“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 with 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 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.
<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 center. 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 center-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 cornes.>
“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.”