Children of the Mind Page 8

  "Don't you feel anything?"

  She swallowed, looked up at him. "I already miss Han Fei-tzu, and I've been gone scarcely two days." She smiled slightly. "I have known a man of grace and wisdom. He found me interesting. I'm quite comfortable with boring you."

  Peter immediately made a show of splashing water on his ears. "I'm burning, that stung, oh, how can I stand it. Vicious! You have the breath of a dragon! Men die at your words!"

  "Only puppets strutting around hanging from strings," said Wang-mu.

  "Better to dangle from strings than to be bound tight by them," said Peter.

  "Oh, the gods must love me, to have put me in the company of a man so clever with words."

  "Whereas the gods have put me in the company of a woman with no breasts."

  She forced herself to pretend to take this as a joke. "Small ones, I thought you said."

  But suddenly the smile left his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've hurt you."

  "I don't think so. I'll tell you later, after a good night's sleep."

  "I thought we were bantering," said Peter. "Bandying insults."

  "We were," said Wang-mu. "But I believe them all."

  Peter winced. "Then I'm hurt, too."

  "You don't know how to hurt," said Wang-mu. "You're just mocking me."

  Peter pushed aside his plate and stood up. "I'll see you back at the apartment. Think you can find the way?"

  "Do I think you actually care?"

  "It's a good thing I have no soul," said Peter. "That's the only thing that stops you from devouring it."

  "If I ever had your soul in my mouth," said Wang-mu, "I would spit it out."

  "Get some rest," said Peter. "For the work I have ahead, I need a mind, not a quarrel." He walked out of the restaurant. The clothing fit him badly. People looked. He was a man of too much dignity and strength to dress so foppishly. Wang-mu saw at once that it shamed him. She saw also that he knew it, that he moved swiftly because he knew this clothing was wrong for him. He would undoubtedly have Jane order him something older looking, more mature, more in keeping with his need for honor.

  Whereas I need something that will make me disappear. Or better yet, clothing that will let me fly away from here, all in a single night, fly Outside and back In to the house of Han Fei-tzu, where I can look into eyes that show neither pity nor scorn.

  Nor pain. For there is pain in Peter's eyes, and it was wrong of me to say he felt none. It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.

  If I apologize to him, he'll mock me for it.

  But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong. Is that a principle Han Fei-tzu taught me? No. I was born with that one. Like my mother said, too much pride, too much pride.

  When she returned to the apartment, however, Peter was asleep; exhausted, she postponed her apology and also slept. Each of them woke during the night, but never at the same time; and in the morning, the edge of last night's quarrel had worn off. There was business at hand, and it was more important for her to understand what they were going to attempt to do today than for her to heal a breach between them that seemed, in the light of morning, to be scarcely more than a meaningless spat between tired friends.

  "The man Jane has chosen for us to visit is a philosopher."

  "Like me?" Wang-mu said, keenly aware of her false new role.

  "That's what I wanted to discuss with you. There are two kinds of philosophers here on Divine Wind. Aimaina Hikari, the man we will meet, is an analytical philosopher. You don't have the education to hold your own with him. So you are the other kind. Gnomic and mantic. Given to pithy phrases that startle others with their seeming irrelevancy."

  "Is it necessary that my supposedly wise phrases only seem irrelevant?"

  "You don't even have to worry about that. The gnomic philosophers depend on others to connect their irrelevancies with the real world. That's why any fool can do it."

  Wang-mu felt anger rise in her like mercury in a thermometer. "How kind of you to choose that profession for me."

  "Don't be offended," said Peter. "Jane and I had to come up with some role you could play on this particular planet that wouldn't reveal you to be an uneducated native of Path. You have to understand that no child on Divine Wind is allowed to grow up as hopelessly ignorant as the servant class on Path."

  Wang-mu did not argue further. What would be the point? If one has to say, in an argument, "I am intelligent! I do know things!" then one might as well stop arguing. Indeed, this idea struck her as being exactly one of those gnomic phrases that Peter was talking about. She said so.

