Enders In Exile

hurt
them—the ones who had wanted to be closer than mere
pals—when he didn't let things change, didn't let them into
his thoughts. He couldn't explain to them that he wasn't keeping them
out, that there was simply no way they'd understand what it was that
occupied him whenever he wasn't forced to think about something else:
    The hive queens.
    It made no sense, what
the formics had done. They weren't stupid. Yet they had made the
strategic mistake of grouping all their queens—not "their"
queens, they
were
the queens, the queens
were
the formics—they had all gathered on their home planet, where
Ender's use of the M.D. Device could—and
did—destroy them utterly, all at once.
    Mazer had explained
that the hive queens must have gathered on their home planet years
before they could have known that the human fleet
had
the M.D. Device. They knew—from the way Mazer had defeated
their main expedition to Earth's star system—that their
greatest weakness was that if you found the hive queen and killed her,
you had killed the whole army. So they withdrew from all their forward
positions, put the hive queens together on their home world, and then
protected that world with everything they had.
    Yes, yes, Ender
understood
that
.
    But Ender had used the
M.D. Device early on in the invasion of the formic worlds, to destroy a
formation of ships. The hive queens had instantly understood the
capabilities of the weapon and never allowed their ships to get close
enough together for the M.D. Device to be able to set up a
self-sustaining reaction.
    So: Once they knew that
the weapon existed, and that humans were willing to use it, why did
they
stay
on that single planet? They must have
known that the human fleet was coming. As Ender won battle after
battle, they must have known that the possibility of their defeat
existed. It would have been easy for them to get onto starships and
disperse from their home planet. Before that last battle began, they
could all have been out of range of the M.D. Device.
    Then we would have had
to hunt them down, ship by ship, queen by queen. Their planets would
still be inhabited by the formics, and so they could have fought us in
bloody confrontations on every world, meanwhile building new ships,
launching new fleets against us.
    But they had stayed.
And died.
    Was it fear? Maybe. But
Ender didn't think so. The hive queens had bred themselves for war. All
the speculations of the scientists who had studied the anatomy and
molecular structure of the formic corpses left over from the Second
Formic War led to that conclusion: The formics were created, first and
foremost, to fight and kill. That implied that they had evolved in a
world where such fighting was necessary.
    The best
guess—at least the one that made the most sense to
Ender—was that they weren't fighting some predatory species
on their home world. Like humans, they would surely have wiped out any
really threatening predator early on. No, they had evolved to fight
each other. Queens fighting queens, spawning vast armies of formics and
developing tools and weapons for them, each of them vying to be the
dominant—or sole surviving—queen.
    Yet somehow they had
gotten over it. They had stopped fighting each other.
    Was it before they had
developed spaceflight and colonized other worlds? Or was it one
particular queen who developed near-lightspeed ships and created
colonies and then used the power that she had developed to crush the
others?
    It wouldn't have
mattered. Her own daughters would surely have rebelled against
her—it would go on and on, each new generation trying to
destroy the one before. That was how hives on Earth worked,
anyway—the rival queen must be driven off or killed. Only the
non-reproducing workers could be allowed to stay, because they weren't
rivals, they were servants.
    It was like the immune
system of an organism. Each hive queen had to make sure that any food
their workers grew was used
only
to nurture her
workers, her children, her mates, and herself. So any
formic—queen or worker—that tried to infiltrate her
territory and use her resources had to be driven off or killed.
    Yet they had stopped
fighting with each other and now cooperated.
    If they could do that
with each other, the implacable enemies that had driven each other's
evolution long enough to become the brilliant sentient beings they
were, then why couldn't they have done it with us? With the humans? Why
couldn't they have tried to communicate