Xenocide

“Our family has a lot of pride.”

“Well, no matter what you think, I'm doing this out of conscience, no matter whether you want to call it pride or stubbor

“I believe you,” said Miro.

"But do I believe you when you say that you believe me? We're in such a tangle." She turned back to her terminal. "Go away now, Miro. I told you I'd think about it, and I will.

“Go see Planter.”

"I'll think about that, too." Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "He is my friend, you know. I'm not inhuman. I'll go see him, you can be sure of that. "

“Good.”

He started for the door.

“Miro,” she said.

He turned, waited.

“Thanks for not threatening to have that computer program of yours crack my files open if I didn't open them myself.”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Andrew would have threatened that, you know. Everybody thinks he's such a saint, but he always bullies people who don't go along with him.”

“He doesn't threaten.”

“I've seen him do it.”

“He warns.”

“Oh. Excuse me. Is there a difference?”

“Yes,” said Miro.

“The only difference between a warning and a threat is whether you're the person giving it or the person receiving it,” said Quara.

“No,” said Miro. “The difference is how the person means it.”

“Go away,” she said. “I've got work to do, even while I'm thinking. So go away.”

He opened the door.

“But thanks,” she said.

He closed the door behind him.

As he walked away from Quara's place, Jane immediately piped up in his ear. “I see you decided against telling her that I broke into her files before you even came.”

“Yes, well,” said Miro. “I feel like a hypocrite, for her to thank me for not threatening to do what I'd already done.”

“I did it.”

“We did it. You and me and Ender. A sneaky group.”

“Will she really think about it?”

“Maybe,” said Miro. “Or maybe she's already thought about it and decided to cooperate and was just looking for an excuse. Or maybe she's already decided against ever cooperating, and she just said this nice thing at the end because she's sorry for me.”

“What do you think she'll do?”

“I don't know what she'll do,” said Miro. “I know what I'll do. I'll feel ashamed of myself every time I think about how I let her think that I respected her privacy, when we'd already pillaged her files. Sometimes I don't think I'm a very good person.”

“You notice she didn't tell you that she's keeping her real findings outside the computer system, so the only files I can reach are worthless junk. She hasn't exactly been frank with you, either.”

“Yes, but she's a fanatic with no sense of balance or proportion.”

“That explains everything.”

“Some traits just run in the family,” said Miro.

The hive queen was alone this time. Perhaps exhausted from something– mating? Producing eggs? She spent all her time doing this, it seemed. She had no choice. Now that workers had to be used to patrol the perimeter of the human colony, she had to produce even more than she had pla

It had always bothered Ender, made him feel uneasy to know that there was only one queen. What if something happened to her? But then, it made the hive queen uncomfortable to think of human beings having only a bare handful of children– what if something happened to them? Both species practiced a combination of nurturance and redundancy to protect their genetic heritage. Humans had a redundancy of parents, and then nurtured the few offspring. The hive queen had a redundancy of offspring, who then nurtured the parent. Each species had found its own balance of strategy.

“Because we're at a dead end. Because everybody else is trying, and you have as much at stake as we do.”

“The descolada threatens you as much as it threatens us. Someday you probably aren't going to be able to control it, and then you're gone.”

“No.” It was the problem of faster-than-light flight. Grego had been wracking his brains. In jail there was nothing else for him to think about. The last time Ender had spoken with him, he wept– as much from exhaustion as frustration. He had covered reams of papers with equations, spreading them all over the secure room that was used as a cell. “Don't you care about faster-than-light flight?”

The mildness of her response almost hurt, it so deeply disappointed him. This is what despair is like, he thought. Quara a brick wall on the nature of descolada intelligence. Planter dying of descolada deprivation. Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu struggling to duplicate years of higher study in several fields, all at once. Grego worn out. And nothing to show for it.

She must have heard his anguish as clearly as if he had howled it.

“You've done it,” he said. “It must be possible.”

He was having trouble making sense of what they were saying. What kind of network was he co