“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?”

“And when you called …”