Si Wang-mu

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Si Wang-mu is a major character in the science fiction novels Xenocide and Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. She is named after the Chinese goddess Xi Wangmu, the Royal Mother of the West.

She is a very intelligent and ambitious girl, but because her world has a rigidly stratified social hierarchy and she is the child of lower-class parents, she has not been well educated; it is assumed that the best she can hope for is to be a servant. She approaches the young "godspoken" lady Han Qing-jao while they are doing "righteous labor" in the rice paddies. Qing-jao is pleased with Wang-mu's intelligence and honesty, hires her as her servant and also begins to educate her.

They become friends for a while, until the sentient computer program Jane reveals that the godspoken have been genetically modified by Congress as a deliberate strategy to make them useful but not a threat. Qing-jao cannot accept this and believes that Jane must be destroyed, but Wang-mu sees Jane as an intelligent and compassionate person and is greatly saddened at the thought of her death. Qing-jao dismisses Wang-mu from her service, but her father, Han Fei-tzu, calls her back to help save Jane and the people of Lusitania . It is eventually discovered that all but one of the people in the small sample testing of members of Han's household gifted with enhanced intelligence are also afflicted with an artificially inflicted form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). That one person is Si Wang-Mu herself, and her genes are used to help cure the remainder of the Path population - to give them all intelligence without the bonds of the OCD. At the end of Xenocide, Wang-mu leaves her home planet, Path, with the young Peter Wiggin to continue this mission, which is detailed in Children of the Mind. She eventually marries Young Peter.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series
Battle School	Petra Arkanian  · Bean  · Han Tzu  · Alai  · Achilles de Flandres  · Ender's jeesh and other Battle School students
Ender's family	Ender Wiggin  · John Paul Wiggin  · Peter Wiggin  · Theresa Wiggin  · Valentine Wiggin
Other	Han Qing-jao  · Si Wang-mu  · Jane  · The Hive Queen  · International Fleet personnel
Books  · Characters  · Concepts