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"The hive queen has told him that she will never build a weapon for any reason."
"Even to save her own species?"
"She'll have the single starship she needs to get offplanet, and the others will also have enough starships to save their species. She's content with that. There's no need to kill anybody."
"But if Congress has its way, millions will be killed!"
"Then that is their responsibility," said Jane. "At least that's what Andrew tells me she answers whenever he raises that point."
"What kind of strange moral reasoning is this?"
"You forget that she only recently discovered the existence of other intelligent life, and she came perilously close to destroying it. Then that other intelligent life almost destroyed her. But it was her own near brush with committing the crime of xenocide that has had the greater effect on her moral reasoning. She can't stop other species from such things, but she can be certain that she doesn't do it herself. She will only kill when that's the only hope she has of saving the existence of her species. And since she has another hope, she won't build a warship."
"Faster-than-light travel," said Master Han. "Is that your only hope?"
"The only one I can think of that has a glimmer of possibility. At least we know that something in the universe moves faster than light-- information is passed down the philotic ray from one ansible to another with no detectable passage of time. A bright young physicist on Lusitania who happens to be locked in jail at the present time is spending his days and nights working on this problem. I perform all his calculations and simulations for him. At this very moment he is testing a hypothesis about the nature of philotes by using a model so complex that in order to run the program I'm stealing time from the computers of almost a thousand different universities. There's hope."
"As long as you live, there's hope," said Wang-mu. "Who will do such massive experiments for him when you're gone?"
"That's why there's so much urgency," said Jane.
"What do you need me for?" asked Master Han. "I'm no physicist, and I have no hope of learning enough in the next few months to make any kind of difference. It's your jailed physicist who'll do it, if anyone can. Or you yourself."
"Everyone needs a dispassionate critic to say, Have you thought of this? Or even, Enough of that dead-end path, get onto another train of thought. That's what I need you for. We'll report our work to you, and you'll examine it and say whatever comes to mind. You can't possibly guess what chance word of yours will trigger the idea we're looking for."