“I never seem to get over to the Oe Building. The language people don’t talk to physicists anyway. They think we speak only mathematics. Wang-mu tells me that the only language we physicists know is the grammar of dreams.”
Wang-mu had no such friendly prompter in her ear, but then an itinerant philosopher was supposed to be gnomic in her speech and mantic in her thought. Thus she could answer Peter’s comment by saying, “I say that is the only grammar you speak. There is no grammar that you understand.”
This prompted Peter to tickle her, which made Wang-mu simultaneously laugh and wrench at his wrist until he stopped, thereby proving to the foresters that they were exactly what their documents said they were: brilliant young people who were nevertheless silly with love—or with youth, as if it made a difference.
They were given a ride in a government floater back to civilized country, where—thanks to Jane’s manipulation of the computer networks—they found an apartment that until yesterday had been empty and unfurnished, but which now was filled with an eclectic mix of furniture and art that reflected a charming mixture of poverty, quirkiness, and exquisite taste.
“Very nice,” said Peter.
Wang-mu, familiar only with the taste of one world, and really only of one man in that one world, could hardly evaluate Jane’s choices. There were places to sit—both Western chairs, which folded people into alternating right angles and never seemed comfortable to Wang-mu, and Eastern mats, which encouraged people to twine themselves into circles of harmony with the earth. The bedroom, with its Western mattress raised high off the ground even though there were neither rats nor roaches, was obviously Peter’s; Wang-mu knew that the same mat that invited her to sit in the main room of the apartment would also be her sleeping mat at night.
She deferentially offered Peter the first bath; he, however, seemed to feel no urgency to wash himself, even though he smelled of sweat from the hike and the hours cooped up in the floater. So Wang-mu ended up luxuriating in a tub, closing her eyes and meditating until she felt restored to herself. When she opened her eyes she no longer felt like a stranger. Rather she was herself, and the surrounding objects and spaces were free to attach themselves to her without damaging her sense of self. This was a power she had learned early in life, when she had no power even over her own body, and had to obey in all things. It was what preserved her. Her life had many unpleasant things attached to it, like remoras to a shark, but none of them changed who she was under the skin, in the cool darkness of her solitude with eyes closed and mind at peace.
When she emerged from the bathroom, she found Peter eating absently from a plate of grapes as he watched a holoplay in which masked Japanese actors bellowed at each other and took great, awkward, thundering steps, as if the actors were playing characters twice the size of their own bodies.
“Have you learned Japanese?” she asked.
“Jane’s translating for me. Very strange people.”
“It’s an ancient form of drama,” said Wang-mu.
“But very boring. Was there ever anyone whose heart was stirred by all this shouting?”
“If you are inside the story,” said Wang-mu, “then they are shouting the words of your own heart.”
“Somebody’s heart says, ‘I am the wind from the cold snow of the mountain, and you are the tiger whose roar will freeze in your own ears before you tremble and die in the iron knife of my winter eyes’?”
“It sounds like you,” said Wang-mu. “Bluster and brag.”
“I am the round-eyed sweating man who stinks like the corpse of a leaking skunk, and you are the flower who will wilt unless I take an immediate shower with lye and ammonia.”
“Keep your eyes closed when you do,” said Wang-mu. “That stuff burns.”
There was no computer in the apartment. Maybe the holoview could be used as a computer, but if so Wang-mu didn’t know how. Its controls looked like nothing she had seen in Han Fei-tzu’s house, but that was hardly a surprise. The people of Path didn’t take their design of anything from other worlds, if they could help it. Wang-mu didn’t even know how to turn off the sound. It didn’t matter. She sat on her mat and tried to remember everything she knew about the Japanese people from her study of Earth history with Han Qing-jao and her father, Han Fei-tzu. She knew that her education was spotty at best, because as a low-class girl no one had bothered to teach her much until she wangled her way into Qing-jao’s household. So Han Fei-tzu had told her not to bother with formal studies, but merely to explore information wherever her interests took her. “Your mind is unspoiled by a traditional education. Therefore you must let yourself discover your own way into each subject.” Despite this seeming liberty, Fei-tzu soon showed her that he was a stern taskmaster even when the subjects were freely chosen. Whatever she learned about history or biography, he would challenge her, question her; demand that she generalize, then refute her generalizations; and if she changed her mind, he would then demand just as sharply that she defend her new position, even though a moment before it had been his own. The result was that even with limited information, she was prepared to reexamine it, cast away old conclusions and hypothesize new ones. Thus she could close her eyes and continue her education without any jewel to whisper in her ear, for she could still hear Han Fei-tzu’s caustic questioning even though he was lightyears away.
