Discovery of Hive Queen Cocoon

Years after the Third Invasion, Ender Wiggin, now governor of the first human colony on a former bugger world, was asked to scout a location for a second settlement. He took along an eleven-year-old boy named Abra, who had been only three when the colony was founded and remembered no other world. On the third morning of their expedition, Ender began to feel an uneasy sense of familiarity. He called out to Abra, who was on top of a steep low hill, and scrambled up to join him. Abra pointed downward into a hollow depression partially filled with water, ringed by concave slopes that cantilevered dangerously over the water. In one direction the hill gave way to two long ridges making a V-shaped valley; in the other, it rose to a piece of white rock, grinning like a skull with a tree growing out of its mouth. Abra remarked that it was like a giant had died there and the Earth had grown up to cover his carcass. Ender knew then why it had looked familiar: it was the Giant's corpse from the mind game he had played as a child at Battle School. He looked through his binoculars in a direction he knew well and saw swings, slides, and monkey bars, now overgrown but unmistakable. Abra noted that the skull-like rock was concrete, not natural stone. Ender said, "I know this place. The buggers built it for me." Abra was incredulous, pointing out that the buggers were all dead fifty years before they arrived. Ender insisted it was impossible but that he knew what he knew. He feared the buggers might be planning revenge, but Abra argued that perhaps this was the closest they could come to talking, to writing a note. Ender decided to go on, and Abra insisted on accompanying him, saying, "You're Ender Wiggin. Don't tell me what eleven-year-old kids can do!" Together they flew in the helicopter over the playground, the woods, the well in the forest clearing, and then out to a cliff with a cave in the cliff wall and a ledge exactly where the End of the World should be. In the distance, just where it should be in the fantasy game, was the castle tower. Ender left Abra with the helicopter, ordering him to go home in an hour if he did not return. Abra protested, but Ender insisted, and Abra stayed. The walls of the tower were notched and ledged for easy climbing, as if they meant him to get in. The room was as it had always been in the game. Ender looked for a snake on the floor but found only a rug with a carved snake's head at one corner. The mirror was waiting for him on the wall, a dull sheet of metal with the rough shape of a human face scratched into it. Ender remembered breaking the mirror in the game, pulling it from the wall, and snakes leaping out to attack him. He walked to the mirror, lifted it, and pulled it away. Nothing jumped from the space behind it. Instead, in a hollowed-out place, there was a white ball of silk with a few frayed strands sticking out. It was the pupa of a queen bugger, already fertilized. As he held it, Ender experienced a flood of visions: he saw the slug-like males clinging to the walls of a dark tunnel, the large adults carrying the infant queen to the mating room, each male penetrating the larval queen, shuddering in ecstasy, and dying. Then the new queen was laid before the old, a magnificent creature clad in soft and shimmering wings. The old queen kissed her to sleep with gentle poison, wrapped her in threads from her belly, and commanded her to become a new city, a new world. Ender wondered how he could know these things, how he could see them like memories in his own mind. In answer, he saw the first of all his battles with the bugger fleets, now from the hive-queen's perspective. He felt what she felt: sadness, a sense of resignation. She had not thought the words, but Ender understood them: "They did not forgive us. We will surely die." Ender asked, "How can you live again?" The queen had no words, but when he closed his eyes, new images came: putting the cocoon in a cool, dark place with water mixed with the sap of a certain tree, kept tepid. Then time, days and weeks, for the pupa to change. When the cocoon turned dusty brown, Ender saw himself splitting it open and helping the small, fragile queen emerge. Then came the thought: "Then I am alive. Then I make my ten thousand children." Ender said, "No. I can't. Your children are the monsters of our nightmares now. If I awoke you, we would only kill you again." In response, a dozen images of human beings being killed by buggers flashed through his mind, accompanied by a grief so powerful he could not bear it, and he wept their tears for them. He said, "If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you." He realized that the buggers had found him through the ansible, followed it, and dwelt in his mind. In the agony of his tortured dreams they came to know him, even as he spent his days destroying them. They found his fear of them and also that he had no knowledge he was killing them. In the few weeks they had, they built this place for him, so he would find it by the evidence of his eyes. The thought pressed into his mind: "We are like you. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams. How were we to know? We could live with you in peace. Believe us, believe us, believe us." Ender reached into the cavity and took out the cocoon. It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it. He said, "I'll carry you. I'll go from world to world until I find a time and a place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time they can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me." He wrapped the queen's cocoon in his jacket and carried her from the tower. Abra asked what was in there. Ender answered, "The answer. To my question." He said nothing more of the matter. They searched for five more days and chose a site for the new colony far to the east and south of the tower. Weeks later, Ender came to Valentine and told her to read something he had written. It was written as if the hive-queen spoke, telling all that they had meant to do and all that they had done. The book was not long, but in it was all the good and all the evil that the hive-queen knew. He signed it not with his name but with a title: Speaker for the Dead. On Earth, the book was published quietly and passed from hand to hand until it was hard to believe that anyone might not have read it. Those who read it began to live by it, and when their loved ones died, a believer would arise beside the grave to be the Speaker for the Dead, telling the truth with full candor. For those who traveled the great cave of space and lived their lives in the hive-queen's tunnels, it became the only religion. No one knew who the original Speaker was. Ender was not inclined to tell them. When Valentine was twenty-five, she finished the last volume of her history of the bugger wars, including at the end the complete text of Ender's little book. By ansible she got an answer from the ancient Hegemon, Peter Wiggin, seventy-seven years old with a failing heart. He said, "I know who wrote it. If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me." Back and forth across the ansible Ender and Peter spoke, with Peter pouring out the story of his days and years, his crimes and his kindnesses. When he died, Ender wrote a second volume, again signed by the Speaker for the Dead. Together, his two books were called the Hive-Queen and the Hegemon, and they were holy writ. Ender said to Valentine, "Come on. Let's fly away and live forever." She said they could not, that there were miracles even relativity could not pull off. He said, "We have to go. I'm almost happy here." She asked why not stay. He answered, "I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it." So they boarded a starship and went from world to world. Wherever they stopped, he was always Andrew Wiggin, itinerant speaker for the dead, and she was always Valentine, historian errant, writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead. And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time.