“Is something wrong?” asked the Aradora. At the same time, the Ceifeiro's hand rested gently on his head.

Ender lifted his head, trying to shake off the sudden attack of love and longing for Valentine. “I'm afraid that this voyage has cost me more than any other. I left behind my sister, who traveled with me for many years. She married in Reykjavik. To me, it seems only a week or so since I left her, but I find that I miss her more than I expected. The two of you–”

“Are you telling us that you are also celibate?” asked the Ceifeiro.

“And widowed now as well,” whispered the Aradora.

It did not seem at all incongruous to Ender to have his loss of Valentine put in those terms.

Jane murmured in his ear. “If this is part of some master plan of yours, Ender, I admit it's much too deep for me.”

But of course it wasn't part of a plan at all. It frightened Ender to feel himself losing control like this. Last night in the Ribeira house he was the master of the situation; now he felt himself surrendering to these married monks with as much abandonment as either Quara or Grego had shown.

“I think,” said the Ceifeiro, “that you came here seeking answers to more questions than you knew.”

“You must be so lonely,” said the Aradora. “Your sister has found her resting place. Are you looking for one, too?”

“I don't think so,” said Ender. “I'm afraid I've imposed on your hospitality too much. Unordained monks aren't supposed to hear confessions.”

The Aradora laughed aloud. “Oh, any Catholic can hear the confession of an infidel.”

The Ceifeiro did not laugh, however. “Speaker Andrew, you have obviously given us more trust than you ever planned, but I can assure you that we deserve that trust. And in the process, my friend, I have come to believe that I can trust you. The Bishop is afraid of you, and I admit I had my own misgivings, but not anymore. I'll help you if I can, because I believe you will not knowingly cause harm to our little village.”

“Ah,” whispered Jane, “I see it now. A very clever maneuver on your part, Ender. You're much better at playacting than I ever knew.”

Her gibing made Ender feel cynical and cheap, and he did what he had never done before. He reached up to the jewel, found the small disengaging pin, and with his fingernail pried it to the side, then down. The jewel went dead. Jane could no longer speak into his ear, no longer see and hear from his vantage point. “Let's go outside,” Ender said.

They understood perfectly what he had just done, since the function of such an implant was well known; they saw it as proof of his desire for private and earnest conversation, and so they willingly agreed to go. Ender had meant switching off the jewel to be temporary, a response to Jane's insensitivity; he had thought to switch on the interface in only a few minutes. But the way the Aradora and the Ceifeiro seemed to relax as soon as the jewel was inactive made it impossible to switch it back on, for a while at least.

Out on the nighttime hillside, in conversation with the Aradora and the Ceifeiro, he forgot that Jane was not listening. They told him of Novinha's childhood solitude, and how they remembered seeing her come alive through Pipo's fatherly care, and Libo's friendship. “But from the night of his death, she became dead to us all.”

Novinha never knew of the discussions that took place concerning her. The sorrows of most children might not have warranted meetings in the Bishop's chambers, conversations in the monastery among her teachers, endless speculations in the Mayor's office. Most children, after all, were not the daughter of Os Venerados; most were not their planet's only xenobiologist.

“She became very bland and businesslike. She made reports on her work with adapting native plant life for human use, and Earthborn plants for survival on Lusitania. She always answered every question easily and cheerfully and innocuously. But she was dead to us, she had no friends. We even asked Libo, God rest his soul, and he told us that he, who had been her friend, he did not even get the cheerful emptiness she showed to everyone else. Instead she raged at him and forbade him to ask her any questions.” The Ceifeiro peeled a blade of native grass and licked the liquid of its inner surface. “You might try this, Speaker Andrew– it has an interesting flavor, and since your body can't metabolize a bit of it, it's quite harmless.”

“You might warn him, husband, that the edges of the grass can slice his lips and tongue like razor blades.”

“I was about to.”

Ender laughed, peeled a blade, and tasted it. Sour cinnamon, a hint of citrus, the heaviness of stale breath– the taste was redolent of many things, few of them pleasant, but it was also strong. “This could be addictive.”

“My husband is about to make an allegorical point, Speaker Andrew. Be warned.”

The Ceifeiro laughed shyly. “Didn't San Angelo say that Christ taught the correct way, by likening new things to old?”

“The taste of the grass,” said Ender. “What does it have to do with Novinha?”

“It's very oblique. But I think Novinha tasted something not at all pleasant, but so strong it overcame her, and she could never let go of the flavor.”

“What was it?”

“In theological terms? The pride of universal guilt. It's a form of vanity and egomania. She holds herself responsible for things that could not possibly be her fault. As if she controlled everything, as if other people's suffering came about as punishment for her sins.”

“She blames herself,” said the Aradora, “for Pipo's death.”

“She's not a fool,” said Ender. “She knows it was the piggies, and she knows that Pipo went to them alone. How could it be her fault?”

“When this thought first occurred to me, I had the same objection. But then I looked over the transcripts and the recordings of the events of the night of Pipo's death. There was only one hint of anything– a remark that Libo made, asking Novinha to show him what she and Pipo had been working on just before Pipo went to see the piggies. She said no. That was all– someone else interrupted and they never came back to the subject, not in the Zenador's Station, anyway, not where the recordings could pick it up.”

“It made us both wonder what went on just before Pipo's death, Speaker Andrew,” said the Aradora. “Why did Pipo rush out like that? Had they quarreled over something? Was he angry? When someone dies, a loved one, and your last contact with them was angry or spiteful, then you begin to blame yourself. If only I hadn't said this, if only I hadn't said that.”

“We tried to reconstruct what might have happened that night. We went to the computer logs, the ones that automatically retain working notes, a record of everything done by each person logged on. And everything pertaining to her was completely sealed up. Not just the files she was actually working on. We couldn't even get to the logs of her connect time. We couldn't even find out what files they were that she was hiding from us. We simply couldn't get in. Neither could the Mayor, not with her ordinary overrides–”

The Aradora nodded. “it was the first time anyone had ever locked up public files like that– working files, part of the labor of the colony.”

“It was an outrageous thing for her to do. Of course the Mayor could have used emergency override powers, but what was the emergency? We'd have to hold a public hearing, and we didn't have any legal justification. Just concern for her, and the law has no respect for people who pry for someone else's good. Someday perhaps we'll see what's in those files, what it was that passed between them just before Pipo died. She can't erase them because they're public business.”

It didn't occur to Ender that Jane was not listening, that he had shut her out. He assumed that as soon as she heard this, she was overriding every protection Novinha had set up and discovering what was in her files.