Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

I thought it was my body.
    "I don't know what to tell you, Miro. I grieved-- for a long time. Sometimes I think I still do. Losing you-- our hope for the future, I mean-- it was better anyway-- that's what I realized. I've had a good family, a good life, and so will you. But losing you as my friend, as my brother, that was the hardest thing, I was so lonely, I don't know if I ever got over that."
    Losing you as my sister was the easy part. I didn't need another sister.
    "You break my heart, Miro. You're so young. You haven't changed, that's the hardest thing, you haven't changed in thirty years."
    It was more than Miro could bear in silence. He didn't lift his head, but he did raise his voice. Far too loudly for the middle of mass, he answered her: "Haven't I?"
    He rose to his feet, vaguely aware that people were turning around to look at him.
    "Haven't I?" His voice was thick, hard to understand, and he was doing nothing to make it any clearer. He took a halting step into the aisle, then turned to face her at last. "This is how you remember me?"
    She looked up at him, aghast-- at what? At Miro's speech, his palsied movements? Or simply that he was embarrassing her, that it didn't turn into the tragically romantic scene she had imagined for the past thirty years?
    Her face wasn't old, but it wasn't Ouanda, either. Middle-aged, thicker, with creases at the eyes. How old was she? Fifty now? Almost. What did this fifty-year-old woman have to do with him?
    "I don't even know you," said Miro. Then he lurched his way to the door and passed out into the morning.
    Some time later he found himself resting in the shade of a tree. Which one was this, Rooter or Human? Miro tried to remember-- it was only a few weeks ago that he left here, wasn't it? --but when he left, Human's tree was still only a sapling, and now both trees looked to be about the same size and he couldn't remember for sure whether Human had been killed uphill or downhill from Rooter. It didn't matter-- Miro had nothing to say to a tree, and they had nothing to say to him.
    Besides, Miro had never learned tree language; they hadn't even known that all that beating on trees with sticks was really a language until it was too late for Miro. Ender could do it, and Ouanda, and probably half a dozen other people, but Miro would never learn, because there was no way Miro's hands could hold the sticks and beat the rhythms. Just one more kind of speech that was now useless to him.
    " Que dia chato, meu filho. "
    That was one voice that would never change. And the attitude was unchanging as well: What a rotten day, my son. Pious and snide at the same time-- and mocking himself for both points of view.
    "Hi, Quim."
    "Father Estevão now, I'm afraid." Quim had adopted the full regalia of a priest, robes and all; now he gathered them under himself and sat on the worn-down grass in front of Miro.
    "You look the part," said Miro. Quim had matured well. As a kid he had looked pinched and pious. Experience with the real world instead of theological theory had given him lines and creases, but the face that resulted had compassion in it. And strength. "Sorry I made a scene at mass."
    "Did you?" asked Miro. "I wasn't there. Or rather, I was at mass-- I just wasn't at the cathedral."
    "Communion for the ramen?"
    "For the children of God. The church already had a vocabulary to deal with strangers. We didn't have to wait for Demosthenes."
    "Well, you don't have to be smug about it, Quim. You didn't invent the terms."
    "Let's not fight."
    "Then let's not butt into other people's meditations."
    "A noble sentiment. Except that you have chosen to rest in the shade of a friend of mine, with whom I need to have a conversation. I thought it was more polite to talk to you first, before I start beating on Rooter with sticks."
    "This is Rooter?"
    "Say hi. I know he was looking forward to your return."
    "I never knew him."
    "But he knew all about you . I don't think you realize, Miro, what a hero you are among the pequeninos. They know what you did for them, and what it cost you."
    "And do they know what it's probably going to cost us all, in the end?"
    "In the end we'll all stand before the judgment bar of God. If a whole planetful of souls is taken there at once, then the only worry is to make sure no one goes unchristened whose soul might have been welcomed among the saints."
    "So you don't even care?"
    "I care, of course," said Quim. "But let's say that there's a longer view, in which life