at once. But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of one such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a round-eyed man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that she could not understand.
"You must understand," he said. "I'm not myself."
Wang-mu spoke the common language well enough at least to understand the idiom. "You are unwell today?" But she knew even as she said it that he had not meant the expression idiomatically at all.
"I'm not myself," he said again. "I'm not really Peter Wiggin."
"I hope not," said Wang-mu. "I read about his funeral in school."
"I do look like him, though, don't I?" He brought up a hologram into the air over his computer terminal. The hologram rotated to look at Wang-mu; Peter sat up and assumed the same pose, facing her.
"There is a resemblance," she said.
"Of course, I'm younger," said Peter. "Because Ender didn't see me again after he left Earth when he was -- what, five years old? A little runt, anyway. I was still a boy. That's what he remembered, when he conjured me out of thin air."
"Not air at all," she said. "Out of nothing."
"Not nothing, either," he said. "Conjured me, all the same." He smiled wickedly. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep."
These words meant something to him, but not to her. In the world of Path she had been expected to be a servant and so was educated very little. Later, in the house of Han Fei-tzu, her abilities had been recognized, first by her former mistress, Han Qing-jao, and later by the master himself. From both she had acquired some bits of education, in a haphazard way. What teaching there had been was mostly technical, and the literature she learned was of the Middle Kingdom, or of Path itself. She could have quoted endlessly from the great poet Li Qing-jao, for whom her one-time mistress had been named. But of the poet he was quoting, she knew nothing.
"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," he said again. And then, changing his voice and manner a little, he answered himself. "Why so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?"
"Shakespeare?" she guessed.
He grinned at her. She thought of the way a cat smiles at the creature it is toying with. "That's always the best guess when a European is doing the quoting," he said.
"The quotation is funny," she said. "A man brags that he can summon the dead. But the other man says that the trick is not calling, but rather getting them to come."
He laughed. "What a way you have with humor."
"This quotation means something to you, because Ender called you forth from the dead."
He looked startled. "How did you know?"
She felt a thrill of fear. Was it possible? "I did not know, I was making a joke."
"Well, it's not true. Not literally. He didn't raise the dead. Though he no doubt thinks he could, if the need arose." Peter sighed. "I'm being nasty. The words just come to my mind. I don't mean them. They just come."
"It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud."
He rolled his eyes. "I wasn't trained for servility, the way you were."
So this was the attitude of one who came from a world of free people -- to sneer at one who had been a servant through no fault of her own. "I was trained to keep unpleasant words to myself as a matter of courtesy," she said. "But perhaps to you, that is just another form of servility."
"As I said, Royal Mother of the West, nastiness comes unbidden to my mouth."
"I am not the Royal Mother," said Wang-mu. "The name was a cruel joke --"
"And only a very nasty person would mock you for it." Peter grinned. "But I'm named for the Hegemon. I thought perhaps bearing ludicrously overwrought names was something we might have in common."
She sat silently, entertaining the possibility that he might have been trying to make friends.
"I came into existence," he said, "only a short while ago. A matter of weeks. I thought you should know that about me."
She didn't understand.
"You know how this starship works?" he said.
Now he was leaping from subject to subject. Testing her. Well, she had had enough of being tested. "Apparently one sits within it and is examined by rude strangers," she said.