  "No, no, I don't mean epigrams," said Peter. "Those are too analytical. I mean genuinely strange things. For instance, you might have said, 'The woodpecker attacks the tree to get at the bug,' and then I would have had to figure out just how that might fit our situation here. Am I the woodpecker? The tree? The bug? That's the beauty of it."

  "It seems to me that you have just proved yourself to be the more gnomic of the two of us."

  Peter rolled his eyes and headed for the door.

  "Peter," she said, not moving from her place.

  He turned to face her.

  "Wouldn't I be more helpful to you if I had some idea of why we're meeting this man, and who he is?"

  Peter shrugged. "I suppose. Though we know that Aimaina Hikari is not the person or even one of the people we're looking for."

  "Tell me whom we are looking for, then."

  "We're looking for the center of power in the Hundred Worlds," he said.

  "Then why are we here, instead of Starways Congress?"

  "Starways Congress is a play. The delegates are actors. The scripts are written elsewhere."

  "Here."

  "The faction of Congress that is getting its way about the Lusitania Fleet is not the one that loves war. That group is cheerful about the whole thing, of course, since they always believe in brutally putting down insurrection and so on, but they would never have been able to get the votes to send the fleet without a swing group that is very heavily influenced by a school of philosophers from Divine Wind."

  "Of which Aimaina Hikari is the leader?"

  "It's more subtle than that. He is actually a solitary philosopher, belonging to no particular school. But he represents a sort of purity of Japanese thought which makes him something of a conscience to the philosophers who influence the swing group in Congress."

  "How many dominoes do you think you can line up and have them still knock each other over?"

  "No, that wasn't gnomic enough. Still too analytical."

  "I'm not playing my part yet, Peter. What are the ideas that this swing group gets from this philosophical school?"

  Peter sighed and sat down--bending himself into a chair, of course. Wang-mu sat on the floor and thought: This is how a man of Europe likes to see himself, with his head higher than all others, teaching the woman of Asia. But from my perspective, he has disconnected himself from the earth. I will hear his words, but I will know that it is up to me to bring them into a living place.

  "The swing group would never use such massive force against what really amounts to a minor dispute with a tiny colony. The original issue, as you know, was that two xenologers, Miro Ribeira and Ouanda Mucumbi, were caught introducing agriculture among the pequeninos of Lusitania. This constituted cultural interference, and they were ordered offplanet for trial. Of course, with the old relativistic lightspeed ships, taking someone off planet meant that when and if they ever went back, everyone they knew would be old or dead. So it was brutally harsh treatment and amounted to prejudgment. Congress might have expected protests from the government of Lusitania, but what it got instead was complete defiance and a cutoff of ansible communications. The tough guys in Congress immediately started lobbying for a single troopship to go and seize control of Lusitania. But they didn't have the votes, until--"

  "Until th
ey raised the specter of the descolada virus."

  "Exactly. The group that was adamantly opposed to the use of force brought up the descolada as a reason why troops shouldn't be sent--because at that time anyone who was infected with the virus had to stay on Lusitania and keep taking an inhibitor that kept the descolada from destroying your body from the inside out. This was the first time that the danger of the descolada became widely known, and the swing group emerged, consisting of those who were appalled that Lusitania had not been quarantined long before. What could be more dangerous than to have a fast-spreading, semi-intelligent virus in the hands of rebels? This group consisted almost entirely of delegates who were strongly influenced by the Necessarian school from Divine Wind."

  Wang-mu nodded. "And what do the Necessarians teach?"

  "That one lives in peace and harmony with one's environment, disturbing nothing, patiently bearing mild or even serious afflictions. However, when a genuine threat to survival emerges, one must act with brutal efficiency. The maxim is, Act only when necessary, and then act with maximum force and speed. Thus, where the militarists wanted a troopship, the Necessarian-influenced delegates insisted on sending a fleet armed with the Molecular Disruption Device, which would destroy the threat of the descolada virus once and for all. There's a sort of ironic neatness about it all, don't you think?"

