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themselves."
"How gnomic," said Wang-mu.
"Oh, shut up about that," said Peter. "Did you actually believe all that stuff
about Edge nations and Center nations?"
"I thought of it," said Wang-mu. "When I first learned Earth history from
Han Fei-tzu. He didn't laugh when I told him my thoughts."
"Oh, I'm not laughing, either. It's naive bullshit, of course, but it's not
exactly funny."
Wang-mu ignored his mockery. "If Leiloa Lavea is dead, where will we go?"
"To Pacifica. To Lumana'i. Hikari learned of Ua Lava in his teenage years at
university. From a Samoan student -- the granddaughter of the Pacifican
ambassador. She had never been to Lumana'i, of course, and so she clung all
the more tightly to its customs and became quite a proselytizer for Leiloa
Lavea. This was long before Hikari ever wrote a thing. He never speaks of it,
he's never written of Ua Lava, but now that he's tipped his hand to us, Jane
is finding all sorts of influence of Ua Lava in all his work. And he has
friends in Lumana'i. He's never met them, but they correspond through the
ansible net."
"What about the granddaughter of the ambassador?"
"She's on a starship right now, headed home to Lumana'i. She left twenty years
ago, when her grandfather died. She should get there ... oh, in another ten
years or so. Depending on the weather. She'll be received with great honor, no
doubt, and her grandfather's body will be buried or burned or whatever they do
-- burned, Jane says -- with great ceremony."
"But Hikari won't try to talk to her."
"It would take a week to space out even a simple message enough for her to
receive it, at the speed the ship is going. No way to have a philosophical
discussion. She'd be home before he finished explaining his question."
For the first time, Wang-mu began to understand the implications of the
instantaneous starflight that she and Peter had used. These long,
life-wrenching voyages could be done away with.
"If only," she said.
"I know," said Peter. "But we can't."
She knew he was right. "So we go there ourselves," she said, returning to the
subject. "Then what?"
"Jane is watching to see whom Hikari writes to. That's the person who'll be in
a position to influence him. And so ..."
"That's who we'll talk to."
"That's right. Do you need to pee or something before we arrange
transportation back to our little cabin in the woods?"
"That would be nice," said Wang-mu. "And you could do with a change of
clothes."
"What, you think even this conservative outfit might be too bold?"
"What are they wearing on Lumana'i?"
"Oh, well, a lot of them just go around naked. In the tropics. Jane says that
given the massive bulk of many adult Polynesians, it can be an inspiring
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sight."
Wang-mu shuddered. "We aren't going to try to pretend to be natives, are we?"
"Not there," said Peter. "Jane's going to fake us as passengers on a starship
that arrived there yesterday from Moskva. We're probably going to be
government officials of some kind."
"Isn't that illegal?" she asked.
Peter looked at her oddly. "Wang-mu, we're already committing treason against
Congress just by having left Lusitania. It's a capital offense. I
don't think impersonating a government official is going to make much of a
difference."
"But I didn't leave Lusitania," said Wang-mu. "I've never seen Lusitania."
"Oh, you haven't missed much. It's just a bunch of savannahs and woods, with
the occasional Hive Queen factory building starships and a bunch of piglike
aliens living in the trees."
"I'm an accomplice to treason though, right?" asked Wang-mu.
"And you're also guilty of ruining a Japanese philosopher's whole day."
"Off with my head."
An hour later they were in a private floater -- so private that there were no
questions asked by their pilot; and Jane saw to it that all their papers
were in order. Before night they were back at their little starship.
"We should have slept in the apartment," said Peter, balefully eyeing the
primitive sleeping accommodations.
Wang-mu only laughed at him and curled up on the floor. In the morning,
rested, they found that Jane had already taken them to Pacifica in their
sleep.
Aimaina Hikari awoke from his dream in the light that was neither night nor
morning, and arose from his bed into air that was neither warm nor cold.
His sleep had not been restful, and his dreams had been ugly ones, frantic
ones, in which all that he did kept turning back on him as the opposite of
what he intended. In his dream, Aimaina would climb to reach the bottom of a
canyon. He would speak and people would go away from him. He would write and
the pages of the book would spurt out from under his hand, scattering
themselves across the floor.
All this he understood to be in response to the visit from those lying
foreigners yesterday. He had tried to ignore them all afternoon, as he read
stories and essays; to forget them all evening, as he conversed with seven
friends who came to visit him. But the stories and essays all seemed to cry
out to him: These are the words of the insecure people of an Edge nation;
and the seven friends were all, he realized, Necessarians, and when he turned
the conversation to the Lusitania Fleet, he soon understood that every one of
them believed exactly as the two liars with their ridiculous names had said
they did.
So Aimaina found himself in the predawn almost-light, sitting on a mat in his
garden, fingering the casket of his ancestors, wondering: Were my dreams sent
to me by the ancestors? Were these lying visitors sent by them as well? And if
their accusations against me were not lies, what was it they were lying about?
For he knew from the way they watched each other, from the young woman's
hesitancy followed by boldness, that they were doing a performance, one that
was unrehearsed but nevertheless followed some kind of script.
Dawn came fully, seeking out each leaf of every tree, then of all the lower [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]