Speaker for the Dead

Speaker. Still he stood behind her, so she had not yet seen his face. "For me it was only a week ago that I left my sister. She was the only kin of mine left alive. Her daughter wasn't born yet, and now she's probably through with college, married, perhaps with children of her own. I'll never know her. But I know your children, Dona Ivanova."
      She lifted the cafezinho and drank it down in a single swallow, though it burned her tongue and throat and made her stomach hurt. "In only a few hours you think you know them?"
      "Better than you do, Dona Ivanova."
      Novinha heard Ela gasp at the Speaker's audacity. And even though she thought his words might be true, it still enraged her to have a stranger say them. She turned to look at him, to snap at him, but he had moved, he was not behind her. She turned farther, finally standing up to look for him, but he wasn't in the room. Ela stood in the doorway, wide-eyed.
      "Come back!" said Novinha. "You can't say that and walk out on me like that!"
      But he didn't answer. Instead, she heard low laughter from the back of the house. Novinha followed the sound. She walked through the rooms to the very end of the house. Miro sat on Novinha's own bed, and the Speaker stood near the doorway, laughing with him. Miro saw his mother and the smile left his face. It caused a stab of anguish within her. She had not seen him smile in years, had forgotten how beautiful his face became, just like his father's face; and her coming had erased that smile.
      "We came here to talk because Quim was so angry," Miro explained. "Ela made the bed."
      "I don't think the Speaker cares whether the bed was made or not," said Novinha coldly. "Do you, Speaker?"
      "Order and disorder," said the Speaker, "they each have their beauty." Still he did not turn to face her, and she was glad of that, for it meant she did not have to see his eyes as she delivered her bitter message.
      "I tell you, Speaker, that you've come on a fool's errand," she said. "Hate me for it if you will, but you have no death to Speak. I was a foolish girl. In my naivete I thought that when I called, the author of The Hive Queen and the Hegemon would come. I had lost a man who was like a father to me, and I wanted consolation."
      Now he turned to her. He was a youngish man, younger than her, at least, but his eyes were seductive with understanding. Perigoso, she thought. He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.
      "Dona Ivanova," he said, "how could you read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagine that its author could bring comfort ?"
      It was Miro who answered-- silent, slow-talking Miro, who leapt into the conversation with a vigor she had not seen in him since he was little. "I've read it," he said, "and the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the tale of the hive queen with deep compassion."
      The Speaker smiled sadly. "But he wasn't writing to the buggers, was he? He was writing to humankind, who still celebrated the destruction of the buggers as a great victory. He wrote cruelly, to turn their pride to regret, their joy to grief. And now human beings have completely forgotten that once they hated the buggers, that once they honored and celebrated a name that is now unspeakable--"
      "I can say anything," said Ivanova. "His name was Ender, and he destroyed everything he touched." Like me, she did not say.
      "Oh? And what do you know of him?" His voice whipped out like a grass-saw, ragged and cruel. "How do you know there wasn't something that he touched kindly? Someone who loved him, who was blessed by his love? Destroyed everything he touched -- that's a lie that can't truthfully be said of any human being who ever lived."
      "Is that your doctrine, Speaker? Then you don't know much." She was defiant, but still his anger frightened her. She had thought his gentleness was as imperturbable as a confessor's.
      And almost immediately the anger faded from his face. "You can ease your conscience," he said. "Your call started my journey here, but others called for a Speaker while I was on the way."
      "Oh?" Who else in this benighted city was familiar enough with The Hive Queen and the Hegemon to want a Speaker, and independent enough of Bishop Peregrino to dare to call for one? "If that's so, then why are you here in my house?"
      "Because I was called to speak the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira, your late husband."
      It was an appalling thought. "Him! Who would want to