Page 938 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<What sort of life would you have led? Mating with human males?> <This is disgusting.>
<Or giving live births, perhaps, in the human manner?>
<Stop this foulness.>
<I was merely speculating.>
<The descolada is gone. You're free of it.>
<But never free of what we should have been. I believe that we were sentient before the descolado came. I believe our history is older than the spacecraft that brought it here. I believe that somewhere in our genes is locked the secret of pequenino life when we were tree-dwellers, rather than the larval stage in the life of sentient trees.>
<If you had no third life, Human, you would be dead now.>
<Dead now, but while I lived I could have been, not a mere brother, but a father. While I lived I could have traveled anywhere, without worrying about returning to my forest if I ever hoped to mate. Never would I have stood day after day rooted to the same spot, living my life vicariously through the tales the brothers bring to me.>
<It's not enough for you to be free of the descolada, then? You must be free of all its consequences or you won't be content?>
<I'm always content. I am what I am, no matter how I got that way.>
<But still not free.>
<Males and females both, we still have to lose our lives in order to pass on our genes.>
<Poor fool. Do you think that I, the hive queen, am free? Do you think that human parents, once they bear young, are ever truly free again? If life to you means independence, a completely unfettered freedom to do as you like, then none of the sentient creatures is alive. None of us is ever fully free.>
<Put down roots, my friend, and then tell me how unfree you were when you were yet unrooted.>
Wang-mu and Master Han waited together on the riverbank some hundred meters from their house, a pleasant walk through the garden. Jane had told them that someone would be coming to see them, someone from Lusitania. They both knew this meant that faster-than-light travel had been achieved,