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"Thank you for inviting me," said Valentine. "But as you can see, as I predicted, it didn't come to much."
She got up from her chair, her body aching from sitting so long in that impossible posture. She had not bowed herself forward. Nor did she bow even now, as the Bishop extended his hand to be kissed. Instead, she shook his hand firmly, then shook Mayor Kovano's hand. As equals. As strangers.
She left the room, burning inside. She had warned them and told them what they ought to do. But like most leaders who had never faced a real crisis, they didn't believe that anything would be different tonight from most other nights. People only really believe in what they've seen before. After tonight, Kovano will believe in curfews and closings at times of public stress. But by then it will be too late. By then they will be counting the casualties.
How many graves would be dug beside Quim's? And whose bodies would go into them?
Though Valentine was a stranger here and knew very few of the people, she couldn't just accept the riot as inevitable. There was only one other hope. She would talk to Grego. Try to persuade him of the seriousness of what was happening here. If he went from bar to bar tonight, counseling patience, speaking calmly, then the riot might be forestalled. Only he had any chance of doing it. They knew him. He was Quim's brother. He was the one whose words had so angered them last night. Enough men might listen to him that the riot might be contained, forestalled, channeled. She had to find Grego.
If only Ender were here. She was a historian; he had actually led men into battle. Well, boys, actually. He had led boys. But it was the same thing-- he'd know what to do. Why is he away now? Why is this in my hands? I haven't the stomach for violence and confrontation. I never have. That's why Ender was born in the first place, a third child conceived at government request in an era when parents weren't usually allowed to have more than two without devastating legal sanctions: because Peter had been too vicious, and she, Valentine, had been too mild.
Ender would have talked the Mayor and the Bishop into acting sensibly. And if he couldn't, he would have known how to go into town himself, calm things down, keep things under control.
As she wished for Ender to be with her, though, she knew that even he couldn't control what was going to happen tonight. Maybe even what she had suggested wouldn't have been enough. She had based her conclusions about what would happen tonight on all that she had seen and read on many different worlds in many different times. Last night's conflagration would definitely spread much farther tonight. But now she was beginning to realize that things might be even worse than she had first assumed. The people of Lusitania had lived in unexpressed fear on an alien world for far too long. Every other human colony had immediately spread out, taken possession of their world, made it their own within a few generations. The humans of Lusitania still lived in a tiny compound, a virtual zoo with terrifying swinelike creatures peering in at them through the bars. What was pent up within these people could not be estimated. It probably could not even be contained. Not for a single day.