“At this, the King of Cocru realized that Ra Oji was challenging Kon Fiji. So he stroked his beard and asked, ‘Then how do you answer Master Kon Fiji’s advocacy for a return to ancient rites to achieve a more moral society where each knows his duty?’
“ ‘Simple: Our ancestors came from a continent where the earth dominated everything, and stability of life in small villages was paramount. But we now live in these islands, where the shifting currents of the ocean determine all. Our people must contend with migrating shoals of fish, unpredictable typhoons and tsunamis, and volcanoes that erupt and release rivers of fire—and even the ground trembles at these moments. We’ve had to invent new logograms to describe new sights, and the only certainty of life is that it’s uncertain. With new circumstances come new philosophies, and it is flexibility and resilience, not rigid adherence to tradition, that will serve us well.’
“ ‘How can you say such things?!’ demanded Kon Fiji. ‘Our lives may have changed, but death has not. Respect for the elderly and honor given for a life well lived connect us to the accumulated wisdom of the past. When you die, do you wish to be buried as a common peasant instead of as a great scholar worthy of admiration?’
“ ‘In a hundred years, Master Kon Fiji, you and I will both be dust, and even the worms and birds who feast on our flesh will also have traveled through multiple revolutions of the wheel of life. Our lives are finite, but the universe is infinite. We are but flashes of lightning bugs on a summer night against the eternal stars. When I die, I wish to be laid out in the open so that the Big Island will act as my coffin, and the River of Heavenly Pearls my shroud; the cicadas will play my funeral procession, and the blooming flowers will be my incense burners; my flesh will feed ten thousand lives, and my bones will enrich the soil. I will return to the great Flow of the universe. Such honor can never be matched by mortal rites enacted by those obeying dead words copied out of a book.’ ”
Zomi cheered and stood up, shaking a fist.
Luan looked at her, his face breaking into a smile.
Zomi looked down and realized that her left leg was supporting her weight. Incredulous, she gingerly shifted her weight and tested her leg by flexing it. The complicated framework of supple branches and tough sinew flexed as well, lending her strength and support as though magnifying the movement of her atrophied muscles.
“How did you do this?” Zomi asked, awe and wonder in her voice.
“When I used to work with Marshal Gin Mazoti in the emperor’s army, we had many veterans who had lost limbs in battle or from working on Emperor Mapidéré’s projects. The marshal and I devised artificial limbs to help these soldiers recover some of their lost abilities. I was inspired to adapt one of them for your condition.” Luan leaned down and showed Zomi how the sinews and supple branches cleverly stored and magnified the energy from her muscles. “It’s acting a bit like a skeleton, but on the outside of your legs instead of inside, giving you both support and mobility.”
“You’re a magician!” Zomi was getting the hang of it, and she moved around in delight. She felt as though she was swimming in air; she had not been able to move about so effortlessly since the night she was struck by lightning. Though she would still need some help to make her way up the mountain, she should be able to move around on flat ground as though her leg were almost perfect.
She looked back at the kind face of Luan and remembered the secret contraption he had been working on in the balloon. This was clearly not something invented at a moment’s notice. How long had he been thinking and working on a prototype in secret? He knew how sensitive she was about her leg, and he hadn’t wanted to embarrass her by drawing attention to it until he had figured out a solution.
Spontaneously, she ran up to Luan and gave him a great big hug.
Luan hugged her back.
The guides, who had been quietly observing the construction and testing of the brace, cheered and clapped.
Zomi didn’t dare to speak because something seemed to be stuck in her throat and she didn’t want to croak like a frog.
Finally, the four of them climbed through the sea of mist and emerged at the top of the cliff. A great, dense forest spread around them, though most of the trees crawled along the ground and were no more than the height of a person due to strong winds at the top of the peak.
They picked their way through this forest. As the guides stopped from time to time to add to the collections in their baskets, Luan hurried over to ask them for explanations of the uses of the plants and fungi, the three conversing by carving logograms in the soil and humus.
Zomi took advantage of her new freedom by wandering around on her own. She particularly loved the birds flitting about on the branches, half-hidden behind the leaves and singing a hundred different songs.
“What’s that bird called?” asked Zomi, pointing at a mottled green-blue bird.
“The fluted thrush.”
“And that one?”
“Scarlet siskin.”
“And that one there with the bright yellow tail?”
“Sun-through-clouds.”
As he told her each name, he sketched for her the logograms.
“Some of these birds seemed similar to the birds the Ano knew in their homeland, and so they gave them the same names; others were new, and new words and logograms had to be invented. But see, all the names of the birds have the bird semantic root, and so even if you didn’t know what the logogram meant, you could guess that it was the name of a bird. This is one of the ways that the Ano logograms can give you hints about knowledge of the world. They are machines that transform the book of nature into models in our minds.”
Zomi thought about this, and then asked for the names of various flowers and mushrooms. Luan patiently told her the names and sketched out the logograms on the ground. He loved how curious she was. It made him feel young again.
“Why is the flower semantic root in the logogram for this mushroom?” asked Zomi.
“A matter of history. Back when the earliest logograms were devised, the ancient Ano thought of mushrooms as a kind of plant. It was only much later that scholars and herbalists decided that the fungi were distinct from the vegetable kingdom.”
“Yet the error in classification persists in the logograms.”
“Knowledge is a vehicle that progresses through errors and blind alleys. It is the nature of history that the ruts left by earlier events persist down the centuries. The wide paved roads in Kriphi follow the course of earlier dirt paths when it was but an Ano fortress, and those roads, in turn, followed the trails of the wandering sheep flocks when it was but a hamlet. The Ano logograms are a record of our climb up the mountain of knowledge.”
“But why study the record of errors? Why force generations of students to make the same mistakes?”
Luan was taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“When the Ano came to these islands, they saw new animals and new plants, and yet they persisted in naming and classifying them using outdated machinery, with a system of logograms that was full of accumulated mistakes. They learned that the seat of thought is in the head, yet ‘mind’ is still written as air-over-heart. Why not start something entirely new?”
“You ask a very good question, Mimi-tika. But I would caution that the desire for perfection, for a fresh start, is very close to a philosophical tyranny that disregards the wisdom of the past.
“In the debate between Kon Fiji and Ra Oji, it is not clear-cut that Kon Fiji had the worse argument. True, things are different in the Islands from the Ano homeland, but the hearts of people—with all their ideals, passions, greedy covetousness displayed side by side with high honor, selfish interest driving noble sacrifice—are not. Kon Fiji was not wrong to say that respect for the wisdom of the past, for paths carved out by generations of lived experience, should not be disregarded overnight.”