The Very Best of F & SF v1 (51 page)

She stared at
me. “You are like one of them,” she said. “You are one of them. You don’t know
what love is. You’re closed into yourself like a rock. I should never have
taken you there. People crouching in the ruins of a society—brutal, rigid,
ignorant, superstitious—Each one in a terrible solitude—And I let them make you
into one of them!”

“You educated me,”
I said, and my voice began to tremble and my mouth to shake around the words, “and
so does the school here, but my aunts educated me, and I want to finish my
education.” I was weeping, but I kept standing with my hands clenched. “I’m not
a woman yet. I want to be a woman.”

“But Ren, you
will be!—ten times the woman you could ever be on Soro— you must try to
understand, to believe me—”

“You have no
power over me,” I said, shutting my eyes and putting my hands over my ears. She
came to me then and held me, but I stood stiff, enduring her touch, until she
let me go.

The ship’s crew
had changed entirely while we were onplanet. The First Observers had gone on to
other worlds; our backup was now a Gethenian archeologist named Arrem, a mild,
watchful person, not young. Arrem had gone down onplanet only on the two desert
continents, and welcomed the chance to talk with us, who had “lived with the
living,” as heshe said. I felt easy when I was with Arrem, who was so unlike
anybody else. Arrem was not a man—I could not get used to having men around all
the time—yet not a woman; and so not exactly an adult, yet not a child: a person,
alone, like me. Heshe did not know my language well, but always tried to talk
it with me. When this crisis came, Arrem came to my mother and took counsel
with her, suggesting that she let me go back down onplanet. Borny was in on
some of these talks, and told me about them.

“Arrem says if
you go to Hain you’ll probably die,” he said. “Your soul will. Heshe says some
of what we learned is like what they learn on Gethen, in their religion. That
kind of stopped Mother from ranting about primitive superstition.... And Arrem
says you could be useful to the Ekumen, if you stay and finish your education
on Soro. You’ll be an invaluable resource.” Borny sniggered, and after a minute
I did too. “They’ll mine you like an asteroid,” he said. Then he said, “You know,
if you stay and I go, we’ll be dead.”

That was how the
young people of the ships said it, when one was going to cross the lightyears
and the other was going to stay. Goodbye, we’re dead. It was the truth.

“I know,” I
said. I felt my throat get tight, and was afraid. I had never seen an adult at
home cry, except when Sut’s baby died. Sut howled all night. Howled like a dog,
Mother said, but I had never seen or heard a dog; I heard a woman terribly
crying. I was afraid of sounding like that. “If I can go home, when I finish
making my soul, who knows, I might come to Hain for a while,” I said, in
Hainish.

“Scouting?”
Borny said in my language, and laughed, and made me laugh again.

Nobody gets to
keep a brother. I knew that. But Borny had come back from being dead to me, so
I might come back from being dead to him; at least I could pretend I might.

My mother came
to a decision. She and I would stay on the ship for another year while Borny
went to Hain. I would keep going to school; if at the end of the year I was
still determined to go back onplanet, I could do so. With me or without me, she
would go on to Hain then and join Borny. If I ever wanted to see them again, I
could follow them. It was a compromise that satisfied no one, but it was the
best we could do, and we all consented.

When he left,
Borny gave me his knife.

After he left, I
tried not to be sick. I worked hard at learning everything they taught me in
the ship school, and I tried to teach Arrem how to be aware and how to avoid
witchcraft. We did slow-walking together in the ship’s garden, and the first
hour of the untrance movements from the Handdara of Karhide on Gethen. We
agreed that they were alike.

The ship was
staying in the Soro system not only because of my family, but because the crew
was now mostly zoologists who had come to study a sea animal on Eleven-Soro, a
kind of cephalopod that had mutated toward high intelligence, or maybe it
already was highly intelligent; but there was a communication problem. “Almost
as bad as with the local humans,” said Steadiness, the zoologist who taught and
teased us mercilessly. She took us down twice by lander to the uninhabited
islands in the Northern Hemisphere where her station was. It was very strange
to go down to my world and yet be a world away from my aunts and sisters and my
soulmate; but I said nothing.

I saw the great,
pale, shy creature come slowly up out of the deep waters with a running ripple
of colors along its long coiling tentacles and a ringing shimmer of sound, all
so quick it was over before you could follow the colors or hear the tune. The
zoologist’s machine produced a pink glow and a mechanically speeded-up twitter,
tinny and feeble in the immensity of the sea. The cephalopod patiently
responded in its beautiful silvery shadowy language. “CP,” Steadiness said to
us, ironic—Communication Problem. “We don’t know what we’re talking about.”

I said, “I
learned something in my education here. In one of the songs, it says,” and I
hesitated, trying to translate it into Hainish, “it says, thinking is one way
of doing and words are one way of thinking.”

Steadiness
stared at me, in disapproval I thought, but probably only because I had never
said anything to her before except “Yes.” Finally she said, “Are you suggesting
that it doesn’t speak in words?”

“Maybe it’s not
speaking at all. Maybe it’s thinking.”

Steadiness
stared at me some more and then said, “Thank you.” She looked as if she too
might be thinking. I wished I could sink into the water, the way the cephalopod
was doing.

The other young
people on the ship were friendly and mannerly. Those are words that have no
translation in my language. I was unfriendly and unmannerly, and they let me
be. I was grateful. But there was no place to be alone on the ship. Of course
we each had a room; though small, the
Heyho
was a Hainish-built explorer, designed to give
its people room and privacy and comfort and variety and beauty while they hung
around in a solar system for years on end. But it was designed. It was all
human-made—everything was human. I had much more privacy than I had ever had at
home in our one-room house; yet there I had been free and here I was in a trap.
I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me,
people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, to be one
of them, one of the people. How could I make my soul? I could barely cling to
it. I was in terror that I would lose it altogether.

