The Very Best of F & SF v1 (50 page)

I repeated it
word for word, as I had learned to do when I listened.

“Right. Good,” he
said, and took off up the steep slope on his short, powerful legs, and was
gone.

Mother would
have gone to the Territory right then, but I told the man’s message to Noyit,
too, and she came to the porch of our house to speak to Mother. I listened to
her, because she was telling things I didn’t know well and Mother didn’t know
at all. Noyit was a small, mild woman, very like her son Ednede; she liked
teaching and singing, so the children were always around her place. She saw
Mother was getting ready for a journey. She said, “House on the Skyline Man
says the boys are all right.” When she saw Mother wasn’t listening, she went
on; she pretended to be talking to me, because women don’t teach women: “He
says some of the men are breaking up the gang. They do that, when the boygroups
get wicked. Sometimes there are magicians among them, leaders, older boys, even
men who want to make a gang. The settled men will kill the magicians and make
sure none of the boys gets hurt. When gangs come out of the Territories, nobody
is safe. The settled men don’t like that. They see to it that the auntring is
safe. So your brother will be all right.”

My mother went
on packing pigi-roots into her net.

“A rape is a
very, very bad thing for the settled men,” said Noyit to me. “It means the
women won’t come to them. If the boys raped some woman, probably the men would
kill
all
the boys.”

My mother was
finally listening.

She did not go
to the rendezvous with Borny, but all through the rainy season she was utterly
miserable. She got sick, and old Dnemi sent Didsu over to dose her with gagberry
syrup. She made notes while she was sick, lying on her mattress, about
illnesses and medicines and how the older girls had to look after sick women,
since grown women did not enter one another’s houses. She never stopped working
and never stopped worrying about Borny.

Late in the
rainy season, when the warm wind had come and the yellow honey-flowers were in
bloom on all the hills, the Golden World time, Noyit came by while Mother was
working in the garden. “House on the Skyline Man says things are all right in
the boygroup,” she said, and went on.

Mother began to
realize then that although no adult ever entered another’s house, and adults
seldom spoke to one another, and men and women had only brief, often casual
relationships, and men lived all their lives in real solitude, still there was
a kind of community, a wide, thin, fine network of delicate and certain
intention and restraint: a social order. Her reports to the ship were filled
with this new understanding. But she still found Sorovian life impoverished,
seeing these persons as mere survivors, poor fragments of the wreck of
something great.

“My dear,” she
said—in Hainish; there is no way to say “my dear” in my language. She was
speaking Hainish with me in the house so that I wouldn’t forget it entirely. —“My
dear, the explanation of an uncomprehended technology as magic
is
primitivism. It’s not a
criticism, merely a description.”

“But technology
isn’t magic,” I said.

“Yes, it is, in
their minds; look at the story you just recorded. Before-Time sorcerers who
could fly in the air and undersea and underground in magic boxes!”

“In
metal
boxes,” I corrected.

“In other words,
airplanes, tunnels, submarines; a lost technology explained as supernatural.”

“The
boxes
weren’t magic,” I
said. “The
people
were. They were sorcerers. They used their power to get power over
other persons. To live rightly a person has to keep away from magic.”

“That’s a
cultural imperative, because a few thousand years ago uncontrolled
technological expansion led to disaster. Exactly. There’s a perfectly rational
reason for the irrational taboo.”

I did not know
what “rational” and “irrational” meant in my language; I could not find words
for them. “Taboo” was the same as “poisonous.” I listened to my mother because
a daughter must learn from her mother, and my mother knew many, many things no
other person knew; but my education was very difficult, sometimes. If only
there were more stories and songs in her teaching, and not so many words, words
that slipped away from me like water through a net!

The Golden Time
passed, and the beautiful summer; the Silver Time returned, when the mists lie
in the valleys between the hills, before the rains begin; and the rains began,
and fell long and slow and warm, day after day after day. We had heard nothing
of Borny and Ednede for over a year. Then in the night the soft thrum of rain
on the reed roof turned into a scratching at the door and a whisper, “Shh—it’s
all right—it’s all right.”

We wakened the
fire and crouched at it in the dark to talk. Borny had got tall and very thin,
like a skeleton with the skin dried on it. A cut across his upper lip had drawn
it up into a kind of snarl that bared his teeth, and he could not say p, b, or
m. His voice was a man’s voice. He huddled at the fire trying to get warmth
into his bones. His clothes were wet rags. The knife hung on a cord around his
neck. “It was all right,” he kept saying. “I don’t want to go on there, though.”

He would not
tell us much about the year and a half in the boygroup, insisting that he would
record a full description when he got to the ship. He did tell us what he would
have to do if he stayed on Soro. He would have to go back to the Territory and
hold his own among the older boys, by fear and sorcery, always proving his
strength, until he was old enough to walk away—that is, to leave the Territory
and wander alone till he found a place where the men would let him settle.
Ednede and another boy had paired, and were going to walk away together when
the rains stopped. It was easier for a pair, he said, if their bond was sexual;
so long as they offered no competition for women, settled men wouldn’t
challenge them. But a new man in the region anywhere within three days’ walk of
an auntring had to prove himself against the settled men there. “It would ’e
three or four years of the same thing,” he said, “challenging, fighting, always
watching the others, on guard, showing how strong you are, staying alert all
night, all day. To end up living alone your whole life. I can’t do it.” He
looked at me. “I’ne not a ’erson,” he said. “I want to go ho’e.”

“I’ll radio the
ship now,” Mother said quietly, with infinite relief.

“No,” I said.

