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"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 ma
ted 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.
It was Ender's thought in her mind, she knew that; that's why the thoughts felt so much like her own. And with his vision of the hive queen, she knew at once that she had been right all along, when she wrote as Demosthenes so many years before. The hive queen was raman, strange but still capable of understanding and being understood.
