Page 888 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"To the last part of it." It was all right to talk to Planter at length. Either he didn't grow impatient with the slowness of Miro's speech-- after all, Planter wasn't going anywhere-- or his own cognitive processes had slowed to match Miro's halting pace. Either way, Planter let Miro finish his own sentences, and answered him as if he had been listening carefully. "Did I understand you to say that this Skysplitter carried little mothers with him?"
"That's right," whispered Planter.
"But he wasn't going to the fathertree."
"No. He just had little mothers on his carries. I learned this story years ago. Before I did any human science."
"You know what it sounds like to me? That the story might come from a time when you didn't carry little mothers to the fathertree. When the little mothers didn't lick their sustenance from the sappy inside of the mothertree. Instead they hung from the carries on the male's abdomen until the infants matured enough to burst out and take their mothers' place at the teat."
"That's why I chanted it for you," said Planter. "I was trying to think of how it might have been, if we were intelligent before the descolada came. And finally I remembered that part in the story of Skysplitter's War."
"He went to the place where the sky broke open."
"The descolada got here somehow, didn't it?"
"How old is that story?"
"Skysplitter's War was twenty-nine generations ago. Our own forest isn't that old. But we carried songs and stories with us from our father-forest."
"The part of the story about the sky and the stars, that could be a lot older, though, couldn't it?"
"Very old. The fathertree Skysplitter died long ago. He might have been very old even when the war took place."
"Do you think it might be possible that this is a memory of the pequenino who first discovered the descolada? That it was brought here by a starship, and that what he saw was some kind of reentry vehicle?"
"That's why I chanted it."
"If that's true, then you were definitely intelligent before the coming of the descolada." "All gone now," said Planter.