ENDER IN EXILE

He was afraid, for a moment, that she had died during the voyage. But no. After he had held the cocoon in his bare hands for a few minutes, an image flickered into his mind. Or rather a rapid series of images—the faces of hundreds of hive queens, a thousand of them, in such rapid succession that he couldn't register any of them. It was as if, upon waking—upon rebooting—all the ancestors in this hive queen's memory had to make an appearance in her mind before settling back and letting her have control of her own brain.

What ensued was not a conversation—it could not be. But when Ender thought back on it, it seemed to him like a conversation, complete with dialogue. It was as if his brain was not designed to remember what had passed between them—the direct transfer of shaped memory. Instead, it translated the exchange into the normal human mode of interresponsive language.

"Is this my new home? Will you let me come out?" she asked him—or rather, she showed herself emerging from the cocoon into the cool air of a cave, and the feeling of a question—or a demand?—came along with the image.

"Too soon," he said—and in his mind there really were words, or at least ideas shapable into language. "Nobody's forgotten anything yet. They would be terrified. They'd kill you as soon as they discovered you or any of your children."

"More waiting," she said. "Wait forever."

"Yes," he said. "I will voyage as often as I can, as far as I can. Five hundred years. A thousand years. I don't know how long it will be before I can safely bring you out, or where we'll be."

She reminded him that she was not affected by the relativistic effects of time travel. "Our minds work on the principle of your ansible. We are always connected to the real time of the universe." For this she used images of clocks that she drew from his own memory. Her own metaphor for time was the sweep of sun across sky for days, and its drift northward and south again to show years. Hive queens never needed to subdivide time into hours and minutes and seconds, because with her own children—the formics—everything was infinitely now.

"I'm sorry that you have to experience all the time of the voyage," said Ender. "But you want me in stasis during the voyage, so I'll stay young long enough to find you a home."

Stasis—she compared his hibernation with her own pupation. "But you come out the same. No change."

"We humans don't change in cocoons. We stay awake through our maturation process."

"So for you, this sleep isn't birth."

"No," said Ender. "It's temporary death. Extinguishment, but with a spark left glowing in the ash. I didn't even dream."

"All I do is dream," she said. "I dream the whole history of my people. They are my mothers, but now they are also my sisters, because I remember doing all the things they do."

For this, she had drawn on the images of Valentine and Peter to say "sisters." And when Peter's face appeared, there was fear and pain in the memory.

"I don't fear him anymore," said Ender. "Or hate him. He turned out to be a great man."

But the hive queen didn't believe him. She drew from his mind the image of the old man from their ansible conversations, and compared it with the child Peter in Ender's deepest memory. They were too different to be the same.

And Ender could not argue the point. Peter the Hegemon was not Peter the monster. Maybe he never was. Maybe both were an illusion. But Peter the monster was the one buried deep in Ender's memory, and he was unlikely to expunge him from it.

He put the cocoon back in its hiding place, locked it, and then left it on the cart of luggage being taken down to the surface.

* * * * *

Virlomi actually came to meet the shuttle; and in moments she made it clear she was extending this courtesy only for Ender's sake. She came aboard the shuttle to talk to him.

Ender did not take this as a good sign. While they waited for her to come aboard, Ender said to Valentine, "She doesn't want me here. She wants me to go back onto the ship."

"Wait and see what she wants," said Valentine. "Maybe she just wants to know what you intend."

When she came in, Virlomi looked so much older than the girl whose face Ender had seen on the vids of the Sino-Indian War. A year or two of brooding over defeat, and then sixteen years of governing a colony—they were bound to take their toll.

"Thank you for letting me visit you so early," she said.

"You have flattered us beyond measure," said Ender. "To come out and receive us yourself."

"I had to see you," she said, "before you emerged into the colony. I swear to you that I told no one of your coming."

"I believe you," said Ender. "But your remark seems to imply that people know I'm here."

"No," she said. "No, there's no rumor of that, thank God."

Which God, Ender wondered. Or, being reputed a goddess, did she thank herself?