“What are we waiting for?” asked Valentine.
“Our guide,” said Ender.
At that moment, the guide arrived. In the darkness, Valentine could barely see the black-reed arm with a single finger and thumb as it nudged Ender’s hand. Immediately Ender enclosed the finger within his left hand; the black thumb closed like a pincer over his hand. Looking up the arm, Valentine tried to see the bugger it belonged to. All she could actually make out, though, was a child-size shadow, and perhaps a slight gleam of reflection off a carapace.
Her imagination supplied all that was missing, and against her will she shuddered.
Miro muttered something in Portuguese. So he, too, was affected by the presence of the bugger. Plikt, however, remained silent, and Valentine couldn’t tell whether she trembled or remained entirely unaffected. Then Miro took a shuffling forward step, pulling on Valentine’s hand, leading her forward into the darkness.
Ender knew how hard this passage would be for the others. So far only he, Novinha, and Ela had ever visited the hive queen, and Novinha had come only the once. The darkness was too unnerving, to move endlessly downward without help of eyes, knowing from small sounds that there was life and movement, invisible but nearby.
“Can we talk?” asked Valentine. Her voice sounded very small.
“It’s a good idea,” said Ender. “You won’t bother them. They don’t take much notice of sound.”
Miro said something. Without being able to see his lips move, Ender found it harder to understand Miro’s speech.
“What?” asked Ender.
“We both want to know how far it is,” Valentine said.
“I don’t know,” said Ender. “From here, anyway. And she might be almost anywhere down here. There are dozens of nurseries. But don’t worry. I’m pretty sure I could find my way out.”
“So could I,” said Valentine. “With a flashlight, anyway.”
“No light,” said Ender. “The egg-laying requires sunlight, but after that light only retards the development of the eggs. And at one stage it can kill the larvae.”
“But you could find your way out of this nightmare in the dark?” asked Valentine.
“Probably,” said Ender. “There are patterns. Like spider webs—when you sense the overall structure, each section of tunnel makes more sense.”
“These tunnels aren’t random?” Valentine sounded skeptical.
“It’s like the tunneling on Eros,” said Ender. He really hadn’t had that much chance to explore when he lived on Eros as a child-soldier. The asteroid had been honeycombed by the buggers when they made it their forward base in the Sol System; it became fleet headquarters for the human allies after it was captured during the first Bugger War. During his months there, Ender had devoted most of his time and attention to learning to control fleets of starships in space. Yet he must have noticed much more about the tunnels than he realized at the time, because the first time the hive queen brought him into her burrows on Lusitania, Ender found that the bends and turns never seemed to take him by surprise. They felt right—no, they felt inevitable.
“What’s Eros?” asked Miro.
“An asteroid near Earth,” said Valentine. “The place where Ender lost his mind.”
Ender tried to explain to them something about the way the tunnel system was organized. But it was too complicated. Like fractals, there were too many possible exceptions to grasp the system in detail—it kept eluding comprehension the more closely you pursued it. Yet to Ender it always seemed the same, a pattern that repeated over and over. Or maybe it was just that Ender had got inside the hivemind somehow, when he was studying them in order to defeat them. Maybe he had simply learned to think like a bugger. In which case Valentine was right—he had lost part of his human mind, or at least added onto it a bit of the hivemind.
Finally when they turned a corner there came a glimmer of light. “Graças a deus,” whispered Miro. Ender noted with satisfaction that Plikt—this stone woman who could not possibly be the same person as the brilliant student he remembered—also let out a sigh of relief. Maybe there was some life in her after all.
“Almost there,” said Ender. “And since she’s laying, she’ll be in a good mood.”
“Doesn’t she want privacy?” asked Miro.
“It’s like a minor sexual climax that goes on for several hours,” said Ender. “It makes her pretty cheerful. Hive queens are usually surrounded only by workers and drones that function as part of themselves. They never learn shyness.”
In his mind, though, he could feel the intensity of her presence. She could communicate with him anytime, of course. But when he was close, it was as if she were breathing into his brainpan; it became heavy, oppressive. Did the others feel it? Would she be able to speak to them? With Ela there had been nothing—Ela never caught a glimmer of the silent conversation. As for Novinha—she refused to speak of it and denied having heard anything, but Ender suspected that she had simply rejected the alien presence. The hive queen said she could hear both their minds clearly enough, as long as they were present, but couldn’t make herself “heard.” Would it be the same with these, today?
It would be such a good thing, if the hive queen could speak to another human. She claimed to be able to do it, but Ender had learned over the past thirty years that the hive queen was unable to distinguish between her confident assessments of the future and her sure memories of the past. She seemed to trust her guesses every bit as much as she trusted her memories; and yet when her guesses turned out wrong, she seemed not to remember that she had ever expected a different future from the one that now was past.
