Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

"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."