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

starship.

CHAPTER 4
     
    “I AM A MAN OF PERFECT SIMPLICITY!”

    "When I was a child, I thought
    a god was disappointed
    whenever some distraction
    interrupted my tracing of the lines
    revealed in the grain of the wood.
    Now I know the gods expect such interruptions,
    for they know our frailty.
    It is completion that surprises them."
    -- from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
     
     
    Peter and Wang-mu ventured out into the world of Divine Wind on their second day. They did not have to worry about learning a language. Divine Wind was an older world, one of the first wave settled in the initial emigration from Earth. It was originally as recidivist as Path, clinging to the ancient ways. But the ancient ways of Divine Wind were Japanese ways, and so it included the possibility of radical change. Scarcely three hundred years into its history, the world transformed itself from being the isolated fiefdom of a ritualized shogunate to being a cosmopolitan center of trade and industry and philosophy. The Japanese of Divine Wind prided themselves on being hosts to visitors from all worlds, and there were still many places where children grew up speaking only Japanese until they were old enough to enter school. But by adulthood, all the people of Divine Wind spoke Stark with fluency, and the best of them with elegance, with grace, with astonishing economy; it was said by Mil Fiorelli, in his most famous book, Observations of Distant Worlds with the Naked Eye , that Stark was a language that had no native speakers until it was whispered by a Divine Wind.
    So it was that when Peter and Wang-mu hiked through the woods of the great natural preserve where their starship had landed and emerged in a village of foresters, laughing about how long they had been "lost" in the woods, no one thought twice about Wang-mu's obviously Chinese features and accent, or even about Peter's white skin and lack of an epicanthic fold. They had lost their documents, they claimed, but a computer search showed them to be licensed automobile drivers in the city of Nagoya, and while Peter seemed to have had a couple of youthful traffic offenses there, otherwise they were not known to have committed any illegal acts. Peter's profession was given as "independent teacher of physics" and Wang-mu's as "itinerant philosopher," both quite respectable positions, given their youth and lack of family attachment. When they were asked casual questions ("I have a cousin who teaches progenerative grammars in the Komatsu University in Nagoya") Jane gave Peter appropriate comments to say:
    "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,