In the wise and subtle story that follows, she demonstrates that quite a bit more than just beauty may be in the eye of the beholder.…
The Shobies’ Story
URSULA K. LE GUIN
They met at Ve Port more than a month before their first flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the Shobies. Their first consensual decision was to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing.
Liden was a fishing port with an eighty-thousand-year history and a population of four hundred. Its fisherfolk farmed the rich shoal waters of their bay, shipped the catch inland to the cities, and managed the Liden Resort for vacationers and tourists and new space crews on isyeye (the word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two). The fisherwomen and fishermen of Liden were as weathered as driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who had misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. “Nope,” she said.
Like most crews, the Shobies used Hainish as their common language. So the name of the one Hainish crew member, Sweet Today, carried its meaning as words as well as name, and at first seemed a silly thing to call a big, tall, heavy woman in her late fifties, imposing of carriage and almost as taciturn as the villagers. But her reserve proved to be a deep well of congeniality and tact, to be called upon as needed, and her name soon began to sound quite right. She had family—all Hainish have family—kinfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines, scattered all over the Ekumen, but no relatives in this crew. She asked to be Grandmother to Rig, Asten, and Betton, and was accepted.
The only Shoby older than Sweet Today was the Terran Lidi, who was seventy-two EYs and not interested in grandmothering. Lidi had been navigating for fifty years, and there was nothing she didn’t know about NAFAL ships, although occasionally she forgot that their ship was the Shoby and called it the Soso or the Alterra. And there were things she didn’t know, none of them knew, about the Shoby.
They talked, as human beings do, about what they didn’t know.
Churten theory was the main topic of conversation, evenings at the driftwood fire on the beach after dinner. The adults had read whatever there was to read about it, of course, before they ever volunteered for the test mission. Gveter had more recent information and presumably a better understanding of it than the others, but it had to be pried out of him. Only twenty-five, the only Cetian in the crew, much hairier than the others, and not gifted in language, he spent a lot of time on the defensive. Assuming that as an Anarresti he was more proficient at mutual aid and more adept at cooperation than the others, he lectured them about their propertarian habits; but he held tight to his knowledge, because he needed the advantage it gave him. For a while he would speak only in negatives: don’t call it the churten “drive,” it isn’t a drive, don’t call it the churten “effect,” it isn’t an effect. What is it, then? A long lecture ensued, beginning with the rebirth of Cetian physics since the revision of Shevekian temporalism by the Intervallists, and ending with the general conceptual framework of the churten. Everyone listened very carefully, and finally Sweet Today spoke, carefully. “So the ship will be moved,” she said, “by ideas?”
“No, no, no, no,” said Gveter. But he hesitated for the next word so long that Karth asked a question: “Well, you haven’t actually talked about any physical, material events or effects at all.” The question was characteristically indirect. Karth and Oreth, the Gethenians who with their two children were the affective focus of the crew, the “hearth” of it, in their terms, came from a not very theoretically minded subculture, and knew it. Gveter could run rings round them with his Cetian physico-philosophico-techno-natter. He did so at once. His accent did not make his explanations any clearer. He went on about coherence and meta-intervals, and at last demanded, with gestures of despair, “Khow can I say it in Khainish? No! It is not physical, it is not not-physical, these are the categories our minds must discard entirely, this is the khole point!”
“Buth-buth-buth-buth-buth-buth,” went Asten, softly, passing behind the half circle of adults at the driftwood fire on the wide, twilit beach. Rig followed, also going, “Buth-buth-buth-buth,” but louder. They were being spaceships, to judge from their maneuvers around a dune and their communications—“Locked in orbit, Navigator!”—but the noise they were imitating was the noise of the little fishing boats of Liden putt-putting out to sea.
“I crashed!” Rig shouted, flailing in the sand. “Help! Help! I crashed!”