It was one of the quirks of her alien mind that disturbed Ender most. Ender had grown up in a culture that judged people’s maturity and social fitness by their ability to anticipate the results of their choices. In some ways the hive queen seemed markedly deficient in this area; for all her great wisdom and experience, she seemed as boldly and unjustifiably confident as a small child.
That was one of the things that frightened Ender about dealing with her. Could she keep a promise? If she failed to keep one, would she even realize what she had done?
Valentine tried to concentrate on what the others were saying, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the silhouette of the bugger leading them. It was smaller than she had ever imagined—no taller than a meter and a half, probably less. Looking past the others, she could only glimpse parts of the bugger, but that was almost worse than seeing it whole. She couldn’t keep herself from thinking that this shiny black enemy had a death grip on Ender’s hand.
Not a death grip. Not an enemy. Not even a creature, in itself. It had as much individual identity as an ear or a toe—each bugger was just another of the hive queen’s organs of action and sensation. In a sense the hive queen was already present with them—was present wherever one of her workers or drones might be, even hundreds of lightyears away. This is not a monster. This is the very hive queen written of in Ender’s book. This is the one he carried with him and nurtured during all our years together, though I didn’t know it. I have nothing to fear.
Valentine had tried suppressing her fear, but it wasn’t working. She was sweating; she could feel her hand slipping in Miro’s palsied grip. As they got closer and closer to the hive queen’s lair—no, her home, her nursery—she could feel herself getting more and more frightened. If she couldn’t handle it alone, there was no choice but to reach out for help. Where was Jakt? Someone else would have to do.
“I’m sorry, Miro,” she whispered. “I think I’ve got the sweats.”
“You?” he said. “I thought it was my sweat.”
That was good. He laughed. She laughed with him—or at least giggled nervously.
The tunnel suddenly opened wide, and now they stood blinking in a large chamber with a shaft of bright sunlight stabbing through a hole in the vault of the ceiling. The hive queen was smack in the center of the light. There were workers all around, but now, in the light, in the pres
ence of the queen, they all looked so small and fragile. Most of them were closer to one meter than a meter and a half in height, while the queen herself was surely three meters long. And height wasn’t the half of it. Her wing-covers looked vast, heavy, almost metallic, with a rainbow of colors reflecting sunlight. Her abdomen was long and thick enough to contain the corpse of an entire human. Yet it narrowed, funnel-like, to an ovipositor at the quivering tip, glistening with a yellowish translucent fluid, gluey, stringy; it dipped into a hole in the floor of the room, deep as it could go, and then came back up, the fluid trailing away like unnoticed spittle, down into the hole.
Grotesque and frightening as this was, a creature so large acting so much like an insect, it did not prepare Valentine for what happened next. For instead of simply dipping her ovipositor into the next hole, the queen turned and seized one of the workers hovering nearby. Holding the quivering bugger between her large forelegs, she drew it close and bit off its legs, one by one. As each leg was bitten off, the remaining legs gesticulated ever more wildly, like a silent scream. Valentine found herself desperately relieved when the last leg was gone, so that the scream was at last gone from her sight.
Then the hive queen pushed the unlimbed worker headfirst down the next hole. Only then did she position her ovipositor over the hole. As Valentine watched, the fluid at the ovipositor’s tip seemed to thicken into a ball. But it wasn’t fluid after all, or not entirely; within the large drop was a soft, jellylike egg. The hive queen maneuvered her body so that her face was directly in the sunlight, her multiplex eyes shining like hundreds of emerald stars. Then the ovipositor plunged downward. When it came up, the egg still clung to the end, but on the next emergence the egg was gone. Several times more her abdomen dipped downward, each time coming up with more strands of fluid stringing downward from the tip.
“Nossa Senhora,” said Miro. Valentine recognized it from its Spanish equivalent—Nuestra Senora, Our Lady. It was usually an almost meaningless expression, but now it took on a repulsive irony. Not the Holy Virgin, here in this deep cavern. The hive queen was Our Lady of the Darkness. Laying eggs over the bodies of lying workers, to feed the larvae when they hatched.
“It can’t always be this way,” said Plikt.
For a moment Valentine was simply surprised to hear Plikt’s voice. Then she realized what Plikt was saying, and she was right. If a living worker had to be sacrificed for every bugger that hatched, it would be impossible for the population to increase. In fact, it would have been impossible for this hive to exist in the first place, since the hive queen had to give life to her first eggs without the benefit of any legless workers to feed them.
It came into Valentine’s mind as if it were her own idea. The hive queen only had to place a living worker’s body into the egg casing when the egg was supposed to grow into a new hive queen. But this wasn’t Valentine’s own idea; it felt too certain for that. There was no way she could know this information, and yet the idea came clearly, unquestionably, all at once. As Valentine had always imagined that ancient prophets and mystics heard the voice of God.
“Did you hear her? Any of you?” asked Ender.
“Yes,” said Plikt.
