drop was a soft, jellylike egg. The Hive Queen maneuvered her body so that her face was directly in the sunlight, her multiplex eyes shining like hundreds of emerald stars. Then the ovipositor plunged downward. When it came up, the egg still clung to the end, but on the next emergence the egg was gone. Several times more her abdomen dipped downward, each time coming up with more strands of fluid stringing downward from the tip.
" Nossa Senhora ," said Miro. Valentine recognized it from its Spanish equivalent-- Nuestra Señora , Our Lady. It was usually an almost meaningless expression, but now it took on a repulsive irony. Not the Holy Virgin, here in this deep cavern. The Hive Queen was Our Lady of the Darkness. Laying eggs over the bodies of lying workers, to feed the larvae when they hatched.
"It can't always be this way," said Plikt.
For a moment Valentine was simply surprised to hear Plikt's voice. Then she realized what Plikt was saying, and she was right. If a living worker had to be sacrificed for every bugger that hatched, it would be impossible for the population to increase. In fact, it would have been impossible for this hive to exist in the first place, since the Hive Queen had to give life to her first eggs without the benefit of any legless workers to feed them.
It came into Valentine's mind as if it were her own idea. The Hive Queen only had to place a living worker's body into the egg casing when the egg was supposed to grow into a new Hive Queen. But this wasn't Valentine's own idea; it felt too certain for that. There was no way she could know this information, and yet the idea came clearly, unquestionably, all at once. As Valentine had always imagined that ancient prophets and mystics heard the voice of God.
"Did you hear her? Any of you?" asked Ender.
"Yes," said Plikt.
"I think so," said Valentine.
"Hear what?" asked Miro.
"The Hive Queen," said Ender. "She explained that she only has to place a worker into the egg casing when she's laying the egg of a new Hive Queen. She's laying five-- there are two already in place. She invited us to come to see this. It's her way of telling us that she's sending out a colony ship. She lays five queen-eggs, and then waits to see which is strongest. That's the one she sends."
"What about the others?" asked Valentine.
"If any of them is worth anything, she cocoons the larva. That's what they did to her. The others she kills and eats. She has to-- if any trace of a rival queen's body should touch one of the drones that hasn't yet mated with this Hive Queen, it would go crazy and try to kill her. Drones are very loyal mates."
"Everybody else heard this?" asked Miro. He sounded disappointed. The Hive Queen wasn't able to talk to him.
"Yes," said Plikt.
"Only a bit of it," said Valentine.
"Empty your mind as best you can," said Ender. "Get some tune going in your head. That helps."
In the meantime, the Hive Queen was nearly done with the next set of amputations. Valentine imagined stepping on the growing pile of legs around the queen; in her imagination, they broke like twigs with hideous snapping sounds.
The queen was answering her thoughts.
The thoughts in her mind were clearer. Not so intrusive now, more controlled. Valentine was able to feel the difference between the Hive Queen's communications and her own thoughts.
" Ouvi ," whispered Miro. He had heard something at last. " Fala mais, escuto . Say more, I'm listening."
Valentine tried to conceive how the Hive Queen was managing to speak Stark into her mind. Then she realized that the Hive Queen was almost certainly doing nothing of the kind-- Miro was hearing her in his native language, Portuguese; and Valentine wasn't really hearing Stark at all, she was hearing the English that it was based on, the American English that she had grown up with. The Hive Queen wasn't sending language to them, she was sending thought, and their brains were making sense of it in whatever language lay deepest in their minds. When Valentine heard the word echoes followed by reverberations , it wasn't the Hive Queen struggling for the right word, it was Valentine's own mind grasping for words to fit the meaning.
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher
Kostenlos Online Lesen 
