"YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD"

"When I follow the path of the gods through the wood,

My eyes take every twisting turn of the grain,

But my body moves straight along the planking,

So those who watch me see that the path of the gods is straight,

While I dwell in a world with no straightness in it."

from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Novinha would not come to him. The gentle old teacher looked genuinely distressed as she told Ender. "She wasn't angry," the old teacher explained. "She told me that ..."

Ender nodded, understanding how the teacher was torn between compassion and honesty. "You can tell me her words," he said. "She is my wife, so I can bear it."

The old teacher rolled her eyes. "I'm married too, you know."

Of course he knew. All the members of the Order of the Children of the Mind of Christ -- Os Filhos da Mente de Cristo -- were married. It was their rule.

"I'm married, so I know perfectly well that your spouse is the one person who knows all the words you can't bear to hear."

"Then let me correct myself," said Ender mildly. "She is my wife, so I am determined to hear it, whether I can bear it or not."

"She says that she has to finish the weeding, so she has no time for lesser battles."

Yes, that sounded like Novinha. She might tell herself that she had taken the mantle of Christ upon her, but if so it was the Christ who denounced the Pharisees, the Christ who said all those cruel and sarcastic things to his enemies and his friends alike, not the gentle one with infinite patience.

Still, Ender was not one to go away merely because his feelings were hurt. "Then what are we waiting for?" asked Ender. "Show me where I can find a hoe."

The old teacher stared at him for a long moment, then smiled and led him out into the gardens. Soon, wearing work gloves and carrying a hoe in one hand, he stood at the end of the row where Novinha worked, bent over in the sunlight, her eyes on the ground before her as she cut under the root of weed after weed, turning each one up to bum to death in the hot dry sun. She was coming toward him.

Ender stepped to the unweeded row beside the one Novinha worked on, and began to hoe toward her. They would not meet, but they would pass close to each other. She would notice him or not. She would speak to him or not. She still loved and needed him. Or not. But no matter what, at the end of this day he would have weeded in the same field as his wife, and her work would have been more easily done because he was there, and so he would still be her husband, however little she might now want him in that role.

The first time they passed each other, she did not so much as look up. But then she would not have to. She would know without looking that the one who joined her in weeding so soon after she refused to meet with her husband would have to be her husband. He knew that she would know this, and he also knew she was too proud to look at him and show that she wanted to see him again. She would study the weeds until she went half blind, because Novinha was not one to bend to anyone else's will.

Except, of course, the will of Jesus. That was the message she had sent him, the message that had brought him here, determined to talk to her. A brief note couched in the language of the Church. She was separating herself from him to serve Christ among the Filhos. She felt herself called to this work. He was to regard himself as having no further responsibility toward her, and to expect nothing more from her than she would gladly give to any of the children of God. It was a cold message, for all the gentleness of its phrasing.

Ender was not one to bend easily to another's will, either. Instead of obeying the message, he came here, determined to do the opposite of what she asked. And why not? Novinha had a terrible record as a decision maker. Whenever she decided to do something for someone else's good, she ended up inadvertently destroying them. Like Libo, her childhood friend and secret lover, the father of all her children during her marriage to the violent but sterile man who had been her husband until he died. Fearing that he would die at the hands of the pequeninos, the way his father had died, Novinha withheld from him her vital discoveries about the biology of the planet Lusitania, fearing that the knowledge of it would kill him. Instead, it was the ignorance of that very information that led him to his death. What she did for his own good, without his knowledge, killed him.

You'd think she'd learn something from that, thought Ender. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people's lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don't want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she's saving them from.

Then again, if she had simply married Libo in the first place and told him everything she knew, he would probably still be alive and Ender would never have married his widow and helped her raise her younger children. It was the only family Ender had ever had or was ever likely to have. So bad as Novinha's decisions tended to be, the happiest time of his life had come about only because of one of the most deadly of her mistakes.

On their second pass, Ender saw that she still, stubbornly, was not going to speak to him, and so, as always, he bent first and broke the silence between them.

"The Filhos are married, you know. It's a married order. You can't become a full member without me."

She paused in her work. The blade of the hoe rested on unbroken soil, the handle light in her gloved fingers. "I can weed the beets without you," she finally said.

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 Estevão 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 Estevão -- 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 Estevão 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 Estevão 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?