A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Yes. But it’s very difficult,” Shan said, “to live without the notion that there is, somewhere, if one could just find it, a fact.”

  “Only fiction,” said Forest, unrelenting. “Fact is one of our finest fictions.”

  “But music comes first,” Shan said. “And dancing is people being music. I think what Dalzul sees is that we can … we can dance to Ganam.”

  “I like that,” said Riel. “And look: on the fiction theory, we should be careful not to ‘believe’ Dalzul’s records, or his ship’s tapes. They’re fictions. But, unless we accept the assumption, based only on the Shoby experiment, that the churten experience necessarily skews perception or judgment of perception, we have no reason to disbelieve them. He’s a seasoned observer and a superb gestalter.”

  “There are elements of a rather familiar kind of fiction in his report,” Forest said. “The princess who has apparently been waiting for him, expecting him, and leads him naked to her palace, where after due ceremonies and amenities she has sex with him—and very good sex too—? I’m not saying I disbelieve it. I don’t. It looks and rings true. But it would be interesting to know how the princess perceived these events.”

  “We can’t know that till we get there and talk to her,” said Riel. “What are we waiting for, anyhow?”

  The Galba was a Hainish in-system glass ship, newly fitted with churten controls. It was a pretty little bubble, not much bigger than the Shoby’s lander. Entering it, Shan had a few rather bad moments. The chaos, the senseless and centerless experience of churten, returned vividly to him: must he go through that again? Could he? Very sharp and aching was the thought of Tai, Tai who should be here now as she had been there then, Tai whom he had come to love aboard the Shoby, and Betton, the clear-hearted child—he needed them, they should be here.

  Forest and Riel slipped through the hatch, and after them came Dalzul, the concentration of his energy almost visible around him as an aura or halo, a brightness of being. No wonder the Unists thought he was God, Shan thought, and thought also of the ceremonial, almost reverent welcome shown Dalzul by the Gaman. Dalzul was charged, full of mana, a power to which others responded, by which they were entrained. Shan’s anxiety slipped from him. He knew that with Dalzul there would be no chaos.

  “They thought we’d be able to control a bubble easier than the ship I had. I’ll try not to bring her out right over the roofs this time. No wonder they thought I was a god, materializing in full view like that!” Shan had got used to the way Dalzul seemed to echo his thoughts, and Riel’s and Forest’s, and had come to expect it; they were in synchrony, it was their strength.

  They took their places, Dalzul at the churten console, Riel plugged into the AI, Shan at the flight controls, and Forest as gestalt and Support. Dalzul looked round and nodded, and Shan took them out a few hundred kilometers from Ve Port. The curve of the planet fell away and the stars shone under his feet, around, above.

  Dalzul began to sing, not a melody but a held note, a full, deep A. Riel joined in, an octave above, then Forest on the F between, and Shan found himself pouring out a steady middle C as if he were a church organ. Riel shifted to the C above, Dalzul and Forest sang the triad, and as the chord changed Shan did not know who sang which note, hearing and being only the sphere of the stars and the sweet frequencies swelling and fading in one long-held unison as Dalzul touched the console and the yellow sun was high in the blue sky above the city.

  Shan had not stopped flying. Red and orange roofs, dusty plazas tilted under the ship. “How about over there, Shan,” Dalzul said, pointing to a green strip by a canal, and Shan brought the Galba effortlessly down in a long glide and touched it onto grass, soft as a soap bubble.

  He looked round at the others and out through the walls.

  “Blue sky, green grass, near noon, natives approaching,” said Dalzul. “Right?”

  “Right,” said Riel, and Shan laughed. No conflict of sensations, no chaos of perceptions, no terror of uncertainty, this time. “We churtened,” he said. “We did it. We danced it!”

  The field workers down by the canal got into a group and watched, evidently afraid to approach, but very soon people could be seen on the dusty road leading out from the city. “The welcoming committee, I trust,” said Dalzul.

