Speaker for the Dead

think of him again, now that he's dead!"
      The Speaker did not answer. Instead Miro spoke sharply from her bed. "Grego would, for one. The Speaker showed us what we should have known-- that the boy is grieving for his father and thinks we all hate him--"
      "Cheap psychology," she snapped. "We have therapists of our own, and they aren't worth much either."
      Ela's voice came from behind her. "I called for him to Speak Father's death, Mother. I thought it would be decades before he came, but I'm glad he's here now, when he can do us some good."
      "What good can he do us!"
      "He already has, Mother. Grego fell asleep embracing him, and Quara spoke to him."
      "Actually," said Miro, "she told him that he stinks."
      "Which was probably true," said Ela, "since Greguinho peed all over him."
      Miro and Ela burst into laughter at the memory, and the Speaker also smiled. This more than anything else discomposed Novinha-- such good cheer had been virtually unfelt in this house since Marcão brought her here a year after Pipo's death. Against her will Novinha remembered her joy when Miro was newly born, and when Ela was little, the first few years of their lives, how Miro babbled about everything, how Ela toddled madly after him through the house, how the children played together and romped in the grass within sight of the piggies' forest just beyond the fence; it was Novinha's delight in the children that poisoned Marcão, that made him hate them both, because he knew that none of it belonged to him. By the time Quim was born, the house was thick with anger, and he never learned how to laugh freely where his parents might notice. Hearing Miro and Ela laugh together was like the abrupt opening of a thick black curtain; suddenly it was daylight again, when Novinha had forgotten there was any season of the day but night.
      How dared this stranger invade her house and tear open all the curtains she had closed!
      "I won't have it," she said. "You have no right to pry into my husband's life."
      He raised an eyebrow. She knew Starways Code as well as anyone, and so she knew perfectly well that he not only had a right, the law protected him in the pursuit of the true story of the dead.
      "Marcão was a miserable man," she persisted, "and telling the truth about him will cause nothing but pain."
      "You're quite right that the truth about him will cause nothing but pain, but not because he was a miserable man," said the Speaker. "If I told nothing but what everyone already knows-- that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar until the constables sent him home-- then I would not cause pain, would I? I'd cause a great deal of satisfaction, because then everyone would be reassured that their view of him was correct all along. He was scum, and so it was all right that they treated him like scum."
      "And you think he wasn't ?"
      "No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."
      "If you believe that, then you're younger than you look," said Novinha.
      "Am I?" said the Speaker. "It was less than two weeks ago that I first heard your call. I studied you then, and even if you don't remember, Novinha, I remember that as a young girl you were sweet and beautiful and good. You had been lonely before, but Pipo and Libo both knew you and found you worthy of love."
      "Pipo was dead."
      "But he loved you."
      "You don't know anything, Speaker! You were twenty-two lightyears away! Besides, it wasn't me I was calling worthless, it was Marcão!"
      "But you don't believe that, Novinha. Because you know the one act of kindness and generosity that redeems that poor man's life."
      Novinha did not understand her own terror, but she had to silence him before he named it, even though she had no idea what kindness of Cáo's he thought he had discovered. "How dare you call me Novinha!" she shouted. "No one has called me that in four years!"
      In answer, he raised his hand and brushed his fingers across the back of her cheek. It was a timid gesture, almost an adolescent one; it reminded her of Libo, and it was more than she could bear. She took his hand, hurled it away, then shoved past him into the room. "Get out!" she shouted at Miro. Her son got up quickly and backed to the door. She could see from