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"Now you understand my problem," said Ender.
They rode on in silence.
The entrance to the hive queen's burrow was a building that looked like any other. There was no special guard-- indeed, in their whole excursion they hadn't seen a single bugger. Valentine remembered when she was young, on her first colony world, trying to imagine what the bugger cities had looked like when they were fully inhabited. Now she knew-- they looked exactly the way they did when they were dead. No scurrying buggers; like ants swarming over the hills. Somewhere, she knew, there were fields and orchards being tended under the open sun, but none of that was visible from here.
Why did this make her feel so relieved?
She knew the answer to the question even as she asked it. She had spent her childhood on Earth during the Bugger Wars; the insectoid aliens had haunted her nightmares, as they had terrified every other child on Earth. Only a handful of human beings, however, had ever seen a bugger in person, and few of those were still alive when she was a child. Even in her first colony, where the ruins of bugger civilization surrounded her, they had found not even one desiccated corpse. All her visual images of the buggers were the horrifying images from the vids.
Yet wasn't she the first person to have read Ender's book, the Hive Queen? Wasn't she the first, besides Ender, to come to think of the hive queen as a person of alien grace and beauty?
She was the first, yes, but that meant little. Everyone else alive today had grown up in a moral universe shaped in part by the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. While she and Ender were the only two left alive who had grown up with the steady campaign of loathing toward the buggers. Of course she felt irrational relief at not having to see the buggers. To Miro and Plikt, the first sight of the hive queen and her workers wouldn't have the same emotional tension that it had for her.
I am Demosthenes, she reminded herself. I'm the theorist who insisted that the buggers were ramen, aliens who could be understood and accepted. I must simply do my best to overcome the prejudices of my childhood. In due time all of humanity will know of the reemergence of the hive queen; it would be shameful if Demosthenes were the one person who could not receive the hive queen as raman.
Ender took the car in a circle around a smallish building. "This is the right place," he said. He pulled the car to a stop, then slowed the fan to settle it onto the capim near the building's single door. The door was very low-- an adult would have to go through on hands and knees.
"How do you know?" asked Miro. "Because she says so," said Ender.