"Both of us mutes," said Sel, "and all of us deaf."
"What I wouldn't give to have just one of them alive."
"But there couldn't be just one," said Sel. "They hived. They needed hundreds, perhaps thousands to reach the critical mass to achieve intelligence."
"Or not," said Po. "It could also be that only the queen was sentient. Why else would they all have died when the queens died?"
"Unless the queen was the nexus, the center of a neural network, so they all collapsed when she did. But until then, all of them individuals."
"As I said, I wish we had one alive," said Po, "so we could know something instead of guessing from a few desiccated corpses."
Sel silently rejoiced that yet another generation of this colony had produced at least one who thought like a scientist. "We have more of them preserved than any of the other colonies. Here, there are so few scavengers that can eat them, the corpses lasted long enough for us to get to the planet's surface and freeze some of them. We actually got to study structure."
"But no queens."
"The sorrow of my life," said Sel.
"Really? That's your greatest regret?"
Sel fell silent.
"Sorry," said Po.
"It's all right. I was just considering your question. My greatest regret. What a question. How can I regret leaving everything behind on Earth, when I left it in order to help save it? And coming here allowed me to do things that other scientists could only dream of. I have been able to name more than five thousand species already and come up with a rudimentary classification system for an entire native biota. More than on any of the other formic worlds."
"Why?"
"Because the formics stripped those worlds and then established only a limited subset of their own flora and fauna. This is the only world where most of the species evolved here. The only place that's messy. The formics brought fewer than a thousand species to their colonies. And their home world, which might have had vastly more diversity, is gone."
"So you don't regret coming here?"
"Of course I do," said Sel. "And I'm also glad to be here. I regret being an old wreck of a man. I'm glad I'm not dead. It seems to me that all my regrets are balanced by something I'm glad of. On average, then, I have no regrets at all. But I'm also not a bit happy. Perfect balance. On average, I don't feel anything at all. I think I don't exist."
"Father says that if you get absurd results, you're not a scientist, you're a philosopher."
"But my results are not absurd."
"You do exist. I can see you and hear you."
"Genetically speaking, Po, I do not exist. I am off the web of life."
"So you choose to measure by the only standard that allows your life to be meaningless?"
Sel laughed. "You are your mother's son."
"Not father's?"
"Both, of course. But it's your mother who won't put up with any bullshit."
"Speaking of which, I can hardly wait to see a bull."
Now that the ship was rapidly decelerating as they approached Shakespeare, the crew were far busier than usual. The first order of business would be docking with the transport ship that had brought the war fleet here to this world forty years before. Without supplies for a return journey, the ship was left as a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit directly over the colony site. Solar power was enough to keep its computers and communications running for these past decades.
The original crew, colonists now, had used their fighters as landing vehicles; their supplies and equipment for the first years of the colony had been designed to fit in or on the fighters. And all of them were equipped with ansibles. But the fighters were land-once vehicles, and had no ability to leave the surface of the planet.
Admiral Morgan's crew would service and refit the transport. They had brought new communications and weather satellites with them, which they would place in geosync at intervals all the way around the planet. Then the old transport would be given a captain and crew, and would voyage, not back to Eros, but on to another colony.
Despite all this business, Ender had no illusion that Admiral Morgan himself was at all distracted from watching over Ender's activities. The man was a planner, a plotter, and while a "man of peace" like him might seem to plod along, never doing much, he was always poised to strike.