“Always fatal? Irreversible?”

«Oh, yes. Actually, Marc o survived ten years longer than usual. His case was remarkable in several ways. In every other recorded case– and admittedly there aren't that many– the disease attacks the testicles first, rendering the victim sterile and, in most cases, impotent. With six healthy children, it's obvious that Marcos Ribeira's testes were the last of his glands to be affected. Once they were attacked, however, progress must have been unusually fast– the testes were completely replaced with fat cells, even though much of his liver and thyroid were still functioning.»

“What killed him in the end?”

“The pituitary and the adrenals weren't functioning. He was a walking dead man. He just fell down in one of the bars, in the middle of some ribald song, as I heard.”

As always, Ender's mind automatically found seeming contradictions. “How does a hereditary disease get passed on if it makes its victims sterile?”

«It's usually passed through collateral lines. One child will die of it; his brothers and sisters won't manifest the disease at all, but they'll pass on the tendency to their children. Naturally, though, we were afraid that Marc o, having children, would pass on the defective gene to all of them.»

“You tested them?”

"Not a one had any of the genetic deformations. You can bet that Dona Ivanova was looking over my shoulder the whole time. We zeroed in immediately on the problem genes and cleared each of the children, bim bim bim, just like that. "

“None of them had it? Not even a recessive tendency?”

«Graqas a Deus,» said the doctor. «Who would ever have married them if they had had the poisoned genes? As it was, I can't understand how Marc o's own genetic defect went undiscovered.»

“Are genetic scans routine here?”

«Oh, no, not at all. But we had a great plague some thirty years ago. Dona Ivanova's own parents, the Venerado Gusto and the Venerada Cida, they conducted a detailed genetic scan of every man, woman, and child in the colony. It's how they found the cure. And their computer comparisons would definitely have turned up this particular defect– that's how I found out what it was when Marc o died. I'd never heard of the disease, but the computer had it on file.»

“And Os Venerados didn't find it?”

“Apparently not, or they would surely have told Marcos. And even if they hadn't told him, Ivanova herself should have found it.”

“Maybe she did,” said Ender.

Navio laughed aloud. «Impossible. No woman in her right mind would deliberately bear the children of a man with a genetic defect like that. Marc o was surely in constant agony for many years. You don't wish that on your own children. No, Ivanova may be eccentric, but she's not insane.»

Jane was quite amused. When Ender got home, she made her image appear above his terminal just so she could laugh uproariously.

“He can't help it,” said Ender. “In a devout Catholic colony like this, dealing with the Biologista, one of the most respected people here, of course he doesn't think to question his basic premises.”

“Don't apologize for him,” said Jane. “I don't expect wetware to work as logically as software. But you can't ask me not to be amused.”

«In a way it's rather sweet of him,» said Ender. «He'd rather believe that Marc o's disease was different from every other recorded case. He'd rather believe that somehow Ivanova's parents didn't notice that Marcos had the disease, and so she married him in ignorance, even though Ockham's razor decrees that we believe the simplest explanation: Maredo's decay progressed like every other, testes first, and all of Novinha's children were sired by someone else. No wonder Marc o was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping with another man. It was probably part of their bargain in the beginning that she would not be faithful to him. But six children is rather rubbing his nose in it.»

“The delicious contradictions of religious life,” said Jane. “She deliberately set out to commit adultery– but she would never dream of using a contraceptive.”

“Have you scanned the children's genetic pattern to find the most likely father?”

“You mean you haven't guessed?”

“I've guessed, but I want to make sure the clinical evidence doesn't disprove the obvious answer.”

“It was Libo, of course. What a dog! He sired six children on Novinha, and four more on his own wife.”

"What I don't understand," said Ender, "is why Novinha didn't marry Libo in the first place. It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then to go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning. "

“Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.”

Miro carefully picked his way through the forest. He recognized trees now and then, or thought he did– no human could ever have the piggies' knack for naming every single tree in the woods. But then, humans didn't worship the trees as totems of their ancestors, either.

Miro had deliberately chosen a longer way to reach the piggies' log house. Ever since Libo accepted Miro as a second apprentice, to work with him alongside Libo's daughter, Ouanda, he had taught them that they must never form a path leading from Milagre to the piggies' home. Someday, Libo warned them, there may be trouble between human and piggy; we will make no path to guide a pogrom to its destination. So today Miro walked the far side of the creek, along the top of the high bank.

Sure enough, a piggy soon appeared in the near distance, watching him. That was how Libo reasoned out, years ago, that the females must live somewhere in that direction; the males always kept a watch on the Zenadors when they went too near. And, as Libo had insisted, Miro made no effort to move any farther in the forbidden direction. His curiosity dampened whenever he remembered what Libo's body looked like when he and Ouanda found it. Libo had not been quite dead yet; his eyes were open and moving. He only died when both Miro and Ouanda knelt at either side of him, each holding a blood-covered hand. Ah, Libo, your blood still pumped when your heart lay naked in your open chest. If only you could have spoken to us, one word to tell us why they killed you.

The bank became low again, and Miro [note: original text says “Libo,” probable accident] crossed the brook by running lightly on the moss-covered stones. In a few more minutes he was there, coming into the small clearing from the east.

Ouanda was already there, teaching them how to churn the cream of cabra milk to make a sort of butter. She had been experimenting with the process for the past several weeks before she got it right. It would have been easier if she could have had some help from Mother, or even Ela, since they knew so much more about the chemical properties of cabra milk, but cooperating with a Biologista was out of the question. Os Venerados had discovered thirty years ago that cabra milk was nutritionally useless to humans. Therefore any investigation of how to process it for storage could only be for the piggies' benefit. Miro and Ouanda could not risk anything that might let it be known they were breaking the law and actively intervening in the piggies' way of life.

The younger piggies took to butter-churning with delightthey had made a dance out of kneading the cabra bladders and were singing now, a nonsensical song that mixed Stark, Portuguese, and two of the piggies' own languages into a hopeless but hilarious muddle. Miro tried to sort out the languages. He recognized Males' Language, of course, and also a few fragments of Fathers' Language, the language they used to speak to their totem trees; Miro recognized it only by its sound; even Libo hadn't been able to translate a single word. It all sounded like ms and bs and gs, with no detectable difference among the vowels.