“I don't understand. What was it like?”

“Then how did you know that you aren't just the hive queen?”

The vision the hive queen had been giving him faded. It wasn't helping anyway, or at least not in any way he could grasp. Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other hive queens– not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there– they held the pattern of the relationship between hive queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it.

“But where do these things come from? Where do you have to go to get them?”

“So they're everywhere?”

“But you said you don't have to go anywhere to get them.”

“What are the doorways like?”

Now he realized that doorway was the word his brain called forth to label the concept they were putting in his mind. And suddenly he was able to grasp an explanation that made sense.

“They're not in the same space-time continuum as ours. But they can enter ours at any point.”

“But this is incredible. You're calling forth some being from another place, and–”

“Philotes,” said Ender. “The things out of which all other things are made.”

“Because I'm only just making the connection. We never meant what you've described, but the thing we did mean, that might be the thing you described.”

“Join the club.”

“So when you make a hive queen, you already have the biological body, and this new thing– this philote that you call out of the non-place where philotes are– it has to be one that's able to comprehend the complex pattern that you have in your minds of what a hive queen is, and when one comes that can do it, it takes on that identity and possesses the body and becomes the self of that body–”

“But there are no workers yet, when the hive queen is first made.”

“We're talking about a passage from another kind of space. A place where philotes already are.”

“And you say that we're made of the same things?”

“But you said that finding me was like making a hive queen.”

“The Fantasy Game,” said Ender. “You made a pattern out of the Fantasy Game.”

“And when you called …”

“But when a philote takes possession of a new hive queen, it controls it, queen-body and worker-bodies. Why didn't this bridge you made take control of me?”

“Why didn't it work?”

“But you could still use it to read my mind.”

“More complicated than you expected?”

“But we didn't know that. How could we know?”

“Too bad. Terrifying brilliance would be useful right now.”