Borny was
watching Mother, and raised his hand when she turned to speak to me.

“I’ll go,” he
said. “She doesn’t have to. Why should she?” Like me, he had learned not to use
names without some reason to.

Mother looked
from him to me and finally gave a kind of laugh. “I can’t leave her here,
Borny!”

“Why should you
go?”

“Because I want
to,” she said. “I’ve had enough. More than enough. We’ve got a tremendous
amount of material on the women, over seven years of it, and now you can fill
the information gaps on the men’s side. That’s enough. It’s time, past time,
that we all got back to our own people. All of us.”

“I have no people,”
I said. “I don’t belong to people. I am trying to be a person. Why do you want
to take me away from my soul? You want me to do magic! I won’t. I won’t do
magic. I won’t speak your language. I won’t go with you!

My mother was
still not listening; she started to answer angrily. Borny put up his hand
again, the way a woman does when she is going to sing, and she looked at him.

“We can talk
later,” he said. “We can decide. I need to sleep.”

He hid in our
house for two days while we decided what to do and how to do it. That was a
miserable time. I stayed home as if I were sick so that I would not lie to the
other persons, and Borny and Mother and I talked and talked. Borny asked Mother
to stay with me; I asked her to leave me with Sadne or Noyit, either of whom
would certainly take me into their household. She refused. She was the mother
and I the child and her power was sacred. She radioed the ship and arranged for
a lander to pick us up in a barren area two days’ walk from the auntring. We
left at night, sneaking away. I carried nothing but my soulbag. We walked all
next day, slept a little when it stopped raining, walked on and came to the
desert. The ground was all lumps and hollows and caves, Before-Time ruins; the
soil was tiny bits of glass and hard grains and fragments, the way it is in the
deserts. Nothing grew there. We waited there.

The sky broke
open and a shining thing fell down and stood before us on the rocks, bigger
than any house, though not as big as the ruins of the Before Time. My mother
looked at me with a queer, vengeful smile. “Is it magic?” she said. And it was
very hard for me not to think that it was. Yet I knew it was only a thing, and
there is no magic in things, only in minds. I said nothing. I had not spoken
since we left my home.

I had resolved
never to speak to anybody until I got home again; but I was still a child, used
to listen and obey. In the ship, that utterly strange new world, I held out
only for a few hours, and then began to cry and ask to go home. Please, please,
can I go home now.

Everyone on the
ship was very kind to me.

Even then I
thought about what Borny had been through and what I was going through,
comparing our ordeals. The difference seemed total. He had been alone, without
food, without shelter, a frightened boy trying to survive among equally
frightened rivals against the brutality of older youths intent on having and
keeping power, which they saw as manhood. I was cared for, clothed, fed so
richly I got sick, kept so warm I felt feverish, guided, reasoned with,
praised, befriended by citizens of a very great city, offered a share in their
power, which they saw as humanity. He and I had both fallen among sorcerers.
Both he and I could see the good in the people we were among, but neither he
nor I could live with them.

Borny told me he
had spent many desolate nights in the Territory crouched in a fireless shelter,
telling over the stories he had learned from the aunts, singing the songs in
his head. I did the same thing every night on the ship. But I refused to tell
the stories or sing to the people there. I would not speak my language, there.
It was the only way I had to be silent.

My mother was
enraged, and for a long time unforgiving. “You owe your knowledge to our people,”
she said. I did not answer, because all I had to say was that they were not my
people, that I had no people. I was a person. I had a language that I did not
speak. I had my silence. I had nothing else.

I went to
school; there were children of different ages on the ship, like an auntring,
and many of the adults taught us. I learned Ekumenical history and geography,
mostly, and Mother gave me a report to learn about the history of Eleven-Soro,
what my language calls the Before Time. I read that the cities of my world had
been the greatest cities ever built on any world, covering two of the
continents entirely, with small areas set aside for farming; there had been 120
billion people living in the cities, while the animals and the sea and the air
and the dirt died, until the people began dying too. It was a hideous story. I
was ashamed of it and wished nobody else on the ship or in the Ekumen knew
about it. And yet, I thought, if they knew the stories I knew about the Before
Time, they would understand how magic turns on itself, and that it must be so.

After less than
a year, Mother told us we were going to Hain. The ship’s doctor and his clever
machines had repaired Borny’s lip; he and Mother had put all the information
they had into the records; he was old enough to begin training for the Ekumenical
Schools, as he wanted to do. I was not flourishing, and the doctor’s machines
were not able to repair me. I kept losing weight, I slept badly, I had terrible
headaches. Almost as soon as we came aboard the ship, I had begun to
menstruate; each time the cramps were agonizing. “This is no good, this ship
life,” she said. “You need to be outdoors. On a planet. On a civilized planet.”

“If l went to
Hain,” I said, “when I came back, the persons I know would all be dead hundreds
of years ago.”

“Serenity,” she
said, “you must stop thinking in terms of Soro. We have left Soro. You must
stop deluding and tormenting yourself, and look forward, not back. Your whole
life is ahead of you. Hain is where you will learn to live it.”

I summoned up my
courage and spoke in my own language: “I am not a child now. You have no power
over me. I will not go. Go without me. You have no power over me!”

Those are the
words I had been taught to say to a magician, a sorcerer. I don’t know if my
mother fully understood them, but she did understand that I was deathly afraid
of her, and it struck her into silence.

After a long
time she said in Hainish, “I agree. I have no power over you. But I have
certain rights; the right of loyalty; of love.”

“Nothing is
right that puts me in your power,” I said, still in my language.