“Oh, Aimaina Hikari,” she said, “you have spoken of our names, but have you forgotten your own? How could the man called ‘Ambiguous Light’ ever think that his teachings could have only the effects that he intended?”
Upon hearing those words, Hikari turned his back and stalked from the room. Had she made the situation better or worse? Wang-mu had no way of knowing. She got to her feet and walked dolefully to the door. Peter would be furious with her. With her boldness she might well have ruined everything for them — and not just for them, but for all those who so desperately hoped for them to stop the Lusitania Fleet.
To her surprise, however, Peter was perfectly cheerful once they got outside Hikari’s garden gate. “Well done, however weird your technique was,” said Peter.
“What do you mean? It was a disaster,” she said; but she was eager to believe that somehow he was right and she had done well after all.
“Oh, he’s angry and he’ll never speak to us again, but who cares? We weren’t trying to change his mind ourselves. We were just trying to find out who it is who does have influence over him. And we did.”
“We did?”
“Jane picked up on it at once. When he said he was a man of ‘perfect simplicity.'”
“Does that mean something more than the plain sense of it?”
“Mr. Hikari, my dear, has revealed himself to be a secret disciple of Ua Lava.”
Wang-mu was baffled.
“It’s a religious movement. Or a joke. It’s hard to know which. It’s a Samoan term, with the literal meaning ‘Now enough,’ but which is translated more accurately as, ‘enough already!'”
“I’m sure you’re an expert on Samoan.” Wang-mu, for her part, had never heard of the language.
“Jane is,” said Peter testily. “I have her jewel in my ear and you don’t. Don’t you want me to pass along what she tells me?”
“Yes, please,” said Wang-mu.
“It’s a sort of philosophy — cheerful stoicism, one might call it, because when things get bad or when things are good, you say the same thing. But as taught by a particular Samoan writer named Leiloa Lavea, it became more than a mere attitude. She taught –”
“She? Hikari is a disciple of a woman?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Peter. “If you listen, I’ll tell you what Jane is telling me.”
He waited. She listened.
“All right, then, what Leiloa Lavea taught was a sort of volunteer communism. It’s not enough just to laugh at good fortune and say, ‘Enough already.’ You have to really mean it — that you have enough. And because you mean it, you take the surplus and you give it away. Similarly, when bad fortune comes, you bear it until it becomes unbearable — your family is hungry, or you can no longer function in your work. And then again you say, ‘Enough already,’ and you change something. You move; you change careers; you let your spouse make all the decisions. Something. You don’t endure the unendurable.”
“What does that have to do with ‘perfect simplicity’?”
“Leiloa Lavea taught that when you have achieved balance in your life — surplus good fortune is being fully shared, and all bad fortune has been done away with — what is left is a life of perfect simplicity. That’s what Aimaina Hikari was saying to us. Until we came, his life had been going on in perfect simplicity. But now we have thrown him out of balance. That’s good, because it means he’s going to be struggling to discover how to restore simplicity to its perfection. He’ll be open to influence. Not ours, of course.”
“Leiloa Lavea’s?”
“Hardly. She’s been dead for two thousand years. Ender met her once, by the way. He came to speak a death on her home world of — well, Starways Congress calls it Pacifica, but the Samoan enclave there calls it Lumana’i. ‘The Future.'”
“Not her death, though.”
“A Fijian murderer, actually. A fellow who killed more than a hundred children, all of them Tongan. He didn’t like Tongans, apparently. They held off on his funeral for thirty years so Ender could come and speak his death. They hoped that the Speaker for the Dead would be able to make sense of what he had done.”