Page 193 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

complex and specialized than any insects, and they had evolved an internal skeleton and shed most of the exoskeleton, their physical structure still echoed their ancestors, who could easily have been very much like Earth's ants. "But don't be fooled by that," said Graff. "It's just as meaningful to say that our ancestors could easily have been very much like squirrels."
"If that's all we have to go on, that's somethig," said Ender.
"Squirrels never built starships," said Graff. "There are usually a few changes on the way from gathering nuts and seeds to harvesting asteroids and putting permanent research stations on the moons of Saturn."
The buggers could probably see about the same spectrum of light as human beings, and there was artificial lighting in their ships and ground installations. However, their antennae seemed airnost vestigial. There was no evidence from their bodies that smelling, tasting, or hearing were particularly important to them. "Of course, we can't be sure. But we can't see any way that they could have used sound for communication. The oddest thing of all was that they also don't have any communication devices on their ships. No radios, nothing that could transimit or receive any kind of signal."
"They communicate ship to ship. I've seen the videos, they talk to each other."
"True. But body to body, mind to mind. It's the most important thing we learned from them. Their communication, however they do it, is instantaneous. Lightspeed is no barrier. When Mazer Rackham defeated their invasion fleet, they all closed up shop. At once. There was no time for a signal. Everything just stopped."
Ender remembered the videos of uninjured buggers lying dead at their posts.
"We knew then that it was possible to communicate faster than light. That was seventy years ago, and once we knew it could be done, we did it. Not me, mind you, I wasn't born then."
"How is it possible?"
"I can't explain philotic physics to you. Half of it nobody understands anyway. What matters is we built the ansible. The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator, but somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere and it caught on. Not that most people even know the machine exists."
"That means that ships could talk to each other even when they're across the solar system," said Ender.
"It means," said Graff, "that ships could talk to each other even when they're across the galaxy. And the buggers can do it without machines."