was easier for a pair, he said, if their bond was sexual; so long as theyoffered no competition for women, settled men wouldn't challenge them. But anew man in the region anywhere within three days' walk of an auntring had toprove himself against the settled men there. "It would 'e three or four yearsof the same thing," he said, "challenging, fighting, always watching theothers, on guard, showing how strong you are, staying alert all night, allday. 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 watchingMother, and raised his hand when she turned to speak to me. "I'll go," hesaid. "She doesn't have to. Why should she?" Like me, he had learned not touse names without some reason to. Mother looked from him to me and finallygave a kind of laugh. "I can't leave her here, Borny!" "Why should yougo?" "Because I want to," she said. "I've had enough. More than enough. We'vegot a tremendous amount of material on the women, over seven years of it, andnow you can fill the information gaps on the men's side. That's enough. It'stime, 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. Whydo you want to take me away from my soul? You want me to do magic! I won't. Iwon't do magic. I won't speak your language. I won't go with you!" My motherwas still not listening; she started to answer angrily. Borny put up his handagain, the way a woman does when she is going to sing, and she looked athim. "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. Thatwas a miserable time. I stayed home as if I were sick so that I would not lieto 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 orNoyit, either of whom would certainly take me into their household. Sherefused. She was the mother and I the child and her power was sacred. Sheradioed the ship and arranged for a lander to pick us up in a barren area twodays' walk from the auntring. We left at night, sneaking away. I carriednothing but my soulbag. We walked all next day, slept a little when it stoppedraining, walked on and came to the desert. The ground was all lumps andhollows and caves, Before-Time ruins; the soil was tiny bits of glass and hardgrains and fragments, the way it is in the deserts. Nothing grew there. Wewaited there. The sky broke open and a shining thing fell down and stoodbefore us on the rocks, bigger than any house, though not as big as the ruinsof the Before Time. My mother looked at me with a queer, vengeful smile. "Isit magic?" she said. And it was very hard for me not to think that it was. YetI knew it was only a thing, and there is no magic in things, only in minds. Isaid 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 tolisten and obey. In the ship, that utterly strange new world, I held out onlyfor a few hours, and then began to cry and ask to go home. Please, please, canI go home now. Everyone on the ship was very kind to me. Even then I thoughtabout what Borny had been through and what I was going through, comparing ourordeals. The difference seemed total. He had been alone, without food, withoutshelter, a frightened boy trying to survive among equally frightened rivalsagainst 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 bycitizens of a very great city, offered a share in their power, which they sawas humanity. He and I had both fallen among sorcerors. Both he and I could seethe good in the people we were among, but neither he nor I could live withthem. Borny told me he had spent many desolate nights in the Territorycrouched in a fireless shelter, telling over the stories he had learned fromthe aunts, singing the songs in his head. I did the same thing every night onthe ship. But I refused to tell the stories or sing to the people there. Iwould not speak my language, there. It was the only way I had to besilent. 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 saywas that they were not my people, that I had no people. I was a person. I hada 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, likean auntring, and many of the adults taught us. I learned Ekumenical historyand geography, mostly, and Mother gave me a report to learn about the historyof Eleven-Soro, what my language calls the Before Time. I read that the citiesof my world had been the greatest cities ever built on any world, covering twoof the continents entirely, with small areas set aside for farming, there hadbeen 120 billion people living in the cities, while the animals and the seaand the air and the dirt died, until the people began dying too. It was ahideous story. I was ashamed of it and wished nobody else on the ship or inthe Ekumen knew about it. And yet, I thought, if they knew the stories I knewabout the Before Time, they would understand how magic turns on itself, andthat it must be so. After less than a year, Mother told us we were going toHain. The ship's doctor and his clever machines had repaired Borny's lip; heand Mother had put all the information they had into the records; he was oldenough to begin training for the Ekumenical Schools, as he wanted to do. I wasnot flourishing, and the doctor's machines were not able to repair me. I keptlosing weight, I slept badly, I had terrible headaches. Almost as soon as wecame aboard the ship, I had begun to menstruate; each time the cramps wereagonizing. "This is no good, this ship life," she said. "You need to beoutdoors. On a planet. On a civilized planet." "If I went to Hain," I said, "when I came back, the persons I know would all be dead hundreds of yearsago." "Serenity," she said, "you must stop thinking in terms of Soro. We haveleft Sore. 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 tolive it." I summoned up my courage and spoke in my own language: "I am not achild now. You have no power over me. I will not go. Go without me. You haveno power over me!" Those are the words I had been taught to say to amagician, a sorceror. I don't know if my mother fully understood them, but shedid understand that I was deathly afraid of her, and it struck her intosilence. After a long time she said in Hainish, "I agree. I have no powerover you. But I have certain rights; the right of loyalty; of love." "Nothingis 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. Youdon't know what love is. You're closed into yourself like a rock. Ishould 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 myvoice began to tremble and my mouth to shake around the words, "and so doesthe 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 womanyet. I want to be a woman." "But Ren, you will be! -- ten times the woman youcould 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 myears. She came to me then and held me, but I stood stiff, enduring hertouch, until she let me go. The ship's crew had changed entirely while wewere onplanet. The First Observers had gone on to other worlds; our backup wasnow a Gethenian archeologist named Arrem, a mild, watchful person, not young. Arrem had gone down onplanet only on the two desert continents, and welcomedthe chance to talk with us, who had "lived with the living," as heshe said. Ifelt easy when I was with Artera, who was so unlike anybody else. Arrem wasnot a man -- I could not get used to having men around all the time-- yet nota woman; and so not exactly an adult, yet not a child: a person, alone, likeme. 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 ofthese talks, and told me about them. "Arrem says if you go to Hain you'llprobabl