  The four of them waited beside the bubble ship. The tension of the moment only heightened the extraordinary vividness of emotion and sensation. Shan felt that he knew the beautiful, harsh outlines of the two volcanoes that bounded the city’s valley, knew them and would never forget them, knew the smell of the air and the fall of the light and the blackness of shadow under leaves; this is herenow, he said to himself with joyous certainty, I am herenow and there is no distance, no separation.

  Tension without fear. Plumed and crested men, broad-chested and strong-armed, walked towards them steadily, their faces impassive, and stopped in front of them. One elderly man nodded his head slightly and said, “Sem Dazu.” Dalzul made the gesture from heart to open embrace, saying, “Viaka!” The other men said, “Dazu, Sem Dazu,” and some of them imitated Dalzul’s gesture.

  “Viaka,” Dalzul said, “beya,”—friend—and he introduced his companions to them, repeating their names and the word friend.

  “Foyes,” said old Viaka. “Shan. Yeh.” He knew he hadn’t come very close to “Riel,” and frowned slightly. “Friends. Be welcome. Come, come in Ganam.” During his brief first stay, Dalzul had not been able to record much of the language for the Hainish linguists to work on; from his meager tapes they and their clever analoguers had produced a little manual of vocabulary and grammar, full of [?]s, which Shan had dutifully studied. He remembered beya, and kiyugi, be welcome [?], be at home [?]. Riel, a hilfer/linguist, would have liked longer to study the manual. “Better to learn the language from the speakers,” Dalzul had said.

  As they walked the dusty road to Ganam city the vividness of impression began to overload on Shan, becoming a blur and glory of heat and radiance, red and yellow clay walls, pottery-red bare breasts and shoulders, purple and red and orange and umber striped and embroidered cloaks and vests and kilts, the gleam of gold and nod of feathers, the smells of oil and incense and dust and smoke and food and sweat, the sounds of many voices, slap of sandals and sluff of bare feet on stone and earth, bells, gongs, the difference of light, the touch and smell and beat of a world where nothing was known and everything was as it was, as it should be, this little city of stone and mud and splendid carvings, fiery in the light of its gold sun, crude, magnificent, and human. It was stranger than anything Shan had known and it was as if he had been away and come home again. Tears blurred his eyes. We are all one, he thought. There is no distance, no time between us; all we need do is step across, and we are here, together. He walked beside Dalzul and heard the people greet him, grave and quiet: Sem Dazu, they said, Sem Dazu, kiyugi. You have come home.

  The first days were all overload. There were moments when Shan thought that he had stopped thinking—was merely experiencing, receiving, not processing. “Process later,” Dalzul said with a laugh, when Shan told him. “How often does one get to be a child?” It was indeed like being a child, having no control over events and no responsibility for them. Expectable or incredible, they happened, and he was part of the happening and watched it happening at the same time. They were going to make Dalzul their king. It was ridiculous and it was perfectly natural. Your king dies without an heir; a silver man drops out of your sky and your princess says, “This is the man”; the silver man vanishes and returns with three strange companions who can work various miracles; you make him king. What else can you do with him?

  Riel and Forest were, of course, reluctant, dubious about so deep an involvement with a native culture, but had no alternative to offer Dalzul. Since the kingship was evidently more honorary than authoritative, they admitted that he had probably better go along with what the Gaman wanted. Trying to keep some perspective on Dalzul’s situation, they had separated themselves early on, living
in a house near the market, where they could be with common people and enjoy a freedom of movement Dalzul did not have. The trouble with being king-to-be, he told Shan, was that he was expected to hang around the palace all day observing taboos.

  Shan stayed with Dalzul. Viaka gave him one of the many wings of the rambling clay palace to himself. He shared it with a relative of Viaka’s wife called Abud, who helped him keep house. Nothing was expected of him, either by Dalzul or by his native hosts; his time was free. The CRG had asked them to spend thirty days in Ganam. The days flowed by like shining water. He tried to keep his journal for the Ekumen, but found he hated to break the continuity of experience by talking about it, analyzing it. The whole point was that nothing happened, he thought, smiling.

