The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “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.

  A woman’s solitude in the auntring is, of course, based firmly on the presence of others at a little distance. It is a contingent, and therefore human, solitude. The settled men are connected as stringently to the women, though not to one another; the settlement is an integral though distant element of the auntring. Even a scouting woman is part of the society—a moving part, connecting the settled parts. Only the isolation of a woman or man who chooses to live outside the settlements is absolute. They are outside the network altogether. There are worlds where such persons are called saints, holy people. Since isolation is a sure way to prevent magic, on my worl
d the assumption is that they are sorcerers, outcast by others or by their own will, their conscience.

  I knew I was strong with magic, how could I help it? and I began to long to get away. It would be so much easier and safer to be alone. But at the same time, and increasingly, I wanted to know something about the great harmless magic, the spells cast between men and women.

  I preferred foraging to gardening, and was out on the hills a good deal; and these days, instead of keeping away from the man’s-houses, I wandered by them, and looked at them, and looked at the men if they were outside. The men looked back. Downriver Lame Man’s long, shining hair was getting a little white in it now, but when he sat singing his long, long songs I found myself sitting down and listening, as if my legs had lost their bones. He was very handsome. So was the man I remembered as a boy named Tret in the auntring, when I was little, Behyu’s son. He had come back from the boygroup and from wandering, and had built a house and made a fine garden in the valley of Red Stone Creek. He had a big nose and big eyes, long arms and legs, long hands; he moved very quietly, almost like Arrem doing the untrance. I went often to pick lowberries in Red Stone Creek valley.

  He came along the path and spoke. “You were Borny’s sister,” he said. He had a low voice, quiet.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  Red Stone Man nodded. “That’s his knife.”

  In my world, I had never talked with a man. I felt extremely strange. I kept picking berries.

  “You’re picking green ones,” Red Stone Man said.

  His soft, smiling voice made my legs lose their bones again.

  “I think nobody’s touched you,” he said. “I’d touch you gently. I think about it, about you, ever since you came by here early in the summer. Look, here’s a bush full of ripe ones. Those are green. Come over here.”

  I came closer to him, to the bush of ripe berries.

  When I was on the ship, Arrem told me that many languages have a single word for sexual desire and the bond between mother and child and the bond between soulmates and the feeling for one’s home and worship of the sacred; they are all called love. There is no word that great in my language. Maybe my mother is right, and human greatness perished in my world with the people of the Before Time, leaving only small, poor, broken things and thoughts. In my language, love is many different words. I learned one of them with Red Stone Man. We sang it together to each other.

  We made a brush house on a little cove of the creek, and neglected our gardens, but gathered many, many sweet berries.

  Mother had put a lifetime’s worth of nonconceptives in the little medicine kit. She had no faith in Sorovian herbals. I did, and they worked.

  But when a year or so later, in the Golden Time, I decided to go out scouting, I thought I might go places where the right herbs were scarce; and so I stuck the little noncon jewel on the back of my left earlobe. Then I wished I hadn’t, because it seemed like witchcraft. Then I told myself I was being superstitious; the noncon wasn’t any more witchcraft than the herbs were, it just worked longer. I had promised my mother in my soul that I would never be superstitious. The skin grew over the noncon, and I took my soulbag and Borny’s knife and the medicine kit, and set off across the world.

  I had told Hyuru and Red Stone Man I would be leaving. Hyuru and I sang and talked together all one night down by the river. Red Stone Man said in his soft voice, “Why do you want to go?” and I said, “To get away from your magic, sorcerer,” which was true in part. If I kept going to him I might always go to him. I wanted to give my soul and body a larger world to be in.

  Now to tell of my scouting years is more difficult than ever. CP! A woman scouting is entirely alone, unless she chooses to ask a settled man for sex, or camps in an auntring for a while to sing and listen with the singing circle. If she goes anywhere near the territory of a boygroup, she is in danger; and if she comes on a rogue she is in danger; and if she hurts herself or gets into polluted country, she is in danger. She has no responsibility except to herself, and so much freedom is very dangerous.

