Page 625 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"They're not just males," said Quara. "They call themselves husbands. Maybe we should call them men." She smiled at Ender in triumph. "You're not half so open-minded as you like to think." Then she brushed past him and went on through the gate into Milagre.
Ender walked up to Human and stood before him. "What did she tell you, Human? Did she tell you that I'll die before I let anyone wipe out the descolada, if doing so would hurt you and your people?"
Of course Human had no immediate answer for him, for Ender had no intention of starting to beat on his trunk with the talking sticks used to produce Father Tongue; if he did, the pequenino males would hear and come running. There was no private speech between pequeninos and fathertrees. If a fathertree wanted privacy, he could always talk silently with the other fathertrees-- they spoke to each other mind to mind, the way the hive queen spoke to the buggers that served as her eyes and ears and hands and feet. If only I were part of that communications network, thought Ender. Instantaneous speech consisting of pure thought, projected anywhere in the universe.
Still, he had to say something to help counteract the sort of thing he knew Quara would have said. "Human, we're doing all we can to save human beings and pequeninos, both. We'll even try to save the descolada virus, if we can. Ela and Novinha are very good at what they do. So are Grego and Quara, for that matter. But for now, please trust us and say nothing to anyone else. Please. If humans and pequeninos come to understand the danger we're in before we're ready to take steps to contain it, the results would be violent and terrible."
There was nothing else to say. Ender went back to the experimental fields. Before nightfall, he and Planter completed the measurements, then burned and flashed the entire field. No large molecules survived inside the disruption barrier. They had done all they could to ensure that whatever the descolada might have learned from this field was forgotten.
What they could never do was get rid of the viruses they carried within their own cells, human and pequenino alike. What if Quara was right? What if the descolada inside the barrier, before it died, managed to "tell" the viruses that Planter and Ender carried inside them about what had been learned from this new strain of potato? About the defenses that Ela and Novinha had tried to build into it? About the ways this virus had found to defeat their tactics?
If the descolada were truly intelligent, with a language to spread information and pass behaviors from one individual to many others, then how could Ender-- how could any of them-- hope to be victorious in the end? In the long run, it might well be that the descolada was the most adaptable species, the one most capable of subduing worlds and eliminating rivals, stronger than humans or piggies or buggers or any other living creatures on any settled worlds. That was the thought that Ender took to bed with him that night, the thought that preoccupied him even as he made love with Novinha, so that she felt the need to comfort him as if he, not she, were the one burdened with the cares of a world. He tried to apologize but soon realized the futility of it. Why add to her worries by telling of his own?
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