Page 781 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

antibodies they'll need throughout their lives. When the descoloda changes itself, we know it because the workers start dying. Then an organ near my ovaries creates new antibodies, and we lay eggs for new workers who can withstand the revised descolada.>
<So you, too, are trying to destroy it.>
<No. Our process is entirely unconscious. It takes place in the body of the hive queen, without conscious intervention. We can't go beyond meeting the present danger. Our organ of immunity is far more effective and adaptable than anything in the human body, but in the long run we'll suffer the same fate as the humans, if the descolada is not destroyed. The difference is that if we are wiped out by the descolada, there is no other hive queen in the universe to carry on our species. We are the last.>
<Your case is even more desperate than theirs.>
<And we are even more helpless to affect it. We have no science of biology beyond simple husbandry. Our natural methods were so effective in fighting disease that we never had the same impetus that humans had, to understand life and control it.>
<Is that the way it is, then? Either we are destroyed, or you and the humans are destroyed. If the descolada continues, it kills you. If it is stopped, we die.>
<This is your world. The descolada is in your bodies. If it comes time to choose between you and us, it will be you that survives.>
<You speak for yourself, my friend. But what will the humans do?>
<If they have the power to destroy the descolada in a way that would also destroy you, we will forbid them to use it.>
<Forbid them? When have humans ever obeyed?>
<We never forbid where we do not also have the power to prevent.>
<Ah.>
<This is your world. Ender knows this. And if other humans ever forget, we will remind them.>
<I have another question.>
<Ask.>
<What about those, like Warmaker, who want to spread the descolada throughout the universe? Will you also forbid them?>
<They must not carry the descolada to worlds that already have multicellular life.>