The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  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.

  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.r />
  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?”