They knew who he was. Or rather, they knew who humans were. They well remembered the Hive Queen’s grief when she experienced the loss of all the other Hive Queens when the human fleet erased the Formic home world centuries ago. Whether this meant that these very drones had been alive at the time, or they merely experienced the Hive Queen’s vivid memories of the tragedy, Ender could not tell. Maybe the drones themselves didn’t know.

  What mattered was that the drones urgently needed something from the humans who had come to their ship.

  It finally dawned on him what they wanted. Give us the Hive Queen.

  What Hive Queen? He framed the question by thinking of a queen and then having an urgent questioning attitude. It didn’t work—it was really the same message they were sending him. Where is she?

  He tried something else. He pictured each of his sibs and himself, and showed that they were also searching for the Hive Queen. He showed them searching through the Herodotus and finding nothing. He hoped they were getting the message: We have no Hive Queen.

  In reply, an image came into his mind, a very clear one. A young man under the open sky of a planet, carrying a cocoon like the one Ender had in his sample case.

  “They want a cocoon,” said Ender. “Get the cocoon we took and give it to them.”

  The drones let go of him and his mind came back. No, his mind had been there all along. He had simply lost full control of it until the drones left him alone. He felt so small and empty. He had never truly felt like a child before, since his life was built around children the same size, and the Giant, who bore no comparison. Now Ender felt how lonely it was to be locked into your own mind, with only the bossiness of language to keep him company.

  Ender opened his eyes and maneuvered himself to watch as Carlotta opened the sample case and took out the cocoon.

  At once the drones swarmed to it, seized it, flew with it to the middle of the room, pressed themselves against it.

  After a long moment, they let go of it and flew together to a corner of the room, where they swarmed, but not in the normal way. They kept bumping into each other—hard enough that it would bruise a human. Bumping, bumping.

  And he realized: They’re grieving. They’re so sad.

  The cocoon continued drifting. Ender moved near it, caught it, returned it to the sample case.

  As soon as the case was closed, a drone came back to him, flying so fast that Ender thought he was being attacked. He caught a glimpse of the ever-alert Sergeant aiming the fog at the drone, but Ender didn’t even have to say no. Carlotta put out a restraining hand.

  The drone landed and latched on to him. Images flooded Ender’s mind again, but not in the confused way. There was despair and hunger in the drone’s message, but he was not angry. Nor were the other drones, whom Ender could sense contributing to the message. The cocoon that Ender had offered them was empty. Dead. It was just another of the cocoons from the Queen’s chamber—they had all died with the Queen.

  But they knew of a living Queen, one who had never been on this ship. They needed her now. A human had her, and they could even show Ender his face, but he had no idea who it was.

  They showed him the inside of the ecotat, all the plants, the small animals. Trees, insects, grasses, flowers, roots, small climbers, creepers, all inside the cylinder.

  They showed him Formic workers loading plants and animals into the huge insectile landing vehicles and launching them down through the atmosphere, where they opened and Formic workers unloaded them, planted things, reducing all the native flora and fauna to protoplasmic goo like the vile liquid in the Hive Queen’s lair.

  It’s what they were doing on Earth during the scouring of China. Turn the native life-forms into a nutrient-rich soup and then start growing useful Formic plants and animals in it.

  But as soon as it was clear that Ender understood, the drone pointedly made the Formic workers disappear.

  Then another image of the Formic landing vehicle opening up. Instead of a Formic worker coming out, this time it was a drone. But it wasn’t flying. It was creeping on the surface. It was being crushed by the gravity of the planet. It was dying.

  They need a Hive Queen. They can’t live on a planet’s surface unless they’re clinging to a queen.

  They showed him again the young man with the cocoon, only this time they showed the cocoon opening up under a bright sun on a planet full of life, and when the cocoon tore open, what came out was a Hive Queen.

  Ender blotted out that image. I don’t have a Hive-Queen-in-a-cocoon for you. Instead he tried to show them images of himself and Sergeant and Carlotta unloading things, planting things. But the drone who was touching him rejected the image, blotting it out. It replaced the image with a picture of hundreds of Formic workers swarming over the surface of the world, tending fields, carrying loads, building things—and then he erased the workers.

  For some reason they couldn’t accept the idea of humans planting their flora and fauna on the planet.

  No, no, Ender was missing the point, thinking like a human. They were showing him that the whole thing was pointless to them if there was no queen to populate the world.

  Ender was getting more adept with the image-language, and now he repeated back to them the image of the dying Formic workers at the time of the Hive Queen’s death. Why? He pushed his inquiry at them with great urgency. Why did the Formic workers die?

  They answered him by showing the dead Hive Queen.

  Why does the death of the Hive Queen cause the death of the workers?

  He had no idea if they really understood. They simply showed the dead Hive Queen again.

  So Ender tried juxtaposition. He remembered the dead Hive Queen, then the dying Formics, but then contrasted them with the swarming drones. Dying workers, living drones, dying workers, living drones, and all the time his urgent inquiry.

  The drones watched these images, his inquiry, till he had repeated them several times.

  Then the messenger let go of him and retreated to the distant corner where the others awaited him.

