The piggy who had been shadowing Miro in the woods now emerged and greeted the others with a loud hooting sound. The dancing went on, but the song stopped immediately. Mandachuva detached himself from the group around Ouanda and came to meet Miro at the clearing's edge.
"Welcome, I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire." That was, of course, an extravagantly precise translation of Miro's name into Stark. Mandachuva loved translating names back and forth between Portuguese and Stark, even though Miro and Ouanda had both explained that their names didn't really mean anything at all, and it was only coincidence if they sounded like words. But Mandachuva enjoyed his language games, as so many piggies did, and so Miro answered to I-Look-Upon-You-With-Desire, just as Ouanda patiently answered to Vaga, which was Portuguese for "wander," the Stark word that most sounded like "Ouanda. "
Mandachuva was a puzzling case. He was the oldest of the piggies. Pipo had known him, and wrote of him as though he were the most prestigious of the piggies. Libo, too, seemed to think of him as a leader. Wasn't his name a slangy Portuguese term for “boss”? Yet to Miro and Ouanda, it seemed as though Mandachuva was the least powerful and prestigious of the piggies. No one seemed to consult him on anything; he was the one piggy who always had free time to converse with the Zenadors, because he was almost never engaged in an important task.
Still, he was the piggy who gave the most information to the Zenadors. Miro couldn't begin to guess whether he had lost his prestige because of his information-sharing, or shared information with the humans to make up for his low prestige among the piggies. It didn't even matter. The fact was that Miro liked Mandachuva. He thought of the old piggy as his friend.
“Has the woman forced you to eat that foul-smelling paste?” asked Miro.
“Pure garbage, she says. Even the baby cabras cry when they have to suck a teat.” Mandachuva giggled.
“If you leave that as a gift for the ladyfolk, they'll never speak to you again.”
“Still, we must, we must,” said Mandachuva, sighing. “They have to see everything, the prying macios!”
Ah, yes, the bafflement of the females. Sometimes the piggies spoke of them with sincere, elaborate respect, almost awe, as if they were gods. Then a piggy would say something as crude as to call them “macios,” the worms that slithered on the bark of trees. The Zenadors couldn't even ask about them– the piggies would never answer questions about the females. There had been a time– a long time– when the piggies didn't even mention the existence of females at all. Libo always hinted darkly that the change had something to do with Pipo's death. Before he died, the mention of females was tabu, except with reverence at rare moments of great holiness; afterward, the piggies also showed this wistful, melancholy way of joking about “the wives.” But the Zenadors could never get an answer to a question about the females. The piggies made it plain that the females were none of their business.
A whistle came from the group around Ouanda. Mandachuva immediately began pulling Miro toward the group. “Arrow wants to talk to you.”
Miro came and sat beside Ouanda. She did not look at him-they had learned long ago that it made the piggies very uncomfortable when they had to watch male and female humans in direct conversation, or even having eye contact with each other. They would talk with Ouanda alone, but whenever Miro was present they would not speak to her or
endure it if she spoke to them. Sometimes it drove Miro crazy that she couldn't so much as wink at him in front of the piggies. He could feel her body as if she were giving off heat like a small star.
“My friend,” said Arrow. “I have a great gift to ask of you.”
Miro could hear Ouanda tensing slightly beside him. The piggies did not often ask for anything, and it always caused difficulty when they did.
“Will you hear me?”
Miro nodded slowly. “But remember that among humans I am nothing, with no power.” Libo had discovered that the piggies were not at all insulted to think that the humans sent powerless delegates among them, while the image of impotence helped them explain the strict limitations on what the Zenadors could do.
“This is not a request that comes from us, in our silly and stupid conversations around the night fire.”
“I only wish I could hear the wisdom that you call silliness,” said Miro, as he always did.
“It was Rooter, speaking out of his tree, who said this.”
Miro sighed silently. He liked dealing with piggy religion as little as he liked his own people's Catholicism. In both cases he had to pretend to take the most outrageous beliefs seriously. Whenever anything particularly daring or importunate was said, the piggies always ascribed it to one ancestor or another, whose spirit dwelt in one of the ubiquitous trees. It was only in the last few years, beginning not long before Libo's death, that they started singling out Rooter as the source of most of the troublesome ideas. It was ironic that a piggy they had executed as a rebel was now treated with such respect in their ancestor-worship.
Still, Miro responded as Libo had always responded. “We have nothing but honor and affection for Rooter, if you honor him.”
“We must have metal.”
Miro closed his eyes. So much for the Zenadors' longstanding policy of never using metal tools in front of the piggies. Obviously, the piggies had observers of their own, watching humans at work from some vantage point near the fence. “What do you need metal for?” he asked quietly.
“When the shuttle came down with the Speaker for the Dead, it gave off a terrible heat, hotter than any fire we can make. And yet the shuttle didn't burn, and it didn't melt.”
"That wasn't the metal, it was a heat-absorbent plastic shield. "
"Perhaps that helps, but metal is in the heart of that machine. In all your machines, wherever you use fire and heat to make things move, there is metal. We will never be able to make fires like yours until we have metal of our own. "
“I can't,” said Miro.
“Do you tell us that we are condemned always to be varelse, and never ramen?”
I wish, Ouanda, that you had not explained Demosthenes' Hierarchy of Exclusion to them. “You are not condemned to anything. What we have given you so far, we have made out of things that grow in your natural world, like cabras. Even that, if we were discovered, would cause us to be exiled from this world, forbidden ever to see you again.”
“The metal you humans use also comes out of our natural world. We've seen your miners digging it out of the ground far to the south of here.”
Miro stored that bit of information for future reference. There was no vantage point outside the fence where the mines would be visible. Therefore the piggies must be crossing the fence somehow and observing humans from within the enclave. “It comes out of the ground, but only in certain places, which I don't know how to find. And even when they dig it up, it's mixed with other kinds of rock. They have to purify it and transform it in very difficult processes. Every speck of metal dug out of the ground is accounted for. If we gave you so much as a single tool– a screwdriver or a masonry saw– it would be missed, it would be searched for. No one searches for cabra milk.”
Arrow looked at him steadily for some time; Miro met his gaze. “We will think about this,” Arrow said. He reached out his hand toward Calendar, who put three arrows in his hand. “Look. Are these good?”
They were as perfect as Arrow's fletchery usually was, well-feathered and true. The innovation was in the tip. It was not made of obsidian.
“Cabra bone,” said Miro.
“We use the cabra to kill the cabra.” He handed the arrows back to Calendar. Then he got up and walked away.
Calendar held the slender wooden arrows out in front of him and sang something to them in Fathers' Language. Miro recognized the song, though he did not understand the words. Mandachuva had once explained to him that it was a prayer, asking the dead tree to forgive them for using tools that were not made of wood. Otherwise, he said, the trees would think the Little Ones hated them. Religion. Miro sighed.