Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.

  The medicine man came to visit him the day before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a while saying nothing. Havzhiva sat with him. He had long been used to silence, and still sometimes forgot that it was not customary among historians.

  “What’s wrong?” the medicine man said. It seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its meditative tone; at any rate, Havzhiva made no answer.

  “Please stand up,” the medicine man said, and when Havzhiva had done so, “Now walk a little.” He walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him. “You’re out of balance,” he said. “Did you know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could get a Staying Chant together this evening.”

  “It’s all right,” Havzhiva said. “I’ve always been off-balance.”

  “There’s no need to be,” the medicine man said. “On the other hand, maybe it’s best, since you’re going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life.”

  They embraced formally, as historians did, especially when as now it was absolutely certain that they would never see one another again. Havzhiva had to give and get a good many formal embraces that day. The next day he boarded the Terraces of Darranda and went across the darkness.

  Yeowe

  During his journey of eighty light-years at NAFAL speed, his mother died, and his father, and Iyan Iyan, everyone he had known in Stse, everyone he knew in Kathhad and on Ve. By the time the ship landed, they had all been dead for years. The child Iyan Iyan had borne had lived and grown old and died.

  This was a knowledge he had lived with ever since he saw Tiu board her ship, leaving him to die. Because of the medicine man, the four people who had sung for him, the old woman, and the waterfalls of Tes, he had lived; but he had lived with that knowledge.

  Other things had changed as well. At the time he left Ve, Werel’s colony planet Yeowe had been a slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over, Yeowe had declared its independence, and the institution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to disintegrate.

  Havzhiva longed to observe this terrible and magnificent process, but the Embassy sent him promptly off to Yeowe. A Hainishman called Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdardon Aya counseled him before he left. “If you want danger, it’s dangerous,” he said, “and if you like hope, it’s hopeful. Werel is unmaking itself, while Yeowe’s trying to make itself. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed. I tell you what, Yehedarhed Havzhiva: there are great gods loose on these worlds.”

  Yeowe had got rid of its Bosses, its Owners, the Four Corporations who had run the vast slave plantations for three hundred years; but though the thirty years of the War of Liberation were over, the fighting had not stopped. Chiefs and warlords among the slaves who had risen to power during the Liberation now fought to keep and extend their power. Factions had battled over the question of whether to kick all foreigners off the planet forever or to admit Aliens and join the Ekumen. The isolationists had finally been voted down, and there was a new Ekumenical Embassy in the old colonial capital. Havzhiva spent a while there learning “the language and the table manners,” as they said. Then the Ambassador, a clever young Terran named Solly, sent him south to the region called Yotebber, which was clamoring for recognition.

  History is infamy, Havzhiva thought as he rode the train through the ruined landscapes of the world.

  The Werelian capitalists who colonised the planet had exploited it and their slaves recklessly, mindlessly, in a long orgy of profit-making. It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done. Strip-mining and single-crop agriculture had defaced and sterilised the earth. The rivers were polluted, dead. Huge dust storms darkened the eastern horizon.

  The Bosses had run their plantations by force and fear. For over a century they had shipped male slaves only, worked them till they died, imported fresh ones as needed. Work gangs in these all-male compounds developed into tribal hierarchies. At last, as the price of slaves on Werel and the cost of shipping rose, the Corporations began to buy bonds women for Yeowe Colony. So over the next two centuries the slave population grew, and slave-cities were founded, “Assetvilles” and “Dustytowns” spreading out from the old compounds of the plantations. Havzhiva knew that the Liberation movement had arisen first among the women in the tribal compounds, a rebellion against male domination, before it became a war of all slaves against their owners.

  The slow train stopped in city after city: miles of shacks and cabins, treeless, whole tracts bombed or burnt out in the war and not yet rebuilt; factories, some of them gutted ruins, some functioning but ancient-looking, rattletrap, smoke-belching. At each station hundreds of people got off the train and onto it, swarming, crowding, shouting out bribes to the porters, clambering up onto the roofs of the cars, brutally shoved off again by uniformed guards and policemen. In the north of the long continent, as on Werel, he had seen many black-skinned people, blue-black; but as the train went farther south there were fewer of these, until in Yotebber the people in the villages and on the desolate sidings were much paler than he was, a bluish, dusty color. These were the “dust people,” the descendants of a hundred generations of Werelian slaves.

  Yotebber had been an early center of the Liberation. The Bosses had made reprisal with bombs and poison gas; thousands of people had died. Whole towns had been burned to get rid of the unburied dead, human and animal. The mouth of the great river had been dammed with rotting bodies But all that was past. Yeowe was free, a new member of the Ekumen of the Worlds, and Havzhiva in the capacity of Sub-Envoy was on his way to help the people of Yotebber Region to begin their new history. Or from the point of view of a Hainishman, to rejoin their ancient history.

