Speaker for the Dead (Ender Quintet Book 2)

by Orson Scott Card

No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.

Plikt closed her eyes. “The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlänning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling—Demosthenes merely drops the accent from the Nordic främling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act.

They refer to each other as brothers. The females are always called wives, never sisters or mothers. They sometimes refer to fathers, but inevitably this term is used to refer to ancestral totem trees. As for what they call us, they do use human, of course, but they have also taken to using the new Demosthenian Hierarchy of Exclusion. They refer to humans as framlings, and to pequeninos of other tribes as utlannings. Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective! And—quite an amazing turn—they have several times referred to the females as varelse!

Maybe she couldn’t know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

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 ...

Came close to tears on this passage

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.

“We know you now. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Even Quim doesn’t hate you now. When you really know somebody, you can’t hate them.” “Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”

He’d show them, three thousand years later, how a father should behave. Bishop Peregrino married them in his chambers.

OSC kinda skimped on all scenes between ender and novinha that showed theecobnection together. It is as if they just married because ender got along well with her kids. He almost made it seem like it was a given. Kind of rubs me the wrong way.