“Hold on, Ship Two!” Asten cried. “I’ll rescue you! Don’t breathe! Oh, oh, trouble with the Churten Drive! Buth-buth-ack! Ack! Brrrrmmm-ack-ack-ack-rrrrrmmmmm, buth-buth-buth-buth.…”
They were six and four EYs old. Tai’s son Betton, who was eleven, sat at the driftwood fire with the adults, though at the moment he was watching Rig and Asten as if he wouldn’t mind taking off to help rescue Ship Two. The little Gethenians had spent more time on ships than on planet, and Asten liked to boast about being “actually fifty-eight,” but this was Betton’s first crew, and his only NAFAL flight had been from Terra to Hain. He and his biomother, Tai, had lived in a reclamation commune on Terra. When she had drawn the lot for Ekumenical service, and requested training for ship duty, he had asked her to bring him as family. She had agreed; but after training, when she volunteered for this test flight, she had tried to get Betton to withdraw, to stay in training or go home. He had refused. Shan, who had trained with them, told the others this, because the tension between the mother and son had to be understood to be used effectively in group formation. Betton had requested to come, and Tai had given in, but plainly not with an undivided will. Her relationship to the boy was cool and mannered. Shan offered him fatherly-brotherly warmth, but Betton accepted it sparingly, coolly, and sought no formal crew relation with him or anyone.
Ship Two was being rescued, and attention returned to the discussion. “All right,” said Lidi. “We know that anything that goes faster than light, any thing that goes faster than light, by so doing transcends the material/immaterial category—that’s how we got the ansible, by distinguishing the message from the medium. But if we, the crew, are going to travel as messages, I want to understand how.”
Gveter tore his hair. There was plenty to tear. It grew fine and thick, a mane on his head, a pelt on his limbs and body, a silvery nimbus on his hands and face. The fuzz on his feet was, at the moment, full of sand. “Khow!” he cried. “I’m trying to tell you khow! Message, information, no no no, that’s old, that’s ansible technology. This is transilience! Because the field is to be conceived as the virtual field, in which the unreal interval becomes virtually effective through the mediary coherence—don’t you see?”
“No,” Lidi said. “What do you mean by mediary?”
After several more bonfires on the beach, the consensus opinion was that churten theory was accessible only to minds very highly trained in Cetian temporal physics. There was a less freely voiced conviction that the engineers who had built the Shoby’s churten apparatus did not entirely understand how it worked. Or more precisely, what it did when it worked. That it worked was certain. The Shoby was the fourth ship it had been tested with, using robot crew; so far sixty-two instantaneous trips, or transiliences, had been effected between points from four hundred kilometers to twenty-seven light-years apart, with stopovers of varying lengths. Gveter and Lidi steadfastly maintained that this proved that the engineers knew perfectly well what they were doing, and that for the rest of them the seeming difficulty of the theory was only the difficulty human minds had in grasping a genuinely new concept.
“Like the circulation of the blood,” said Tai. “People went around with their hearts beating for a long time before they understood w
hy.” She did not look satisfied with her own analogy, and when Shan said, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” she looked offended. “Mysticism,” she said, in the tone of voice of one warning a companion about dog shit on the path.
“Surely there’s nothing beyond understanding in this process,” Oreth said, somewhat tentatively. “Nothing that can’t be understood, and reproduced.”
“And quantified,” Gveter said stoutly.
“But even if people understand the process, nobody knows the human response to it—the experience of it. Right? So we are to report on that.”
“Why shouldn’t it be just like NAFAL flight, only even faster?” Betton asked.
“Because it is totally different,” said Gveter.
“What could happen to us?”
Some of the adults had discussed possibilities, all of them had considered them; Karth and Oren had talked it over in appropriate terms with their children; but evidently Betton had not been included in such discussions.
“We don’t know,” Tai said sharply. “I told you that at the start, Betton.”
“Most likely it will be like NAFAL flight,” said Shan, “but the first people who flew NAFAL didn’t know what it would be like, and had to find out the physical and psychic effects—”
“The worst thing,” said Sweet Today in her slow, comfortable voice, “would be that we would die. Other lives have been on some of the test flights. Crickets. And intelligent ritual animals on the last two Shoby tests. They were all all right.” It was a very long statement for Sweet Today, and carried proportional weight.
