“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 living beings have
been on some of the test flights. Crickets. And intelligent ritual animals on the last two
Shoby
tests. They were all right.” It was a very long statement for Sweet Today, and carried proportional weight.
“We are almost certain,” 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 towards 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
pants 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 ansible 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.
Rig and Asten discovered that as well as the elevators there was a stately staircase with a curving banister, leading from
the reception hall up to the library. They slid down the banister shrieking wildly, until Shan threatened to apply a local
gravity field and force them to slide up it, which they besought him to do. Betton watched the little ones with a superior
gaze, and took the elevator; but the next day he slid down the banister, going a good deal faster than Rig and Asten because
he could push off harder and had greater mass, and nearly broke his tailbone. It was Betton who organized the tray-sliding
races, but Rig generally won them, being small enough to stay on the tray all the way down the stairs. None of the children
had had any lessons at the beach, except in swimming and being Shobies; but while they waited through an unexpected five-day
delay at Ve Port, Gveter did physics with Betton and math with all three daily in the library, and they did some history with
Shan and Oreth, and danced with Tai in the low-G gym.
When she danced, Tai became light, free, laughing. Rig and Asten loved her then, and her son danced with her like a colt,
like a kid, awkward and blissful. Shan often joined them; he was a dark and elegant dancer, and she would dance with him,
but even then was shy, would not touch. She had been celibate since Betton’s birth. She did not want Shan’s patient, urgent
desire, did not want to cope with it, with him. She would turn from him to Betton, and son and mother would dance wholly absorbed
in the steps, the airy pattern they
made together. Watching them, the afternoon before the test flight, Sweet Today began to wipe tears from her eyes, smiling,
never saying a word.
“Life is good,” said Gveter very seriously to Lidi.
“It’ll do,” she said.
Oreth, who was just coming out of female kemmer, having thus triggered Karth’s male kemmer, all of which, by coming on unexpectedly
early, had delayed the test flight for these past five days, enjoyable days for all—Oreth watched Rig, whom she had fathered,
dance with Asten, whom she had borne, and watched Karth watch them, and said in Karhidish, “Tomorrow… “ The edge was very
sweet.
Anthropologists solemnly agree that we must not attribute “cultural constants” to the human population of any planet; but
certain cultural traits or expectations do seem to run deep. Before dinner that last right in port, Shan and Tai appeared
in black-and-silver uniforms of the Terran Ekumen, which had cost them—Terra also still had a money economy—a half-year’s
allowance.
Asten and Rig clamored at once for equal grandeur. Karth and Oreth suggested their party clothes, and Sweet Today brought
out silver lace scarves, but Asten sulked, and Rig imitated. The idea of a
uniform,
Asten told them, was that it was the
same.
“Why?” Oreth inquired.
Old Lidi answered sharply: “So that no one is responsible.”
She then went off and changed into a black velvet evening suit that wasn’t a uniform but that didn’t leave Tai and Shan sticking
out like sore thumbs. She had left Terra at age eighteen and never been back nor wanted to, but Tai and Shan were shipmates.
Karth and Oreth got the idea and put on their finest fur-trimmed hiebs, and the children were appeased with their own party
clothes plus all of Karth’s hereditary
and massive gold jewelry. Sweet Today appeared in a pure white robe which she claimed was in fact ultraviolet. Gveter braided
his mane. Betton had no uniform, but needed none, sitting beside his mother at table in a visible glory of pride.
Meals, sent up from the Port kitchens, were very good, and this one was superb: a delicate Hainish iyanwi with all seven sauces,
followed by a pudding flavored with Terran chocolate. A lively evening ended quietly at the big fireplace in the library.
The logs were fake, of course, but good fakes; no use having a fireplace on a ship and then burning plastic in it. The neocellulose
logs and kindling smelled right, resisted catching, caught with spits and sparks and smoke billows, flared up bright. Oreth
had laid the fire, Karth lit it. Everybody gathered round.
“Tell bedtime stories,” Rig said.
Oreth told about the Ice Caves of Kerm Land, how a ship sailed into the great blue sea-cave and disappeared and was never
found by the boats that entered the caves in search; but seventy years later that ship was found drifting—not a living soul
aboard nor any sign of what had become of them—off the coast of Osemyet, a thousand miles overland from Kerm….