Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

she trembled or remained entirely unaffected. Then Miro took a shuffling forward step, pulling on Valentine's hand, leading her forward into the darkness.
     
     
     
    Ender knew how hard this passage would be for the others. So far only he, Novinha, and Ela had ever visited the Hive Queen, and Novinha had come only the once. The darkness was too unnerving, to move endlessly downward without help of eyes, knowing from small sounds that there was life and movement, invisible but nearby.
    "Can we talk?" asked Valentine. Her voice sounded very small.
    "It's a good idea," said Ender. "You won't bother them . They don't take much notice of sound."
    Miro said something. Without being able to see his lips move, Ender found it harder to understand Miro's speech.
    "What?" asked Ender.
    "We both want to know how far it is," Valentine said.
    "I don't know," said Ender. "From here, anyway. And she might be almost anywhere down here. There are dozens of nurseries. But don't worry. I'm pretty sure I could find my way out."
    "So could I," said Valentine. "With a flashlight, anyway."
    "No light," said Ender. "The egg-laying requires sunlight, but after that light only retards the development of the eggs. And at one stage it can kill the larvae."
    "But you could find your way out of this nightmare in the dark?" asked Valentine.
    "Probably," said Ender. "There are patterns. Like spider webs-- when you sense the overall structure, each section of tunnel makes more sense."
    "These tunnels aren't random?" Valentine sounded skeptical.
    "It's like the tunneling on Eros," said Ender. He really hadn't had that much chance to explore when he lived on Eros as a child-soldier. The asteroid had been honeycombed by the buggers when they made it their forward base in the Sol System; it became fleet headquarters for the human allies after it was captured during the first Bugger War. During his months there, Ender had devoted most of his time and attention to learning to control fleets of starships in space. Yet he must have noticed much more about the tunnels than he realized at the time, because the first time the Hive Queen brought him into her burrows on Lusitania, Ender found that the bends and turns never seemed to take him by surprise. They felt right-- no, they felt inevitable .
    "What's Eros?" asked Miro.
    "An asteroid near Earth," said Valentine. "The place where Ender lost his mind."
    Ender tried to explain to them something about the way the tunnel system was organized. But it was too complicated. Like fractals, there were too many possible exceptions to grasp the system in detail-- it kept eluding comprehension the more closely you pursued it. Yet to Ender it always seemed the same, a pattern that repeated over and over. Or maybe it was just that Ender had got inside the hivemind somehow, when he was studying them in order to defeat them. Maybe he had simply learned to think like a bugger. In which case Valentine was right-- he had lost part of his human mind, or at least added onto it a bit of the hivemind.
    Finally when they turned a corner there came a glimmer of light. " Graças a deus ," whispered Miro. Ender noted with satisfaction that Plikt-- this stone woman who could not possibly be the same person as the brilliant student he remembered-- also let out a sigh of relief. Maybe there was some life in her after all.
    "Almost there," said Ender. "And since she's laying, she'll be in a good mood."
    "Doesn't she want privacy?" asked Miro.
    "It's like a minor sexual climax that goes on for several hours," said Ender. "It makes her pretty cheerful. Hive Queens are usually surrounded only by workers and drones that function as part of themselves. They never learn shyness."
    In his mind, though, he could feel the intensity of her presence. She could communicate with him anytime, of course. But when he was close, it was as if she were breathing into his brainpan; it became heavy, oppressive. Did the others feel it? Would she be able to speak to them? With Ela there had been nothing-- Ela never caught a glimmer of the silent conversation. As for Novinha-- she refused to speak of it and denied having heard anything, but Ender suspected that she had simply rejected the alien presence. The Hive Queen said she could hear both their minds clearly enough, as long as they were present, but couldn't make herself "heard." Would it be the same with these, today?
    It would be such a good thing, if the Hive Queen could speak to another human. She