Page 1047 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<And if we fail?>
<Ender dies. Jane dies. We die when the fleet comes. How is this different from the course that any other life takes?>
<It's all in the timing,> said Human.
<Will you try to join the web? You and Rooter and the other fathertrees?>
<I don't know what you mean by a web, or if it's even different from the way we fathers are with each other. You might remember, too, that we are also bound up with the mothertrees. They can't speak, but they're filled with life, and we anchor ourselves to them as surely as your workers are tied to you. Find a way to include them in your web, and the fathers will be joined effortlessly.>
<Let's play with this tonight, Human. Let me try to weave with you. Tell me what it looks like to you, and I'll try to make you understand what I'm doing and where it leads.>
<Shouldn't we find Ender first? In case he slips away?>
<In due time,> said the Hive Queen. <And besides, I'm not altogether sure I know how to find him if he's unconscious.>
<Why not? Once you gave him dreams-- he slept then.>
<Then we had the bridge.>
<Maybe Jane is listening to us now.>
<No,> said the Hive Queen. <I'd know her if she were linked to us. Her shape was made to fit too well with mine for it to go unrecognized.>
***
Plikt stood beside Ender's bed because she could not bear to sit, could not bear to move. He was going to die without uttering another word. She had followed him, had given up home and family to be near him, and what had he said to her? Yes, he let her be his shadow sometimes; yes, she was a silent observer of many of his conversations over the past few weeks and months. But when she tried to speak to him of things more personal, of deep memories, of what he meant by the things that he had done, he only shook his head and said-- kindly, because he was kind, but firmly also because he did not wish her to misunderstand-- said to her, "Plikt, I'm not a teacher anymore."
Yes you are, she wanted to say to him. Your books go on teaching even where you have never been. The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and already The Life of Human seems likely to take its place beside them. How can you say you're through with teaching, when there are other books to write, other deaths to speak? You have spoken the deaths of killers and saints, aliens, and once the death of a whole city swallowed up in a cataclysmic volcano. But in telling these stories of others,