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
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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 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.