Page 286 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

Home! What was home, if not this place? Was she supposed to go now to the Biologista's Station, where her bed had not been slept in for more than a year, except for catnaps during lab work? Was that supposed to be her home? She had left it because it was so painfully empty of her parents; now the Zenador's Station was empty, too: Pipo dead and Libo changed into an adult with duties that would take him away from her. This place wasn't home, but neither was any other place.
The Arbiter led Libo away. His mother, Conceicao, was waiting for him in the Arbiter's house. Novinha barely knew the woman, except as the librarian who maintained the Lusitanian archive. Novinha had never spent time with Pipo's wife or other children, she had not cared that they existed; only the work here, the life here had been real. As Libo went to the door he seemed to grow smaller, as if he were a much greater distance away, as if he were being borne up and off by the wind, shrinking into the sky like a kite; the door closed behind him.
Now she felt the magnitude of Pipo's loss. The mutilated corpse on the hillside was not his death, it was merely his death's debris. Death itself was the empty place in her life. Pipo had been a rock in a storm, so solid and strong that she and Libo, sheltered together in his lee, had not even known the storm existed. Now he was gone, and the storm had them, would carry them whatever way it would. Pipo, she cried out silently. Don't go! Don't leave us! But of course he was gone, as deaf to her prayers as ever her parents had been.
The Zenador's Station was still busy; the Mayor herself, Bosquinha, was using a terminal to transmit all of Pipo's data by ansible to the Hundred Worlds, where experts were desperately trying to make sense of Pipo's death.
But Novinha knew that the key to his death was not in Pipo's files. It was her data that had killed him, somehow. It was still there in the air above her terminal, the holographic images of genetic molecules in the nuclei of piggy cells. She had not wanted Libo to study it, but now she looked and looked, trying to see what Pipo had seen, trying to understand what there was in the images that had made him rush out to the piggies, to say or do something that had made them murder him. She had inadvertently uncovered some secret that the piggies would kill to keep, but what was it?
The more she studied the holos, the less she understood, and after a while she didn't see them at all, except as a blur through her tears as she wept silently. She had killed him, because without even meaning to she had found the pequeninos' secret. If I had never come to this place, if I had not dreamed of being Speaker of the piggies' story, you would still be alive, Pipo; Libo would have his father, and be happy; this place would still be home. I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.
It was the Mayor who noticed her short, sharp breaths and realized, with brusque compassion, that this girt was also shaken and grieving. Bosquinha left others to continue the ansible reports and led Novinha out of the Zenador's Station.