“I'm telling you that when the piggies killed Pipo and Libo they thought they were helping them transform into the next stage of their existence. They weren't beasts, they were ramen, giving the highest honor to the men who had served them so well.”

“Another moral transformation, is that it?” asked the Bishop. “Just as you did today in your Speaking, making us see Marcos Ribeira again and again, each time in a new light, now you want us to think the piggies are noble? Very well, they're noble. But I won't rebel against Congress, with all the suffering such a thing would cause, just so our scientists can teach the piggies how to make refrigerators.”

“Please,” said Novinha.

They looked at her expectantly.

“You say that they stripped our files? They read them all?”

“Yes,” said Bosquinha.

“Then they know everything that I have in my files. About the Descolada.”

“Yes,” said Bosquinha.

Novinha folded her hands in her lap. “There won't be any evacuation.”

“I didn't think so,” said Ender. “That's why I asked Ela to bring you.”

“Why won't there be an evacuation?” asked Bosquinha.

“Because of the Descolada.”

“Nonsense,” said the Bishop. “Your parents found a cure for that.”

“They didn't cure it,” said Novinha. “They controlled it. They stopped it from becoming active.”

“That's right,” said Bosquinha. “That's why we put the additives in the water. The Colador.”

“Every human being on Lusitania, except perhaps the Speaker, who may not have caught it yet, is a carrier of the Descolada.”

“The additive isn't expensive,” said the Bishop. “But perhaps they might isolate us. I can see that they might do that.”

“There's nowhere isolated enough,” said Novinha. “The Descolada is infinitely variable. It attacks any kind of genetic material. The additive can be given to humans. But can they give additives to every blade of grass? To every bird? To every fish? To every bit of plankton in the sea?”

“They can all catch it?” asked Bosquinha. “I didn't know that.”

“I didn't tell anybody,” said Novinha. “But I built the protection into every plant that I developed. The amaranth, the potatoes, everything– the challenge wasn't making the protein usable, the challenge was to get the organisms to produce their own Descolada blockers.”

Bosquinha was appalled. “So anywhere we go–”

"We can trigger the complete destruction of the biosphere.

«And you kept this a secret?» asked Dom Crist o.

“There was no need to tell it.” Novinha looked at her hands in her lap. “Something in the information had caused the piggies to kill Pipo. I kept it secret so no one else would know. But now, what Ela has learned over the last few years, and what the Speaker has said tonight– now I know what it was that Pipo learned. The Descolada doesn't just split the genetic molecules and prevent them from reforming or duplicating. It also encourages them to bond with completely foreign genetic molecules. Ela did the work on this against my will. All the native life on Lusitania thrives in plant-and-animal pairs. The cabra with the capim. The watersnakes with the grama. The suckflies with the reeds. The xingadora bird with the tropeqo vines. And the piggies with the trees of the forest.”

«You're saying that one becomes the other?» Dom Crist o was at once fascinated and repelled.

“The piggies may be unique in that, in transforming from the corpse of a piggy into a tree,” said Novinha. “But perhaps the cabras become fertilized from the pollen of the capim. Perhaps the flies are hatched from the tassels of the river reeds. It should be studied. I should have been studying it all these years.”

«And now they'll know this?» asked Dom Crist o. «From your files?»

“Not right away. But sometime in the next twenty or thirty years. Before any other framlings get here, they'll know,” said Novinha.

“I'm not a scientist,” said the Bishop. “Everyone else seems to understand except me. What does this have to do with the evacuation?”

Bosquinha fidgeted with her hands. “They can't take us off Lusitania,” she said. “Anywhere they took us, we'd carry the Descolada with us, and it would kill everything. There aren't enough xenobiologists in the Hundred Worlds to save even a single planet from devastation. By the time they get here, they'll know that we can't leave.”

“Well, then,” said the Bishop. “That solves our problem. If we tell them now, they won't even send a fleet to evacuate us.”

“No,” said Ender. “Bishop Peregrino, once they know what the Descolada will do, they'll see to it that no one leaves this planet, ever.”

The Bishop scoffed. “What, do you think they'll blow up the planet? Come now, Speaker, there are no more Enders among the human race. The worst they might do is quarantine us here–”

«In which case,» said Dom Crist o, «why should we submit to their control at all? We could send them a message telling them about the Descolada, informing them that we will not leave the planet and they should not come here, and that's it.»

Bosquinha shook her head. “Do you think that none of them will say, 'The Lusitanians, just by visiting another world, can destroy it. They have a starship, they have a known propensity for rebelliousness, they have the murderous piggies. Their existence is a threat.'”

“Who would say that?” said the Bishop.

“No one in the Vatican,” said Ender. “But Congress isn't in the business of saving souls.”

“And maybe they'd be right,” said the Bishop. “You said yourself that the piggies want starflight. And yet wherever they might go, they'll have this same effect. Even uninhabited worlds, isn't that right? What will they do, endlessly duplicate this bleak landscape– forests of a single tree, prairies of a single grass, with only the cabra to graze it and only the xingadora to fly above it?”

“Maybe someday we could find a way to get the Descolada under control,” said Ela.

“We can't stake our future on such a thin chance,” said the Bishop.

“That's why we have to rebel,” said Ender. “Because Congress will think exactly that way. Just as they did three thousand years ago, in the Xenocide. Everybody condemns the Xenocide because it destroyed an alien species that turned out to be harmless in its intentions. But as long as it seemed that the buggers were determined to destroy humankind, the leaders of humanity had no choice but to fight back with all their strength. We are presenting them with the same dilemma again. They're already afraid of the piggies. And once they understand the Descolada, all the pretense of trying to protect the piggies will be done with. For the sake of humanity's survival, they'll destroy us. Probably not the whole planet. As you said, there are no Enders today. But they'll certainly obliterate Milagre and remove any trace of human contact. Including killing all the piggies who know us. Then they'll set a watch over this planet to keep the piggies from ever emerging from their primitive state. If you knew what they know, wouldn't you do the same?”

«A Speaker for the Dead says this?» said Dom Crist o.

“You were there,” said the Bishop. “You were there the first time, weren't you. When the buggers were destroyed.”

“Last time we had no way of talking to the buggers, no way of knowing they were ramen and not varelse. This time we're here. We know that we won't go out and destroy other worlds. We know that we'll stay here on Lusitania until we can go out safely, the Descolada neutralized. This time,” said Ender, “we can keep the ramen alive, so that whoever writes the piggies' story won't have to be a Speaker for the Dead.”

The secretary opened the door abruptly, and Ouanda burst in. “Bishop,” she said. “Mayor. You have to come. Novinha–”

“What is it?” said the Bishop.

“Ouanda, I have to arrest you,” said Bosquinha.

“Arrest me later,” she said. “It's Miro. He climbed over the fence.”