Page 865 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<Do you think we didn't try?>
"Why didn't it work?"
<You weren't capable of letting a pattern like that control you. You could willingly become part of a pattern that was real and alive, but you couldn't be controlled by it. You couldn't even be destroyed by it. And there was so much of you in the pattern that we couldn't even control it ourselves. Too strange for us.>
"But you could still use it to read my mind."
<We could use it to stay connected with you in spite of all the strangeness. We studied you, especially when you played the game. And as we understood you, we began to grasp the idea of your whole species. That each individual of you was alive, with no hive queen at all.>
"More complicated than you expected?"
<And less. Your individual minds were simpler in the ways that we expected to be complicated, and complicated in ways that we expected them to be simple. We realized that you were truly alive and beautiful in your perverse and tragic lonely way and we decided not to send another colony ship to your worlds.>
"But we didn't know that. How could we know?"
<We also realized that you were dangerous and terrible. You in particular, dangerous because you found all our patterns and we couldn't think of anything complicated enough to confuse you. So you destroyed all but me. Now I understand you better. I've had all these years to study you. You are not as terrifyingly brilliant as we thought.>
"Too bad. Terrifying brilliance would be useful right now."
<We prefer a comforting glow of intelligence.>
"We humans get slower as we age. Give me a few more years and I'll be downright cozy." <We know that you'll die someday. Even though you put it off for so long.>
Ender didn't want this to become another conversation about mortality or any of the other aspects of human life that so fascinated the hive queen. There was still one question that had occurred to him during the hive queen's story. An intriguing possibility.
"The bridge you made. Where was it? In the computer?" <Inside you. The way I'm inside the body of the hive queen.>