Children of the Mind (Ender, Book 4) (Ender Quartet)

what it all might mean. I see Ender in you looking out at me. You see Ender in me looking out at you. And yet not one of us is truly him; we are each our own self, all of us strangers on our own road. We walked awhile on that road with Ender Wiggin. He showed us things we might not otherwise have seen. But the road goes on without him now. In the end, he was no more than any other man. But no less, either."
    And then it was over. No prayer -- the prayers had all been said before she spoke, for the bishop had no intention of letting this unreligious ritual of Speaking be a part of the services of Holy Mother Church. The weeping had been done as well, the grief purged. They rose from their places on the ground, the older ones stiffly, the children with exuberance, running and shouting to make up for the long confinement. It was good to hear laughter and shouting. That was also a good way to say good-bye to Ender Wiggin.
    Valentine kissed Jakt and her children, embraced Wang-mu, then made her way alone through the crush of citizens. So many of the humans of Milagre had fled to other colonies; but now, with their planet saved, many of them chose not to stay on the new worlds. Lusitania was their home. They weren't the pioneering kind. Many others, though, had come back solely for this ceremony. Jane would return them to their farms and houses on virgin worlds. It would take a generation or two to fill the empty houses in Milagre.
    On the porch Peter waited for her. She smiled at him. "I think you have an appointment now," said Valentine.
    They walked together out of Milagre and into the new-growth forest that still could not utterly hide the evidence of recent fire. They walked until they came to a bright and shining tree. They arrived almost at the same time that the others, walking from the funeral site, arrived. Jane came to the glowing mothertree and touched it -- touched a part of herself, or at least a dear sister. Then Peter took his place beside Wang-mu, and Miro stood with Jane, and the priest married the two couples under the mothertree, with pequeninos looking on, and Valentine as the only human witness of the ceremony. No one else even knew the ceremony was taking place; it would not do, they had decided, to distract from Ender's funeral or Plikt's speaking. Time enough to announce the marriages later on.
    When the ceremony was done, the priest left, with pequeninos as his guide to take him back through the wood. Valentine embraced the newly married couples, Jane and Miro, Peter and Wang-mu, spoke to them for a moment one by one, murmured words of congratulations and farewell, and then stood back and watched.
    Jane closed her eyes, smiled, and then all four of them were gone. Only the mothertree remained in the middle of the clearing, bathed in light, heavy with fruit, festooned with blossoms, a perpetual celebrant of the ancient mystery of life.

AFTERWORD

    The storyline of Peter and Wang-mu was tied to Japan from the beginning of my planning for the book Xenocide , which was originally intended to include everything in Children of the Mind as well. I was reading a history of prewar Japan and was intrigued by the notion that the people driving the war forward were not the members of the ruling elite, nor even the top leaders of the Japanese military, but rather the young midlevel officers. Of course these very officers would surely have thought it ridiculous that they were in any way in control of the war effort. They drove the war forward, not because they had power in their hands, but because the rulers of Japan dared not be shamed before them.
    In my own speculation on the matter, it occurred to me then that it was the ruling elite's image of these midlevel officers' perception of honor that drove them, projecting their own ideas of honor onto their subordinates, who may or may not have responded to Japanese retreat or retrenchment as the senior officers feared. So if someone were to have attempted to prevent Japan's escalation of aggressive war from China to Indochina and finally to the United States, one would have had to change, not the real beliefs of the midlevel officers, but the beliefs of the senior officers about the probable attitudes of those midlevel officers. Thus one would not attempt to persuade the senior officers that the war effort was foolish and doomed -- they already knew it and were choosing to ignore it out of a fear of being thought unworthy. One might better have tried to