Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition Page 6

  The drones realized what was happening in time to seal off the Hive Queen's chamber and their own helm. They also sealed off the doors leading "outside," or into the ecotat.

  This drove the rabs insane. Cut off not only from a supply of corpses but also from any access to the slugs, they went crazy, eating each other, eating their mates, their own young.

  But in their frenzy they broke into four of the tram tubes. Now the rabs inside the ecotat, as they collected slugs and put them into the trams, were really feeding the feral rabs. Only one tram continued to send unneeded slugs into the Queen's lair. The only reason the rabs left that one alone was that they were getting plenty to eat from the other four. It didn't occur to their tiny minds to search for more.

  All of this Ender received through visions and feelings put into his mind. It was a constant struggle to make sense of what he was seeing, but he never lost track of the intensity of purpose that the drones felt as they, through the one drone, "talked" to him.

  It finally dawned on him what they wanted. Give us the Hive Queen. He pictured each of his sibs and himself, and showed that they were also searching for the Hive Queen. He showed them searching through the Herodotus and finding nothing. He hoped they were getting the message: We have no Hive Queen.

  In reply, an image came into his mind, a very clear one. A young man under the open sky of a planet, carrying a cocoon like the one Ender had in his samples case.

  "They want a cocoon," said Ender. "Get the cocoon we took and give it to them."

  The drones let go of him and his mind came back. No, his mind had been there all along. He had simply lost full control of it until the drones left him alone. He felt so small and empty.

  Ender opened his eyes and maneuvered himself to watch as Carlotta opened the sample case and took out the cocoon.

  At once the drones swarmed to it, seized it, flew with it to the middle of the room, pressed themselves against it.

  After a long moment, they let go of it and flew together to a corner of the room, where they swarmed, but not in the normal way. They kept bumping into each other -- hard enough that it would bruise a human. Bumping, bumping.

  And he realized: They're grieving. They're so sad.

  The cocoon continued drifting. Ender moved near it, caught it, returned it to the sample case.

  As soon as the case was closed, a drone came back to him, flying so fast that Ender thought he was being attacked. He caught a glimpse of the ever-alert Sergeant aiming the fog at the drone, but Ender didn't even have to say no. Carlotta put out a restraining hand.

  The drone landed and latched on to him. Images flooded Ender's mind again, but not in the confused way. There was despair and hunger in the drone's message, but he was not angry. Nor were the other drones, whom Ender could sense contributing to the message.

  The cocoon that Ender had offered them was empty. Dead. It was just another of the cocoons from the Queen's chamber -- they had all died with the Queen.

  But they knew of a living Queen, one who had never been on this ship. They needed her now. A human had her, and they could even show Ender his face, but he had no idea who it was.

  They showed him the inside of the ecotat, all the plants, the small animals. Trees, insects, grasses, flowers, roots, small climbers, creepers, all inside the cylinder.

  They showed him Formic workers loading plants and animals into the huge insectile landing vehicles and launching them down through the atmosphere, where they opened and Formic workers unloaded them, planted things, reducing all the native flora and fauna to protoplasmic goo like the vile liquid in the Hive Queen's lair.

  It's what they were doing on Earth during the scouring of China. Turn the native life-forms into a nutrient-rich soup and then start growing useful Formic plants and animals in it.

  But as soon as it was clear that Ender understood, the messenger drone pointedly made the Formic workers disappear.

  Then another image of the Formic landing vehicle opening up. Instead of a Formic worker coming out, this time it was a drone. But it wasn't flying. It was creeping on the surface. It was being crushed by the gravity of the planet. It was dying.

  They need a Hive Queen. They can't live on a planet's surface unless they're clinging to a queen.

  They showed him again the young man with the cocoon, only this time they showed the cocoon opening up under a bright sun on a planet full of life, and when the cocoon tore open, what came out was a Hive Queen.

  Ender blotted out that image. I don't have a Hive-Queen-in-a-cocoon for you. Instead he tried to show them images of himself and Sergeant and Carlotta unloading things planting things. But the drone who was touching him rejected the image, blotting it out. It replaced the image with picture of hundreds of Formic workers swarming over the surface of the world, tending fields, carrying loads, building things -- and then he erased the workers.

  For some reason they couldn't accept the idea of humans planting their flora and fauna on the planet.

  No, no, Ender was missing the point, thinking like a human. They were showing him that the whole thing was pointless to them if there was no queen to populate the world.

  Ender was getting more adept with the image-language, and now he repeated back to them the image of the dying Formic workers at the time of the Hive Queen's death. Why? He pushed his inquiry at them with great urgency. Why did the Formic workers die?

  They answered him by showing the dead Hive Queen.

  Why does the death of the Hive Queen cause the death of the workers?

  He had no idea if they really understood. They simply showed the dead Hive Queen again.

  So Ender tried juxtaposition. He remembered the dead Hive Queen, then the dying Formics, but then contrasted them with the swarming drones. Dying workers, living drones, dying workers, living drones, and all the time his urgent inquiry.

  The drones watched these images, his inquiry, till he had repeated them several times.