  The only experience that stood out as in some way different was a day he spent with old Viaka’s niece [?] and her husband [?]—he had tried to get the kinship system straight, but the question marks remained, and for some reason this young couple seemed not to use their names. They took him on a long and beautiful walk to a waterfall up on the slope of the larger volcano, Iyananam. He understood that it was a sacred place they wanted him to see. He was very much surprised to find that the sacred waterfall was employed to power a sacred dynamo. The Gaman, as far as his companions could explain and he could understand, had a quite adequate grasp of the principles of hydroelectricity, though they were woefully short of conductors, and had no particular practical use for the power they generated. Their discussion seemed to be about the nature of electricity rather than the application of it, but he could follow very little of it. He tried to ask if there was any place they used electricity, but all he could say was, “somewhere come out?” At such moments he did not find it so agreeable to feel like a child, or a half-wit. Yes, the young woman said, it comes out at the ishkanem when the basemmiak vada. Shan nodded and made notes. Like all Gaman, his companions enjoyed watching him talk into his noter and seeing the tiny symbols appear on the tiny screen, an amiable magic.

  They took him onto a terrace built out from the little dynamo building, which was built of dressed stone laid in marvelously intricate courses. They tried to explain something, pointing downstream. He saw something shining in the quick glitter of the water, but could not make out what it was. Heda, taboo, they said, a word he knew well from Dalzul, though he had not himself run into anything heda till now. As they went on, he caught the name “Dazu” in their conversation with each other, but again could not follow. They passed a little earth shrine, where in the informal worship of the Gaman each of them laid a leaf from a nearby tree, and then set off down the mountainside in the long light of late afternoon.

  As they rounded a turn of the steep trail, he could see in the hazy golden distance down the great valley two other settlements, towns or cities. He was surprised to see them, and then surprised by his surprise. He realized that he had been so absorbed in being in Ganam that he had forgotten it was not the only place in the world. Pointing, he asked his companions, “Belong Gaman?” After some discussion, probably of what on earth he meant, they said no, only Ganam belonged to the Gaman; those cities were other cities.

  Was Dalzul, then, right in thinking the world was called Ganam, or did that name mean just the city and its lands? “Tegud ao? What you call?” he asked, patting the ground, sweeping his arms around the circle of valley, the mountain at their backs, the other mountain facing them. “Nanam tegudyeh,” said Viaka’s niece [?], tentatively, but her husband [?] disagreed, and they discussed it impenetrably for a mile or more. Shan gave up, put away his noter, and enjoyed the walk in the cool of the evening down towards the golden walls of Ganam.

  The next day, or maybe it was the day after, Dalzul came by while Shan was pruning the fruit tree in the walled courtyard of his bit of the palace. The pruning knife was a thin, slightly curved steel blade with a gracefully carved, well-worn wooden handle; it was sharp as a razor. “This is a lovely tool,” he said to Dalzul. “My grandmother taught me to prune. It’s not an art I’ve been able to practice much since I joined the Ekumen. They’re good orcharders here. I was out talking with some of them yesterday.” Had it been yesterday? Not that it mattered. Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval, Shan had been thinking as he studied the tree, learning the inner rhythm of its growth, the patterned intervals of its branches. The years are flowers, the worlds are fruit … “Pruning makes me poetical,” he said, and then, looking at Dalzul, said, “Is something wrong?” It was like a skipped pulse, a wrong note, a step mistaken in the dance.

  “I don’t know,” Dalzul said. “Let’s sit down a minute.” They went to the shade under the balcony and settled down cross-legged on the flagstones. “Probably,” Dalzul said, “I’ve relied too far on my intuitive understanding of these people—followed my nose, instead of holding back, learning the language word by word, going by the book…. I don’t know. But something is amiss.”

