborn corn and potatoes to make--"
      "To make maximum use of the nutrients available in the Lusitanian environment. Do you think I'm planning to take the examination without knowing what my life's work would be?"
      "Your life's work, to devote yourself to improving the lives of people you despise."
      Now Novinha saw the trap that he had laid for her. Too late; it had sprung. "So you think that a xenobiologist can't do her work unless she loves the people who use the things she makes?"
      "I don't care whether you love us or not. What I have to know is what you really want. Why you're so passionate to do this."
      "Basic psychology. My parents died in this work, and so I'mixying to step into their role."
      "Maybe," said Pipo. "And maybe not. What I want to know, Novinha, what I must know before I'll let you take the test, is what community you do belong to."
      "You said it yourself! I don't belong to any."
      "Impossible. Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn't belong to. I am this and this and this, but definitely not that and that and that. All your definitions are negative. I could make an infinite list of the things you are not. But a person who really believes she doesn't belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad."
      "That's me, insane to the root."
      "Not insane.   Driven by a sense of purpose that is frightening. If you take the test you'll pass it. But before I let you take it, I have to know: Who will you become when you pass? What do you believe in, what are you part of, what do you care about, what do you love?"
      "Nobody in this or any other world."
      "I don't believe you."
      "I've never known a good man or woman in the world except my parents and they're dead! And even they-- nobody understands anything ."
      "You."
      "I'm part of anything, aren't I? But nobody understands anybody, not even you, pretending to be so wise and compassionate but you're only getting me to cry like this because you have the power to stop me from doing what I want to do--"
      "And it isn't xenobiology."
      "Yes it is! That's part of it, anyway."
      "And what's the rest of it?"
      "What you are. What you do. Only you're doing it all wrong, you're doing it stupidly ."
      "Xenobiologist and xenologer."
      "They made a stupid mistake when they created a new science to study the piggies. They were a bunch of tired old anthropologists who put on new hats and called themselves Xenologers. But you can't understand the piggies just by watching the way they behave! They came out of a different evolution! You have to understand their genes, what's going on inside their cells. And the other animals' cells, too, because they can't be studied by themselves, nothing lives in isolation---"
      Don't lecture me, thought Pipo. Tell me what you feel.
      And to provoke her to be more emotional, he whispered, "Except you."
      It worked. From cold and contemptuous she became hot and defensive. "You'll never understand them! But I will!"
      "Why do you care about them? What are the piggies to you?"
      "You'd never understand. You're a good Catholic ." She said the word with contempt. "It's a book that's on the Index."
      Pipo's face glowed with sudden understanding. "The Hive Queen and the Hegemon."
      "He lived three thousand years ago, whoever he was, the one who called himself the Speaker for the Dead. But he understood the buggers! We wiped them all out, the only other alien race we ever knew, we killed them all, but he understood ."
      "And you want to write the story of the piggies the way the original Speaker wrote of the buggers."
      "The way you say it, you make it sound as easy as doing a scholarly paper. You don't know what it was like to write The Hive Queen and the Hegemon. How much agony it was for him to-- to imagine himself inside an alien mind-- and come out of it filled with love for the great creature we destroyed. He lived at the same time as the worst human