Ender in Exile Page 0,146

shuttle. Of course he was pleased to do anything for the great Ender Wiggin. He's of that generation - he was on Eros when you won that final victory. He says he saw you in the corridors there, more than once."

Ender thought back to his brief meeting with the captain before going into stasis. "I didn't recognize him."

"He didn't expect you to. He really is a nice man. Much better at his job than old what's-his-name."

"Quincy Morgan."

"I remembered his name, Ender, I just didn't want to say it or hear it."

Ender cleaned himself up. Stasis left him with a sort of scum all over his body; his skin seemed to crackle just a little when he moved. This can't be good for you, he thought as he scrubbed it off and the skin protested by giving him little stabbing pains. But Graff does stasis ten months of the year and he's still going strong.

And he got me a pension. Isn't that nice. I can't imagine Ganges is using Hegemony money any more than Shakespeare was, but once interstellar trade starts up, maybe there'll start being some buying power in the FPE dollar.

Dried and dressed, Ender got his luggage out of storage and, in the privacy of Valentine's locked stateroom, from which she had discreetly absented herself, Ender opened the case containing the cocoon of the last hive queen in the universe.

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