  Then the messenger let go of him and retreated to the distant corner where the others awaited him.

  "What did you say?" asked Sergeant. "Did you piss them off?"

  "They know this cocoon is dead," said Ender, "and they want a live one."

  "Well, abracadabra," said Carlotta. "What do they think we are? Wizards?"

  "They think there's a living Hive Queen in a cocoon somewhere. A human has her. I saw him -- they know his face, it's the same face every time. When they saw our ship and realized we were human, they thought we were bringing that cocoon with us. They thought that's what I had in the sample case."

  "Sorry to be such a disappointment," said Sergeant. "Why would they think a Hive Queen cocoon survived?"

  Then the two who were wearing their helmets grew quiet, listening. "The Giant's laughing," said Carlotta.

  "Put your helmet on," said Sergeant. "You want to hear this."

  "My helmet tells them I'm done talking with them, and I'm not."

  Sergeant sighed, but Carlotta came close to Ender, sat beside him. He could hear the Giant faintly now.

  "It's the Speaker for the Dead," the Giant said. "The Speaker for the Dead has that cocoon. She's alive inside it, that Hive Queen. That's why he could interview her and write his book."

  So The Hive Queen was based on truth after all. And these Formics knew about it because all Hive Queens were in constant contact with each other.

  But not the drones. Ender realized that the moment the Hive Queen died, the drones had contact only with each other. Their mental powers were much greater than those of the workers, but they didn't match the Hive Queen's ability to project its mental control or contact over seemingly infinite distances. The drones had to be close.

  The messenger drone returned and landed on his head.

  It had a different message now. Ender saw the life of these drones for the past century. There had been twenty. Now there were only five.

  Ender saw the death of each one. It was numbingly alike. They opened the door, and while most of the dro
nes fought off the attacking rabs, a few would fly past them, outmaneuvering the rabs. They went to the ecotat and entered through a portal known only to them. The feral rabs could not get through it.

  Inside the ecotat, they would gather all the slugs they could and then fly back, slowly, burdened with the clinging slugs.

  As they neared the helm, they would pry off a slug or two and fling it near the horde of rabs pressing against the door of the helm. The rabs immediately went into a feeding frenzy. While they were distracted, the door opened again, and the drones flew in with their remaining slugs.

  Only now and then a rab noticed them and bounded upward, clawing. One by one over the centuries, drones were killed. And as fewer drones remained, it became harder to fight off the rabs at the door, and more dangerous.

  The expeditions to the ecotat ended. Instead, they opened the door just a crack and closed it at once. Then they fought the rabs that got in, killed them, peeled them, ate them.

  But their flesh was nauseating to eat, and worse, they lost more of their brother drones in fighting the rabs that got in. It had been a long time since they had dared to do any such thing. They had been fasting. Two of the drones had died of starvation. The others ate their bodies -- not a strange thing to do, in Formic terms, for the Queen herself would eat drones that she no longer found useful, then cause an egg to hatch as a drone and bring it to take the eaten one's place. Drones were, in a word, delicious.

  That's what had kept these five alive till now.

  Ender reached into his sample case himself and took out the two slugs he had collected. They were still very much alive; Ender had a clear enough memory of the images of the drones feasting on slugs that he now thought of them as delicious, though of course humans could not metabolize half the proteins in their squirmy bodies.

  The drone that had been talking to him waited till last, allowing the others to feed first. The drones were small enough that Ender could see that even a portion of a slug was a substantial meal.

  They saved a good part of both slugs for the drone-who-talked-to-humans. He ate last; he ate best.

  While they ate, Ender summarized what he had learned.

  "I think that meal saved their lives," said Ender.

  "A little hard on the slugs," said Sergeant.

  "I think they would have been better with cinnamon," said Carlotta.

  Ender ignored their humor. There was no such thing as Formic humor, and he was feeling very Formic right now. "They don't see any point in seeding this planet if they don't have a Hive Queen. And we have none to give them."

  "At least we can get them food," said Sergeant. "And tame these feral rabs. In fact, we can kill them, if they want. The ship is theirs, so the rabs are theirs, and if they want them dead, we can sedate them and then blast them all. Make the ship safe for the drones again."

  "I'll offer," said Ender. "But it won't change the pointlessness of their lives."

  "Won't change the pointlessness of ours, either," said Sergeant.

  On the ship, the children obeyed the drones' request that they wipe out the feral rabs. There were plenty of domestic rabs alive in the ecotat and the Hive Queen's chamber. By finding and killing all the feral rabs, the children were rendering the drones' lives bearable. They could feed on slugs to their hearts' content. Their debt of gratitude to the humans -- no, the antonines, the leguminotes -- would be considerable.

  If Formics could feel gratitude. Were the drones deceiving them, too?

  It took the children a couple of hours to clear out the ship, with drones leading them to every pocket of feral rabs. By this, Bean learned something else: The drones' mental abilities extended to sensing the tiny minds of the rabs. What were the individual workers capable of, if the Hive Queen had ever let them alone? Did they have mental abilities comparable to the drones'? Could they "talk" to each other directly? Or would the Queen always sense the conversation and put a stop to it?

