Page 859 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<We'll try-- something in between. Something milder. We'll remember, and tell you what's happening. Show you bits. Protect you. Safe.>
"Try, yes."
She gave him no time to reflect or prepare. At once he felt himself seeing out of compound eyes, not many lenses with the same vision, but each lens with its own picture. It gave him the same vertiginous feeling as so many years before. But this time he understood a little better-- in part because she was making it less intense than before, and in part because he knew something about the hive queen now, about what she was doing to him.
The many different visions were what each of the workers was seeing, as if each were a single eye connected to the same brain. There was no hope of Ender making sense of so many images at once.
<We'll show you one. The one that matters.>
Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one, the others were sorted out. He imagined that she must have some organizing principle for the workers. She could disregard all those who weren't part of the queen-making process. Then, for Ender's sake, she had to sort through even the ones who were part of it, and that was harder, because usually she could sort the visions by task rather than by the individual workers. At last, though, she was able to show him a primary image and he could focus on it, ignoring the flickers and flashes of peripheral visions.
A queen being hatched. She had shown him this before, in a carefully-planned vision when he had first met her, when she was trying to explain things to him. Now, though, it wasn't a sanitized, carefully orchestrated presentation. The clarity was gone. It was murky, distracted, real. It was memory, not art.
<You see we have the queen-body. We know she's a queen because she starts reaching out for workers, even as a larva.>
"So you can talk to her?"
<She's very stupid. Like a worker.>
"She doesn't grow her intelligence until cocooning?"
<No. She has her-- like your brain. The memory-think. It's just empty.>
"So you have to teach her."
<What good would teaching do? The thinker isn't there. The found thing. The binder-together.> "I don't know what you're talking about."
<Stop trying to look and think, then. This isn't done with eyes.>