Children of the Mind Read online

  Peter was standing also, and he reached down to lift Wang-mu to her feet.

  "We have given offense where we meant none," said Peter. "I am ashamed. We must go at once."

  Wang-mu was surprised to hear Peter sound so oriental. The American way was to make excuses, to stay and argue.

  She let him lead her to the door. Hikari did not follow them; it was left to poor Kenji, who was terrified to see her placid master so exercised, to show them out. But Wang-mu was determined not to let this visit end entirely in disaster. So at the last moment she rushed back and flung herself to the floor, prostrate before Hikari in precisely the pose of humiliation that she had vowed only a little while ago that she would never adopt again. But she knew that as long as she was in that posture, a man like Hikari would have to listen to her.

  "Oh, Aimaina Hikari," she said, "you have spoken of our names, but have you forgotten your own? How could the man called 'Ambiguous Light' ever think that his teachings could have only the effects that he intended?"

  Upon hearing those words, Hikari turned his back and stalked from the room. Had she made the situation better or worse? Wang-mu had no way of knowing. She got to her feet and walked dolefully to the door. Peter would be furious with her. With her boldness she might well have ruined everything for them--and not just for them, but for all those who so desperately hoped for them to stop the Lusitania Fleet.

  To her surprise, however, Peter was perfectly cheerful once they got outside Hikari's garden gate. "Well done, however weird your technique was," said Peter.

  "What do you mean? It was a disaster," she said; but she was eager to believe that somehow he was right and she had done well after all.

  "Oh, he's angry and he'll never speak to us again, but who cares? We weren't trying to change his mind ourselves. We were just trying to find out who it is who does have influence over him. And we did."

  "We did?"

  "Jane picked up on it at once. When he said he was a man of 'perfect simplicity.' "

  "Does that mean something more than the plain sense of it?"

  "Mr. Hikari, my dear, has revealed himself to be a secret disciple of Ua Lava."

  Wang-mu was baffled.

  "It's a religious movement. Or a joke. It's hard to know which. It's a Samoan term, with the literal meaning 'Now enough,' but which is translated more accurately as, 'enough already!' "

  "I'm sure you're an expert on Samoan." Wang-mu, for her part, had never heard of the language.

  "Jane is," said Peter testily. "I have her jewel in my ear and you don't. Don't you want me to pass along what she tells me?"

  "Yes, please," said Wang-mu.

  "It's a sort of philosophy--cheerful stoicism, one might call it, because when things get bad or when things are good, you say the same thing. But as taught by a particular Samoan writer named Leiloa Lavea, it became more than a mere attitude. She taught--"

  "She? Hikari is a disciple of a woman?"

  "I didn't say that," said Peter. "If you listen, I'll tell you what Jane is telling me."

  He waited. She listened.

  "All right, then, what Leiloa Lavea taught was a sort of volunteer communism. It's not enough just to laugh at good fortune and say, 'Enough already.' You have to really mean it--that you have enough. And because you mean it, you take the surplus and you give it away. Similarly, when bad fortune comes, you bear it until it becomes unbearable--your family is hungry, or you can no longer function in your work. And then again you say, 'Enough already,' and you change something. You move; you change careers; you let your spouse make all the decisions. Something. You don't endure the unendurable."

  "What does that have to do with 'perfect simplicity'?"

  "Leiloa Lavea taught that when you have achieved balance in your life--surplus good fortune is being fully shared, and all bad fortune has been done away with--what is left is a life of perfect simplicity. That's what Aimaina Hikari was saying to us. Until we came, his life had been going on in perfect simplicity. But now we have thrown him out of balance. That's good, because it means he's going to be struggling to discover how to restore simplicity to its perfection. He'll be open to influence. Not ours, of course."

  "Leiloa Lavea's?"

  "Hardly. She's been dead for two thousand years. Ender met her once, by the way. He came to speak a death on her home world of--well, Starways Congress calls it Pacifica, but the Samoan enclave there calls it Lumana'i. 'The Future.' "

  "Not her death, though."

  "A Fijian murderer, actually. A fellow who killed more than a hundred children, all of them Tongan. He didn't like Tongans, apparently. They held off on his funeral for thirty years so Ender could come and speak his death. They hoped that the Speaker for the Dead would be able to make sense of what he had done."

  "And did he?"

  Peter sneered. "Oh, of course, he was splendid. Ender can do no wrong. Yadda yadda yadda."

  She ignored his hostility toward Ender. "He met Leiloa Lavea?"

  "Her name means 'to be lost, to be hurt.' "

  "Let me guess. She chose it herself."

  "Exactly. You know how writers are. Like Hikari, they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves."

  "How gnomic," said Wang-mu.

  "Oh, shut up about that," said Peter. "Did you actually believe all that stuff about Edge nations and Center nations?"

  "I thought of it," said Wang-mu. "When I first learned Earth history from Han Fei-tzu. He didn't laugh when I told him my thoughts."

  "Oh, I'm not laughing, either. It's naive bullshit, of course, but it's not exactly funny."

