Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition

under him was a sturdy cargo net -- a hammock, but with rods to keep it from collapsing into a wad with him folded up inside it.
    When he was completely free of the door, he was resting comfortably within the hammock. Then they swayed him down like good sailors, and the illusion of gravity grew for him as gently and naturally as if he had climbed down a ladder.
    It was just a bit more gravity than he had been used to. He had to breathe just a little more deeply and often. But he wasn't panting. He could do this. He could live this way. For a while.
    When he was at rest on the ground, the cloth of the hammock under him, the birds came swooping down, and he realized they were not birds at all. They were the drones.
    They hovered around him, then came to rest on the ground. Ender came then -- the lab wasn't far away -- and he seemed happy. Too happy for the occasion, really -- his lab work must be going well. Bean had been tracking his lines of research as best he could, but Carlotta had set up this network, and Bean found that she had blocked, or simply not created, the back doors and surreptitious channels he had used constantly on the Herodotus . They were cutting him loose from his close supervision of their lives, even as they solemnly obeyed him in all his overt decisions.
    "They want to begin at once," said Ender. "Talking to you."
    "Before you die," said Cincinnatus dryly.

     
    "Then we'll start at once," said Bean.
    The images came slowly, gently, and feelings were not pushed hard. Suggestions, really.
    At first Bean spoke aloud what he was getting from the drones. Ender, who was also touching them and seeing all, affirmed for him that he was understanding them well.
    Soon it was Carlotta who kept him company. And then Cincinnatus took his turn. The drones also worked in shifts, two at a time staying with him.
    Three days he lived in the dream. Unlike the Hive Queens, Bean did not attempt to hide anything. His whole life he laid bare before the drones. Let them feel what it meant to be a human, a man -- one with responsibilities to others, but ultimately an agent unto himself, free to choose as long as he also accepted the consequences of his choices.
    They marveled. They were horrified at some things -- at the idea of murder. Bean let them see that he thought it was murder when the Hive Queen broke off contact with the mind of a worker, killing her. But the drones were merely amused at his obvious misinterpretation. Not like you, she's not like you humans, you don't understand. They didn't say those words, but he understood the idea from their amused, patient, dismissive feelings. Like adults talking to precocious children. Like Bean talking to his own children when they weren't yet two and had not yet begun to educate themselves completely on their own.

     
    At last the drones withdrew themselves, and then Bean slept for real, deeply, completely. Not dreamlessly, but they were the comfortable dreams of ordinary sleep. No nightmares.
    Then he woke, and spoke to his children. "I learned much, but what was most interesting were the things the Hive Queen never showed them. They didn't believe that anything was left out, they believed she was completely open to them, but what else could they believe? Their lives were surrounded by the lies she wove for them."
    "Parents do that to protect their children, I heard," said Carlotta.
    "I heard that too," said Bean. "And it's probably necessary. Just frustrating for an inquirer like me."
    "How are you feeling?" she asked him.
    "Physically? Look at the machinery and tell me whether I'm alive or not."
    "Good heartbeat," she said. "Other vitals fine -- for a man your size."
    He slept again. When next he woke, it was dusk, and all three children were gathered around him.
    "Father," said Ender. "I have something to tell you. Good and bad. Good, mostly."
    "Then tell me," said Bean. "I don't want to die during a preamble. Get to the meat."
    "Then here it is," said Ender. "The Formics have inadvertently taught me how to cure our condition. We can turn on the normal human patterns of growth and then the end of growth, without switching off Anton's Key."
    "How?" asked Bean.

     
    "They do it with organelles. Like our mitochondria. The queens could mix up a bacterial soup in glands that are only vestigial in the workers and drones. Then they infect the eggs of workers with these bacteria, and the bacteria take up residence in every cell in their bodies.
    "The organelles are