“I think so,” said Valentine.
“Hear what?” asked Miro.
“The hive queen,” said Ender. “She explained that she only has to place a worker into the egg casing when she’s laying the egg of a new hive queen. She’s laying five—there are two already in place. She invited us to come to see this. It’s her way of telling us that she’s sending out a colony ship. She lays five queen-eggs, and then waits to see which is strongest. That’s the one she sends.”
“What about the others?” asked Valentine.
“If any of them is worth anything, she cocoons the larva. That’s what they did to her. The others she kills and eats. She has to—if any trace of a rival queen’s body should touch one of the drones that hasn’t yet mated with this hive queen, it would go crazy and try to kill her. Drones are very loyal mates.”
“Everybody else heard this?” asked Miro. He sounded disappointed. The hive queen wasn’t able to talk to him.
“Yes,” said Plikt.
“Only a bit of it,” said Valentine.
“Empty your mind as best you can,” said Ender. “Get some tune going in your head. That helps.”
In the meantime, the hive queen was nearly done with the next set of amputations. Valentine imagined stepping on the growing pile of legs around the queen; in her imagination, they broke like twigs with hideous snapping sounds.
The queen was answering her thoughts.
The thoughts in her mind were clearer. Not so intrusive now, more controlled. Valentine was able to feel the difference between the hive queen’s communications and her own thoughts.
“Ouvi,” whispered Miro. He had heard something at last. “Fala mais, escuto. Say more, I’m listening.”
Valentine tried to conceive how the hive queen was managing to speak Stark into her mind. Then she realized that the hive queen was almost certainly doing nothing of the kind—Miro was hearing her in his native language, Portuguese; and Valentine wasn’t really hearing Stark at all, she was hearing the English that it was based on, the American English that she had grown up with. The hive queen wasn’t sending language to them, she was sending thought, and their brains were making sense of it in whatever language lay deepest in their minds. When Valentine heard the word echoes followed by reverberations, it wasn’t the hive queen struggling for the right word, it was Valentine’s own mind grasping for words to fit the meaning.
“She’s making a joke,” whispered Ender. “Not a judgment.”
Valentine was grateful for his interpretation. The visual image that came with the phrase rogue people was of an elephant stomping a man to death. It was an image out of her childhood, the story from which she had first learned the word rogue. It frightened her, that image, the way it had frightened her as a child. She already hated the hive queen’s presence in her mind. Hated the way she could dredge up forgotten nightmares. Everything about the hive queen was a nightmare. How could Valentine ever have imagined that this being was raman? Yes, there was communication. Too much of it. Communication like mental illness.
And what she was saying—that they heard her so well because they were philotically connected to Ender. Valentine thought back to what Miro and Jane had said during the voyage—was it possible that her philotic strand was twined into Ender, and through him to the hive queen? But how could such a thing have happened? How could Ender ever have become bound to the hive queen in the first place?
The understanding came suddenly, like a door opening. The buggers weren’t all born docile. They could have their own identity. Or at least a breakdown of control. And so the hive queens had evolved a way of capturing them, binding them philotically to get them under control.
And no one guessed the danger Ender was in. That the hive queen expected to be able to capture him, make him the same kind of mindless tool of her will as any bugger.
Valentine felt the word like a hammer inside her mind. She means me. She means me, me, me … she struggled to remember who me was. Valentine. I’m Valentine. She means Valentine.
It gave her a sick feeling inside. Was it possible that the military was correct all along? Was it possible that only their cruel separation of Valentine and Ender saved him? That if she had been with Ender, the buggers could have used her to get control of him?
Valentine thought of the picture that had come to her mind on the ship. Of people twined together, families tied by invisible cords, children to parents, parents to each other, or to their own parents. A shifting network of strings tying people together, wherever their allegiance belonged. Only now the picture was of herself, tied to Ender. And then of Ender, tied … to the hive queen … the queen shaking her ovipositor, the strands quivering, and at the end of the strand, Ender’s head, wagging, bobbing …
She shook her head, trying to clear away the image.
This time the you was not Valentine; she could feel the question recede from her. And now, as the hive queen waited for an answer, she felt another thought in her mind. So close to her own way of thinking that if she hadn’t been sensitized, if she hadn’t been waiting for Ender to answer, she would have assumed it was her own natural thought.
Never, said the thought in her mind. I will never kill you. I love you.
And along with this thought came a glimmer of genuine emotion toward the hive queen. All at once her mental image of the hive queen included no loathing at all. Instead she seemed majestic, royal, magnificent. The rainbows from her wing-covers no longer seemed like an oily scum on water; the light reflecting from her eyes was like a halo; the glistening fluids at the tip of her abdomen were the threads of life, like milk at the nipple of a woman’s breast, stringing with saliva to her baby’s suckling mouth. Valentine had been fighting nausea till now, yet suddenly she almost worshipped the hive queen.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 93
