Peter grinned. “Oh, tell him that, he’ll be so proud. Anyway, in his first book, he says, The Japanese learned the wrong lesson. Those nuclear bombs cut the strings. Japan was utterly prostrate. The proud old government was destroyed, the emperor became a figurehead, democracy came to Japan, and then wealth and great power.”
“The bombs were a blessing, then?” asked Wang-mu doubtfully.
“No, no, not at all. He thinks the wealth of Japan destroyed the people’s soul. They adopted the destroyer as their father. They became America’s bastard child, blasted into existence by American bombs. Puppets again.”
“Then what does he have to do with the Necessarians?”
“Japan was bombed, he says, precisely because they were already too European. They treated China as the Europeans treated America, selfishly and brutally. But the Japanese ancestors could not bear to see their children become such beasts. So just as the gods of Japan sent a Divine Wind to stop the Chinese fleet, so the gods sent the American bombs to stop Japan from becoming an imperialist state like the Europeans. The Japanese response should have been to bear the American occupation and then, when it was over, to become purely Japanese again, chastened and whole. The title of his book was, Not Too Late.”
“And I’ll bet the Necessarians use the American bombing of Japan as another example of striking with maximum force and speed.”
“No Japanese would have dared to praise the American bombing until Hikari made it possible to see the bombing, not as Japan’s victimization, but as the gods’ attempt at redemption of the people.”
“So you’re saying that the Necessarians respect him enough that if he changed his mind, they would change theirs — but he won’t change his mind, because he believes the bombing of Japan was a divine gift?”
“We’re hoping he will change his mind,” said Peter, “or our trip will be a failure. The thing is, there’s no chance he’ll be open to direct persuasion from us, and Jane can’t tell from his writings what or who it is who might influence him. We have to talk to him to find out where to go next — so maybe we can change their mind.”
“This is really complicated, isn’t it?” said Wang-mu.
“Which is why I didn’t think it was worth explaining it to you. What exactly are you going to do with this information? Enter into a discussion of the subtleties of history with an analytical philosopher of the first rank, like Hikari?”
“I’m going to listen,” said Wang-mu.
“That’s what you were going to do before,” said Peter.
“But now I will know who it is I’m listening to.”
“Jane thinks it was a mistake for me to tell you, because now you’ll be interpreting everything he says in light of what Jane and I already think we know.”
“Tell Jane that the only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.”
Peter laughed. “Epigrams again,” he said. “You’re supposed to say –”
“Don’t tell me how to be gnomic again,” said Wang-mu. She got up from the floor. Now her head was higher than Peter’s. “You’re the gnome. And as for me being mantic — remember that the mantic eats its mate.”
“I’m not your mate,” said Peter, “and ‘mantic’ means a philosophy that comes from vision or inspiration or intuition rather than from scholarship and reason.”
“If you’re not my mate,” said Wang-mu, “stop treating me like a wife.”
Peter looked puzzled, then looked away. “Was I doing that?”
“On Path, a husband assumes his wife is a fool and teaches her even the things she already knows. On Path, a wife has to pretend, when she is teaching her husband, that she is only reminding him of things he taught her long before.”
“Well, I’m just an insensitive oaf, aren’t I.”
“Please remember,” said Wang-mu, “that when we meet with Aimaina Hikari, he and I have one fund of knowledge that you can never have.”
“And what’s that?”
“A life.”
She saw the pain on his face and at once regretted causing it. But it was a reflexive regret — she had been trained from childhood up to be sorry when she gave offense, no matter how richly it was deserved.