"Card, Orson Scott - Ender Wiggins 04 - Children of the Mind 1.0c" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

His heart leapt with relief that he had penetrated her veil of silence. "No you can't," he said. "Because here I am."

"These are the potatoes," she said. "I can't stop you from helping with the potatoes."

In spite of themselves they both laughed, and with a groan she unbent her back, stood straight, let the hoe handle fall to the ground, and took Ender's hands in hers, a touch that thrilled him despite two layers of thick workglove cloth between their palms and fingers.

"If I do profane with my touch," Ender began.

"No Shakespeare," she said. "No 'lips two blushing pilgrims ready stand.'"

"I miss you," he said.

"Get over it," she said.

"I don't have to. If you're joining the Filhos, so am I."

She laughed.

Ender didn't appreciate her scorn. "If a xenobiologist can retreat from the world of meaningless suffering, why can't an old retired speaker for the dead?"

"Andrew," she said, "I'm not here because I've given up on life. I'm here because I really have turned my heart over to the Redeemer. You could never do that. You don't belong here."

"I belong here if you belong here. We made a vow. A sacred one, that the Holy Church won't let us set aside. In case you forgot."

She sighed and looked out at the sky over the wall of the monastery. Beyond the wall, through meadows, over a fence, up a hill, into the woods ... that's where the great love of her life, Libo, had gone, and where he died. Where Pipo, his father, who was like a father to her as well, where he had gone before, and also died. It was into another wood that her son Estevao had gone, and also died, but Ender knew, watching her, that when she saw the world outside these walls, it was all those deaths she saw. Two of them had taken place before Ender got to Lusitania. But the death of Estevao-- she had begged Ender to stop him from going to the dangerous place where pequeninos were talking of war, of killing humans. She knew as well as Ender did that to stop Estevao would have been the same as to destroy him, for he had not become a priest to be safe, but rather to try to carry the message of Christ to these tree people. Whatever joy came to the early Christian martyrs had surely come to Estevao as he slowly died in the embrace of a murderous tree. Whatever comfort God sent to them in their hour of supreme sacrifice. But no such joy had come to Novinha. God apparently did not extend the benefits of his service to the next of kin. And in her grief and rage she blamed Ender. Why had she married him, if not to make herself safe from these disasters?

He had never said to her the most obvious thing, that if there was anyone to blame, it was God, not him. After all, it was God who had made saints-- well, almost saints-- out of her parents, who died as they discovered the antidote to the descolada virus when she was only a child. Certainly it was God who led Estevao out to preach to the most dangerous of the pequeninos. Yet in her sorrow it was God she turned to, and turned away from Ender, who had meant to do nothing but good for her.

He never said this because he knew that she would not listen. And he also refrained from saying it because he knew she saw things another way. If God took Father and Mother, Pipo, Libo, and finally Estevao away from her, it was because God was just and punished her for her sins. But when Ender failed to stop Estevao from his suicidal mission to the pequeninos, it was because he was blind, self-willed, stubborn, and rebellious, and because he did not love her enough.

But he did love her. With all his heart he loved her.

All his heart?

All of it he knew about. And yet when his deepest secrets were revealed in that first voyage Outside, it was not Novinha that his heart conjured there. So apparently there was someone who mattered even more to him.

Well, he couldn't help what went on in his unconscious mind, any more than Novinha could. All he could control was what he actually did, and what he was doing now was showing Novinha that regardless of how she tried to drive him away, he would not be driven. That no matter how much she imagined that he loved Jane and his involvement in the great affairs of the human race more than he loved her, it was not true, she was more important to him than any of it. He would give it all up for her. He would disappear behind monastery walls for her. He would weed rows of unidentified plant life in the hot sun. For her.

But even that was not enough. She insisted that he do it, not for her, but for Christ. Well, too bad. He wasn't married to Christ, and neither was she. Still, it couldn't be displeasing to God when a husband and wife gave all to each other. Surely that was part of what God expected of human beings.

"You know I don't blame you for the death of Quim," she said, using the old family nickname for Estevao.

"I didn't know that," he said, "but I'm glad to find it out."

"I did at first, but I knew all along that it was irrational," she said. "He went because he wanted to, and he was much too old for some interfering parent to stop him. If I couldn't, how could you?"

"I didn't even want to," said Ender. "I wanted him to go. It was the fulfillment of his life's ambition."

"I even know that now. It's right. It was right for him to go, and it was even right for him to die, because his death meant something. Didn't it?"