Whereas I need something that will make me disappear. Or better yet, clothing that will let me fly away from here, all in a single night, fly Outside and back In to the house of Han Fei-tzu, where I can look into eyes that show neither pity nor scorn.
Nor pain. For there is pain in Peter’s eyes, and it was wrong of me to say he felt none. It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.
If I apologize to him, he’ll mock me for it.
But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong. Is that a principle Han Fei-tzu taught me? No. I was born with that one. Like my mother said, too much pride, too much pride.
When she returned to the apartment, however, Peter was asleep; exhausted, she postponed her apology and also slept. Each of them woke during the night, but never at the same time; and in the morning, the edge of last night’s quarrel had worn off. There was business at hand, and it was more important for her to understand what they were going to attempt to do today than for her to heal a breach between them that seemed, in the light of morning, to be scarcely more than a meaningless spat between tired friends.
“The man Jane has chosen for us to visit is a philosopher.”
“Like me?” Wang-mu said, keenly aware of her false new role.
“That’s what I wanted to discuss with you. There are two kinds of philosophers here on Divine Wind. Aimaina Hikari, the man we will meet, is an analytical philosopher. You don’t have the education to hold your own with him. So you are the other kind. Gnomic and mantic. Given to pithy phrases that startle others with their seeming irrelevancy.”
“Is it necessary that my supposedly wise phrases only seem irrelevant?”
“You don’t even have to worry about that. The gnomic philosophers depend on others to connect their irrelevancies with the real world. That’s why any fool can do it.”
Wang-mu felt anger rise in her like mercury in a thermometer. “How kind of you to choose that profession for me.”
“Don’t be offended,” said Peter. “Jane and I had to come up with some role you could play on this particular planet that wouldn’t reveal you to be an uneducated native of Path. You have to understand that no child on Divine Wind is allowed to grow up as hopelessly ignorant as the servant class on Path.”
Wang-mu did not argue further. What would be the point? If one has to say, in an argument, “I am intelligent! I do know things!” then one might as well stop arguing. Indeed, this idea struck her as being exactly one of those gnomic phrases that Peter was talking about. She said so.
“No, no, I don’t mean epigrams,” said Peter. “Those are too analytical. I mean genuinely strange things. For instance, you might have said, ‘The woodpecker attacks the tree to get at the bug,’ and then I would have had to figure out just how that might fit our situation here. Am I the woodpecker? The tree? The bug? That’s the beauty of it.”
“It seems to me that you have just proved yourself to be the more gnomic of the two of us.”
Peter rolled his eyes and headed for the door.
“Peter,” she said, not moving from her place.
He turned to face her.
“Wouldn’t I be more helpful to you if I had some idea of why we’re meeting this man, and who he is?”
Peter shrugged. “I suppose. Though we know that Aimaina Hikari is not the person or even one of the people we’re looking for.”
“Tell me whom we are looking for, then.”
“We’re looking for the center of power in the Hundred Worlds,” he said.
“Then why are we here, instead of Starways Congress?”
“Starways Congress is a play. The delegates are actors. The scripts are written elsewhere.”
“Here.”
“The faction of Congress that is getting its way about the Lusitania Fleet is not the one that loves war. That group is cheerful about the whole thing, of course, since they always believe in brutally putting down insurrection and so on, but they would never have been able to get the votes to send the fleet without a swing group that is very heavily influenced by a school of philosophers from Divine Wind.”