“Of all the documents that were ever treasured in the history of mankind…” said Ouanda. No one needed her to finish the sentence. Human, Leaf-eater, and Mandachuva carefully wrapped the book again in leaves and handed it, not to Ender, but to Ouanda. Ender knew at once, with terrible certainty, what that meant. The piggies still had work for him to do, work that would require that his hands be free.
“Now the covenant is made the human way,” said Human. “You must make it true for the Little Ones as well.”
“Can't the signing be enough?” asked Ender.
“From now on the signing is enough,” said Human. “But only because the same hand that signed for the humans also took the covenant in our way, too.”
“Then I will,” said Ender, “as I promised you I would.”
Human reached out and stroked Ender from the throat to the belly. “The brother's word is not just in his mouth,” he said. “The brother's word is in his life.” He turned to the other piggies. “Let me speak to my father one last time before I stand beside him.”
Two of the strange brothers came forward with their small clubs in their hands. They walked with Human to Rooter's tree and began to beat on it and sing in the Fathers' Language. Almost at once the trunk split open. The tree was still fairly young, and not so very much thicker in the trunk than Human's own body; it was a struggle for him to get inside. But he fit, and the trunk closed up after him. The drumming changed rhythm, but did not let up for a moment.
Jane whispered in Ender's ear. “I can hear the resonance of the drumming change inside the tree,” she said. “The tree is slowly shaping the sound, to turn the drumming into language.”
The other piggies set to work clearing ground for Human's tree. Ender noticed that he would be planted so that, from the gate, Rooter would seem to stand on the left hand, and Human on the right. Pulling up the capim by the root was hard work for the piggies; soon Quim was helping them, and then Olhado, and then Ouanda and Ela.
Ouanda gave the covenant to Novinha to hold while she helped dig capim. Novinha, in turn, carried it to Ender, stood before him, looked at him steadily. “You signed it Ender Wiggin,” she said. “Ender.”
The name sounded ugly even to his own ears. He had heard it too often as an epithet. “I'm older than I look,” said Ender. “That was the name I was known by when I blasted the buggers' home world out of existence. Maybe the presence of that name on the first treaty ever signed between humans and ramen will do something to change the meaning of the name.”
“Ender,” she whispered. She reached toward him, the bundled treaty in her hands, and held it against his chest; it was heavy, since it contained all the pages of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, on the other sides of pages where the covenant was written. “I never went to the priests to confess,” she said, “because I knew they would despise me for my sin. Yet when you named all my sins today, I could bear it because I knew you didn't despise me. I couldn't understand why, though, till now.”
“I'm not one to despise other people for their sins,” said Ender. “I haven't found one yet, that I didn't say inside myself, I've done worse than this.”
“All these years you've borne the burden of humanity's guilt.”
“Yes, well, it's nothing mystical,” said Ender. “I think of it as being like the mark of Cain. You don't make many friends, but nobody hurts you much, either.”
The ground was clear. Mandachuva spoke in Tree Language to the piggies beating on the trunk; their rhythm changed, and again the aperture in the tree came open. Human slid out as if he were an infant being born. Then he walked to the center of the cleared ground. Leaf-eater and Mandachuva each handed him a knife. As he took the knives, Human spoke to them– in Portuguese, so the humans could understand, and so it would carry great force. “I told Shouter that you lost your passage to the third life because of a great misunderstanding by Pipo and Libo. She said that before another hand of hands of days, you both would grow upward into the light.”
Leaf-eater and Mandachuva both let go of their knives, touched Human gently on the belly, and stepped back to the edge of the cleared ground.
Human held out the knives to Ender. They were both made of thin wood. Ender could not imagine a tool that could polish wood to be at once so fine and sharp, and yet so strong. But of course no tool had polished these. They had come thus perfectly shaped from the heart of a living tree, given as a gift to help a brother into the third life.
It was one thing to know with his mind that Human would not really die. It was another thing to believe it. Ender did not take the knives at first. Instead he reached past the blades and took Human by the wrists. “To you it doesn't feel like death. But to me– I only saw you for the first time yesterday, and tonight I know you are my brother as surely as if Rooter were my father, too. And yet when the sun rises in the morning, I'll never be able to talk to you again. It feels like death to me, Human, how ever it feels to you.”
“Come and sit in my shade,” said Human, “and see the sunlight through my leaves, and rest your back against my trunk. And do this, also. Add another story to the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. Call it the Life of Human. Tell all the humans how I was conceived on the bark of my father's tree, and born in darkness, eating my mother's flesh. Tell them how I left the life of darkness behind and came into the half-light of my second life, to learn language from the wives and then come forth to learn all the miracles that Libo and Miro and Ouanda came to teach. Tell them how on the last day of my second life, my true brother came from above the sky, and together we made this covenant so that humans and piggies would be one tribe, not a human tribe or a piggy tribe, but a tribe of ramen. And then my friend gave me passage to the third life, to the full light, so that I could rise into the sky and give life to ten thousand children before I die.”
“I'll tell your story,” said Ender.
“Then I will truly live forever.”
Ender took the knives. Human lay down upon the ground.
“Olhado,” said Novinha. “Quim. Go back to the gate. Ela, you too.”
“I'm going to see this, Mother,” said Ela. “I'm a scientist.”
“You forget my eyes,” said Olhado. “I'm recording everything. We can show humans everywhere that the treaty was signed. And we can show piggies that the Speaker took the covenant in their way, too.”
“I'm not going, either,” said Quim. “Even the Blessed Virgin stood at the foot of the cross.”
“You can stay,” said Novinha softly. And she also stayed.
Human's mouth was filled with capim, but he didn't chew it very much. “More,” said Ender, “so you don't feel anything.”
“That's not right,” said Mandachuva. “These are the last moments of his second life. It's good to feel something of the pains of this body, to remember when you're in the third life, and beyond pain.”
Mandachuva and Leaf-eater told Ender where and how to cut. It had to be done quickly, they told him, and their hands reached into the steaming body to point out organs that must go here or there. Ender's hands were quick and sure, his body calm, but even though he could only rarely spare a glance away from the surgery, he knew that above his bloody work, Human's eyes were watching him, watching him, filled with gratitude and love, filled with agony and death.
It happened under his hands, so quickly that for the first few minutes they could watch it grow. Several large organs shriveled as roots shot out of them; tendrils reached from place to place within the body; Human's eyes went wide with the final agony; and out of his spine a sprout burst upward, two leaves, four leaves– And then stopped. The body was dead; its last spasm of strength had gone to making the tree that rooted in Human's spine. Ender had seen the rootlets and tendrils reaching through the body. The memories, the soul of Human had been transferred into the cells of the newly sprouted tree. It was done. His third life had begun. And when the sun rose in the morning, not long from now, the leaves would taste the light for the first time.