Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

walked to the computer waiting quietly in the corner. "May I turn this on?"
    " Pois não ," he said. Of course.
    "Once it's on, Jane will be with us."
    "Ender's personal program."
    "The computer entity whose soul we're trying to locate."
    "Ah," he said. "Maybe you should be telling me things."
    "I already know what I know. So start talking. About those ideas you had as a child, and what has become of them since."
    ----
    Quara had a chip on her shoulder from the moment Miro entered the room. "Don't bother," she said.
    "Don't bother what?"
    "Don't bother telling me my duty to humanity or to the family-- two separate, non-overlapping groups, by the way."
    "Is that what I came for?" asked Miro.
    "Ela sent you to persuade me to tell her how to castrate the descolada."
    Miro tried a little humor. "I'm no biologist. Is that possible?"
    "Don't be cute," said Quara. "If you cut out their ability to pass information from one virus to another, it's like cutting out their tongues and their memory and everything that makes them intelligent. If she wants to know this stuff, she can study what I studied. It only took me five years of work to get there."
    "There's a fleet coming."
    "So you are an emissary."
    "And the descolada may figure out how to--"
    She interrupted him, finished his sentence. "Circumvent all our strategies to control it, I know."
    Miro was annoyed, but he was used to people getting impatient with his slowness of speech and cutting him off. And at least she had guessed what he was driving at. "Any day," he said. "Ela feels time pressure."
    "Then she should help me learn to talk to the virus. Persuade it to leave us alone. Make a treaty, like Andrew did with the pequeninos. Instead, she's cut me off from the lab. Well, two can play that game. She cuts me off, I cut her off."
    "You were telling secrets to the pequeninos."
    "Oh, yes, Mother and Ela, the guardians of truth! They get to decide who knows what. Well, Miro, let me tell you a secret. You don't protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it."
    "I know that," said Miro.
    "Mother completely screwed up our family because of her damned secrets. She wouldn't even marry Libo because she was determined to keep a stupid secret, which if he'd known might have saved his life."
    "I know," said Miro.
    This time he spoke with such vehemence that Quara was taken aback. "Oh, well, I guess that was a secret that bothered you more than it did me. But then you should be on my side in this, Miro. Your life would have been a lot better, all our lives would have been, if Mother had only married Libo and told him all her secrets. He'd still be alive, probably."
    Very neat solutions. Tidy little might-have-beens. And false as hell. If Libo had married Novinha, he wouldn't have married Bruxinha, Ouanda's mother, and thus Miro wouldn't have fallen unsuspectingly in love with his own half-sister because she would never had existed at all. That was far too much to say, however, with his halting speech. So he confined himself to saying "Ouanda wouldn't have been born," and hoped she would make the connections.
    She considered for a moment, and the connection was made. "You have a point," she said. "And I'm sorry. I was only a child then."
    "It's all past," said Miro.
    "Nothing is past," said Quara. "We're still acting it out, over and over again. The same mistakes, again and again. Mother still thinks that you keep people safe by keeping secrets from them."
    "And so do you," said Miro.
    Quara thought about that for a moment. "Ela was trying to keep the pequeninos from knowing that she was working on destroying the descolada. That's a secret that could have destroyed the whole pequenino society, and they weren't even being consulted. They were preventing the pequeninos from protecting themselves. But what I'm keeping secret is-- maybe-- a way to intellectually castrate the descolada-- to make it half-alive."
    "To save humanity without destroying the pequeninos."
    "Humans and pequeninos, getting together to compromise on how to wipe out a helpless third species!"
    "Not exactly helpless."
    She ignored him. "Just the way Spain and Portugal got the Pope to divide up the world between their Catholic Majesties back in the old days right after Columbus. A line on a map, and poof-- there's Brazil, speaking Portuguese instead of Spanish. Never mind that nine out of ten Indians had to die, and the rest lose all their rights and power for centuries, even their very languages--"
    It was