  "I don't see it."

  "Oh, it fits together so perfectly. Ender Wiggin was the one who used the Little Doctor to wipe out the bugger home world. Now it's going to be used for only the second time--against the very world where he happens to live! It gets even thicker. The first Necessarian philosopher, Ooka, used Ender himself as the prime example of his ideas. As long as the buggers were seen to be a dangerous threat to the survival of humankind, the only appropriate response was utter eradication of the enemy. No half-measures would do. Of course the buggers turned out not to have been a threat after all, as Ender himself wrote in his book The Hive Queen, but Ooka defended the mistake because the truth was unknowable at the time Ender's superiors turned him loose against the enemy. What Ooka said was, 'Never trade blows with the enemy.' His idea was that you try never to strike anyone, but when you must, you strike only one blow, but such a harsh one that your enemy can never, never strike back."

  "So using Ender as an example--"

  "That's right. Ender's own actions are being used to justify repeating them against another harmless species."

  "The descolada wasn't harmless."

  "No," said Peter. "But Ender and Ela found another way, didn't they? They struck a blow against the descolada itself. But there's no way now to convince Congress to withdraw the fleet. Because Jane already interfered with Congress's ansible communications with the fleet, they believe they face a formidable widespread secret conspiracy. Any argument we make will be seen as disinformation. Besides, who would believe the farfetched tale of that first trip Outside, where Ela created the anti-descolada, Miro recreated himself, and Ender made my dear sister and me?"

  "So the Necessarians in Congress--"

  "They don't call themselves that. But the influence is very strong. It is Jane's and my opinion that if we can get some prominent Necessarians to declare against the Lusitania Fleet--with convincing reasoning, of course--the solidarity of the pro-fleet majority in Congress will be broken up. It's a thin majority--there are plenty of people horrified by such devastating use of force against a colony world, and others who are even more horrified at the idea that Congress would destroy the pequeninos, the first sentient species found since the destruction of the buggers. They would love to stop the fleet, or at worst use it to impose a permanent quarantine."

  "Why aren't we meeting with a Necessarian, then?"

  "Because why would they listen to us? If we identify ourselves as supporters of the Lusitanian cause, we'll be jailed and questioned. And if we don't, who will take our ideas seriously?"

  "This Aimaina Hikari, then. What is he?"

  "Some people call him the Yamato philosopher. All the Necessarians of Divine Wind are, naturally, Japanese, and the philosophy has become most influential among the Japanese, both on their home worlds and wherever they have a substantial population. So even though Hikari isn't a Necessarian, he is honored as the keeper of the Japanese soul."

  "If he tells them that it's un-Japanese to destroy Lusitania--"

  "But he won't. Not easily, anyway. His seminal work, which won him his reputation as the Yamato philosopher, included the idea that the Japanese people were born as rebellious puppets. First it was Chinese culture that pulled the strings. But Hikari says, Japan learned all the wrong lessons from the attempted Chinese invasion of Japan--which, by the way, was defeated by a great storm, called kamikaze, which means 'Divine Wind.' So you can be sure everyone on this world, at least, remembers that ancient story. Anyway, Japan locked itself away on an island, and at first refused to deal with Europeans when they came. But then an American fleet forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade, and then the Japanese made up for lost time. The Meiji Restoration led to Japan trying to industrialize and Westernize itself--and once again a new set of strings made the puppet dance, says Hikari. Only once again, the wrong lessons were learned. Since the Europeans at the time were imperialists, dividing up Africa and Asia among them, Japan decided it wanted a piece of the imperial pie. There was China, the old puppetmaster. So there was an invasion--"

  "We were taught of this invasion on Path," said Wang-mu.

  "I'm surprised they taught any history more recent than the Mongol invasion," said Peter.

  "The Japanese were finally stopped when the Americans dropped the first nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities."