  Wang-mu ignored his mockery. "If Leiloa Lavea is dead, where will we go?"

  "To Pacifica. To Lumana'i. Hikari learned of Ua Lava in his teenage years at university. From a Samoan student--the granddaughter of the Pacifican ambassador. She had never been to Lumana'i, of course, and so she clung all the more tightly to its customs and became quite a proselytizer for Leiloa Lavea. This was long before Hikari ever wrote a thing. He never speaks of it, he's never written of Ua Lava, but now that he's tipped his hand to us, Jane is finding all sorts of influence of Ua Lava in all his work. And he has friends in Lumana'i. He's never met them, but they correspond through the ansible net."

  "What about the granddaughter of the ambassador?"

  "She's on a starship right now, headed home to Lumana'i. She left twenty years ago, when her grandfather died. She should get there . . . oh, in another ten years or so. Depending on the weather. She'll be received with great honor, no doubt, and her grandfather's body will be buried or burned or whatever they do--burned, Jane says--with great ceremony."

  "But Hikari won't try to talk to her."

  "It would take a week to space out even a simple message enough for her to receive it, at the speed the ship is going. No way to have a philosophical discussion. She'd be home before he finished explaining his question."

  For the first time, Wang-mu began to understand the implications of the instantaneous starflight that she and Peter had used. These long, life-wrenching voyages could be done away with.

  "If only," she said.

  "I know," said Peter. "But we can't."

  She knew he was right. "So we go there ourselves," she said, returning to the subject. "Then what?"

  "Jane is watching to see whom Hikari writes to. That's the person who'll be in a position to influence him. And so . . ."

  "That's who we'll talk to."

  "That's right. Do you need to pee or something before we arrange transportation back to our little cabin in the woods?"

  "That would be nice," said Wang-mu. "And you could do with a change of clothes."

  "What, you think even this conservative outfit might be too bold?"

  "What are they wearing on Lumana'i?"

  "Oh, well, a lot of them just go around naked. In the tropics. Jane says that given the massive bulk of many adult Polynesians, it can be an inspiring sight."

>   Wang-mu shuddered. "We aren't going to try to pretend to be natives, are we?"

  "Not there," said Peter. "Jane's going to fake us as passengers on a starship that arrived there yesterday from Moskva. We're probably going to be government officials of some kind."

  "Isn't that illegal?" she asked.

  Peter looked at her oddly. "Wang-mu, we're already committing treason against Congress just by having left Lusitania. It's a capital offense. I don't think impersonating a government official is going to make much of a difference."

  "But I didn't leave Lusitania," said Wang-mu. "I've never seen Lusitania."

  "Oh, you haven't missed much. It's just a bunch of savannahs and woods, with the occasional Hive Queen factory building starships and a bunch of piglike aliens living in the trees."

  "I'm an accomplice to treason though, right?" asked Wang-mu.

  "And you're also guilty of ruining a Japanese philosopher's whole day."

  "Off with my head."

  An hour later they were in a private floater--so private that there were no questions asked by their pilot; and Jane saw to it that all their papers were in order. Before night they were back at their little starship.

  "We should have slept in the apartment," said Peter, balefully eyeing the primitive sleeping accommodations.

  Wang-mu only laughed at him and curled up on the floor. In the morning, rested, they found that Jane had already taken them to Pacifica in their sleep.

  Aimaina Hikari awoke from his dream in the light that was neither night nor morning, and arose from his bed into air that was neither warm nor cold. His sleep had not been restful, and his dreams had been ugly ones, frantic ones, in which all that he did kept turning back on him as the opposite of what he intended. In his dream, Aimaina would climb to reach the bottom of a canyon. He would speak and people would go away from him. He would write and the pages of the book would spurt out from under his hand, scattering themselves across the floor.

  All this he understood to be in response to the visit from those lying foreigners yesterday. He had tried to ignore them all afternoon, as he read stories and essays; to forget them all evening, as he conversed with seven friends who came to visit him. But the stories and essays all seemed to cry out to him: These are the words of the insecure people of an Edge nation; and the seven friends were all, he realized, Necessarians, and when he turned the conversation to the Lusitania Fleet, he soon understood that every one of them believed exactly as the two liars with their ridiculous names had said they did.

  So Aimaina found himself in the predawn almost-light, sitting on a mat in his garden, fingering the casket of his ancestors, wondering: Were my dreams sent to me by the ancestors? Were these lying visitors sent by them as well? And if their accusations against me were not lies, what was it they were lying about? For he knew from the way they watched each other, from the young woman's hesitancy followed by boldness, that they were doing a performance, one that was unrehearsed but nevertheless followed some kind of script.