The actors stopped ranting before Peter had finished his shower. Wang-mu did not notice. She did notice, however, when a voice from the holoview said, “Would you like another recorded selection, or would you prefer to connect with a current broadcast?”
For a moment Wang-mu thought that the voice must be Jane; then she realized that it was simply the rote menu of a machine. “Do you have news?” she asked.
“Local, regional, planetary or interplanetary?” asked the machine.
“Begin with local,” said Wang-mu. She was a stranger here. She might as well get acquainted.
When Peter emerged, clean and dressed in one of the stylish local costumes that Jane had had delivered for him, Wang-mu was engrossed in an account of a trial of some people accused of overfishing a lush coldwater region a few hundred kilometers from the city they were in. What was the name of this town? Oh, yes. Nagoya. Since Jane had declared this to be their hometown on all their false records, of course this was where the floater had brought them. “All worlds are the same,” said Wang-mu. “People want to eat fish from the sea, and some people want to take more of the fish than the ocean can replenish.”
“What harm does it do if I fish one extra day or take one extra ton?” Peter asked.
“Because if everyone does, then—” She stopped herself. “I see. You were ironically speaking the rationalization of the wrongdoers.”
“Am I clean and pretty now?” asked Peter, turning around to show off his loose-fitting yet somehow form-revealing clothing.
“The colors are garish,” said Wang-mu. “It looks as if you’re screaming.”
“No, no,” said Peter. “The idea is for the people who see me to scream.”
“Aaaah,” Wang-mu screamed softly.
“Jane says that this is actually a conservative costume—for a man of my age and supposed profession. Men in Nagoya are known for being peacocks.”
“And the women?”
“Bare-breasted all the time,” said Peter. “Quite a stunning sight.”
“That is a lie. I didn’t see one bare-breasted woman on our way in and—” Again she stopped and frowned at him. “Do you really want me to assume that everything you say is a lie?”
“I thought it was worth a try.”
“Don’t be silly. I have no breasts.”
“You have small ones,” said Peter. “Surely you’re aware of the distinction.”
“I don’t want to discuss my body with a man dressed in a badly planned, overgrown flower garden.”
“Women are all dowds here,” said Peter. “Tragic but true. Dignity and all that. So are the old men. Only the boys and young men on the
prowl are allowed such plumage as this. I think the bright colors are to warn women off. Nothing serious from this lad! Stay to play, or go away. Some such thing. I think Jane chose this city for us solely so she could make me wear these things.”
“I’m hungry. I’m tired.”
“Which is more urgent?” asked Peter.
“Hungry.”
“There are grapes,” he offered.
“Which you didn’t wash. I suppose that’s a part of your death wish.”
“On Divine Wind, insects know their place and stay there. No pesticides. Jane assured me.”
“There were no pesticides on Path, either,” said Wang-mu. “But we washed to clear away bacteria and other one-celled creatures. Amebic dysentery will slow us down.”
“Oh, but the bathroom is so nice, it would be a shame not to use it,” said Peter. Despite his flippancy, Wang-mu saw that her comment about dysentery from unwashed fruit bothered him.
“Let’s eat out,” said Wang-mu. “Jane has money for us, doesn’t she?”
Peter listened for a moment to something coming from the jewel in his ear.
“Yes, and all we have to do is tell the master of the restaurant that we lost our IDs and he’ll let us thumb our way into our accounts. Jane says we’re both very rich if we need to be, but we should try to act as if we were of limited means having an occasional splurge to celebrate something. What shall we celebrate?”
“Your bath.”
“You celebrate that. I’ll celebrate our safe return from being lost in the woods.”
Soon they found themselves on the street, a busy place with few cars, hundreds of bicycles, and thousands of people both on and off the glideways. Wang-mu was put off by these strange machines and insisted they walk on solid ground, which meant choosing a restaurant close by. The buildings in this neighborhood were old but not yet tatty-looking; an established neighborhood, but one with pride. The style was radically open, with arches and courtyards, pillars and roofs, but few walls and no glass at all. “The weather must be perfect here,” said Wang-mu.
“Tropical, but on the coast with a cold current offshore. It rains every afternoon for an hour or so, most of the year anyway, but it never gets very hot and never gets chilly at all.”
“It feels as though everything is outdoors all the time.”
“It’s all fakery,” said Peter. “Our apartment had glass windows and climate control, you notice. But it faces back, into the garden, and besides, the windows are recessed, so from below you don’t see the glass. Very artful. Artificially natural looking. Hypocrisy and deception—the human universal.”