One of the rocks
in my soulbag, a little ugly gray rock that I had picked up on a certain day in
a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece
of my world, that became my world. Every night I took it
out
and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the
sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft hushing of the
ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea.

The doctor
hopefully fed me various tonics. Mother and I ate breakfast together every
morning. She kept at work, making our notes from all the years on Eleven-Soro
into her report to the Ekumen, but I knew the work did not go well. Her soul
was in as much danger as mine was.

“You will never
give in, will you, Ren?” she said to me one morning out of the silence of our
breakfast. I had not intended the silence as a message. I had only rested in
it.

“Mother, I want
to go home and you want to go home,” I said. “Can’t we?”

Her expression
was strange for a moment, while she misunderstood me; then it cleared to grief,
defeat, relief.

“Will we be
dead?” she asked me, her mouth twisting.

“I don’t know. I
have to make my soul. Then I can know if I can come.”

“You know I can’t
come back. It’s up to you.”

“I know. Go see
Borny,” I said. “Go home. Here we’re both dying.” Then noises began to come out
of me, sobbing, howling. Mother was crying. She came to me and held me, and I
could hold my mother, cling to her and cry with her, because her spell was
broken.

From the lander
approaching I saw the oceans of Eleven-Soro, and in the greatness of my joy I
thought that when I was grown and went out alone I would go to the sea shore
and watch the sea-beasts shimmering their colors and tunes till I knew what
they were thinking. I would listen, I would learn, till my soul was as large as
the shining world. The scarred barrens whirled beneath us, ruins as wide as the
continent, endless desolations. We touched down. I had my soulbag, and Borny’s
knife around my neck on its string, a communicator implant behind my right
earlobe, and a medicine kit Mother had made for me. “No use dying of an
infected finger, after all,” she had said. The people on the lander said
goodbye, but I forgot to. I set off out of the desert, home.

It was summer;
the night was short and warm; I walked most of it. I got to the auntring about
the middle of the second day. I went to my house cautiously, in case somebody
had moved in while I was gone; but it was just as we had left it. The
mattresses were moldy, and I put them and the bedding out in the sun, and
started going over the garden to see what had kept growing by itself.

The pigi had got
small and seedy, but there were some good roots. A little boy came by and
stared; he had to be Migi’s baby. After a while Hyuru came by. She squatted
down near me in the garden in the sunshine. I smiled when I saw her, and she
smiled, but it took us a while to find something to say.

“Your mother
didn’t come back,” she said.

“She’s dead,” I
said.

“I’m sorry,” Hyuru
said.

She watched me
dig up another root.

“Will you come
to the singing circle?” she asked.

I nodded.

She smiled
again. With her rosebrown skin and wide-set eyes, Hyuru had become very
beautiful, but her smile was exactly the same as when we were little girls. “Hi,
ya!” she sighed in deep contentment, lying down on the dirt with her chin on
her arms. “This is good!”

I went on
blissfully digging.

That year and
the next two, I was in the singing circle with Hyuru and two other girls. Didsu
still came to it often, and Han, a woman who settled in our auntring to have
her first baby, joined it too. In the singing circle the older girls pass
around the stories, songs, knowledge they learned from their own mother, and
young women who have lived in other auntrings teach what they learned there; so
women make each other’s souls, learning how to make their children’s souls.

Han lived in the
house where old Dnemi had died. Nobody in the auntring except Sut’s baby had
died while my family lived there. My mother had complained that she didn’t have
any data on death and burial. Sut had gone away with her dead baby and never
came back, and nobody talked about it. I think that turned my mother against
the others more than anything else. She was angry and ashamed that she could
not go and try to comfort Sut and that nobody else did. “It is not human,” she
said. “It is pure animal behavior. Nothing could be clearer evidence that this
is a broken culture—not a society, but the remains of one. A terrible, an
appalling poverty.”

I don’t know if
Dnemi’s death would have changed her mind. Dnemi was dying for a long time, of
kidney failure I think; she turned a kind of dark orange color, jaundice. While
she could get around, nobody helped her. When she didn’t come out of her house
for a day or two, the women would send the children in with water and a little
food and firewood. It went on so through
the winter; then one
morning little Rashi told his mother Aunt Dnemi was “staring.” Several of the
women went to Dnemi’s house, and entered it for the first and last time. They
sent for all the girls in the singing circle, so that we could learn what to
do. We took turns sitting by the body or in the porch of the house, singing
soft songs, child-songs, giving the soul a day and a night to leave the body
and the house; then the older women wrapped the body in the bedding, strapped
it on a kind of litter, and set off with it toward the barren lands. There it
would be given back, under a rock cairn or inside one of the ruins of the
ancient city. “Those are the lands of the dead,” Sadne said. “What dies stays
there.”

Han settled down
in that house a year later. When her baby began to be born she asked Didsu to
help her, and Hyuru and I stayed in the porch and watched, so that we could
learn. It was a wonderful thing to see, and quite altered the course of my
thinking, and Hyuru’s too. Hyuru said, “I’d like to do that!” I said nothing,
but thought, So do I, but not for a long time, because once you have a child
you’re never alone.

And though it is
of the others, of relationships, that I write, the heart of my life has been my
being alone.

I think there is
no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody,
to communicate to others. CP, as Steadiness would say. Solitude is
non-communication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to
itself.