y 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 Motherfrom ranting about primitive superstition .... And Arrem says you could beuseful to the Ekumen, if you stay and finish your education on Soro. You'll bean 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 youstay and I go, we'll be dead." That was how the young people of the shipssaid it, when one was going to cross the lightyears and the other was going tostay. Goodbye, we're dead. It was the truth. "I know," I said. I felt mythroat 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, Mothersaid, but I had never seen or heard a dog, I heard a woman terribly crying. Iwas afraid of sounding like that. "If I can go home, when I finish making mysoul, who knows, I might come to Hain for a while," I said, in Hainish. "Scouting?" Borny said in my language, and laughed, and made melaugh again. Nobody gets to keep a brother. I knew that. But Borny had comeback from being dead to me, so I might come back from being dead to him; atleast I could pretend I might. My mother came to a decision. She and I wouldstay on the ship for another year while Borny went to Hain. I would keep goingto school; if at the end of the year I was still determined to go backonplanet, I could do so. With me or without me, she would go on to Hain thenand join Borny. If I ever wanted to see them again, I could follow them. Itwas a compromise that satisfied no one, but it was the best we could do, andwe all consented. When he left, Borny gave me his knife. After he left, Itried not to be sick. I worked hard at learning everything they taught me inthe ship school, and I tried to teach Arrem how to be aware and how to avoidwitchcraft. We did slow walking together in the ship's garden, and the firsthour of the untrance movements from the Handdata of Karhide on Gethen. We agreed that they were alike. The ship was staying in the Soro system notonly because of my family, but because the crew was now mostly zoologists whohad come to study a sea animal on Eleven-Soro, a kind of cephalopod that hadmutated toward high intelligence, or maybe it already was highly intelligent; but there was a communication problem. "Almost as bad as with the localhumans," said Steadiness, the zoologist who taught and teased us mercilessly. She took us down twice by lander to the uninhabited islands in the NorthernHemisphere where her station was. It was very strange to go down to my worldand yet be a world away from my aunts and sisters and my soulmate; but I saidnothing. I saw the great, pale, shy creature come slowly up out of the deepwaters with a running ripple of colors along its long coiling tentacles and aringing shimmer of sound, all so quick it was over before you could follow thecolors or hear the tune. The zoologist's machine produced a pink glow and amechanically 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 knowwhat 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 intoHainish, "it says, thinking is one way of doing and words are one way ofthinking." Steadiness stared at me, in disapproval I thought, but probablyonly because I had never said anything to her before except "Yes." Finally shesaid, "Are you suggesting that it doesn't speak in words?" "Maybe it's notspeaking 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 Icould sink into the water, the way the cephalopod was doing. The other youngpeople on the ship were friendly and mannerly. Those are words that have notranslation in my language. I was unfriendly and unmannerly, and they let mebe. I was grateful. But there was no place to be alone on the ship. Of coursewe 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 andbeauty while they hung around in a solar system for years on end. But itwas designed. It was all human-made -- everything was human. I had much moreprivacy 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 aroundme, 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 couldI make my soul? I could barely cling to it. I was in terror that I would loseit altogether. One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little ugly gray rock that Ihad picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the riverin the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. Everynight I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting tosleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to thesoft hushing of the ship's systems, like a mechanical sea. The doctor hopefully fed me various tonics. Mother and I ate breakfast together everymorning. She kept at work, making our notes from all the years on Eleven-Sorointo her report to the Ekumen, but I knew the work did not go well. Her soulwas 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 notintended the silence as a message. I had only rested in it. "Mother, I wantto go home and you want to go home," I said. "Can't we?" Her expression wasstrange 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 Ithought that when I was grown and went out alone I would go to the sea shoreand watch the sea-beasts shimmering their colors and tunes till I knew whatthey were thinking. I would listen, I would learn, till my soul was as largeas the shining world. The scarred barrens whirled beneath us, rains as wide asthe continent, endless desolations. We touched down. I had my soulbag, andBorny's knife around my neck on its string a communicator implant behind myright earlobe, and a medicine kit Mother had made for me. "No use dying of aninfected finger, after all," she had said. The people on the lander saidgood-bye, 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 aboutthe middle of the second day. I went to my house cautiously, in case somebodyhad moved in while I was gone; but it was just as we had left it. Themattresses 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. Thepigi had got small and seedy, but there were some good roots. A little boycame by and stared; he had to be Migi's baby. After a while Hyuru came by. Shesquatted 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," Hyurusaid. She watched me dig up another root. "Will you come to the singingcircle?" she asked. I nodded. She smiled again. With her rosebrown skin andwide-set eyes, Hyuru had become very beautiful, but her smile was exactly thesame 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 circlewith Hyuru and two other gifts. Didsu still came to it often, and Han, a womanwho settled in our auntring to have her first baby, joined it too. In thesinging circle the older gifts pass around the stories, songs, knowledge theylearned from their own mother, and young women who have lived in otherauntrings 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 myfamily lived there. My mother had complained that she didn't have any data ondea
th 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
Coming of Age in Karhide Page 11
