Page 324 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"It generates an electric field that stimulates any pain-sensitive nerves that come within it," said Jane. "Just touching it makes all your wetware go screwy-- it makes you feel as though somebody were cutting off your fingers with a file."
"Pleasant thought. Are we in a concentration carrip? Or a zoo?"
"It all depends on how you look at it," said Jane. "It's the human side of the fence that's connected to the rest of the universe, and the piggy side that's trapped on its home world."
"The difference is that they don't know what they're missing."
"I know," said Jane. "It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born homo sapiens." Beyond the fence was a hillside, and along the top of the hill a thick forest began. "The xenologers have never gone deep into piggy lands. The piggy community that they deal with is less than a kilometer inside this wood. The piggies live in a log house, all the males together. We don't know about any other settlements except that the satellites have been able to confirm that every forest like this one carries just about all the population that a hunter-gatherer culture can sustain."
"They hunt?"
"Mostly they gather."
"Where did Pipo and Libo die?"
Jane brightened a patch of grassy ground on the hillside leading up to the trees. A large tree grew in isolation nearby, with two smaller ones not far off.
"Those trees," said Ender. "I don't remember any being so close in the holos I saw on Trondheim."
"It's been twenty-two years. The big one is the tree the piggies planted in the corpse of the rebel called Rooter, who was executed before Pipo was murdered. The other two are more recent piggy executions."
"I wish I knew why they plant trees for piggies, and not for humans."
"The trees are sacred," said Jane. "Pipo recorded that many of the trees in the forest are named. Libo speculated that they might be named for the dead."
"And humans simply aren't part of the pattern of treeworship. Well, that's likely enough. Except that I've found that rituals and myths don't come from nowhere. There's usually some reason for it that's tied to the survival of the community."
"Andrew Wiggin, anthropologist?" "The proper study of mankind is man."