Page 669 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"Come on, Miro," said Ender.
Miro allowed Ender to help him to his feet. Then they climbed back onto the car and headed home to Milagre.
***
Miro had told them that he didn't want to go to mass. Ender and Novinha went without him. But as soon as they were gone, he found it impossible to remain in the house. He kept getting the feeling that someone was just outside his range of vision. In the shadows, a smallish figure, watching him. Encased in smooth hard armor, only two clawlike fingers on its slender arms, arms that could be bitten off and cast down like brittle kindling wood. Yesterday's visit to the hive queen had bothered him more than he dreamed possible.
I'm a xenologer, he reminded himself. My life has been devoted to dealing with aliens. I stood and watched as Ender flayed Human's mammaloid body and I didn't even flinch, because I'm a dispassionate scientist. Sometimes maybe I identify too much with my subjects. But I don't have nightmares about them, I don't start seeing them in shadows.
Yet here he was, standing outside the door of his mother's house because in the grassy fields, in the bright sunlight of a Sunday morning, there were no shadows where a bugger could wait to spring.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
The hive queen isn't an insect. She and her people are warm-blooded, just like the pequeninos. They respirate, they sweat like mammals. They may carry with them the structural echoes of their evolutionary link with insects, just as we have our resemblances to lemurs and shrews and rats, but they created a bright and beautiful civilization. Or at least a dark and beautiful one. I should see them the way Ender does, with respect, with awe, with affection.
And all I managed, barely, was endurance.
There's no doubt that the hive queen is raman, capable of comprehending and tolerating us. The question is whether I am capable of comprehending and tolerating her. And I can't be the only one. Ender was so right to keep the knowledge of the hive queen from most of the people of Lusitania. If they once saw what I saw, or even caught a glimpse of a single bugger, the fear would spread, each one's terror would feed on everyone else's dread, until-- until something. Something bad. Something monstrous.
Maybe we're the varelse. Maybe xenocide is built into the human psyche as into no other species. Maybe the best thing that could happen for the moral good of the universe is for the descolada to get loose, to spread throughout the human universe and break us down to nothing. Maybe the descolada is God's answer to our unworthiness.