“We know,” said Gveter, “that no temporal rearrangement is involved in churten, as it is in NAFAL. And mass is involved only in terms of needing a certain core mass, just as for ansible transmission, but not in itself. So maybe even a pregnant person could be a transilient.”
“They can’t go on ships,” Asten said. “The unborn dies if they do.”
Asten was half-lying across Oreth’s lap; Rig, thumb in mouth, was asleep on Karth’s lap.
“When we were Oneblins,” Asten went on, sitting up, “there were ritual animals with our crew. Some fish and some Terran cats and a whole lot of Hainish gholes. We got to play with them. And we helped thank the ghole that they tested for lithovirus. But it didn’t die. It bit Shapi. The cats slept with us. But one of them went into kemmer and got pregnant, and then the Oneblin had to go to Hain, and she had to have an abortion, or all her unborns would have died inside her and killed her too. Nobody knew a ritual for her, to explain to her. But I fed her some extra food. And Rig cried.”
“Other people I know cried too,” Karth said, stroking the child’s hair.
“You tell good stories, Asten,” Sweet Today observed.
“So we’re sort of ritual humans,” said Betton.
“Volunteers,” Tai said.
“Experimenters,” said Lidi.
“Experiencers,” said Shan.
“Explorers,” Oreth said.
“Gamblers,” said Karth.
The boy looked from one face to the next.
“You know,” Shan said, “back in the time of the League, early in NAFAL flight, they were sending out ships to really distant systems—trying to explore everything—crews that wouldn’t come back for centuries. Maybe some of them are still out there. But some of them came back after four, five, six hundred years, and they were all mad. Crazy!” He paused dramatically. “But they were all crazy when they started. Unstable people. They had to be crazy to volunteer for a time dilation like that. What a way to pick a crew, eh?” He laughed.
“Are we stable?” said Oreth. “I like instability. I like this job. I like the risk, taking the risk together. High stakes! That’s the edge of it, the sweetness of it.”
Karth looked down at their children, and smiled.
“Yes. Together,” Gveter said. “You aren’t crazy. You are good. I love you. We are ammari.”
“Ammar,” the others said to him, confirming this unexpected declaration. The young man scowled with pleasure, jumped up, and pulled off his shirt. “I want to swim. Come on, Betton. Come on swimming!” he said, and ran off toward the dark, vast waters that moved softly beyond the ruddy haze of their fire. The boy hesitated, then shed his shirt and sandals and followed. Shan pulled up Tai, and they followed; and finally the two old women went off into the night and the breakers, rolling up their pant legs, laughing at themselves.
To Gethenians, even on a warm summer night on a warm summer world, the sea is no friend. The fire is where you stay. Oreth and Asten moved closer to Karth and watched the flames, listening to the faint voices out in the glimmering surf, now and then talking quietly in their own tongue, while the little sisterbrother slept on.
* * *
After thirty lazy days at Liden the Shobies caught the fish train inland to the city, where a Fleet lander picked them up at the train station and took them to the spaceport on Ve, the next planet out from Hain. They were rested, tanned, bonded, and ready to go.
One of Sweet Today’s hemi-affiliate cousins once removed was on duty in Ve Port. She urged the Shobies to ask the inventors of the churten on Urras and Anarres any questions they had about churten operation. “The purpose of the experimental flight is understanding,” she insisted, “and your full intellectual participation is essential. They’ve been very anxious about that.”
Lidi snorted.
“Now for the ritual,” said Shan, as they went to the ansible room in the sunward bubble. “They’ll explain to the animals what they’re going to do and why, and ask them to help.”
“The animals don’t understand that,” Betton said in his cold, angelic treble. “It’s just to make the humans feel better.”
“The humans understand?” Sweet Today asked.
“We all use each other,” Oreth said. “The ritual says: we have no right to do so; therefore, we accept the responsibility for the suffering we cause.”