  “What did you say?” asked Sergeant. “Did you piss them off?”

  “They know this cocoon is dead,” said Ender, “and they want a live one.”

  “Well, abracadabra,” said Carlotta. “What do they think we are? Wizards?”

  “They think there’s a living Hive Queen in a cocoon somewhere. A human has her. I saw him—they know his face, it’s the same face every time. When they saw our ship and realized we were human, they thought we were bringing that cocoon with us. They thought that’s what I had in the sample case.”

  “Sorry to be such a disappointment,” said Sergeant. “Why would they think a Hive Queen cocoon survived?”

  Then the two who were wearing their helmets grew quiet, listening. “The Giant’s laughing,” said Carlotta.

  “Put your helmet on,” said Sergeant. “You want to hear this.”

  “My helmet tells them I’m done talking with them, and I’m not.”

  Sergeant sighed, but Carlotta came close to Ender, sat beside him. He could hear the Giant faintly now.

  “It’s the Speaker for the Dead,” the Giant said. “The Speaker for the Dead has that cocoon. She’s alive inside it, that Hive Queen. That’s why he could interview her and write his book.”

  So The Hive Queen was based on truth after all. And these Formics knew about it because all Hive Queens were in constant contact with each other.

  But not the drones. Ender realized that the moment the Hive Queen died, the drones had contact only with each other. Their mental powers were much greater than those of the workers, but they didn’t match the Hive Queen’s ability to project her mental control or contact over seemingly infinite distances. The drones had to be close.

  The messenger drone returned and landed on his head.

  It had a different message now. Ender saw the life of these drones for the past century. There had been twenty. Now there were only five.

  Ender saw the death of each one. It was numbingly alike. They opened the door, and while most of the drones fought off the attacking rabs, a few would fly past them, outmaneuvering the rabs. They went to the ecotat and entered through a portal known only to them. The feral rabs could not get through it.

  Inside the ecotat, they would gather all the slugs they could and then fly back, slowly, burdened with the clinging slugs.

  As they neared the helm, they would pry off a slug or two and fling it near the horde of rabs pressing against the door of the helm. The rabs immediately went into a feeding frenzy. While they were distracted, the door opened again, and the drones flew in with their remaining slugs.

  Only now and then a rab noticed them and bounded upward, clawing. One by one over the centuries, drones were killed. And as fewer drones remained, it became harder to fight off the rabs at the door, and more dangerous.

  The expeditions to the ecotat ended. Instead, they opened the door just a crack and closed it at once. Then they fought the rabs that got in, killed them, peeled them, ate them.

  But their flesh was nauseating to eat, and worse, they lost more of their brother drones in fighting the rabs that got in. It had been a long time since they had dared to do any such thing. They had been fasting. Two of the drones had died of starvation. The others ate their bodies—not a strange thing to do, in Formic terms, for the Queen herself would eat drones that she no longer found useful, then cause an egg to hatch as a drone and bring it to take the eaten one’s place. Drones were, in a word, delicious.

  That’s what had kept these five alive till now.

  Ender reached into his sample case himself and took out the two slugs he had collected. They were still very much alive; Ender had a clear enough memory of the images of the drones feasting on slugs that he now thought of them as delicious, though of course humans could not metabolize half the proteins in their squirmy bodies.

  The drone that had been talking to him waited till last, allowing the others to feed first. The drones were small enough that Ender could see that even a portion of a slug was a substantial meal.

  They saved a good part of both slugs for the drone-who-talked-to-humans. He ate last; he ate best.

  While they ate, Ender summarized what he had learned.

  “I think that meal saved their lives,” said Ender.

  “A little hard on the slugs,” said Sergeant.

  “I think they would have been better with cinnamon,” said Carlotta.

  Ender ignored their humor. There was no such thing as Formic humor, and he was feeling very Formic right now. “They don’t see any point in seeding this planet if they don’t have a Hive Queen. And we have none to give them.”

  “At least we can get them food,” said Sergeant. “And tame these feral rabs. In fact, we can kill them, if they want. The ship is theirs, so the rabs are theirs, and if they want them dead, we can sedate them and then blast them all. Make the ship safe for the drones again.”

  “I’ll offer,” said Ender. “But it won’t change the pointlessness of their lives.”

  “Won’t change the pointlessness of ours, either,” said Sergeant.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Giant Moves

  The whole time they were in the ark, it was all Bean could do to keep silent. He had commanded so many times in the field that it almost killed him to be a silent observer. The problem was that almost everything he thought of doing, so did Cincinnatus or one of the other children.

  The helmets fed their data into one of the computers on Herodotus and constructed a three-dimensional model of their movements in the holodisplay of Bean’s primary computer. The picture was never complete—whatever the helmets hadn’t observed was left blank. But their movements began to construct a map of the ark. All very useful.

  When the rabs in their breeding chamber swarmed over the children and he saw two of them get claws up under Carlotta’s visor, Bean almost died. His heart gave several mighty heaves in his chest and then was ominously still. A couple of alarms went off. Bean even felt the shooting pain in his left shoulder and arm that was a harbinger of the end.

