Orson Card - Children of the Mind

"Because if everyone does, then --" She stopped herself. "I see. You were ironically speaking the rationalization of the wrongdoers."

"Am I clean and pretty now?" asked Peter, turning around to show off his loose-fitting yet somehow form-revealing clothing.

"The colors are garish," said Wang-mu. "It looks as if you're screaming."

"No, no," said Peter. "The idea is for the people who see me to scream."

"Aaaah," Wang-mu screamed softly.

"Jane says that this is actually a conservative costume -- for a man of my age and supposed profession. Men in Nagoya are known for being peacocks."

"And the women?"

"Bare-breasted all the time," said Peter. "Quite a stunning sight."

"That is a lie. I didn't see one bare-breasted woman on our way in and --" Again she stopped and frowned at him. "Do you really want me to assume that everything you say is a lie?"

"I thought it was worth a try."

"Don't be silly. I have no breasts."

"You have small ones," said Peter. "Surely you're aware of the distinction."

"I don't want to discuss my body with a man dressed in a badly planned, overgrown flower garden."

"Women are all dowds here," said Peter. "Tragic but true. Dignity and all that. So are the old men. Only the boys and young men on the prowl are allowed such plumage as this. I think the bright colors are to warn women off. Nothing serious from this lad! Stay to play, or go away. Some such thing. I think Jane chose this city for us solely so she could make me wear these things."

"I'm hungry. I'm tired."

"Which is more urgent?" asked Peter.

"Hungry."

"There are grapes," he offered.

"Which you didn't wash. I suppose that's a part of your death wish."

"On Divine Wind, insects know their place and stay there. No pesticides. Jane assured me."

"There were no pesticides on Path, either," said Wang-mu. "But we washed to clear away bacteria and other one-celled creatures. Amebic dysentery will slow us down."

"Oh, but the bathroom is so nice, it would be a shame not to use it," said Peter. Despite his flippancy, Wang-mu saw that her comment about dysentery from unwashed fruit bothered him.

"Let's eat out," said Wang-mu. "Jane has money for us, doesn't she?"

Peter listened for a moment to something coming from the jewel in his ear.

"Yes, and all we have to do is tell the master of the restaurant that we lost our IDs and he'll let us thumb our way into our accounts. Jane says we're both very rich if we need to be, but we should try to act as if we were of limited means having an occasional splurge to celebrate something. What shall we celebrate?"

"Your bath."

"You celebrate that. I'll celebrate our safe return from being lost in the woods."

Soon they found themselves on the street, a busy place with few cars, hundreds of bicycles, and thousands of people both on and off the glideways. Wang-mu was put off by these strange machines and insisted they walk on solid ground, which meant choosing a restaurant close by. The buildings in this neighborhood were old but not yet tatty-looking; an established neighborhood, but one with pride. The style was radically open, with arches and courtyards, pillars and roofs, but few walls and no glass at all. "The weather must be perfect here," said Wang-mu.

"Tropical, but on the coast with a cold current offshore. It rains every afternoon for an hour or so, most of the year anyway, but it never gets very hot and never gets chilly at all."

"It feels as though everything is outdoors all the time."

"It's all fakery," said Peter. "Our apartment had glass windows and climate control, you notice. But it faces back, into the garden, and besides, the windows are recessed, so from below you don't see the glass. Very artful. Artificially natural looking. Hypocrisy and deception -- the human universal."

"It's a beautiful way to live," said Wang-mu. "I like Nagoya."

"Too bad we won't be here long."

Before she could ask to know where they were going and why, Peter pulled her into the courtyard of a busy restaurant. "This one cooks the fish," said Peter. "I hope you don't mind that."

"What, the others serve it raw?" asked Wang-mu, laughing. Then she realized that Peter was serious. Raw fish!

"The Japanese are famous for it," said Peter, "and in Nagoya it's almost a religion. Notice -- not a Japanese face in the restaurant. They wouldn't deign to eat fish that was destroyed by heat. It's just one of those things that they cling to. There's so little that's distinctively Japanese about their culture now, so they're devoted to the few uniquely Japanese traits that survive."

Wang-mu nodded, understanding perfectly how a culture could cling to long-dead customs just for the sake of national identity, and also grateful to be in a place where such customs were all superficial and didn't distort and destroy the lives of the people the way they had on Path.

Their food came quickly -- it takes almost no time to cook fish -- and as they ate, Peter shifted his position several times on the mat. "Too bad this place isn't nontraditional enough to have chairs."

"Why do Europeans hate the earth so much that you must always lift yourself above it?" asked Wang-mu.

"You've already answered your question," said Peter coldly. "You start from the assumption that we hate the earth. It makes you sound like some magic-using primitive."

Wang-mu blushed and fell silent.

"Oh, spare me the passive oriental woman routine," said Peter. "Or the passive I-was-trained-to-be-a-servant-and-you-sound-like-a-cruel-heartless-master manipulation through guilt. I know I'm a shit and I'm not going to change just because you look so downcast."

"Then you could change because you wish not to be a shit any longer."

"It's in my character. Ender created me hateful so he could hate me. The added benefit is that you can hate me, too."

"Oh, be quiet and eat your fish," she said. "You don't know what you're talking about. You're supposed to analyze human beings and you can't understand the person closest to you in all the world."

"I don't want to understand you," said Peter. "I want to accomplish my task by exploiting this brilliant intelligence you're supposed to have -- even if you believe that people who squat are somehow 'closer to the earth' than people who remain upright."

"I wasn't talking about me," she said. "I was talking about the person closest to you. Ender."

"He is blessedly far from us right now."

"He didn't create you so that he could hate you. He long since got over hating you."

"Yeah, yeah, he wrote The Hegemon , et cetera, et cetera."

"That's right," said Wang-mu. "He created you because he desperately needed someone to hate him ."

Peter rolled his eyes and took a drink of milky pineapple juice. "Just the right amount of coconut. I think I'll retire here, if Ender doesn't die and make me disappear first."

"I say something true, and you answer with coconut in the pineapple juice?"

"Novinha hates him," said Peter. "He doesn't need me."

"Novinha is angry at him, but she's wrong to be angry and he knows it. What he needs from you is a ... righteous anger. To hate him for the evil that is really in him, which no one but him sees or even believes is there."

"I'm just a nightmare from his childhood," said Peter. "You're reading too much into this."

"He didn't conjure you up because the real Peter was so important in his childhood. He conjured you up because you are the judge, the condemner. That's what Peter drummed into him as a child. You told me yourself, talking about your memories. Peter taunting him, telling him of his unworthiness, his uselessness, his stupidity, his cowardice. You do it now. You look at his life and call him a xenocide, a failure. For some reason he needs this, needs to have someone damn him."