"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 planned. Her offspring didn't have to be educated— they entered adulthood quickly, having all the knowledge that any other adult had. But the process of conception, egg-laying, emergence, and cocooning still took time. Weeks for each adult. She produced a prodigious number of young, compared to a single human. But compared to the town of Milagre, with more than a thousand women of childbearing age, the bugger colony had only one producing female.
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 practised 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.
Why are you bothering us about this?
"Because we're at a dead end. Because everybody else is trying, and you have as much at stake as we do."
Do I?
"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."
But it's not the descolada you're asking me about.
"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?"
It would be very nice.
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.
Don't.
Don't.
"You've done it," he said. "It must be possible."
We've never travelled faster than light.
"You projected an action across light-years. You found me."
You found us, Ender.
"Not so," he said. "I never even knew we had made mental contact until I found the message you had left for me." It had been the moment of greatest strangeness in his life, to stand on an alien world and see a model, a replication of the landscape that had existed in only one other place— the computer on which he had played his personalised version of the Fantasy Game. It was like having a total stranger come up to you and tell you your dream from the night before. They had been inside his head. It made him afraid, but it also excited him. For the first time in his life, he felt known. Not known of— he was famous throughout humanity, and in those days his fame was all positive, the greatest hero of all time. Other people knew of him. But with this bugger artifact, he discovered for the first time that he was known.
Think, Ender. Yes, we reached out toward our enemy, but we weren't looking for you. We were looking for someone like us. A network of minds linked together, with a central mind controlling it. We find each other's minds without trying, because we recognise the pattern. Finding a sister is like finding ourself.
"How did you find me, then?"
We never thought about how. We only did it. Found a hot bright source. A network, but very strange, with shifting membership. And at the centre of it, not something like us, but just another— common one. You. But with such intensity. Focused into the network, toward the other humans. Focused inward on your computer game. And focused outward, beyond all, on us. Searching for us.
"I wasn't searching for you. I was studying you." Watching every vid they had at the Battle School, trying to understand the way the bugger mind worked. "I was imagining you."
So we say. Searching for us. Imagining us. That's how we search for each other. So you were calling us.
"And that was all?"
No, no. You were so strange. We didn't know what you were. We couldn't read anything in you. Your vision was so limited. Your ideas shifted so rapidly, and you thought of only one thing at a time. And the network around you kept shifting so much, each member's connection with you waxing and waning over time, sometimes very quickly—
He was having trouble making sense of what they were saying. What kind of network was he connected to?
The other soldiers. Your computer.
"I wasn't connected. They were my soldiers, that's all."
How do you think we're connected? Do you see any wires?
"But humans are individuals, not like your workers."
Many queens, many workers, changing back and forth, very confusing. Terrible, frightening time. What were these monsters that had wiped out our colony ship? What kind of creature? You were so strange we couldn't imagine you at all. We could only feel you when you were searching for us.
Not helpful at all. Nothing to do w
ith faster-than-light flight. It all sounded like mumbo-jumbo, not like science at all. Nothing that Grego could express mathematically.
Yes, that's right. We don't do this like science. Not like technology. No numbers or even thought. We found you like bringing forth a new queen. Like starting a new hive.
Ender didn't understand how establishing an ansible link with his brain could be like hatching out a new queen. "Explain it to me."
We don't think about it. We just do it.
"But what are you doing when you do it?"
What we always do.
"And what do you always do?"
How do you make your penis fill with blood to mate, Ender? How do you make your pancreas secrete enzymes? How do you switch on puberty? How do you focus your eyes?
"Then remember what you do, and show it to me."
You forget that you don't like this, when we show you through our eyes.
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."
Are you like Planter? Trying to die?
"No. I'll tell you to stop. It didn't kill me before."
We'll try— something in between. Something milder. We'll remember, and tell you what's happening. Show you bits. Protect you. Safe.
"Try, yes."
She gave him no time to reflect or prepare. At once he felt himself seeing out of compound eyes, not many lenses with the same vision, but each lens with its own picture. It gave him the same vertiginous feeling as so many years before. But this time he understood a little better— in part because she was making it less intense than before, and in part because he knew something about the hive queen now, about what she was doing to him.
The many different visions were what each of the workers was seeing, as if each were a single eye connected to the same brain. There was no hope of Ender making sense of so many images at once.
We'll show you one. The one that matters.
Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one, the others were sorted out. He imagined that she must have some organising 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-planned vision when he had first met her, when she was trying to explain things to him. Now, though, it wasn't a sanitised, carefully orchestrated presentation. The clarity was gone. It was murky, distracted, real. It was memory, not art.
You see we have the queen-body. We know she's a queen because she starts reaching out for workers, even as a larva.
"So you can talk to her?"
She's very stupid. Like a worker.
"She doesn't grow her intelligence until cocooning?"
No. She has her— like your brain. The memory-think. It's just empty.
"So you have to teach her."
What good would teaching do? The thinker isn't there. The found thing. The binder-together.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Stop trying to look and think, then. This isn't done with eyes.
"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."
How's this?
"I'm still seeing something."
Your brain is turning it into seeing.
"Then explain it. Help me make sense of it."
It's the way we feel each other. We're finding the reaching-out place in the queen-body. The workers all have it, too, but all it reaches for is the queen and when it finds her all the reaching is over. The queen never stops reaching. Calling.
"So then you find her?"
We know where she is. The queen-body. The worker-caller. The memory-holder.
"Then what are you searching for?"
The us-thing. The binder. The meaning-maker.
"You mean there's something else? Something besides the queen's body?"
Yes, of course. The queen is just a body, like the workers. Didn't you know this?
"No, I never saw it."
Can't see it. Not with eyes.
"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."
We thought you did too.
"So if the queen's just a body, who are you?"
We're the hive queen. And all the workers. We come and make one person out of all. The queen-body, she obeys us like the worker-bodies. We hold them all together, protect them, let them work perfectly as each is needed. We're the centre. Each of us.
"But you've always talked as if you were the hive queen."
We are. Also all the workers. We're all together.
"But this centre-thing, this binder-together—"
We call it to come and take the queen-body, so she can be wise, our sister.
"You call it. What is it?"
The thing we call.
"Yes, what is it?"
What are you asking? It's the called-thing. We call 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?"
It hears us calling and comes.
"But how do you call?"
As you called us. We imagine the thing which it must become. The pattern of the hive. The queen and the workers and the binding together. Then one comes who understands the pattern and can hold it. We give the queen-body to it.
"So you're calling some other creature to come and take possession of the queen."
To become the queen and the hive and all. To hold the pattern we imagined.
"So where does it come from?"
Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide Page 50