  But drugs were fed into his veins automatically, and his heart rate returned to normal.

  Ironic, if the rabs killed me just because I couldn’t stop watching the children.

  He feared for them; he was proud of them. They, having known no one but each other and a giant for five of their six years, had no idea of how impossibly small they seemed. The words coming out of their mouths still astonished him. The depth of their analysis, their quickness of thought. If I sounded like them on the streets of Rotterdam, no wonder Sister Carlotta rescued me. I did not belong there.

  As these children would be completely out of place in an American first grade, or biding their time in Finland till they turned seven. Carlotta could pass any engineering degree; Ender could get a doctorate, since much of his work would qualify for a dissertation if Bean had made him write it up properly. Cincinnatus could get into any military academy in the world and be top cadet, except for that little thing about age and size, and the fact that no adult would follow him.

  Yet adults had followed children in the Third Formic War, the final one. Bean had been one of those children. He had sent men to their death, and unlike Ender he knew it.

  But it’s one thing to send adult soldiers, all of whom were volunteers, into battle with a high risk of death. To send six-year-olds, even brilliant ones, especially brilliant ones, the only hope of their new species—that was unconscionable.

  Yet Bean had sent them, because he knew they had to test themselves. When Bean died they would bear full responsibility for a powerful starship and, if Bean had his way, for the Formic ark and a new planet as well. Now he knew they were ready.

  What chilled him, though, were the things Ender reported about his conversation with the drones. How quickly he had learned to make himself understood to a people without language! The courage he had shown in letting them enter his mind. But then they told him things, impossible things. The Formic workers had minds of their own? The Hive Queens suppressed them?

  This was not even hinted at in Ender Wiggin’s book The Hive Queen. Either his son Ender had mistaken their meaning, or his friend Ender Wiggin had been lied to by the cocooned Hive Queen he was carrying around from world to world.

  Ender, you poor man! How did they find you? How did they get the treasure of their species into your hands? And why did you take on the responsibility? The Hive Queen had changed the opinion of most people, so that now Ender Wiggin was called “Ender the Xenocide” and his victory had become known as an unspeakable war crime. All this Ender Wiggin bore—no, caused—in order to make amends with a people that he believed he had completely destroyed.

  But when they encountered Ender Wiggin, when he wrote The Hive Queen, the Hive Queen he spoke to had known about this ark. The Hive Queen aboard the colony ship had not yet died. Yet Ender Wiggin was given to believe that the sole survivor of the Formic species was in his hands. How many other ancient colony ships like this were there? How many others had the Formics sent out during the years when the International Fleet was making its way to all their known colony worlds? For all Bean knew, the Formics already had a hundred worlds, and were merely biding their time.

  One thing was certain: Bean had to talk to these drones himself. He had to know what they knew, for it seemed they knew everything that the Hive Queen knew.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps she only used them to help her monitor the ship, to help her control the workers. She might have kept any number of secrets from them. Why should she tell them everything? She communed with other Hive Queens that way, but with lesser beings, with tools, with slaves, why would she?

  Still, he had to know, for himself, what the drones knew. Not that he didn’t believe Ender’s reporting—the boy simply lacked the context that Bean would bring to such a mental conversation.

  The problem was that Bean could hardly expect the drones to come to him. Leave their ship? Their responsibility to the ship had kept them alive for a century after their Queen died. Even now, they lived only in the hope of saving their ship by finding another queen. They wouldn’t leave the ship—what could Bean offer them?

  So if he was to find out the truth about the Hive Queens, he would have to go to them.

  On the ship, the children obeyed the drones’ request that they wipe out the feral rabs. There were plenty of domestic rabs alive in the ecotat and the Hive Queen’s chamber. By finding and killing all the feral rabs, the children were rendering the drones’ lives bearable. They could feed on slugs to their hearts’ content. Their debt of gratitude to the humans—no, the antonines, the leguminotes—would be considerable.

  If Formics could feel gratitude. Were the drones deceiving them, too?

  It took the children a couple of hours to clear out the ship, with drones leading them to every pocket of feral rabs. By this, Bean learned something else: The drones’ mental abilities extended to sensing the tiny minds of the rabs. What were the individual workers capable of, if the Hive Queen had ever let them alone? Did they have mental abilities comparable to the drones’? Could they “talk” to each other directly? Or would the Queen always sense the conversation and put a stop to it?

  Why did they die when the Queen died? Why didn’t the drones die? They were, if anything, more dependent on the Queen, and yet when she lay down and died they flew away. Only the workers died. Why?

  So many questions.

  “Mission accomplished,” said Cincinnatus. “Permission to return to Herodotus.”

  Bean wanted to say, Yes, brilliantly done, come to my arms, my beamish boy! But he needed more information if he was to accomplish what he knew he had to do before he died. “How tired are you?” he asked. “It’s been a long day.”

  Cincinnatus polled the others. “Tired, but … what do you have in mind?”

  “Two things,” said Bean. “Ender’s samples—he needs to get a sample from the drones. Enough to run their genome and compare it to the genome from the dead cocoon. So we can compare male and female, drone and worker.”