Enders In Exile

money. Gold is just a soft metal to them."
    "A useful one. What's
to say they didn't have bugs just like these, only bred to extract
iron, platinum, aluminum, copper, whatever they wanted?"
    "So they didn't need
tools to mine."
    "No, Po—these
are
the tools. And the refineries." Sel knelt
down. "Let's see if we can get any kind of DNA sample from these."
    "Dead all this time?"
    "There's no way these
are native to this planet. The formics brought them here. So they're
native to the formic home world. Or bred from something native there."
    "Not necessarily," said
Po, "or other colonies would have found them long before now."
    "It took
us
forty years, didn't it?"
    "What if this is a
hybrid?" asked Po. "So it exists only on this world?"
    By now, Sel was
sampling DNA and finding it far easier than he thought. "Po, there's no
way this has been dead for forty years."
    Then it twitched
reflexively under his hand.
    "Or twenty minutes,"
said Sel. "It still has reflexes. It isn't dead."
    "Then it's dying," said
Po. "It has no strength."
    "Starving to death, I
bet," said Sel. "Maybe it just finished its metamorphosis and was
trying to get to the tunnel entrance and stopped here to die."
    Po took the samples
from him and stowed them in Sel's pack.
    "So these gold bugs are
still alive, forty years after the formics stopped bringing them food?
How long
is
the metamorphosis?"
    "Not forty years," said
Sel. He stood up, then bent over again to look at the gold bug. "I
think these cocooned-up bugs embedded in the columns are young. Fresh."
He stood up and started striding deeper into the cavern.
    There were more gold
bugs now, many of them lying on the ground—but unlike the
first one they found, many of these were destroyed, hollowed out.
Nothing but the thick golden shells of their backs, with legs discarded
as if they had been . . .
    "Spat out," said Sel.
"These were eaten."
    "By what?"
    "Larvae," said Sel.
"Cannibalizing the adults because otherwise there's nothing to eat
here. Each generation getting smaller—look how large this one
is? Each one smaller because they only eat the bodies of the adults."
    "And they're working
their way back toward the door," said Po. "To get outside where the
nutrients are."
    "When the formics
stopped coming . . ."
    "Their shells are too
heavy to make much progress," said Po. "So they get as far as they can,
then the larvae feed on the corpse of the adult, then they crawl toward
the light of the entrance as far as they can, cocoon up, and the next
generation emerges, smaller than the last one."
    Now they were among
much larger shells. "These things are supposed to be more than a meter
in length," said Sel. "The closer to the entrance, the smaller."
    Po stopped, pointed at
the lamp. "They're heading toward the light?"
    "Maybe we'll be able to
see one."
    "Rock-devouring larvae
that grind up solid rock and poop out bonded stone columns."
    "I didn't say I wanted
to see it up close."
    "But you do."
    "Well. Yes."
    Now they were both
looking around them, squinting to try to see movement somewhere in the
cavern.
    "What if there's
something it likes much better than light?" asked Po.
    "Soft-bodied food?"
asked Sel. "Don't think I haven't thought of it. The formics brought
them food. Now maybe we have, too."
    At that moment, Po
suddenly rose straight up into the air.
    Sel held up the stick.
Directly above him, a huge sluglike larva clung to the ceiling. Its
mouth end was tightly fastened on Po's back.
    "Unstrap and drop down
here!" called Sel.
    "All our samples!"
    "We can always get more
samples! I don't want to have to extract bits of
you
from one of these pillars!"
    Po got the straps open
and dropped to the floor.
    The pack disappeared
into the larva's maw. They could hear hard metal squeaking and scraping
as the larva's teeth tried to grind up the metal instruments. They
didn't wait to watch. They started toward the entrance. Once they
passed the first gold bug's body, they looked for the bits of blanket
to mark the path.
    "Take my pack," said
Sel, shrugging it off as he walked. "It's got the radio and the DNA
samples in it—get out the entrance and radio for help."
    "I'm not leaving you,"
said Po. But he was obeying.
    "You're the only one
who can get out the entrance faster than that thing can crawl."
    "We haven't seen how
fast it can go."
    "Yes we have," said
Sel. He walked backward for a moment, holding up the lamp.
    The larva was about
thirty meters behind them and coming on faster than they had