She didn't have to wait long. The Speaker rowed up the river in a small boat, just like one of the farside farmers, who had no use for roads. The skin of his back was shockingly white; even the few Lusos who were light-complected enough to be called loiros were much darker-skinned. His whiteness made him seem weak and slight. But then she saw how quickly the boat moved against the current; how accurately the oars were placed each time at just the right depth, with a long, smooth pull; how tightly wrapped in skin his muscles were. She felt a moment's stab of grief, and then realized that it was grief for her father, despite the depth of her hatred for him; she had not realized until this moment that she loved anything about him, but she grieved for the strength of his shoulders and back, for the sweat that made his brown skin dazzle like glass in the sunlight.

No, she said silently, I don't grieve for your death, C o. I grieve that you were not more like the Speaker, who has no connection with us and yet has given us more good gifts in three days than you in your whole life; I grieve that your beautiful body was so worm-eaten inside.

The Speaker saw her and skimmed the boat to shore, where she waited. She waded in the reeds and muck to help him pull the boat aground.

“Sorry to get you muddy,” he said. “But I haven't used my body in a couple of weeks, and the water invited me–”

“You row well,” she said.

“The world I came from, Trondheim, was mostly ice and water. A bit of rock here and there, some soil, but anyone who couldn't row was more crippled than if he couldn't walk.”

“That's where you were born?”

“No. Where I last Spoke, though.” He sat on the grama, facing the water.

She sat beside him. “Mother's angry at you.”

His lips made a little half-smile. “She told me.”

Without thinking, Ela immediately began to justify her mother. “You tried to read her files.”

“I read her files. Most of them. All but the ones that mattered.”

“I know. Quim told me.” She caught herself feeling just a little triumphant that Mother's protection system had bested him. Then she remembered that she was not on Mother's side in this. That she had been trying for years to get Mother to open those very files to her. But momentum carried her on, saying things she didn't mean to say. “Olhado's sitting in the house with his eyes shut off and music blasting into his ears. Very upset.”

“Yes, well, he thinks I betrayed him.”

“Didn't you?” That was not what she meant to say.

“I'm a Speaker for the Dead. I tell the truth, when I speak at all, and I don't keep away from other people's secrets.”

“I know. That's why I called for a Speaker. You don't have any respect for anybody.”

He looked annoyed. “Why did you invite me here?” he asked.

This was working out all wrong. She was talking to him as if she were against him, as if she weren't grateful for what he had already done for the family. She was talking to him like the enemy. Has Quim taken over my mind, so that I say things I don't mean?

“You invited me to this place on the river. The rest of your family isn't speaking to me, and then I get a message from you. To complain about my breaches of privacy? To tell me I don't respect anybody?”

“No,” she said miserably. “This isn't how it was supposed to go.”

“Didn't it occur to you that I would hardly choose to be a Speaker if I had no respect for people?”

In frustration she let the words burst out. “I wish you had broken into all her files! I wish you had taken every one of her secrets and published them through all the Hundred Worlds!” There were tears in her eyes; she couldn't think why.

“I see. She doesn't let you see those files, either.”

“Sou aprendiz dela, nao sou? E porque choro, diga-me! O senhor tem o jeito.”

“I don't have any knack for making people cry, Ela,” he answered softly. His voice was a caress. No, stronger, it was like a hand gripping her hand, holding her, steadying her. “Telling the truth makes you cry.”

“Sou ingrata, sou ma filha–”

“Yes, you're ungrateful, and a terrible daughter,” he said, laughing softly. “Through all these years of chaos and neglect you've held your mother's family together with little help from her, and when you followed her in her career, she wouldn't share the most vital inforination with you; you've earned nothing but love and trust from her and she's replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you're sick of it. You're just about the worst person I've ever known.”

She found herself laughing at her own self-condemnation. Childishly, she didn't want to laugh at herself. “Don't patronize me.” She tried to put as much contempt into her voice as possible.

He noticed. His eyes went distant and cold. “Don't spit at a friend,” he said.

She didn't want him to be distant from her. But she couldn't stop herself from saying, coldly, angrily, “You aren't my friend.”

For a moment she was afraid he believed her. Then a smile came to his face. “You wouldn't know a friend if you saw one.”

Yes I would, she thought. I see one now. She smiled back at him.

“Ela,” he said, “are you a good xenobiologist?”

“Yes.”

“You're eighteen years old. You could take the guild tests at sixteen. But you didn't take them.”

“Mother wouldn't let me. She said I wasn't ready.”

“You don't have to have your mother's permission after you're sixteen.”

“An apprentice has to have the permission of her master.”

“And now you're eighteen, and you don't even need that.”

“She's still Lusitania's xenobiologist. It's still her tab. What if I passed the test, and then she wouldn't let me into the lab until after she was dead?”

“Did she threaten that?”

“She made it clear that I wasn't to take the test.”

“Because as soon as you're not an apprentice anymore, if she admits you to the lab as her co-xenobiologist you have full access–”

“To all the working files. To all the locked files.”

“So she'd hold her own daughter back from beginning her career, she'd give you a permanent blot on your record– unready for the tests even at age eighteen– just to keep you from reading those files.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Mother's crazy.”

“No. Whatever else Novinha is, Ela, she is not crazy.”

«Ela ‚ boba mesma, Senhor Falante.»

He laughed and lay back in the grama. “Tell me how she's boba, then.”

“I'll give you the list. First: She won't allow any investigation of the Descolada. Thirty-four years ago the Descolada nearly destroyed this colony. My grandparents, Os Venerados, Deus os abencoe, they barely managed to stop the Descolada. Apparently the disease agent, the Descolada bodies, are still present– we have to eat a supplement, like an extra vitamin, to keep the plague from striking again. They told you that, didn't they? If you once get it in your system, you'll have to keep that supplement all your life, even if you leave here.”

“I knew that, yes.”

“She won't let me study the Descolada bodies at all. That's what's in some of the locked files, anyway. She's locked up all of Gusto's and Cida's discoveries about the Descolada bodies. Nothing's available.”

The Speaker's eyes narrowed. “So. That's one-third of boba. What's the rest?”

“It's more than a third. Whatever the Descolada body is, it was able to adapt to become a human parasite ten years after the colony was founded. Ten years! If it can adapt once, it can adapt again.”

“Maybe she doesn't think so.”

“Maybe I ought to have a right to decide that for myself.”

He put out a hand, rested it on her knee, calmed her. “I agree with you. But go on. The second reason she's boba.”

“She won't allow any theoretical research. No taxonomy. No evolutionary models. If I ever try to do any, she says I obviously don't have enough to do and weighs me down with assignments until she thinks I've given up.”