A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (10 page)

To keep your work, to try to keep it for yourself, to take her body from her, Kwatewa! How could you, how could you, my brother?
her heart said. But she put the question back into the silence and stood silent among the willows, the trees sacred to her
caste, watching the funeral procession come between the flaxfields. It was his shame, not hers. What was shame to a Tanner?
It was pride she felt, pride. For that was her masterpiece that Dastuye the Musician held now and raised to his lips as he
walked before the procession, guiding the new ghost to its body’s grave.

She had made that instrument, the kerastion, the flute that is played only at a funeral. The kerastion is made of leather,
and the leather is tanned human skin, and the skin is that of the wombmother or the fore-mother of the dead.

When Wekuri, wombmother of Chumo and Kwatewa, had died two winters ago, Chumo the Tanner had claimed her privilege. There
had been an old, old kerastion to play at Wekuri’s funeral, handed down from her grandmothers; but the Musician, when he had
finished playing it, laid it on the mats that wrapped Wekuri in the open grave. For the night before, Chumo had flayed the
left arm of the body, singing the songs of power of her caste as she worked, the songs that ask the dead mother to put her
voice, her song into the instrument. She had kept and cured the piece of rawhide, rubbing it with the secret cures, wrapping
it round a clay cylinder to harden, wetting it, oiling it, forming it and refining its form, till the clay went to powder
and was knocked from the tube, which she then cleaned and rubbed and oiled and finished. It was a privilege which only the
most powerful, the most truly shameless of the Tanners took, to make a kerastion of the mother’s skin. Chumo had claimed it
without fear or doubt. As she worked she had many times pictured the Musician leading the procession, playing the flute, guiding
her own spirit to its grave. She had wondered which of the Musicians it might be, and who would follow her, walking in her
funeral procession. Never once had she thought that it would be played for Kwatewa before it was played for her. How was she
to think of him, so much younger, dying first?

He had killed himself out of shame. He had cut his wrist veins with one of the tools he had made to cut stone.

His death itself was no shame, since there had been nothing for him to do but die. There was no fine, no ablution, no purification,
for what he had done.

Shepherds had found the cave where he had kept the stones, great marble pieces from the cave walls, carved into copies of
his own sandsculptures, his own sacred work for the Solstice and the Hariba: sculptures of stone, abominable, durable, desecrations
of the body of the Mother.

People of his caste had destroyed the things with hammers, beaten them to dust and sand, swept the sand down into the river.
She had thought Kwatewa would follow them, but he had gone to the cave at night and taken the sharp tool and cut his wrists
and let his blood run. Why can’t it stop running, Chumo?

The Musician had come abreast of her now as she stood among the willows by the burying ground. Dastuye was old and skillful;
his slow dancewalk seemed to float him above the ground in rhythm with the soft heartbeat of the drum that followed. Guiding
the spirit and the body on its litter borne by four casteless men, he played the kerastion. His lips lay light on the leather
mouthpiece, his fingers moved lightly as he played, and there was no sound at all. The kerastion flute has no stops and both
its ends are plugged with disks of bronze. Tunes played on it are not heard by living ears. Chumo, listening, heard the drum
and the whisper of the north wind in the willow leaves. Only Kwatewa in his woven grass shroud on the litter heard what song
the Musician played for him, and knew whether it was a song of shame, or of grief, or of welcome.

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 fisher-women 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 Ter-ran 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 Intervalists, 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, “Know 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. “Know!” he cried. “I’m trying
to tell you know! 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
why.” 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 Oreth had
talked it over in appropriate terms with their children; but evidently Betton had not been included in such discussions.