  Dawn came fully, seeking out each leaf of every tree, then of all the lower plants, to give each one its own distinct shading and coloration; the breeze came up, making the light infinitely changeable. Later, in the heat of the day, all the leaves would become the same: still, submissive, receiving sunlight in a massive stream like a firehose. Then, in the afternoon, the clouds would roll overhead, the light rains would fall; the limp leaves would recover their strength, would glisten with water, their color deepening, readying for night, for the life of the night, for the dreams of plants growing in the night, storing away the sunlight that had been beaten into them by day, flowing with the cool inward rivers that had been fed by the rains. Aimaina Hikari became one of the leaves, driving all thoughts but light and wind and rain out of his mind until the dawn phase was ended and the sun began to drive downward with the day's heat. Then he rose up from his seat in the garden.

  Kenji had prepared a small fish for his breakfast. He ate it slowly, delicately, so as not to disturb the perfect skeleton that had given shape to the fish. The muscles pulled this way and that, and the bones flexed but did not break. I will not break them now, but I take the strength of the muscles into my own body. Last of all he ate the eyes. From the parts that move comes the strength of the animal. He touched the casket of his ancestors again. What wisdom I have, however, comes not from what I eat, but from what I am given each hour, by those who whisper into my ear from ages past. Living men forget the lessons of the past. But the ancestors never forget.

  Aimaina arose from his breakfast table and went to the computer in his gardening shed. It was just another tool--that's why he kept it here, instead of enshrining it in his house or in a special office the way so many others did. His computer was like a trowel. He used it, he set it aside.

  A face appeared in the air above his terminal. "I am calling my friend Yasunari," said Aimaina. "But do not disturb him. This matter is so trivial that I would be ashamed to have him waste his time with it."

  "Let me help you on his behalf then," said the face in the air.

  "Yesterday I asked for information about Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-mu, who had an appointment to visit with me."

  "I remember. It was a pleasure finding them so quickly for you."

  "I found their visit very disturbing," said Aimaina. "Something that they told me was not true, and I need more information in order to find out what it was. I do not wish to violate their privacy, but are there matters of public record--perhaps their school attendance, or places of employment, or some matters of family connections . . ."

  "Yasunari has told us that all things you ask for are for a wise purpose. Let me search."

  The face disappeared for a moment, then flickered back almost immediately.

  "This is very odd. Have I made a mistake?" She spelled the names carefully.

  "That's correct," said Aimaina. "Exactly like yesterday."

  "I remember them, too. They live in an apartment only a few blocks from your house. But I can't find them at all today. And here I search the apartment building and find that the apartment they occupied has been empty for a year. Aimaina, I am very surprised. How can two people exist one day and not exist the next day? Did I make some mistake, either yesterday or today?"

  "You made no mistake, helper of my friend. This is the information I needed. Please, I beg you to think no more about it. What looks like a mystery to you is in fact a solution to my questions."

  They bade each other polite farewells.

  Aimaina walked from his garden workroom past the struggling leaves that bowed under the pressure of the sunlight. The ancestors have pressed wisdom on me, he thought, like sunlight on the leaves; and last night the water flowed through me, carrying this wisdom through my mind like sap through the tree. Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-mu were flesh and blood, and filled with lies, but they came to me and spoke the truth that I needed to hear. Is this not how the ancestors bring messages to their living children? I have somehow launched ships armed with the most terrible weapons of war. I did this when I was young; now the ships are near their destination and I am old and I cannot call them back. A world will be destroyed and Congress will look to the Necessarians for approval and they will give it, and then the Necessarians will look to me for approval, and I will hide my face in shame. My leaves will fall and I will stand bare before them. That is why I should not have lived my life in this tropical place. I have forgotten winter. I have forgotten shame and death.

  Perfect simplicity--I thought I had achieved it. But instead I have been a bringer of bad fortune.

  He sat in the garden for an hour, drawing single characters in the fine gravel of the path, then wiping it smooth and writing again. At last he returned to the garden shed and on the computer typed the message he had been composing:

  Ender the Xenocide was a child and did not know the war was real; yet he chose to destroy a populated planet in his game. I am an adult and have known all along that the game was real; but I did not kno
w I was a player. Is my blame greater or less than the Xenocide's if another world is destroyed and another raman species obliterated? What is my path to simplicity now?

  His friend would know few of the circumstances surrounding this query; but he would not need more. He would consider the question. He would find an answer.

  A moment later, an ansible on the planet Pacifica received his message. On the way, it had already been read by the entity that sat astride all the strands of the ansible web. For Jane, though, it was not the message that mattered so much as the address. Now Peter and Wang-mu would know where to go for the next step in their quest.

  5

  "NOBODY IS RATIONAL"

  "My father often told me,

  We have servants and machines

  in order that our will may be carried out

  beyond the reach of our own arms.

  Machines are more powerful than servants

  and more obedient and less rebellious,

  but machines have no judgment

  and will not remonstrate with us

  when our will is foolish,

  and will not disobey us

  when our will is evil.

  In times and places where people despise the gods,

  those most in need of servants have machines,

  or choose servants who will behave like machines.

  I believe this will continue

  until the gods stop laughing."

  from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

  The hovercar skimmed over the fields of amaranth being tended by buggers under the morning sun of Lusitania. In the distance, clouds already arose, cumulus stacks billowing upward, though it was not yet noon.