  "The equivalent, in those days, of the Little Doctor. The irresistible, total weapon. The Japanese soon came to regard these nuclear weapons as a kind of badge of pride: We were the first people ever to have been attacked by nuclear weapons. It had become a kind of permanent grievance, which wasn't a bad thing, really, because that was part of their impetus to found and populate many colonies, so that they would never be a helpless island nation again. But then along comes Aimaina Hikari, and he says--by the way, his name is self-chosen, it's the name he used to sign his first book. It means 'Ambiguous Light.' "

  "How gnomic," said Wang-mu.

  Peter grinned. "Oh, tell him that, he'll be so proud. Anyway, in his first book, he says, The Japanese learned the wrong lesson. Those nuclear bombs cut the strings. Japan was utterly prostrate. The proud old government was destroyed, the emperor became a figurehead, democracy came to Japan, and then wealth and great power."

  "The bombs were a blessing, then?" asked Wang-mu doubtfully.

  "No, no, not at all. He thinks the wealth of Japan destroyed the people's soul. They adopted the destroyer as their father. They became America's bastard child, blasted into existence by American bombs. Puppets again."

  "Then what does he have to do with the Necessarians?"

  "Japan was bombed, he says, precisely because they were already too European. They treated China as the Europeans treated America, selfishly and brutally. But the Japanese ancestors could not bear to see their children become such beasts. So just as the gods of Japan sent a Divine Wind to stop the Chinese fleet, so the gods sent the American bombs to stop Japan from becoming an imperialist state like the Europeans. The Japanese response should have been to bear the American occupation and then, when it was over, to become purely Japanese again, chastened and whole. The title of his book was, Not Too Late."

  "And I'll bet the Necessarians use the American bombing of Japan as another example of striking with maximum force and speed."

  "No Japanese would have dared to praise the American bombing until Hikari made it possible to see the bombing, not as Japan's victimization, but as the gods' attempt at redemption of the people."

  "So you're saying that the Necessarians respect him enough that if he changed his mind, they would change theirs--but he won't change his mind, because he believes the bombing of Japan was
a divine gift?"

  "We're hoping he will change his mind," said Peter, "or our trip will be a failure. The thing is, there's no chance he'll be open to direct persuasion from us, and Jane can't tell from his writings what or who it is who might influence him. We have to talk to him to find out where to go next--so maybe we can change their mind."

  "This is really complicated, isn't it?" said Wang-mu.

  "Which is why I didn't think it was worth explaining it to you. What exactly are you going to do with this information? Enter into a discussion of the subtleties of history with an analytical philosopher of the first rank, like Hikari?"

  "I'm going to listen," said Wang-mu.

  "That's what you were going to do before," said Peter.

  "But now I will know who it is I'm listening to."

  "Jane thinks it was a mistake for me to tell you, because now you'll be interpreting everything he says in light of what Jane and I already think we know."

  "Tell Jane that the only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge."

  Peter laughed. "Epigrams again," he said. "You're supposed to say--"

  "Don't tell me how to be gnomic again," said Wang-mu. She got up from the floor. Now her head was higher than Peter's. "You're the gnome. And as for me being mantic--remember that the mantic eats its mate."

  "I'm not your mate," said Peter, "and 'mantic' means a philosophy that comes from vision or inspiration or intuition rather than from scholarship and reason."

  "If you're not my mate," said Wang-mu, "stop treating me like a wife."

  Peter looked puzzled, then looked away. "Was I doing that?"

  "On Path, a husband assumes his wife is a fool and teaches her even the things she already knows. On Path, a wife has to pretend, when she is teaching her husband, that she is only reminding him of things he taught her long before."

  "Well, I'm just an insensitive oaf, aren't I."

  "Please remember," said Wang-mu, "that when we meet with Aimaina Hikari, he and I have one fund of knowledge that you can never have."

  "And what's that?"

  "A life."

  She saw the pain on his face and at once regretted causing it. But it was a reflexive regret--she had been trained from childhood up to be sorry when she gave offense, no matter how richly it was deserved.