Page 856 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

knowledge that any other adult had. But the process of conception, egg-laying, emergence, and cocooning still took time. Weeks for each adult. She produced a prodigious number of young, compared to a single human. But compared to the town of Milagre, with more than a thousand women of childbearing age, the bugger colony had only one producing female.
It had always bothered Ender, made him feel uneasy to know that there was only one queen. What if something happened to her? But then, it made the hive queen uncomfortable to think of human beings having only a bare handful of children-- what if something happened to them? Both species practiced a combination of nurturance and redundancy to protect their genetic heritage. Humans had a redundancy of parents, and then nurtured the few offspring. The hive queen had a redundancy of offspring, who then nurtured the parent. Each species had found its own balance of strategy.
<Why are you bothering us about this?>
"Because we're at a dead end. Because everybody else is trying, and you have as much at stake as we do."
<Do I?>
"The descolada threatens you as much as it threatens us. Someday you probably aren't going to be able to control it, and then you're gone."
<But it's not the descolada you're asking me about.>
"No." It was the problem of faster-than-light flight. Grego had been wracking his brains. In jail there was nothing else for him to think about. The last time Ender had spoken with him, he wept-- as much from exhaustion as frustration. He had covered reams of papers with equations, spreading them all over the secure room that was used as a cell. "Don't you care about faster-than-light flight?"
<It would be very nice.>
The mildness of her response almost hurt, it so deeply disappointed him. This is what despair is like, he thought. Quara a brick wall on the nature of descolada intelligence. Planter dying of descolada deprivation. Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu struggling to duplicate years of higher study in several fields, all at once. Grego worn out. And nothing to show for it.
She must have heard his anguish as clearly as if he had howled it. <Don't.>
<Don't.>
"You've done it," he said. "It must be possible."
<We've never traveled faster than light.>