Children of the Mind (Ender, Book 4) (Ender Quartet)

marriage very seriously."
    "Yes, well, it's left something of a leadership vacuum here," said Olhado. "Not that everybody isn't doing their job just fine. I mean, the system works and all that. But Ender was the one we all looked to to tell us what to do when the system stops working. If you know what I mean."
    "I know what you mean," said Miro. "And you can speak of it in front of Jane. She knows she's going to be shut down as soon as Starways Congress gets their plans in place."
    "It's more complicated than that," said Grego. "Most people don't know about the danger to Jane -- for that matter, most don't even know she exists. But they can do the arithmetic to figure out that even going full tilt, there's no way to get all the humans off Lusitania before the fleet gets here. Let alone the pequeninos. So they know that unless the fleet is stopped, somebody is going to be left here to die. There are already those who say that we've wasted enough starship space on trees and bugs."
    "Trees" referred, of course, to the pequeninos, who were not, in fact, transporting fathertrees and mothertrees; and "bugs" referred to the Hive Queen, who was also not wasting space sending a lot of workers. But every world they were settling did have a large contingent of pequeninos and at least one hive queen and a handful of workers to help her get started. Never mind that it was the hive queen on every world that quickly produced workers who were doing the bulk of the labor getting agriculture started; never mind that because they were not taking trees with them, at least one male and female in every group of pequeninos had to be "planted" -- had to die slowly and painfully so that a fathertree and mothertree could take root and maintain the cycle of pequenino life. They all knew -- Grego more than any other, since he'd recently been in the thick of it -- that under the polite surface was an undercurrent of competition between species.
    And it was not just among the humans, either. While on Lusitania the pequeninos still outnumbered humans by vast numbers, on the new colonies the humans predominated. "It's your fleet coming to destroy Lusitania," said Human, the leader of the fathertrees these days. "And even if every human on Lusitania died, the human race would continue. While for the Hive Queen and for us, it is nothing less than the survival of our species that is at stake. And yet we understand that we must let humans dominate for a time on these new worlds, because of your knowledge of skills and technologies we have not yet mastered, because of your practice at subduing new worlds, and because you still have the power to set fires to burn our forests." What Human said so reasonably, his resentment couched in polite language, many other pequeninos and fathertrees said more passionately: "Why should we let these human invaders, who brought all this evil upon us, save almost all their population, while most of us will die?"
    "Resentment between the species is nothing new," said Miro.
    "But until now we had Ender to contain it," said Grego. "Pequeninos, the Hive Queen, and most of the human population saw Ender as a fair broker, someone they could trust. They knew that as long as he was in charge of things, as long as his voice was heard, their interests would be protected."
    "Ender isn't the only good person leading this exodus," said Miro.
    "It's a matter of trust, not of virtue," said Valentine. "The nonhumans know that Ender is the Speaker for the Dead. No other human has ever spoken for another species that way. And yet the humans know that Ender is the Xenocide -- that when the human race was threatened by an enemy countless generations ago, he was the one who acted to stop them and save humanity from, as they feared, annihilation. There isn't exactly a candidate with equivalent qualifications ready to step into Ender's role."
    "What's that to me?" asked Miro bluntly. "Nobody listens to me here. I have no connections. I certainly can't take Ender's place either, and right now I'm tired and I need to sleep. Look at Young Val, she's half-dead with weariness, too."
    It was true; she was barely able to stand. Miro at once reached out to support her; she gratefully leaned against his shoulder.
    "We don't want you to take Ender's place," said Olhado. "We don't want anybody to take his place. We want him to take his place."
    Miro laughed. "You think I can persuade him? You've got his sister right there! Send her!"
    Old Valentine