<To become the queen and the hive and all. To hold the pattern we imagined.>
“So where does it come from?”
<Wherever it was when it felt us calling.>
“But where is that?”
<Not here.>
“Fine, I believe you. But where does it come from?”
<Can't think of the place.>
“You forget?”
<We mean that the place where it is can't be thought of. If we could think of the place then they would already have thought of themselves and none of them would need to take the pattern we show.>
“What kind of thing is this binder-together?”
<Can't see it. Can't know it until it finds the pattern and then when it's there it's like us.>
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.
<No. This is ugly, the terrible thing you're thinking. We aren't another thing. We're this thing. We are the hive queen, just the way you're the body. You say, My body, and yet you are your body, but you're also possessor of the body. The hive queen is ourself, this body is me, not something else inside. I. I wasn't anything until I found the imagining.>
“I don't understand. What was it like?”
<How can I remember? I never had memory until I followed the imagining and came to this place and became the hive queen.>
“Then how did you know that you aren't just the hive queen?”
<Because after I came, they gave me the memories. I saw the queen-body before I came, and then I saw the queen-body after I was in it. I was strong enough to hold the pattern in my mind, and so I could possess it. Become it. It took many days but then we were whole and they could give us the memories because I had the whole memory.>
The vision the hive queen had been giving him faded. It wasn't helping anyway, or at least not in any way he could grasp. Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other hive queens– not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there– they held the pattern of the relationship between hive queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it.
<Yes.>
“But where do these things come from? Where do you have to go to get them?”
<We don't go anywhere. We call, and there they are.>
“So they're everywhere?”
<They aren't here at all. Nowhere here. Another place.>
“But you said you don't have to go anywhere to get them.”
<Doorways. We don't know where they are, but everywhere there's a door.>
“What are the doorways like?”
<Your brain made the word you say. Doorway. Doorway.>
Now he realized that doorway was the word his brain called forth to label the concept they were putting in his mind. And suddenly he was able to grasp an explanation that made sense.
“They're not in the same space-time continuum as ours. But they can enter ours at any point.”
<To them all points are the same point. All wheres are the same where. They only find one where-ness in the pattern.>
“But this is incredible. You're calling forth some being from another place, and–”
<The calling forth is nothing. All things do it. All new makings. You do it. Every human baby has this thing. The pequeninos are these things also. Grass and sunlight. All making calls them, and they come to the pattern. if there are already some who understand the pattern, then they come and possess it. Small patterns are very easy. Our pattern is very hard. Only a very wise one can possess it.>
“Philotes,” said Ender. “The things out of which all other things are made.”
<The word you say doesn't make a meaning like what we mean.>
“Because I'm only just making the connection. We never meant what you've described, but the thing we did mean, that might be the thing you described.”
<Very unclear.>
“Join the club.”
<Very welcome laughing happy.>
“So when you make a hive queen, you already have the biological body, and this new thing– this philote that you call out of the non-place where philotes are– it has to be one that's able to comprehend the complex pattern that you have in your minds of what a hive queen is, and when one comes that can do it, it takes on that identity and possesses the body and becomes the self of that body–”
<Of all the bodies.>
“But there are no workers yet, when the hive queen is first made.”
<It becomes the self of the workers-to-come.>
“We're talking about a passage from another kind of space. A place where philotes already are.”
<All in the same non-place. No place-ness in that place. No where-being. All hungry for whereness. All thirsty for pattern. All lonely for selfness.>
“And you say that we're made of the same things?”
<How could we have found you if you weren't?>
“But you said that finding me was like making a hive queen.”
<We couldn't find the pattern in you. We were trying to make a pattern between you and the other humans, only you kept shifting and changing, we couldn't make sense of it. And you couldn't make sense of us, either, so that reaching of yours couldn't make a pattern, either. So we took the third pattern. You reaching into the machine. You yearning so much for it. Like the life-yearning of the new queen-body. You were binding yourself to the program in the computer. It showed you images. We could find the images in the computer and we could find them in your mind. We could match them while you watched. The computer was very complicated and you were even more complicated but it was a pattern that held still. You were moving together and while you were together you possessed each other, you had the same vision. And when you imagined something and did it, the computer made something out of your imagining and imagined something back. Very primitive imagining from the computer. It wasn't a self. But you were making it a self by the life-yearning. The reaching-out you were doing.>
“The Fantasy Game,” said Ender. “You made a pattern out of the Fantasy Game.”
<We imagined the same thing you were imagining. All of us together. Calling. It was very complicated and strange, but much simpler than anything else we found in you. Since then we know– very few humans are capable of concentrating the way you concentrated on that game. And we've seen no other computer program that responded to a human the way that game responded to you. It was yearning, too. Cycling over and over, trying to find something to make for you. >
“And when you called …”
<It came. The bridge we needed. The together-binder for you and the computer program. It held the pattern so that it was alive even when you weren't paying attention to it. It was linked to you, you were part of it, and yet we could also understand it. It was the bridge.>
“But when a philote takes possession of a new hive queen, it controls it, queen-body and worker-bodies. Why didn't this bridge you made take control of me?”
<Do you think we didn't try?>
“Why didn't it work?”
<You weren't capable of letting a pattern like that control you. You could willingly become part of a pattern that was real and alive, but you couldn't be controlled by it. You couldn't even be destroyed by it. And there was so much of you in the pattern that we couldn't even control it ourselves. Too strange for us.>
“But you could still use it to read my mind.”
<We could use it to stay connected with you in spite of all the strangeness. We studied you, especially when you played the game. And as we understood you, we began to grasp the idea of your whole species. That each individual of you was alive, with no hive queen at all.>