"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. "Gracas 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 presence 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 living 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.