  In my right earlobe was the tiny communicator; every forty days, as I had promised, I sent a signal to the ship that meant “all well.” If I wanted to leave, I would send another signal. I could have called for the lander to rescue me from a bad situation, but though I was in bad situations a couple of times I never thought of using it. My signal was the mere fulfillment of a promise to my mother and her people, the network I was no longer part of, a meaningless communication.

  Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new.

  So at last I came back home. I had been gone about four years.

  Hyuru had moved into my old house when she left her mother’s house. She had not gone scouting, but had taken to going to Red Stone Creek Valley; and she was pregnant. I was glad to see her living there. The only house empty was an old half-ruined one too close to Hedimi’s. I decided to make a new house. I dug out the circle as deep as my chest; the digging took most of the summer. I cut the sticks, braced and wove them, and then daubed the framework solidly with mud inside and out. I remembered when I had done that with my mother long, long ago, and how she had said, “That’s right. That’s good.” I left the roof open, and the hot sun of late summer baked the mud into clay. Before the rains came, I thatched the house with reeds, a triple thatching, for I’d had enough of being wet all winter.

  My auntring was more a string than a ring, stretching along the north bank of the river for about three kilos; my house lengthened the string a good bit, upstream from all the others. I could just see the smoke from Hyuru’s fireplace. I dug it into a sunny slope with good drainage. It is still a good house.

  I settled down. Some of my time went to gathering and gardening and mending and all the dull, repetitive actions of primitive life, and some went to singing and thinking the songs and stories I had learned here at home and while scouting, and the things I had learned on the ship, also. Soon enough I found why women are glad to have children come to listen to them, for songs and stories are meant to be heard, listened to. “Listen!” I would say to the children. The children of the auntring came and went, like the little fish in the river, one or two or five of them, little ones, big ones. When they came, I sang or told stories to them. When they left, I went on in silence. Sometimes I joined the singing circle to give what I had learned traveling to the older girls. And that was all I did; except that I worked, always, to be aware of all I did.

  By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.

  I helped Hyuru have her baby, a girl, and played with the baby. Then after a couple of years I took the noncon out of my left earlobe. Since it left a little hole, I made the hole go all the way through with a burnt needle, and when it healed I hung in it a tiny jewel I had found in a ruin when I was scouting. I had seen a man on the ship with a jewel hung in his ear that way. I wore it when I went out foraging. I kept
clear of Red Stone Valley. The man there behaved as if he had a claim on me, a right to me. I liked him still, but I did not like that smell of magic about him, his imagination of power over me. I went up into the hills, northward.

  A pair of young men had settled in old North House about the time I came home. Often boys got through boygroup by pairing, and often they stayed paired when they left the Territory. It helped their chances of survival. Some of them were sexually paired, others weren’t; some stayed paired, others didn’t. One of this pair had gone off with another man last summer. The one that stayed wasn’t a handsome man, but I had noticed him. He had a kind of solidness I liked. His body and hands were short and strong. I had courted him a little, but he was very shy. This day, a day in the Silver Time when the mist lay on the river, he saw the jewel swinging in my ear, and his eyes widened.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I wore it to make you look at me,” I said.

  He was so shy that I finally said, “If you only like sex with men, you know, just tell me.” I really was not sure.

  “Oh, no,” he said, “no. No.” He stammered and then bolted back down the path. But he looked back; and I followed him slowly, still not certain whether he wanted me or wanted to be rid of me.

  He waited for me in front of a little house in a grove of redroot, a lovely little bower, all leaves outside, so that you would walk within arm’s length of it and not see it. Inside he had laid sweet grass, deep and dry and soft, smelling of summer. I went in, crawling because the door was very low, and sat in the summer-smelling grass. He stood outside. “Come in,” I said, and he came in very slowly.

  “I made it for you,” he said.

  “Now make a child for me,” I said.

  And we did that; maybe that day, maybe another.

  Now I will tell you why after all these years I called the ship, not knowing even if it was still there in the space between the planets, asking for the lander to meet me in the barren land.