Page 1092 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<She has found him,> said the Hive Queen.
<Found her, you mean. Young Valentine.>
<It was Ender that she found and Ender that she recognized. But yes, Val's vessel is the one to which she leapt.>
<How could you see her? I never saw her at all.>
<She once was part of us, you know. And what the Samoan said, as one of my workers watched on Jakt's computer terminal, that helped me find her. We kept looking for her in a single place, and never saw her. But when we knew she was constantly moving, we realized: her body was as large as the farthest reaches of all of human colonization, and just as our aiuas remain within our bodies and are easily found, so hers also remained within her body, but since it was larger than us and even included us, she was never still, never contained in a space small enough for us to see her. Not till she had lost most of herself did I find her. But now I know where she is.>
<So Young Valentine is hers now?>
<No,> said the Hive Queen. <Ender can't let go.> ***
Jane spun joyously through this body, so different from any she had ever remembered before, but within moments she realized that the aiua she had recognized, the aiua she had followed here, was not willing to give up even a small part of itself to her. Wherever she touched, there it was, touching also, affirming its control; and now in panic Jane began to sense that while she might be inside a lacework of extraordinary beauty and fineness-- this temple of living cells on a frame of bone-- no part of it belonged to her and if she stayed it would only be as a fugitive. She did not belong here, no matter how she loved it.
And she did love it. For all the thousands of years that she had lived, so vast in space, so fast in time, she had nevertheless been crippled without knowing it. She was alive, but nothing that was part of her large kingdom was alive. All had been ruthlessly under her control, but here in this body, this human body, this woman named Val, there were millions of small bright lives, cell upon cell of life, thriving, laboring, growing, dying, linked body to body and aiua to aiua, and it was in these links that creatures of flesh dwelt and it was far more vivid, despite the sluggishness of thought, than her own experience of life had been. How can they think at all, these flesh-beings, with all these dances going on around them, all these songs to distract them?
She touched the mind of Valentine and was flooded with memory. It had nothing like the precision and depth of Jane's old memory, but every moment of experience was vivid and powerful, alive and real as no memory had been that Jane had ever known before. How can they keep from holding still all day simply to remember the day before? Because each new moment shouts louder than memory.