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

persuade the senior officers that the midlevel officers whose high opinion was essential to their honor would not condemn them for backing down in the face of irresistible force, but would rather honor them for preserving the independence of their own nation.
    As I thought further, though, I realized that even this was too direct -- it could not be done. One would have to be able to point not only to evidence that the midlevel officers' minds had been changed, but also to plausible reasons for the change of heart. Still, I wondered, what if some one influential thinker or philosopher who was perceived as "inside" the culture of the military elite had reinterpreted history in such a way as to genuinely transform the military's perception of a great war commander? Such transformative ideas have come before -- and most particularly have come to Japan, which, despite the seeming rigidity of its culture, and perhaps because of its long life just beyond the edge of Chinese culture, has been the most successful nation in modern times in adopting and adapting ideas and customs as if they had always believed them or practiced them, thus preserving the image of rigidity and continuity when in fact being supremely flexible. An idea could have swept through the military culture and left the elites with a war that no longer seemed necessary or desirable; if this had happened before Pearl Harbor, Japan might have been able to back down from its aggressive war in China, consolidate its holdings, and restore peace with the United States.
    (Whether this would have been good or bad is another question, of course. To have avoided the war that cost so many lives and caused so many horrors, not least the firebombing of Japanese cities and ultimately the use of nuclear weapons for the first and, so far, only time in history, would have been unarguably good; but one must not forget that it was losing that war that brought about the American occupation of Japan and the forcible imposition of democratic ideas and practices, which led to a flowering of Japanese culture and the Japanese economy that might never have been possible under the rule of the military elite. It is fortunate that we do not have the power to replay history, because then we would be forced to choose: Do you knacker the horse to get the glue?)
    In any event, I knew then that someone -- I thought at first it would be Ender -- would have to go from world to world in search of the ultimate source of power in Starways Congress. Whose mind had to be changed in order to transform the culture of Starways Congress in such a way as to stop the Lusitania Fleet? Since this whole issue began for me with a consideration of a history of Japan, I determined that a far-future Japanese culture must play some role in the story. Thus Peter and Wang-mu come to the planet Divine Wind.
    Another thought-path also brought me to Japan, however. It happened that I visited with dear friends in Utah, Van and Elizabeth Gessel, at a time shortly after Van, a professor of Japanese language at Brigham Young University, had acquired a CD called Music of Hikari Oe . Van played the CD -- powerful, skillful, evocative music of the Western, mathematical tradition -- as he told me something of the composer. Hikari Oe, he told me, is brain damaged, mentally retarded; but when it comes to music, he is gifted. His father, Kenzaburo Oe, recently received the Nobel prize for literature; and while Kenzaburo Oe has written many things, the most powerful of his works, and almost certainly the ones for which the prize was given, are those that deal with his relationship to his damaged child, both the pain of having such a child and the transformative joy of discovering the true nature of that child while also discovering the true nature of that parent who stays and loves him.
    I at once felt a powerful kinship with Kenzaburo Oe, not because my writing in any way resembles his, but because I also have a brain-damaged child and have followed my own course in dealing with the fact of him in my life. Like Kenzaburo Oe, I could not keep my damaged child out of my writing; he shows up again and again. Yet this very sense of kinship also made me avoid seeking out Oe's writings, for I feared that either he would have ideas about such children that I could not agree with, and then I would be hurt or angry; or his ideas would be so truthful and powerful that I then would be forced into silence, having nothing to add. (This is