"I am a man of perfect simplicity!" cried Hikari, rising to his feet. "You have come to torture me with accusations that cannot be true!"

"We make no accusation," said Wang-mu softly, refusing to rise. "We offer an observation. If we are wrong, we beg you to teach us our mistake."

Hikari was trembling, and his left hand now clutched the locket of his ancestors' ashes that hung on a silk ribbon around his neck. "No," he said. "I will not let you pretend to be humble seekers after truth. You are assassins. Assassins of the heart, come to destroy me, come to tell me that in seeking to find the Yamato way I have somehow caused my people to rule the human worlds and use that power to destroy a helplessly weak sentient species! It is a terrible lie to tell me, that my life's work has been so useless. I would rather you had put poison in my tea, Si Wang-mu. I would rather you had put a gun to my head and blown it off, Peter Wiggin. They named you well, your parents -- proud and terrible names you both bear. The Royal Mother of the West? A goddess? And Peter Wiggin, the first hegemon! Who gives their child such a name as that?"

Peter was standing also, and he reached down to lift Wang-mu to her feet.

"We have given offense where we meant none," said Peter. "I am ashamed. We must go at once."

Wang-mu was surprised to hear Peter sound so oriental. The American way was to make excuses, to stay and argue.

She let him lead her to the door. Hikari did not follow them; it was left to poor Kenji, who was terrified to see her placid master so exercised, to show them out. But Wang-mu was determined not to let this visit end entirely in disaster. So at the last moment she rushed back and flung herself to the floor, prostrate before Hikari in precisely the pose of humiliation that she had vowed only a little while ago that she would never adopt again. But she knew that as long as she was in that posture, a man like Hikari would have to listen to her.

"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."

"And did he?"

Peter sneered. "Oh, of course, he was splendid. Ender can do no wrong. Yadda yadda yadda."

She ignored his hostility toward Ender. "He met Leiloa Lavea?"

"Her name means 'to be lost, to be hurt.'"

"Let me guess. She chose it herself."

"Exactly. You know how writers are. Like Hikari, they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create 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."