Page 862 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<We mean that the place where it is can't be thought of. If we could think of the place then they would already have thought of themselves and none of them would need to take the pattern we show.>
"What kind of thing is this binder-together?"
<Can't see it. Can't know it until it finds the pattern and then when it's there it's like us.>
Ender couldn't help shuddering. All this time he had thought that he was speaking to the hive queen herself. Now he realized that the thing that talked to him in his mind was only using that body the way it used the buggers. Symbiosis. A controlling parasite, possessing the whole hive queen system, using it.
<No. This is ugly, the terrible thing you're thinking. We aren't another thing. We're this thing. We are the hive queen, just the way you're the body. You say, My body, and yet you are your body, but you're also possessor of the body. The hive queen is ourself, this body is me, not something else inside. I. I wasn't anything until I found the imagining.>
"I don't understand. What was it like?"
<How can I remember? I never had memory until I followed the imagining and came to this place and became the hive queen.>
"Then how did you know that you aren't just the hive queen?"
<Because after I came, they gave me the memories. I saw the queen-body before I came, and then I saw the queen-body after I was in it. I was strong enough to hold the pattern in my mind, and so I could possess it. Become it. It took many days but then we were whole and they could give us the memories because I had the whole memory.>
The vision the hive queen had been giving him faded. It wasn't helping anyway, or at least not in any way he could grasp. Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other hive queens-- not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there-- they held the pattern of the relationship between hive queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it.
<Yes.>
"But where do these things come from? Where do you have to go to get them?" <We don't go anywhere. We call, and there they are.>
"So they're everywhere?"