the workers was seeing, as if each were a single eye connected to the same brain. There was no hope of Ender making sense of so many images at once.
Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one, the others were sorted out. He imagined that she must have some organizing principle for the workers. She could disregard all those who weren't part of the queen-making process. Then, for Ender's sake, she had to sort through even the ones who were part of it, and that was harder, because usually she could sort the visions by task rather than by the individual workers. At last, though, she was able to show him a primary image and he could focus on it, ignoring the flickers and flashes of peripheral visions.
A queen being hatched. She had shown him this before, in a carefully-planned vision when he had first met her, when she was trying to explain things to him. Now, though, it wasn't a sanitized, carefully orchestrated presentation. The clarity was gone. It was murky, distracted, real. It was memory, not art.
"So you can talk to her?"
"She doesn't grow her intelligence until cocooning?"
"So you have to teach her."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then stop showing me anything, if it depends on another sense. Eyes are too important to humans; if I see anything it'll mask out anything but clear speech and I don't think there's much of that at a queen-making."
"I'm still seeing something."
"Then explain it. Help me make sense of it."
"So then you find her?"
"Then what are you searching for?"
"You mean there's something else? Something besides the queen's body?"
"No, I never saw it."
"I didn't know to look for anything else. I saw the making of the queen when you first showed it to me years ago. I thought I understood then."
"So if the queen's just a body, who are you ?"
"But you've always talked as if you were the Hive Queen."
"But this center-thing, this binder-together--"
"You call it. What is it?"
"Yes, what is it?"
It was almost unbearably frustrating. So much of what the Hive Queen did was instinctive. She had no language and so she had never had a need to develop clear explanations of that which had never needed explaining till now. So he had to help her find a way to clarify what he couldn't perceive directly.
"Where do you find it?"
"But how do you call?"
"So you're calling some other creature to come and take possession of the queen."
"So where does it come from?"
"But where is that?"
"Fine, I believe you. But where does it come from?"
"You forget?"
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