Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

cold virgin, a huntress? Is that not what I am now? Sixteen years old and untouched
     
    and a flute sounds
    as if someone were coming
     
    I listen and listen but never hear the melody of someone coming ...
    No. What she heard were the distant sounds of a meal being readied; a clattering of bowls and spoons, laughter from the kitchen. Her reverie broken, she reached up and wiped the foolish tears from her cheeks. How could she think of herself as lonely, when she lived in this full house where everyone had cared for her all her life? I sit here reciting to myself scraps of old poetry when I have work to do.
    At once she began to call up the reports that had been made about investigations into the identity of Demosthenes.
    The reports made her think for a moment that this was a dead end, too. More than three dozen writers on almost as many worlds had been arrested for producing seditious documents under that name. Starways Congress had reached the obvious conclusion: Demosthenes was simply the catchall name used by any rebel who wanted to get attention. There was no real Demosthenes, not even an organized conspiracy.
    But Qing-jao had doubts about that conclusion. Demosthenes had been remarkably successful in stirring up trouble on every world. Could there possibly be someone of so much talent among the traitors on every planet? Not likely.
    Besides, thinking back to when she had read Demosthenes, Qing-jao, remembered noticing the coherence of his writings. The singularity and consistency of his vision-- that was part of what made him so seductive. Everything seemed to fit, to make sense together.
    Hadn't Demosthenes also devised the Hierarchy of Foreignness? Utlanning, Framling, Raman, Varelse. No; that had been written many years ago-- it had to be a different Demosthenes. Was it because of that earlier Demosthenes' hierarchy that the traitors were using the name? They were writing in support of the independence of Lusitania, the only world where intelligent nonhuman life had been found. It was only appropriate to use the name of the writer who had first taught humanity to realize that the universe wasn't divided between humans and nonhumans, or between intelligent and non-intelligent species.
    Some strangers, the earlier Demosthenes had said, were framlings-- humans from another world. Some were ramen-- of another intelligent species, yet able to communicate with human beings, so that we could work out differences and make decisions together. Others were varelse, "wise beasts," clearly intelligent and yet completely unable to reach a common ground with humankind. Only with varelse would war ever be justified; with raman, humans could make peace and share the habitable worlds. It was an open way of thinking, full of hope that strangers might still be friends. People who thought that way could never have sent a fleet with Dr. Device to a world inhabited by an intelligent species.
    This was a very uncomfortable thought: that the Demosthenes of the hierarchy would also disapprove of the Lusitania Fleet. Almost at once Qing-jao had to counter it. It didn't matter what the old Demosthenes thought, did it? The new Demosthenes, the seditious one, was no wise philosopher trying to bring peoples together. Instead he was trying to sow dissension and discontent among the worlds-- provoke quarrels, perhaps even wars between framlings.
    And seditious Demosthenes was not just a composite of many rebels working on different worlds. Her computer search soon confirmed it. True, many rebels were found who had published on their own planet using the name Demosthenes, but they were always linked to small, ineffective, useless little publications-- never to the really dangerous documents that seemed to turn up simultaneously on half the worlds at once. Each local police force, however, was very happy to declare their own petty "Demosthenes" the perpetrator of all the writings, take their bows, and close the case.
    Starways Congress had been only too happy to do the same thing with their own investigation. Having found several dozen cases where local police had arrested and convicted rebels who had incontrovertibly published something under the name Demosthenes, the Congress investigators sighed contentedly, declared that Demosthenes had proved to be a catchall name and not one person at all, and then stopped investigating.
    In short, they had all taken the easy way out. Selfish, disloyal-- Qing-jao felt a surge of indignation that such