Xenocide (Ender's Saga 3)

"You can't," said Valentine.

"I can't stop them and I can't let them go," said Ender. "To stop them would be to risk destroying the buggers and the piggies alike. To let them go would be to risk destroying all of humanity."

"You have to talk to them. You have to reach some kind of agreement."

"What would an agreement with us be worth?" asked Ender. "We don't speak for humanity in general. And if we make threats, the hive queen will simply destroy all our satellites and probably our ansible as well. She may do that anyway, just to be safe."

"Then we'd really be cut off," said Miro.

"From everything," said Ender.

It took Valentine a moment to realize that they were thinking of Jane. Without an ansible, they couldn't speak to her anymore. And without the satellites that orbited Lusitania, Jane's eyes in space would be blinded.

"Ender, I don't understand," said Valentine. "Is the hive queen our enemy?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" asked Ender. "That's the trouble with restoring her species. Now that she has her freedom again, now that she's not bundled up in a cocoon hidden in a bag under my bed, the hive queen will act in the best interest of her species--whatever she thinks that is."

"But Ender, it can't be that there has to be war between humans and buggers again."

"If there were no human fleet heading toward Lusitania, the question wouldn't come up."

"But Jane has disrupted their communications," said Valentine. "They can't receive the order to use the Little Doctor."

"For now," said Ender. "But Valentine, why do you think Jane risked her own life in order to cut off their communications?"

"Because the order was sent."

"Starways Congress sent the order to destroy this planet. And now that Jane has revealed her power, they'll be all the more determined to destroy us. Once they find a way to get Jane out of the way, they'll be even more certain to act against this world."

"Have you told the hive queen?"

"Not yet. But then, I'm not sure how much she can learn from my mind without my wanting her to. It's not exactly a means of communication that I know how to control."

Valentine put her hand on Ender's shoulder. "Was this why you tried to persu

ade me not to come see the hive queen? Because you didn't want her to learn the real danger?"

"I just don't want to face her again," said Ender. "Because I love her and I fear her. Because I'm not sure whether I should help her or try to destroy her. And because once she gets those rockets into space, which could be any day now, she could take away our power to stop her. Take away our connection with the rest of humanity."

And, again, what he didn't say: She could cut Ender and Miro off from Jane.

"I think we definitely need to have a talk with her," said Valentine.

"Either that or kill her," said Miro.

"Now you understand my problem," said Ender.

They rode on in silence.

The entrance to the hive queen's burrow was a building that looked like any other. There was no special guard--indeed, in their whole excursion they hadn't seen a single bugger. Valentine remembered when she was young, on her first colony world, trying to imagine what the bugger cities had looked like when they were fully inhabited. Now she knew--they looked exactly the way they did when they were dead. No scurrying buggers like ants swarming over the hills. Somewhere, she knew, there were fields and orchards being tended under the open sun, but none of that was visible from here.

Why did this make her feel so relieved?

She knew the answer to the question even as she asked it. She had spent her childhood on Earth during the Bugger Wars; the insectoid aliens had haunted her nightmares, as they had terrified every other child on Earth. Only a handful of human beings, however, had ever seen a bugger in person, and few of those were still alive when she was a child. Even in her first colony, where the ruins of bugger civilization surrounded her, they had found not even one desiccated corpse. All her visual images of the buggers were the horrifying images from the vids.

Yet wasn't she the first person to have read Ender's book, the Hive Queen? Wasn't she the first, besides Ender, to come to think of the hive queen as a person of alien grace and beauty?

She was the first, yes, but that meant little. Everyone else alive today had grown up in a moral universe shaped in part by the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. While she and Ender were the only two left alive who had grown up with the steady campaign of loathing toward the buggers. Of course she felt irrational relief at not having to see the buggers. To Miro and Plikt, the first sight of the hive queen and her workers wouldn't have the same emotional tension that it had for her.