Page 1017 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"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 ofwell, 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?"