Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

"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."