Betton listened and brooded.
Gveter addressed the ansible first, and talked to it for half an hour, mostly in Pravic and mathematics. Finally, apologizing, and looking a little unnerved, he invited the others to use the instrument. There was a pause. Lidi activated it, introduced herself, and said, “We have agreed that none of us, except Gveter, has the theoretical background to grasp the principles of the churten.”
A scientist twenty-two light-years away responded in Hainish via the rather flat auto-translator voice, but with unmistakable hopefulness, “The churten, in lay terms, may be seen as displacing the virtual field in order to realize relational coherence in terms of the transiliential experientiality.”
“Quite,” said Lidi.
“As you know, the material effects have been nil, and negative effect on low-intelligence sentients also nil; but there is considered to be a possibility that the participation of high intelligence in the process might affect the displacement in one way or another. And that such displacement would reciprocally affect the participant.”
“What has the level of our intelligence got to do with how the churten functions?” Tai asked.
A pause. Their interlocutor was trying to find the words, to accept the responsibility.
“We have been using ‘intelligence’ as shorthand for the psychic complexity and cultural dependence of our species,” said the translator voice at last. “The presence of the transilient as conscious mind nonduring transilience is the untested factor.”
“But if the process is instantaneous, how can we be conscious of it?” Oreth asked.
“Precisely,” said the ansible, and after another pause continued, “As the experimenter is an element of the experiment, so we assume that the transilient may be an element or agent of transilience. This is why we asked for a crew to test the process, rather than one or two volunteers. The psychic interbalance of a bonded social group is a margin of strength against disintegrative or incomprehensible experience, if any such occurs. Also, the separate observations of the
group members will mutually interverify.”
“Who programs this translator?” Shan snarled in a whisper. “Interverify! Shit!”
Lidi looked around at the others, inviting questions.
“How long will the trip actually take?” Betton asked.
“No long,” the translator voice said, then self-corrected: “No time.”
Another pause.
“Thank you,” said Sweet Today, and the scientist on a planet twenty-two years of time-dilated travel from Ve Port answered, “We are grateful for your generous courage, and our hope is with you.”
They went directly from the ansible room to the Shoby.
* * *
The churten equipment, which was not very space-consuming and the controls of which consisted essentially of an on-off switch, had been installed alongside the Nearly as Fast as Light motivators and controls of an ordinary interstellar ship of the Ekumenical Fleet. The Shoby had been built on Hain about four hundred years ago, and was thirty-two years old. Most of its early runs had been exploratory, with a Hainish-Chiffewarian crew. Since in such runs a ship might spend years in orbit in a planetary system, the Hainish and Chiffewarians, feeling that it might as well be lived in rather than endured, had arranged and furnished it like a very large, very comfortable house. Three of its residential modules had been disconnected and left in the hangars on Ve, and still there was more than enough room for a crew of only ten. Tai, Betton, and Shan, new from Terra, and Gveter from Anarres, accustomed to the barracks and the communal austerities of their marginally habitable worlds, stalked about the Shoby, disapproving it. “Excremental,” Gveter growled. “Luxury!” Tai sneered. Sweet Today, Lidi, and the Gethenians, more used to the amenities of shipboard life, settled right in and made themselves at home. And Gveter and the younger Terrans found it hard to maintain ethical discomfort in the spacious, high-ceilinged, well-furnished, slightly shabby living rooms and bedrooms, studies, high-and low-G gyms, the dining room, library, kitchen, and bridge of the Shoby. The carpet in the bridge was a genuine Henyekaulil, soft deep blues and purples woven in the patterns of the constellations of the Hainish sky. There was a large, healthy plantation of Terran bamboo in the meditation gym, part of the ship’s self-contained vegetal/respiratory system. The windows of any room could be programmed by the homesick to a view of Abbenay or New Cairo or the beach at Liden, or cleared to look out on the suns nearer and farther and the darkness between the suns.
The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990 Page 12