  He was met at the station in Yotebber City by a large crowd surging and cheering and yelling behind barricades manned by policemen and soldiers; in front of the barricades was a delegation of officials wearing splendid robes and sashes of office and variously ornate uniforms: big men, most of them, dignified, very much public figures. There were speeches of welcome, reporters and photographers for the holonet and the neareal news. It wasn’t a circus, however The big men were definitely in control. They wanted their guest to know he was welcome, he was popular, he was—as the Chief said in his brief, impressive speech—the Envoy from the Future.

  That night in his luxurious suite in an Owner’s city mansion converted to a hotel, Havzhiva thought: If they knew that their man from the future grew up in a pueblo and never saw a neareal till he came here…

  He hoped he would not disappoint these people. From the moment he had first met them on Werel he had liked them, despite their monstrous society. They were full of vitality and pride, and here on Yeowe they were full of dreams of justice. Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran said of another god: I believe in it because it is impossible. He slept well, and woke early in the warm, bright morning, full of anticipation. He walked out to begin to get to know the city, his city.

  The doorman—it was disconcerting to find that people who had fought so desperately for their freedom had servants—the doorman tried hard to get him to wait for a car, a guide, evidently distressed at the great man’s going out so early, afoot, without a retinue. Havzhiva explained that he wanted to walk and was quite able to walk alone. He set off, leaving the unhappy doorman calling after him, “Oh, sir, please, avoid the City Park, sir!”

  Havzhiva obeyed, thinking the park must be closed for a ceremony or replanting. He came on a plaza where a market was in full swing, and there found himself likely to become the center of a crowd; people inevitably noticed him. He wore the handsome Yeowan clothes, singlet, breeches, a light narrow robe, but he was the only person with red-brown skin in a city of four hundred thous
and people. As soon as they saw his skin, his eyes, they knew him: the Alien. So he slipped away from the market and kept to quiet residential streets, enjoying the soft, warm air and the decrepit, charming colonial architecture of the houses. He stopped to admire an ornate Tualite temple. It looked rather shabby and desolate, but there was, he saw, a fresh offering of flowers at the feet of the image of the Mother at the doorway. Though her nose had been knocked off during the war, she smiled serenely, a little cross-eyed. People called out behind him. Somebody said close to him, “Foreign shit, get off our world,” and his arm was seized as his legs were kicked out from under him. Contorted faces, screaming, closed in around him. An enormous, sickening cramp seized his body, doubling him into a red darkness of struggle and voices and pain, then a dizzy shrinking and dwindling away of light and sound.

  An old woman was sitting by him, whispering an almost tuneless song that seemed dimly familiar.

  She was knitting. For a long time she did not look at him; when she did she said, “Ah.” He had trouble making his eyes focus, but he made out that her face was bluish, a pale bluish tan, and there were no whites to her dark eyes.

  She rearranged some kind of apparatus that was attached to him somewhere, and said, “I’m the medicine woman—the nurse. You have a concussion, a slight skull fracture, a bruised kidney, a broken shoulder, and a knife wound in your gut; but you’ll be all right; don’t worry.” All this was in a foreign language, which he seemed to understand. At least he understood “don’t worry,” and obeyed.

  He thought he was on the Terraces of Darranda in NAFAL mode. A hundred years passed in a bad dream but did not pass. People and clocks had no faces. He tried to whisper the Staying Chant and it had no words. The words were gone. The old woman took his hand. She held his hand and slowly, slowly brought him back into time, into local time, into the dim, quiet room where she sat knitting.

  It was morning, hot, bright sunlight in the window. The Chief of Yotebber Region stood by his bedside, a tower of a man in white-and-crimson robes.

  “I’m very sorry,” Havzhiva said, slowly and thickly because his mouth was damaged. “It was stupid of me to go out alone. The fault was entirely mine.”

  “The villains have been caught and will be tried in a court of justice,” said the Chief.

  “They were young men,” Havzhiva said “My ignorance and folly caused the incident—”

  “They will be punished,” the Chief said.

  The day nurses always had the holoscreen up and watched the news and the dramas as they sat with him. They kept the sound down, and Havzhiva could ignore it. It was a hot afternoon; he was watching faint clouds move slowly across the sky, when the nurse said, using the formal address to a person of high status, “Oh, quick—if the gentleman will look, he can see the punishment of the bad men who attacked him!”

  Havzhiva obeyed. He saw a thin human body suspended by the feet, the arms and hands twitching, the intestines hanging down over the chest and face He cried out aloud and hid his face in his arm. “Turn it off,” he said, “turn it off!” He retched and gasped for air. “You are not people!” he cried in his own language, the dialect of Stse. There was some coming and going in the room. The noise of a yelling crowd ceased abruptly. He got control of his breath and lay with his eyes shut, repeating one phrase of the Staying Chant over and over until his mind and body began to steady and find a little balance somewhere, not much.

  They came with food; he asked them to take it away.

  The room was dim, lit only by a nightlight somewhere low on the wall and the lights of the city outside the window. The old woman, the night nurse, was there, knitting in the half dark.

  “I’m sorry,” Havzhiva said at random, knowing he didn’t know what he had said to them.

