“Very pretty,” said Bishop Peregrino.

Bosquinha looked over at Dom Cristao. “Do you recognize the model?”

He shook his head. “But I think I know what this meeting is about.”

Dona Crist leaned forward on her chair. «Is there any safe place where we can hide the things we want to keep?»

Bishop Peregrino's expression of detached amusement vanished from his face. “I don't know what this meeting is about.”

Bosquinha turned around on her stool to face him. “I was very young when I was appointed to be Governor of the new Lusitania Colony. It was a great honor to be chosen, a great trust. I had studied government of communities and social systems since my childhood, and I had done well in my short career in Oporto. What the committee apparently overlooked was the fact that I was already suspicious, deceptive, and chauvinistic.”

“These are virtues of yours that we have all come to admire,” said Bishop Peregrino.

Bosquinha smiled. “My chauvinism meant that as soon as Lusitania Colony was mine, I became more loyal to the interests of Lusitania than to the interests of the Hundred Worlds or Starways Congress. My deceptiveness led me to pretend to the committee that on the contrary, I had the best interests of Congress at heart at all times. And my suspicion led me to believe that Congress was not likely to give Lusitania anything remotely like independent and equal status among the Hundred Worlds.”

“Of course not,” said Bishop Peregrino. “We are a colony.”

“We are not a colony,” said Bosquinha. “We are an experiment. I examined our charter and license and all the Congressional Orders pertaining to us, and I discovered that the normal privacy laws did not apply to us. I discovered that the committee had the power of unlimited access to all the memory files of every person and institution on Lusitania.”

The Bishop began to look angry. “Do you mean that the committee has the right to look at the confidential files of the Church?”

“Ah,” said Bosquinha. “A fellow chauvinist.”

“The Church has some rights under the Starways Code.”

“Don't be angry with me.”

“You never told me.”

“If I had told you, you would have protested, and they would have pretended to back down, and then I couldn't have done what I did.”

“Which is?”

“This program. It monitors all ansible-initiated accesses to any files in Lusitania Colony.”

Dom Cristao chuckled. “You're not supposed to do that.”

“I know. As I said, I have many secret vices. But my program never found any major intrusion– oh, a few files each time the piggies killed one of our xenologers, that was to be expected– but nothing major. Until four days ago.”

“When the Speaker for the Dead arrived,” said Bishop Peregrino.

Bosquinha was amused that the Bishop obviously regarded the Speaker's arrival as such a landmark date that he instantly made such a connection. "Three days ago," said Bosquinha, "a nondestructive scan was initiated by ansible. It followed an interesting pattern. " She turned to the terminal and changed the display. Now it showed accesses primarily in high-level areas, and limited to only one region of the display. "It accessed everything to do with the xenologers and xenobiologists of Milagre. It ignored all security routines as if they didn't exist. Everything they discovered, and everything to do with their personal lives. And yes, Bishop Peregrino, I believed at the time and I believe today that this had to do with the Speaker."

“Surely he has no authority with Starways Congress,” said the Bishop.

Dom Cristao nodded wisely. “San Angelo once wrote– in his private journals, which no one but the Children of the Mind ever read–”

The Bishop turned on him with glee. “So the Children of the Mind do have secret writings of San Angelo!”

«Not secret,» said Dona Crist . «Merely boring. Anyone can read the journals, but we're the only ones who bother.»

«What he wrote,» said Dom Crist o, «was that Speaker Andrew is older than we know. Older than Starways Congress, and in his own way perhaps more powerful.»

Bishop Peregrino snorted. “He's a boy. Can't be forty years old yet.”

“Your stupid rivalries are wasting time,” said Bosquinha sharply. “I called this meeting because of an emergency. As a courtesy to you, because I have already acted for the benefit of the government of Lusitania.”

The others fell silent.

Bosquinha returned the terminal to the original display. “This morning my program alerted me for a second time. Another systematic ansible access, only this time it was not the selective nondestructive access of three days ago. This time it is reading everything at data-transfer speed, which implies that all our files are being copied into offworld computers. Then the directories are rewritten so that a single ansible-initiated command will completely destroy every single file in our computer memories.”

Bosquinha could see that Bishop Peregrino was surprised– and the Children of the Mind were not.

“Why?” said Bishop Peregrino. “To destroy all our files– this is what you do to a nation or a world that is– in rebellion, that you wish to destroy, that you–”

“I see,” said Bosquinha to the Children of the Mind, “that you also were chauvinistic and suspicious.”

«Much more narrowly than you, I'm afraid,» said Dom Crist o. «But we also detected the intrusions. We of course copied all our records– at great expense– to the monasteries of the Children of the Mind on other worlds, and they will try to restore our files after they are stripped. However, if we are being treated as a rebellious colony, I doubt that such a restoration will be permitted. So we are also making paper copies of the most vital information. There is no hope of printing everything, but we think we may be able to print out enough to get by. So that our work isn't utterly destroyed.»

“You knew this?” said the Bishop. “And you didn't tell me?”

“Forgive me, Bishop Peregrino, but it did not occur to us that you would not have detected this yourselves.”

“And you also don't believe we do any work that is important enough to be worth printing out to save!”

“Enough!” said Mayor Bosquinha. “Printouts can't save more than a tiny percentage– there aren't enough printers in Lusitania to make a dent in the problem. We couldn't even maintain basic services. I don't think we have more than an hour left before the copying is complete and they are able to wipe out our memory. But even if we began this morning, when the intrusion started, we could not have printed out more than a hundredth of one percent of the files that we access every day. Our fragility, our vulnerability is complete.”

“So we're helpless,” said the Bishop.

“No. But I wanted to make clear to you the extremity of our situation, so that you would accept the only alternative. It will be very distasteful to you.”

“I have no doubt of that,” said Bishop Peregrino.

“An hour ago, as I was wrestling with this problem, trying to see if there was any class of files that might be immune to this treatment, I discovered that in fact there was one person whose files were being completely overlooked. At first I thought it was because he was a framling, but the reason is much more subtle than that. The Speaker for the Dead has no files in Lusitanian memory.”

«None? Impossible,» said Dona Crist .

“All his files are maintained by ansible. Offworld. All his records, all his finances, everything. Every message sent to him. Do you understand?”

«And yet he still has access to them–» said Dom Crist o.

"He is invisible to Starways Congress. If they place an embargo on all data transfers to and from Lusitania, his files will still be accessible because the computers do not see his file accesses as data transfers. They are original storage– yet they are not in Lusitanian memory.