"We humans don't change in cocoons. We stay awake through our maturation process."

"So for you, this sleep isn't birth."

"No," said Ender. "It's temporary death. Extinguishment, but with a spark left glowing in the ash. I didn't even dream."

"All I do is dream," she said. "I dream the whole history of my people. They are my mothers, but now they are also my sisters, because I remember doing all the things they do."

For this, she had drawn on the images of Valentine and Peter to say "sisters." And when Peter's face appeared, there was fear and pain in the memory.

"I don't fear him anymore," said Ender. "Or hate him. He turned out to be a great man."

But the hive queen didn't believe him. She drew from his mind the image of the old man from their ansible conversations, and compared it with the child Peter in Ender's deepest memory. They were too different to be the same.

And Ender could not argue the point. Peter the Hegemon was not Peter the monster. Maybe he never was. Maybe both were an illusion. But Peter the monster was the one buried deep in Ender's memory, and he was unlikely to expunge him from it.

He put the cocoon back in its hiding place, locked it, and then left it on the cart of luggage being taken down to the surface.

Virlomi actually came to meet the shuttle; and in moments she made it clear she was extending this courtesy only for Ender's sake. She came aboard the shuttle to talk to him.

Ender did not take this as a good sign. While they waited for her to come aboard, Ender said to Valentine, "She doesn't want me here. She wants me to go back onto the ship."

"Wait and see what she wants," said Valentine. "Maybe she just wants to know what you intend."

When she came in, Virlomi looked so much older than the girl whose face Ender had seen on the vids of the Sino-Indian War. A year or two of brooding over defeat, and then sixteen years of governing a colony — they were bound to take their toll.

"Thank you for letting me visit you so early," she said.

"You have flattered us beyond measure," said Ender. "To come out and receive us yourself."

"I had to see you," she said, "before you emerged into the colony. I swear to you that I told no one of your coming."

"I believe you," said Ender. "But your remark seems to imply that people know I'm here."

"No," she said. "No, there's no rumor of that, thank God."

Which God, Ender wondered. Or, being reputed a goddess, did she thank herself?

"When Colonel Graff — oh, whatever his title was then — he'll always be Colonel Graff to me — when he told me he had asked you to come, it was because he anticipated problems with a particular mother and son."

"Nichelle and Randall Firth," said Ender.

"Yes," she said. "It happens that I had also noticed them as a potential problem during setup back in Battle School — Ellis Island — whatever the name of the place was by then. So I understood his concern. What I didn't know was why he thought you could handle them better than I could."

"I'm not sure he thought I could. Perhaps he only wanted you to have a resource to draw on, in case I had some ideas. Have they been a problem?"

"The mother was your ordinary reclusive paranoid," said Virlomi. "But she worked hard, and if she seemed obsessively protective of her son, there was nothing perverse about their relationship — she never tried to keep him in her bed, for instance, and she never bathed him after infancy — none of the danger signs. He was such a tiny baby. Almost like a toy. But he walked and talked incredibly young. Shockingly young."

"And he stayed small," said Ender, "until he was in his teens. Just kept growing at an ordinary pace and then didn't stop. I imagine he's something of a giant now."

"Two full meters in height with no sign of stopping," said Virlomi. "How did you know this?"

"Because of who his parents are."

Virlomi gasped. "Graff knows who the real father is. And he didn't tell me. How was I supposed to deal with this situation if he didn't give me all the information?"

"Forgive me for reminding you," said Ender, "but you were not widely trusted at the time."

"No," she said. "But I thought if he made me governor, he'd give me. but that's past and gone."

Ender wondered if, indeed, Graff was gone. He wasn't on any of the registries he could access — but he didn't have ansible privileges like those he'd had before, as a new governor coming to his colony. There were deep searches he simply wasn't given time to pursue.

"Graff didn't want to leave you without knowledge. But he gave it to me, and left it to me to judge how much to tell you."

"So you don't trust me either?" Her voice sounded jocular, but there was pain under it.

"I don't know you," said Ender. "You made war against my friends. You liberated your country from the invaders. But then you became a vengeful invader yourself. I don't know what to do with this information. Let me make up my mind as I come to know you."

Valentine spoke up for the first time since their initial greetings. "What is it that has happened that made you assure us that you told no one Ender was coming?"

Virlomi turned to her respectfully. "It's part of the longstanding struggle between me and Randall Firth."

"Isn't he still a child?"

Virlomi laughed bitterly. "Do Battle School graduates really say such things to each other?"

Ender chuckled. "Apparently so. How long has this struggle gone on?"

"By the time he was twelve, he was such a precocious. orator. that he had the old settlers and the non-Indian colonists who came with me eating out of his hand. At first he was their clever mascot. Now he is something closer to a spiritual leader, a.»

"A Virlomi," said Ender.

"He has made himself into their equivalent of the way the Indian colonists regard me, yes," she said. "I never claimed to be a goddess."

"Let's not argue such old issues."

"I just want you to know the truth."

"No, Virlomi," said Valentine, intruding again, or so Virlomi's expression seemed to say. "You deliberately constructed the goddess image, and when people asked you, you gave nondenial denials: 'Since when do goddesses walk the earth? 'Would a goddess fail so often? And the most loathsomely deceptive of them all: "What do you think?»

Virlomi sighed. "You have no mercy," she said.

"No," said Valentine. "I have a lot of mercy. I just don't have any manners."

"Yes," said Virlomi. "He has learned from watching me, how I handle the Indians, how they worship me. His group has no shared religion, no traditions in common. But he constructed one, especially because everyone knew that evil book The Hive Queen."

"How is it evil?" asked Ender.

"Because it's a pack of lies. Who could know what the hive queens thought or felt or remembered or tried to do? But it has turned the formics into tragic figures in the minds of the impressionable fools who memorize that damnable book."

Ender chuckled. "Smart boy."

"What?" Virlomi asked him, looking suspicious.

"I assume you're telling me this because he somehow claims that he is the heir of the hive queens."

"Which is absolutely absurd because ours is the first colony that was not founded on the ruins of formic civilization."

"So how does he manage it?" asked Ender.

"He claims that the Indian population — eighty percent of the total — are merely trying to reestablish here the exact culture they had on Earth. While he and the others are the ones who are trying to create something new. He really does have the gall to call his little movement the 'Natives of Ganges. And he says we Indians are like the jackals who have settled other worlds — destroying the natives and then stealing all that they accomplished."