Xenocide

Xenocide Page 44

by Orson Scott Card

  A queen being hatched. She had shown him this before, in a carefully-planned vision when he had first met her, when she was trying to explain things to him. Now, though, it wasn't a sanitized, carefully orchestrated presentation. The clarity was gone. It was murky, distracted, real. It was memory, not art.

  "So you can talk to her?"

 

  "She doesn't grow her intelligence until cocooning?"

 

  "So you have to teach her."

 

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

 

  "Then stop showing me anything, if it depends on another sense. Eyes are too important to humans; if I see anything it'll mask out anything but clear speech and I don't think there's much of that at a queen-making."

 

  "I'm still seeing something."

 

  "Then explain it. Help me make sense of it."

  "So then you find her?"

 

  "Then what are you searching for?"

 

  "You mean there's something else? Something besides the queen's body?"

 

  "No, I never saw it."

 

  "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."

 

  "But this center-thing, this binder-together--"

 

  "You call it. What is it?"

 

  "Yes, what is it?"

 

  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?"

 

  "You forget?"

  "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.

  "I don't understand. What was it like?"

 

  "Then how did you know that you aren't just the hive queen?"

  The vision the hive queen had been giving him faded. It wasn't helping anyway, or at least not in any way he could grasp. Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other hive queens--not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there--they held the pattern of the relationship between hive queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it.

 

  "But where do these things come from? Where do you have to go to get them?"

 

  "So they're everywhere?"

 

  "But you said you don't have to go anywhere to get them."

 

  "What are the doorways like?"

 

  Now he realized that doorway was the word his brain called forth to label the concept they were putting in his mind. And suddenly he was able to grasp an explanation that made sense.

  "They're not in the same spacetime continuum as ours. But they can enter ours at any point."

 

  "But this is incredible. You're calling forth some being from another place, and--"

  "Philotes," said Ender. "The things out of which all other things are made."

 

  "Because I'm only just making the connection. We never meant what you've described, but the thing we did mean, that might be the thing you described."

 

  "Join the club."

 

  "So when you make a hive queen, you already have the biological body, and this new thing--this philote that you call out of the non-place where philotes are--i
t has to be one that's able to comprehend the complex pattern that you have in your minds of what a hive queen is, and when one comes that can do it, it takes on that identity and possesses the body and becomes the self of that body--"

 

  "But there are no workers yet, when the hive queen is first made."

 

  "We're talking about a passage from another kind of space. A place where philotes already are."

  "And you say that we're made of the same things?"

 

  "But you said that finding me was like making a hive queen."

  "The Fantasy Game," said Ender. "You made a pattern out of the Fantasy Game."

  "And when you called . . ."

  "But when a philote takes possession of a new hive queen, it controls it, queen-body and worker-bodies. Why didn't this bridge you made take control of me?"

 

  "Why didn't it work?"

  "But you could still use it to read my mind."

  "More complicated than you expected?"

  "But we didn't know that. How could we know?"

  "Too bad. Terrifying brilliance would be useful right now."

 

  "We humans get slower as we age. Give me a few more years and I'll be downright cozy."

 

  Ender didn't want this to become another conversation about mortality or any of the other aspects of human life that so fascinated the hive queen. There was still one question that had occurred to him during the hive queen's story. An intriguing possibility.

  "The bridge you made. Where was it? In the computer?"

 

  "But not part of me."

  "Could it control the computer?"

 

  "How long did you use this bridge? How long was it there?"

 

  "But it was still there the whole time you were studying me."

 

  "How long would it last?"

 

  "But what body was the bridge in?"

 

  "This thing was inside me?"

  "No. To you it was like--a bodily function. Like balling up your fist to hit somebody. You did it, and then when you didn't need it you didn't notice whether your fist was still there or not."

 

  "It's still alive, isn't it?"

  "But it would still be linked to the computer, wouldn't it? A connection between me and the computer. Only the pattern could have grown, couldn't it? It could include other people, too. Think of it being linked to Miro--the young man I brought with me--"

 

  "And instead of being linked to that one computer, linked to thousands and thousands of them, through the ansible links between worlds."

  "And I always thought--Jane and I always thought that she was--that she had somehow come to exist in the ansible connections between worlds. That's probably where she feels herself, the place that feels like the center of her--body, I was going to say."

 

  "Like trying to find a particular muscle that you've been using all your life but never by itself."

 

  "The comparison?"

  "Jane," whispered Ender. "You're a big girl now."

  Jane's voice came in answer: "You're cheating, Ender. I can't hear what she's saying to you. I can only fee
l your heart pounding and your rapid breathing."

 

  "Neither is Jane."

 

  "She's the bridge. You made her."

  "You reached out across the lightyears and found me because I was looking for you. And then you found a pattern and called a creature from another space who grasped the pattern and possessed it and became Jane. All of this instantaneously. Faster than light."

  "I know. I know. This may not help us answer the question I came here with. But I had another question, just as important to me, that I never thought would have anything to do with you, and here you had the answer to it all along. Jane's real, alive the whole time, and her self isn't out there in space, it's inside me. Connected to me. They can't kill her by switching her off. That's something."

 

  "But they can't kill the whole pattern, don't you see? It doesn't depend on the ansibles after all. It depends on me and on the link between me and the computers. They can't cut the link between me and the computers here and in the satellites orbiting Lusitania. And maybe she doesn't need the ansibles, either. After all, you don't need them to reach me through her."

  "I'll leave you, then. But this will help. This has to help. If Jane can find a way to survive because of this, then that's a real victory. The first victory, when I was beginning to think there wasn't any victory to be had in this."

  The moment he left the presence of the hive queen, he began talking to Jane, telling her everything he could remember of what the hive queen could explain. Who Jane was, how she was created.

 

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