The satellites? “What could they see from the sky?”

“Maybe the hunt,” said Arrow.

“Maybe the shearing of the cabra,” said Leaf-eater.

“Maybe the fields of amaranth,” said Cups.

“All of those,” said Human. “And maybe they saw that the wives have let three hundred twenty children be born since the first amaranth harvest.”

“Three hundred!”

“And twenty,” said Mandachuva.

“They saw that food would be plenty,” said Arrow. “Now we're sure to win the next war. Our enemies will be planted in huge new forests all over the plain, and the wives will put mother trees in every one of them.”

Miro felt sick. Is this what all their work and sacrifice was for, to give some transient advantage to one tribe of piggies? Almost he said, Libo didn't die so you could conquer the world. But his training took over, and he asked a noncommittal question. “Where are all these new children?”

“None of the little brothers come to us,” explained Human. “We have too much to do, learning from you and teaching all the other brother-houses. We can't be training little brothers.” Then, proudly, he added, “Of the three hundred, fully half are children of my father, Rooter.”

Mandachuva nodded gravely. “The wives have great respect for what you have taught us. And they have great hope in the Speaker for the Dead. But what you tell us now, this is very bad. If the framlings hate us, what will we do?”

“I don't know,” said Miro. For the moment, his mind was racing to try to cope with all the information they had just told him. Three hundred twenty new babies. A population explosion. And Rooter somehow the father of half of them. Before today Miro would have dismissed the statement of Rooter's fatherhood as part of the piggies' totemic belief system. But having seen a tree uproot itself and fall apart in response to singing, he was prepared to question all his old assumptions.

Yet what good did it do to learn anything now? They'd never let him report again; he couldn't follow up; he'd be aboard a starship for the next quarter century while someone else did all his work. Or worse, no one else.

“Don't be unhappy,” said Human. “You'll see– the Speaker for the Dead will make it all work out well.”

“The Speaker. Yes, he'll make everything work out fine.” The way he did for me and Ouanda. My sister.

“The hive queen says he'll teach the framlings to love us.”

“Teach the framlings,” said Miro. “He'd better do it quickly then. It's too late for him to save me and Ouanda. They're arresting us and taking us off planet.”

“To the stars?” asked Human hopefully.

“Yes, to the stars, to stand trial! To be punished for helping you. It'll take us twenty-two years to get there, and they'll never let us come back.”

The piggies took a moment to absorb this information. Fine, thought Miro. Let them wonder how the Speaker is going to solve everything for them. I trusted in the Speaker, too, and it didn't do much for me. The piggies conferred together.

Human emerged from the group and came closer to the fence. “We'll hide you.”

“They'll never find you in the forest,” said Mandachuva.

“They have machines that can track me by my smell,” said Miro.

“Ah. But doesn't the law forbid them to show us their machines?” asked Human.

Miro shook his head. “It doesn't matter. The gate is sealed to me. I can't cross the fence.”

The piggies looked at each other.

“But you have capim right there,” said Arrow.

Miro looked stupidly at the grass. “So what?” he asked.

“Chew it,” said Human.

“Why?” asked Miro.

“We've seen humans chewing capim,” said Leaf-eater. “The other night, on the hillside, we saw the Speaker and some of the robe-humans chewing capim.”

“And many other times,” said Mandachuva.

Their impatience with him was frustrating. “What does that have to do with the fence?”

Again the piggies looked at each other. Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He sat down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. Finally Human gave him a particularly vicious pinch, and when Mandachuva did not respond, they began saying, in males' language, Ready, Time to go, Now, Ready.

Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.

Miro leaped to his feet and began to cry out just as Mandachuva reached the top; by the time he finished his cry, Mandachuva was standing up and dusting himself off.

“You can't do that,” said Miro. “It stimulates all the pain nerves in the body. The fence can't be crossed.”

“Oh,” said Mandachuva.

From the other side of the fence, Human was rubbing his thighs together. “He didn't know,” he said. “The humans don't know.”

“It's an anesthetic,” said Miro. “It stops you from feeling pain.”

“No,” said Mandachuva. “I feel the pain. Very bad pain. Worst pain in the world.”

“Rooter says the fence is even worse than dying,” said Human. “Pain in all the places.”

“But you don't care,” said Miro.

“It's happening to your other self,” said Mandachuva. “It's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self.”

Then Miro remembered a detail that had been lost in the grotesquerie of Libo's death. The dead man's mouth had been filled with a wad of capim. So had the mouth of every piggy that had died. Anesthetic. The death looked like hideous torture, but pain was not the purpose of it. They used an anesthetic. It had nothing to do with pain.

“So,” said Mandachuva. “Chew the grass, and come with us. We'll hide you.”

“Ouanda,” said Miro.

“Oh, I'll go get her,” said Mandachuva.

“You don't know where she lives.”

“Yes I do,” said Mandachuva.

“We do this many times a year,” said Human. “We know where everybody lives.”

“But no one has ever seen you,” said Miro.

“We're very secret,” said Mandachuva. “Besides, nobody is looking for us.”

Miro imagined dozens of piggies creeping about in Milagre in the middle of the night. No guard was kept. Only a few people had business that took them out in the darkness. And the piggies were small, small enough to duck down in the capim and disappear completely. No wonder they knew about metal and machines, despite all the rules designed to keep them from learning about them. No doubt they had seen the mines, had watched the shuttle land, had seen the kilns firing the bricks, had watched the fazendeiros plowing and planting the human-specific amaranth. No wonder they had known what to ask for.

How stupid of us, to think we could cut them off from our culture. They kept far more secrets from us than we could possibly keep from them. So much for cultural superiority.

Miro pulled up his own blade of capim.

“No,” said Mandachuva, taking the blade from his hands. “You don't get the root part. If you take the root part, it doesn't do you any good.” He threw away Miro's blade and tore off his own, about ten centimeters above the base. Then he folded it and handed it to Miro, who began to chew it.

Mandachuva pinched and poked him.

“Don't worry about that,” said Miro. “Go get Ouanda. They could arrest her any minute. Go. Now. Go on.”

Mandachuva looked at the others and, seeing some invisible signal of consent, jogged off along the fenceline toward the slopes of Vila Alta, where Ouanda lived.

Miro chewed a little more. He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn't care. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda. Forget the rules, all the rules. They had no power over him once he left the human enclave and entered the piggies' forest. He would become a renegade, as they already accused him of being, and he and Ouanda could leave behind all the insane rules of human behavior and live as they wanted to, and raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies, from the forest life; something new in the Hundred Worlds, and Congress would be powerless to stop them.