  Why did they die when the Queen died? Why didn't the drones die? They were, if anything, more dependent on the Queen, and yet when she lay down and died they flew away. Only the workers died. Why?

  So many questions.

  "Mission accomplished," said Cincinnatus.

  CHAPTER 11

  "Two things left to do," said Bean. "Ender's samples -- he needs to get a sample from the drones. Enough to run their genome and compare it to the genome from the dead cocoon. So we can compare male and female, drone and worker."

  "I'll try to negotiate a biopsy on some body part that contains their genome. Maybe they kept some relic of the dead ones."

  "I already had this planned," said Bean. "While Ender's getting his samples, Carlotta, I need you to figure out a way to get me into the ecotat."

  The children were silent.

  "No," said Carlotta.

  "They must have built the ark with a plan for getting large quantities of plants and animals out of there to ship it down to the planet's surface. However they plan to get that stuff out, I can go in that way."

  "It'll kill you," said Ender.

  "You're going to dock the Hound with Herodotus at the cargo bay. With both doors open and gravity turned off, a six-year-old could push me into the Hound. You have work to do," he said. "Carlotta, come back with a plan to get me into the ecotat, or don't come back. Ender, get a sample."

  "What about me?" asked Cincinnatus.

  "Stay with Ender and protect him. I don't think Carlotta will be in any danger."

  "No sir," said Cincinnatus. "We stay together. We all watch while Ender gets his sample from the drones, if he can. Then we all go with Carlotta."

  The children came back. Bean piloted the Hound for them again, and this time docked it directly over the cargo bay. The Herodotus was designed for this, and soon the doors opened and a much higher ceiling loomed above Bean.

  He had not realized how claustrophobic he had felt all these years, how the ceiling had oppressed him as he grew larger and larger. But when it was removed, he felt a great lightening of his spirit. He was almost cheerful.

  The children weren't. They were afraid that they would accidently kill him somehow in the transfer. "That's not fair," said Carlotta. "To put that guilt on us."

  "No guilt," said Bean. "I'd rather die doing something than lying here like a melon."

  They had never seen a melon growing on the ground.

  There was work to do before the transfer. Bean insisted that they transfer all the lab equipment first. Bean watched and tried not to fret as the children learned from the drones how to build sealed laboratories in the ecotat. It was a technology well known on the ark, because when they reached the planet's surface it would take time to find or dig tunnels and caves.

  Bean had imagined that he might make the transfer in just a few days, but Carlotta was methodical and slow, testing everything. She also insisted on moving a lot of computers out of Herodotus and getting them powered up and networked in the ecotat. And then the big one.

  "I want to move the ansible," she said.

  Bean hadn't anticipated that one. "Eventually," he said. "But your network is reaching between the ships just fine. You can access human communications systems just fine from there."

  "Ender and I hacked the tech years ago," said Carlotta. "We thought you'd be angry so we didn't tell you."

  At last it was time for Bean to make the voyage.

  It had been hard enough for him to walk into Herodotus when he took the toddlers aboard and left Petra and the other babies -- for their normal children truly were still babies then, just learning to talk, toddling about on unsteady legs. He hadn't cared much about the uselessness of the enlargements that had been attempted. He knew that even the taller table and larger chair would soon be useless to him. He wasn't going to make another. He knew from the start that he would end up lying on his back or his side in the cargo bay, with gravity set as close to nothing as possible.

  But he had walked onto the ship. Now Carlotta cut the gravity to nothing, then turn
ed on the gravitator she had rigged on the Hound. It drew him upward very slowly. She and Cincinnatus rose with him, rotating him slowly in midair, so that when he reached the padded flooring of the Hound, he settled into it very gently on his back.

  "Carlotta," he said, "we can't go until I'm rigged to control the Hound. Bring me my holotop."

  She laughed. "We know how you pilot ships, Father. You're deft at it, but the trajectory you used on every trip you've piloted for us would kill you. Cincinnatus is taking you, and instead of an hour, the trip is going to take the best part of a day. So snuggle in and sleep."

  It was a better flight than Bean would have given himself, and as they drifted into the open airlock in the side of the ark, Bean could only admire how deftly Cincinnatus brought the Hound to a stop in the middle of the air.

  This high off the ground, Bean felt almost no gravity. Then the door opened and he saw the ecotat with his own eyes for the first time.

  The relief he had felt when the ceiling lifted in the Herodotus had been nothing compared to this. It was so large, and the false sun in the center of the opposite hub gave such a sincere imitation of sunlight that Bean felt for a dizzying moment as if he had come back home to Earth.

  Then he saw how the world bent upward in both directions, and formed a clearly visible ceiling overhead, with trees and meadows and even small lakes -- ponds, really. But there were birds flying -- had anyone mentioned the birds? -- and while the trees were all from the Formic worlds, Bean had never become an expert on the trees of Earth. They were forest enough for him. The green took his breath away; the strange colors here and there still seemed to belong.

  It wasn't a planet, but it was as close to one as he would ever come. He had never thought to be in a living world like this again.