“I wasn't connected. They were my soldiers, that's all.”

“But humans are individuals, not like your workers.”

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.”

“But what are you doing when you do it?”

“And what do you always do?”

“Then remember what you do, and show 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.”

“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.

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-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.