Page 828 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"Haven't you?" said Planter. "Then why did you assume that we would only think of this possibility if some human told us?"
Ender had no good answer. He had to confess to himself that he had been thinking of the pequeninos as if they were children in some ways, to be protected. Worries had to be kept as secrets from them. It hadn't occurred to him that they were perfectly capable of discovering all the worst horrors on their own.
"And if our intelligence does come from the descolada, and you found a way to destroy it, what would we become then?" Planter looked at them, triumphant in his bitter victory. "Nothing but tree rats," he said.
"That's the second time you've used that term," said Ender. "What are tree rats?"
"That's what they were shouting," said Planter, "some of the men who killed the mothertree."
"There's no such animal," said Valentine.
"I know," said Planter. "Grego explained it to me. 'Tree rat' is a slang name for squirrels. He showed me a holo of one on his computer in jail."
"You went to visit Grego?" Ela was plainly horrified.
"I had to ask him why he tried to kill us all, and then why he tried to save us," said Planter.
"There!" cried Valentine triumphantly. "You can't tell me that what Grego and Miro did that night, stopping the mob from burning Rooter and Human-- you can't tell me that that was just the acting out of genetic forces!"
"But I never said that human behavior was meaningless," said Planter. "It's you that tried to comfort me with that idea. We know that you humans have your heroes. We pequeninos are the ones who are only tools of a gaialogical virus."
"No," said Ender. "There are pequenino heroes, too. Rooter and Human, for instance."
"Heroes?" said Planter. "They acted as they did in order to win what they achieved-- their status as fathertrees. It was the hunger to reproduce. They might have looked like heroes to you humans, who only die once, but the death they suffered was really birth. There was no sacrifice."
"Your whole forest was heroic, then," said Ela. "You broke free from all the old channels and made a treaty with us that required you to change some of your most deeply-rooted customs."
"We wanted the knowledge and the machines and the power you humans had. What's heroic about a treaty in which all we have to do is stop killing you, and in return you give us a thousand-year boost in our technological development?"