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taught her to think of as The pequenino fathertree named
Human had explained to her that in one of the human languages this had
something to do with love. The connections of love. But the Hive Queen knew
better. Love was the savage coupling of the drones. Love was the genes of all
creatures demanding that they be replicated, replicated, replicated.
The philotic twining was something else. There was a voluntary component to
it, when the creature was truly sentient. It could bestow its loyalty where it
wanted. This was greater than love, because it created something more than
random offspring. Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became
something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.
she said to Human, by way of launching
their conversation tonight. They spoke every night like this, mind to mind,
though they had never met. How could they, she always in the dark of her deep
home, he always rooted by the gate of Milagre? But the conversation of the
mind was truer than any language, and they knew each other better than they
ever could have by use of mere sight and touch.
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said Human.
it make?> Then she told him all that had passed between her and Young
Valentine and Miro today.
said Human.
and hard of hearing.>
in their new homes. How can we make a good web for catching an aiúa?
Especially one that already has a home. And where is that home? Where is this
bridge my mothers made? Where is this Jane?>
said Human.
The Hive Queen understood that he was answering her question.
asked the Hive Queen.
us. So it's no surprise that he should be the first human like us in his
ability to control more than one body.>
said Human.
old body ever since the others came into existence. And for a while it looked
like he might slough off Young Valentine. But that's changed now.>
disease. He just doesn't exchange oxygen well. He can't rise up into
consciousness. Ender's sister, Old Valentine, says that maybe he's paying full
attention to his other selves, so much so that he can't spare any for the here
and now of his own old body. So his body is starting to fail, here
and there. Lungs first. Maybe a little bit everywhere, only it's the lungs
that show it first.>
Human reminded her mildly.
The Hive Queen had already made the connection that Human intended.
more than needing a web to catch the aiúa of this Jane. We need to catch
Ender's aiúa, too, and pass it into one of his other bodies.>
hive queen dies, so also do all her workers.>
right. Only because the workers haven't the capacity to hold a hive queen's
mind.>
Because death means nothing to you?>
said Human.
said the Hive Queen.
said Human.
because he's lost the will to live. This body is dying because he's lost
interest in the life that it's leading. But he still wants to live the life of
Peter. And the life of Valentine.>
He's never learned to cast out and link as we fathertrees can. As you do with
your workers, and now with me.>
hear his thoughts and see through his eyes. And he dreamed of us during those
days.>
he shouldn't kill you.>
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never learned to question his senses half enough.>
said the Hive Queen.
we'll learn enough to find and catch this Jane, too.>
from the course that any other life takes?>
we fathers are with each other. You might remember, too, that we are also
bound up with the mothertrees. They can't speak, but they're filled with life,
and we anchor ourselves to them as surely as your workers are tied to you.
Find a way to include them in your web, and the fathers will be joined
effortlessly.>
what it looks like to you, and I'll try to make you understand what I'm doing
and where it leads.>
said the Hive Queen.
know how to find him if he's unconscious.>
said the Hive Queen.
was made to fit too well with mine for it to go unrecognized.>
Plikt stood beside Ender's bed because she could not bear to sit, could not
bear to move. He was going to die without uttering another word. She had
followed him, had given up home and family to be near him, and what had he
said to her? Yes, he let her be his shadow sometimes; yes, she was a silent
observer of many of his conversations over the past few weeks and months.
But when she tried to speak to him of things more personal, of deep memories,
of what he meant by the things that he had done, he only shook his head and
said -- kindly, because he was kind, but firmly also because he did not wish
her to misunderstand -- said to her, "Plikt, I'm not a teacher anymore."
Yes you are, she wanted to say to him. Your books go on teaching even where
you have never been. The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and already The Life of
Human seems likely to take its place beside them. How can you say you're
through with teaching, when there are other books to write, other deaths to
speak? You have spoken the deaths of killers and saints, aliens, and once the
death of a whole city swallowed up in a cataclysmic volcano. But in telling
these stories of others, where was your story, Andrew Wiggin? How can I speak
your death if you never explained it to me?
Or is this your last secret -- that you never knew any more about the people
whose deaths you spoke than I know about you today. You force me to invent, to
guess, to wonder, to imagine -- is this what you also did?
Discover the most widely believed story, then find an alternate explanation
that made sense to others and had meaning and the power to transform, and then
tell that tale -- even though it was also a fiction, and no truer than the
story everyone believed? Is that what I must say as I speak the death of the
Speaker for the Dead? His gift was not to discover truth, it was to invent it;
he did not unfold, unknot, untwist the lives of the dead, he created them. And
so I create his. His sister says he died because he tried to follow his wife
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