"Whereas the gods have put me in the company of a woman with no breasts."
She forced herself to pretend to take this as a joke. "Small ones, I thought you said."
But suddenly the smile left his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've hurt you."
"I don't think so. I'll tell you later, after a good night's sleep."
"I thought we were bantering," said Peter. "Bandying insults."
"We were," said Wang-mu. "But I believe them all."
Peter winced. "Then I'm hurt, too."
"You don't know how to hurt," said Wang-mu. "You're just mocking me."
Peter pushed aside his plate and stood up. "I'll see you back at the apartment. Think you can find the way?"
"Do I think you actually care?"
"It's a good thing I have no soul," said Peter. "That's the only thing that stops you from devouring it."
"If I ever had your soul in my mouth," said Wang-mu, "I would spit it out."
"Get some rest," said Peter. "For the work I have ahead, I need a mind, not a quarrel." He walked out of the restaurant. The clothing fit him badly. People looked. He was a man of too much dignity and strength to dress so foppishly. Wang-mu saw at once that it shamed him. She saw also that he knew it, that he moved swiftly because he knew this clothing was wrong for him. He would undoubtedly have Jane order him something older looking, more mature, more in keeping with his need for honor.
Whereas I need something that will make me disappear. Or better yet, clothing that will let me fly away from here, all in a single night, fly Outside and back In to the house of Han Fei-tzu, where I can look into eyes that show neither pity nor scorn.
Nor pain. For there is pain in Peter's eyes, and it was wrong of me to say he felt none. It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.
If I apologize to him, he'll mock me for it.
But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong. Is that a principle Han Fei-tzu taught me? No. I was born with that one. Like my mother said, too much pride, too much pride.
When she returned to the apartment, however, Peter was asleep; exhausted, she postponed her apology and also slept. Each of them woke during the night, but never at the same time; and in the morning, the edge of last night's quarrel had worn off. There was business at hand, and it was more important for her to understand what they were going to attempt to do today than for her to heal a breach between them that seemed, in the light of morning, to be scarcely more than a meaningless spat between tired friends.
"The man Jane has chosen for us to visit is a philosopher."
"Like me?" Wang-mu said, keenly aware of her false new role.
"That's what I wanted to discuss with you. There are two kinds of philosophers here on Divine Wind. Aimaina Hikari, the man we will meet, is an analytical philosopher. You don't have the education to hold your own with him. So you are the other kind. Gnomic and mantic. Given to pithy phrases that startle others with their seeming irrelevancy."
"Is it necessary that my supposedly wise phrases only seem irrelevant?"
"You don't even have to worry about that. The gnomic philosophers depend on others to connect their irrelevancies with the real world. That's why any fool can do it."
Wang-mu felt anger rise in her like mercury in a thermometer. "How kind of you to choose that profession for me."
"Don't be offended," said Peter. "Jane and I had to come up with some role you could play on this particular planet that wouldn't reveal you to be an uneducated native of Path. You have to understand that no child on Divine Wind is allowed to grow up as hopelessly ignorant as the servant class on Path."
Wang-mu did not argue further. What would be the point? If one has to say, in an argument, "I am intelligent! I do know things!" then one might as well stop arguing. Indeed, this idea struck her as being exactly one of those gnomic phrases that Peter was talking about. She said so.
"No, no, I don't mean epigrams," said Peter. "Those are too analytical. I mean genuinely strange things. For instance, you might have