Speaker for the Dead

truth, when I speak at all, and I don't keep away from other people's secrets."
      "I know. That's why I called for a speaker. You don't have any respect for anybody."
      He looked annoyed. "Why did you invite me here?" he asked.
      This was working out all wrong. She was talking to him as if she were against him, as if she weren't grateful for what he had already done for the family. She was talking to him like the enemy. Has Quim taken over my mind, so that I say things I don't mean?
      "You invited me to this place on the river. The rest of your family isn't speaking to me, and then I get a message from you . To complain about my breaches of privacy? To tell me I don't respect anybody?"
        "No," she said miserably. "This isn't how it was supposed to go."
      "Didn't it occur to you that I would hardly choose to be a speaker if I had no respect for people?"
      In frustration she let the words burst out. "I wish you had broken into all her files! I wish you had taken every one of her secrets and published them through all the Hundred Worlds!" There were tears in her eyes; she couldn't think why.
      "I see. She doesn't let you see those files, either."
      "Sou aprendiz dela, não sou? E porque choro, diga-me! O senhor tem o jeito."
      "I don't have any knack for making people cry, Ela," he answered softly. His voice was a caress. No, stronger, it was like a hand gripping her hand, holding her, steadying her. "Telling the truth makes you cry."
      "Sou ingrata, sou má filha--"
      "Yes, you're ungrateful, and a terrible daughter," he said, laughing softly. "Through all these years of chaos and neglect you've held your mother's family together with little help from her, and when you followed her in her career, she wouldn't share the most vital inforination with you; you've earned nothing but love and trust from her and she's replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you're sick of it. You're just about the worst person I've ever known."
      She found herself laughing at her own self-condemnation. Childishly, she didn't want to laugh at herself. "Don't patronize me." She tried to put as much contempt into her voice as possible.
      He noticed. His eyes went distant and cold. "Don't spit at a friend," he said.
      She didn't want him to be distant from her. But she couldn't stop herself from saying, coldly, angrily, "You aren't my friend."
      For a moment she was afraid he believed her. Then a smile came to his face. "You wouldn't know a friend if you saw one."
      Yes I would, she thought. I see one now. She smiled back at him.
      "Ela," he said, "are you a good xenobiologist?"
      "Yes."
      "You're eighteen years old. You could take the guild tests at sixteen. But you didn't take them."
      "Mother wouldn't let me. She said I wasn't ready."
      "You don't have to have your mother's permission after you're sixteen."
      "An apprentice has to have the permission of her master."
      "And now you're eighteen, and you don't even need that."
      "She's still Lusitania's xenobiologist. It's still her tab. What if I passed the test, and then she wouldn't let me into the lab until after she was dead?"
      "Did she threaten that?"
      "She made it clear that I wasn't to take the test."
      "Because as soon as you're not an apprentice anymore, if she admits you to the lab as her co-xenobiologist you have full access--"
      "To all the working files. To all the locked files."
      "So she'd hold her own daughter back from beginning her career, she'd give you a permanent blot on your record-- unready for the tests even at age eighteen-- just to keep you from reading those files."
      "Yes."
      "Why?"
      "Mother's crazy."
      "No. Whatever else Novinha is, Ela, she is not crazy."
      "Ela é boba mesma, Senhor Falante."
      He laughed and lay back in the grama. "Tell me how she's boba, then."
      "I'll give you the list. First: She won't allow any investigation of the Descolada. Thirty-four years ago the Descolada nearly destroyed this colony. My grandparents, Os Venerados, Deus os abençoe, they barely managed to stop the Descolada. Apparently the disease agent, the Descolada bodies, are still present-- we have to eat a supplement, like an extra vitamin, to keep the plague from striking again. They told you that, didn't they? If you once get it in your system, you'll have to keep that supplement all your life, even if you leave here."
      "I knew that,