“It’s a beautiful way to live,” said Wang-mu. “I like Nagoya.”
“Too bad we won’t be here long.”
Before she could ask to know where they were going and why, Peter pulled her into the courtyard of a busy restaurant. “This one cooks the fish,” said Peter. “I hope you don’t mind that.”
“What, the others serve it raw?” asked Wang-mu, laughing. Then she realized that Peter was serious. Raw fish!
“The Japanese are famous for it,” said Peter, “and in Nagoya it’s almost a religion. Notice—not a Japanese face in the restaurant. They wouldn’t deign to eat fish that was destroyed by heat. It’s just one of those things that they cling to. There’s so little that’s distinctively Japanese about their culture now, so they’re devoted to the few uniquely Japanese traits that survive.”
Wang-mu nodded, understanding perfectly how a culture could cling to long-dead customs just for the sake of national identity, and also grateful to be in a place where such customs were all superficial and didn’t distort and destroy the lives of the people the way they had on Path.
Their food came quickly—it takes almost no time to cook fish—and as they ate, Peter shifted his position several times on the mat. “Too bad this place isn’t nontraditional enough to have chairs.”
“Why do Europeans hate the earth so much that you must always lift yourself above it?” asked Wang-mu.
“You’ve already answered your question,” said Peter coldly. “You start from the assumption that we hate the earth. It makes you sound like some magic-using primitive.”
Wang-mu blushed and fell silent.
“Oh, spare me the passive oriental woman routine,” said Peter. “Or the passive I-was-trained-to-be-a-servant-and-you-sound-like-a-cruel-heartless-master manipulation through guilt. I know I’m a shit and I’m not going to change just because you look so downcast.”
“Then you could change because you wish not to be a shit any longer.”
“It’s in my character. Ender created me hateful so he could hate me. The added benefit is that you can hate me, too.”
“Oh, be quiet and eat your fish,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re supposed to analyze human beings and you can’t understand the person closest to you in all the world.”
“I don’t want to understand you,” said Peter. “I want to accomplish my task by exploiting this brilliant intelligence you’re supposed to have—even if you believe that people who squat are somehow ‘closer to the earth’ than people who remain upright.”
“I wasn’t talking about me,” she said. “I was talking about the person closest to you. Ender.”
“He is blessedly far from us right now.”
“He didn’t create you so that he could hate you. He long since got over hating you.”
“Yeah, yeah, he wrote The Hegemon, et cetera, et cetera.”
“That’s right,” said Wang-mu. “He created you because he desperately needed someone to hate him.”
Peter rolled his eyes and took a drink of milky pineapple juice. “Just the right amount of coconut. I think I’ll retire here, if Ender doesn’t die and make me disappear first.”
“I say something true, and you answer with coconut in the pineapple juice?”
“Novinha hates him,” said Peter. “He doesn’t need me.”
“Novinha is angry at him, but she’s wrong to be angry and he knows it. What he needs from you is a . . . righteous anger. To hate him for the evil that is really in him, which no one but him sees or even believes is there.”
“I’m just a nightmare from his childhood,” said Peter. “You’re reading too much into this.”
“He didn’t conjure you up because the real Peter was so important in his childhood. He conjured you up because you are the judge, the condemner. That’s what Peter drummed into him as a child. You told me yourself, talking about your memories. Peter taunting him, telling him of his unworthiness, his uselessness, his stupidity, his cowardice. You do it now. You look at his life and call him a xenocide, a failure. For some reason he needs this, needs to have someone damn him.”
“Well, how nice that I’m around, then, to despise him,” said Peter.
“But he also is desperate for someone to forgive him, to have mercy on him, to interpret all his actions as well meant. Valentine is not there because he loves her—he has the real Valentine for that. He has his wife. He needs your sister to exist so she can forgive him.”
“So if I stop hating Ender, he won’t need me anymore and I’ll disappear?”
“If Ender stops hating himself, then he won’t need you to be so mean and you’ll be easier to get along with.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not that easy getting along with somebody who’s constantly analyzing a person she’s never met and preaching at the person she has met.”
“I hope I make you miserable,” said Wang-mu. “It’s only fair, considering.”
“I think Jane brought us here because the local costumes reflect who we are. Puppet though I am, I take some perverse pleasure in life. While you—you can turn anything drab just by talking about it.”
Wang-mu bit back her tears and returned to her food.
“What is it with you?” Peter said.
She ignored him, chewed slowly, finding the untouched core of herself, which was busily enjoying the food.
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.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 139