  “Oh, Mr. Envoy,” the old woman said with a long sigh. “I read about your people. The Hainish people. You don’t do things like we do. You don’t torture and kill each other. You live in peace. I wonder, I wonder what we seem to you. Like witches, like devils, maybe.”

  “No,” he said, but he swallowed down another wave of nausea.

  “When you feel better, when you’re stronger, Mr. Envoy, I have a thing I want to speak to you about.” Her voice was quiet and full of an absolute, easy authority, which probably could become formal and formidable. He had known people who talked that way all his life.

  “I can listen now,” he said, but she said, “Not now. Later. You are tired. Would you like me to sing?”

  “Yes,” he said, and she sat and knitted and sang voicelessly, tunelessly, in a whisper. The names of her gods were in the song: Tual, Kamye, They are not my gods, he thought, but he closed his eyes and slept, safe in the rocking balance.

  Her name was Yeron, and she was not old. She was forty-seven. She had been through a thirty-year war and several famines. She had artificial teeth, something Havzhiva had never heard of, and wore eyeglasses with wire frames; body mending was not unknown on Werel, but on Yeowe most people couldn’t afford it, she said. She was very thin, and her hair was thin. She had a proud bearing, but moved stiffly from an old wound in the left hip. “Everybody, everybody in this world has a bullet in them, or whipping scars, or a leg blown off, or a dead baby in their heart,” she said. “Now you’re one of us, Mr. Envoy. You’ve been through the fire.”

  He was recovering well. There were five or six medical specialists on his case. The Regional Chief visited every few days and sent officials daily. The Chief was, Havzhiva realised, grateful. The outrageous attack on a representative of the Ekumen had given him the excuse and strong popular support for a strike against the diehard isolationist World Party led by his rival, another warlord hero of the Liberation. He sent glowing reports of his victories to the Sub-Envoy’s hospital room. The holonews was all of men in uniforms running, shooting, flyers buzzing over desert hills. As he walked the halls, gaining strength, Havzhiva saw patients lying in bed in the wards wired in to the neareal net, “experiencing” the fighting, from the point of view, of course, of the ones with guns, the ones with cameras, the ones who shot.

  At night the screens were dark, the nets were down, and Yeron came and sat by him in the dim light from the window.

  “You said there was something you had to tell me,” he said. The city night was restless, full of noises, music, voices down in the street below the window she had opened wide to let in the warm, many-scented air.

  “Yes, I did.” She put her knitting down. “I am your nurse, Mr. Envoy, but also a messenger. When I heard you’d been hurt, forgive me, but I said, ‘Praise the Lord Kamye and the Lady of Mercy!’ Because I had not known how to bring my message to you, and now I knew how.” Her quiet voice paused a minute. “I ran this hospital for fifteen years. During the war. I can still pull a few strings here.” Again she paused. Like her voice, her silences were familiar to him. “I’m a messenger to the Ekumen,” she said, “from the women. Women here. Women all over Yeowe. We want to make an alliance with you…I know, the government already did that. Yeowe is a member of the Ekumen of the Worlds. We know that. But what does it mean? To us? It means nothing. Do you know what women are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are not part of the government. Women made the Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like the men. But they weren’t generals, they aren’t chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock. Here it’s some better. But not good. I was trained in the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And we’re what we always were. Property. I don’t think that’s what we fought the long war for. Do you, Mr. Envoy? I think what we have is a new liberation to make. We have to finish the job.”

  After a long silence, Havzhiva asked softly, “Are you organised?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Just like the old days. We can organise in the dark!” She laughed a little. “But I don’t think we can win freedom for ourselve
s alone by ourselves alone. There has to be a change. The men think they have to be bosses. They have to stop thinking that. Well, one thing we have learned in my lifetime, you don’t change a mind with a gun. You kill the boss and you become the boss. We must change that mind. The old slave mind, boss mind. We have got to change it, Mr. Envoy. With your help. The Ekumen’s help.”

  “I’m here to be a link between your people and the Ekumen. But I’ll need time,” he said. “I need to learn.”

  “All the time in the world. We know we can’t turn the boss mind around in a day or a year. This is a matter of education.” She said the word as a sacred word. “It will take a long time. You take your time. If we just know that you will listen.”

  “I will listen,” he said.

  She drew a long breath, took up her knitting again. Presently she said, “It won’t be easy to hear us.”

  He was tired. The intensity of her talk was more than he could yet handle. He did not know what she meant. A polite silence is the adult way of signifying that one doesn’t understand. He said nothing.

  She looked at him “How are we to come to you? You see, that’s a problem. I tell you, we are nothing. We can come to you only as your nurse. Your house-maid. The woman who washes your clothes. We don’t mix with the chiefs. We aren’t on the councils. We wait on table. We don’t eat the banquet.”

  “Tell me—” he hesitated. “Tell me how to start. Ask to see me if you can. Come as you can, as it…if it’s safe?” He had always been quick to learn his lessons. “I’ll listen. I’ll do what I can.” He would never learn much distrust.

  She leaned over and kissed him very gently on the mouth. Her lips were light, dry, soft.