  Shan watched the strong, vivid face as Dalzul spoke. The fierce sunlight had tanned his white skin to a more human color. He wore his own shirt and trousers, but had let his grey hair fall loose as Gaman men did, wearing a narrow headband interwoven with gold, which gave him a regal and barbaric look.

  “These are a barbaric people,” he said. “More violent, more primitive perhaps, than I wanted to admit. This kingship they’re determined to invest me with— I’m afraid I have to see it as something more than an honor or a sacral gesture. It is political, after all. At least, it would seem that by being chosen to be king, I’ve made a rival. An enemy.”

  “Who?”

  “Aketa.”

  “I don’t know him. He’s not in the palace here?”

  “No. He’s not one of Viaka’s people. He seems to have been away when I first came. As I understand Viaka, this man considers himself the heir to the throne and the legitimate mate of the princess.”

  “Princess Ket?” Shan had never yet spoken to the princess, who kept herself aloof, staying always in her part of the palace, though she allowed Dalzul to visit her there. “What does she say about this Aketa? Isn’t she on your side? She chose you, after all.”

  “She says I am to be king. That hasn’t changed. But she has. She’s left the palace. In fact she’s gone to live, as well as I can tell, in this Aketa’s household! My God, Shan, is there any world in this universe where men can understand women?”

  “Gethen,” Shan said.

  Dalzul laughed, but his face remained intense, pondering. “You have a partner,” he said after a while. “Maybe that’s the answer. I never came to a place with a woman where I knew, really knew, what she wanted, who she was. If you stick it out, do you finally get there?”

  Shan was touched at the older man, the brilliant man, asking him such questions. “I don’t know,” he said. “Tai and I—we know each other in a way that—But it’s not easy—I don’t know…. But about the princess— Riel and Forest have been talking with people, learning the language. As women, maybe they’d have some insights?”

  “Women yes and no,” Dalzul said. “It’s why I chose them, Shan. With two real women, the psychological dynamics might have been too complicated.”

  Shan said nothing, feeling again that something was missing or he was missing something, misunderstanding. He wondered if Dalzul knew that most of Shan’s sexuality had been with men until he met Tai.

  “Consider,” Dalzul said, “for instance, if the princess thought she should be jealous of one or both of them, thought they were my sexual partners. That could be a snake’s nest! As it is, they’re no threat. Of course, seeking consonance, I’d have preferred all men. But the Elders on Hain are mostly old women, and I knew I had to suit them. So I asked you and your partner, a married couple. When your partner couldn’t come, these two seemed the best solution. And they’ve performed admirably. But I don’t think they’re equipped to tell me what’s going on in the mind, or the hormones, of a very fully sexed woman such as the princess.”

  The bea
t skipped again. Shan rubbed one hand against the rough stone of the terrace, puzzled at his own sense of confusion. Trying to return to the original subject, he asked, “If it is a political kingship, not a sacral one, can you possibly—just withdraw your candidacy, as it were?”

  “Oh, it’s sacred. The only way I could withdraw is to run away. Churten back to Ve Port.”

  “We could fly the Galba to another part of the planet,” Shan suggested. “Observe somewhere else.”

  “From what Viaka tells me, leaving’s not really an option. Ket’s defection has apparently caused a schism, and if Aketa gains power, his supporters will wreak vengeance on Viaka and all his people. Blood sacrifice for offense to the true and sacred king’s person…. Religion and politics! How could I of all men be so blind? I let my longings persuade me that we’d found a rather primitive idyll. But what we’re in the middle of here is a factional and sexual competition among intelligent barbarians who keep their pruning hooks and their swords extremely sharp.” Dalzul smiled suddenly, and his light eyes flashed. “They are wonderful, these people. They are everything we lost with our literacy, our industry, our science. Directly sensual—utterly passionate—primally real. I love them. If they want to make me their king, then by God I’ll put a basket of feathers on my head and be their king! But before that, I’ve got to figure out how to handle Aketa and his crew. And the only key to Aketa seems to be our moody Princess Ket. Whatever you can find out, tell me, Shan. I need your advice and your help.”