Xenocide

“I wasn't co

Not helpful at all. Nothing to do with faster-than-light flight. It all sounded like mumbo-jumbo, not like science at all. Nothing that Grego could express mathematically.

Ender didn't understand how establishing an ansible link with his brain could be like hatching out a new queen. “Explain it to me.”

It was true. She had tried only a couple of times, when he was very young and had first discovered her cocoon. He simply couldn't cope with it, couldn't make sense of it. Flashes, a few glimpses were clear, but it was so disorienting that he panicked, and probably fainted, though he was alone and couldn't be sure what had happened, clinically speaking.

“If you can't tell me, we have to do something.”

“No. I'll tell you to stop. It didn't kill me before.”

Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one, the others were sorted out. He imagined that she must have some organizing principle for the workers. She could disregard all those who weren't part of the queen-making process. Then, for Ender's sake, she had to sort through even the ones who were part of it, and that was harder, because usually she could sort the visions by task rather than by the individual workers. At last, though, she was able to show him a primary image and he could focus on it, ignoring the flickers and flashes of peripheral visions.

A queen being hatched. She had shown him this before, in a carefully-pla

“She doesn't grow her intelligence until cocooning?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I didn't know to look for anything else. I saw the making of the queen when you first showed it to me years ago. I thought I understood then.”

“So if the queen's just a body, who are you?”

“But you've always talked as if you were the hive queen.”

It was almost unbearably frustrating. So much of what the hive queen did was instinctive. She had no language and so she had never had a need to develop clear explanations of that which had never needed explaining till now. So he had to help her find a way to clarify what he couldn't perceive directly.

“Where do you find it?”

“But how do you call?”

“So you're calling some other creature to come and take possession of the queen.”

“So where does it come from?”

“But where is that?”

“Fine, I believe you. But where does it come from?”

“What kind of thing is this binder-together?”

Ender couldn't help shuddering. All this time he had thought that he was speaking to the hive queen herself. Now he realized that the thing that talked to him in his mind was only using that body the way it used the buggers. Symbiosis. A controlling parasite, possessing the whole hive queen system, using it.