of him. But with this bugger artifact, he discovered for the first time that he was known.
"Think, Ender. Yes, we reached out toward our enemy, but we weren't looking for you. We were looking for someone like us. A network of minds linked together, with a central mind controlling it. We find each other's minds without trying, because we recognize the pattern. Finding a sister is like finding ourself."
"How did you find me, then?"
"We never thought about how. We only did it. Found a hot bright source. A network, but very strange, with shifting membership. And at the center of it, not something like us, but just another - common one. You. But with such intensity. Focused into the network, toward the other humans. Focused inward on your computer game. And focused outward, beyond all, on us. Searching for us."
"I wasn't searching for you. I was studying you." Watching every vid they had at the Battle School, trying to understand the way the bugger mind worked. "I was imagining you."
"So we say. Searching for us. Imagining us. That's how we search for each other. So you were calling us."
"And that was all?"
"No, no. You were so strange. We didn't know what you were. We couldn't read anything in you. Your vision was so limited. Your ideas shifted so rapidly, and you thought of only one thing at a time. And the network around you kept shifting so much, each member's connection with you waxing and waning over time, sometimes very quickly - "
He was having trouble making sense of what they were saying. What kind of network was he connected to?
"The other soldiers. Your computer."
"I wasn't connected. They were my soldiers, that's all."
"How do you think we're connected? Do you see any wires?"
"But humans are individuals, not like your workers."
"Many queens, many workers, changing back and forth, very confusing. Terrible, frightening time. What were these monsters that had wiped out our colony ship? What kind of creature? You were so strange we couldn't imagine you at all. We could only feel you when you were searching for us."
Not helpful at all. Nothing to do with faster-than-light flight. It all sounded like mumbo-jumbo, not like science at all. Nothing that Grego could express mathematically.
"Yes, that's right. We don't do this like science. Not like technology. No numbers or even thought. We found you like bringing forth a new queen. Like starting a new hive."
Ender didn't understand how establishing an ansible link with his brain could be like hatching out a new queen. "Explain it to me."
"We don't think about it. We just do it."
"But what are you doing when you do it?"
"What we always do."
"And what do you always do?"
"How do you make your penis fill with blood to mate, Ender? How do you make your pancreas secrete enzymes? How do you switch on puberty? How do you focus your eyes?"
"Then remember what you do, and show it to me."
"You forget that you don't like this, when we show you through our eyes."
It was true. She had tried only a couple of times, when he was very young and had first discovered her cocoon. He simply couldn't cope with it, couldn't make sense of it. Flashes, a few glimpses were clear, but it was so disorienting that he panicked, and probably fainted, though he was alone and couldn't be sure what had happened, clinically speaking.
"If you can't tell me, we have to do something."
"Are you like Planter? Trying to die?"
"No. I'll tell you to stop. It didn't kill me before."
"We'll try - something in between. Something milder. We'll remember, and tell you what's happening. Show you bits. Protect you. Safe."
"Try, yes."
She gave him no time to reflect or prepare. At once he felt himself seeing out of compound eyes, not many lenses with the same vision, but each lens with its own picture. It gave him the same vertiginous feeling as so many years before. But this time he understood a little better - in part because she was making it less intense than before, and in part because he knew something about the hive queen now, about what she was doing to him.
The many different visions were what each of 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.
"We'll show you one. The one that matters."
Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one,