I could and did correct Tubdu: “Only in her part of it. She told me there’s lots of parts of it where they do.” I felt obscurely
defensive of my mother, though Tubdu spoke without a shadow of malice or contempt; she adored Isako. She had fallen in love
with her “the moment I saw her—that black hair! that mouth!”—and simply found it endearingly funny that such a woman could
have expected to marry only a man.
“I understand,” Tubdu hastened to assure me. “I know—on Terra it’s different, their fertility was damaged, they have to think
about marrying for children. And they marry in twos, too. Oh, poor Isako! How strange it must have seemed to her! I remember
how she looked at me—” And off she went again into what we children called The Great Giggle, her joyous, silent, seismic laughter.
To those unfamiliar with our customs I should explain that on O, a world with a low, stable human population and an ancient
climax technology, certain social arrangements are almost universal. The dispersed village, an association of farms, rather
than the city or state, is the basic social unit. The population consists of two halves or moieties. A child is born into
its mother’s moiety, so that all ki’O (except the mountain folk of Ennik) belong either to the Morning People, whose time
is from midnight to noon, or the Evening People, whose time is from noon to midnight. The sacred origins and functions of
the moieties are recalled in the Discussions and the Plays and in the services at every farm shrine. The original social function
of the moiety was probably to structure exogamy into marriage and so discourage inbreeding in isolated farmholds, since one
can have sex with or marry only a person of the other moiety. The rule is severely reinforced. Transgressions, which of course
occur, are met with shame, contempt, and ostracism. One’s identity as a Morning or an Evening Person is as deeply and intimately
part of oneself as one’s gender, and has quite as much to do with one’s sexual life.
A ki’O marriage, called a sedoretu, consists of a Morning woman and man and an Evening woman and man; the heterosexual pairs
are called Morning and Evening according to the woman’s moiety; the homosexual pairs are called Day—the two women—and Night—the
two men.
So rigidly structured a marriage, where each of four people must be sexually compatible with two of the
others while never having sex with the fourth—clearly this takes some arranging. Making sedoretu is a major occupation of
my people. Experimenting is encouraged; foursomes form and dissolve, couples “try on” other couples, mixing and matching.
Brokers, traditionally elderly widowers, go about among the farmholds of the dispersed villages, arranging meetings, setting
up field dances, serving as universal confidants. Many marriages begin as a love match of one couple, either homosexual or
heterosexual, to which another pair or two separate people become attached. Many marriages are brokered or arranged by the
village elders from beginning to end. To listen to the old people under the village great tree making a sedoretu is like watching
a master game of chess or tidhe. “If that Evening boy at Erdup were to meet young Tobo during the flour-processing at Gad’d
…” “Isn’t Hodin’n of the Oto Morning a programmer? They could use a programmer at Erdup….” The dowry a prospective bride or
groom can offer is their skill, or their home farm. Otherwise undesired people may be chosen and honored for the knowledge
or the property they bring to a marriage. The farmhold, in turn, wants its new members to be agreeable and useful. There is
no end to the making of marriages on O. I should say that all in all they give as much satisfaction as any other arrangement
to the participants, and a good deal more to the marriage-makers.
Of course many people never marry. Scholars, wandering Discussers, itinerant artists and experts, and specialists in the Centers
seldom want to fit themselves into the massive permanence of a farmhold sedoretu. Many people attach themselves to a brother’s
or sister’s marriage as aunt or uncle, a position with limited, clearly defined responsibilities; they can have sex with either
or both spouses of the other moiety, thus sometimes increasing the sedoretu from four to seven or eight. Children of that
relationship are called cousins. The children of one mother are brothers or sisters to one another; the children of the Morning
and the children
of the Evening are germanes. Brothers, sisters, and first cousins may not marry, but germanes may. In some less conservative
parts of O germane marriages are looked at askance, but they are common and respected in my region.
My father was a Morning man of Udan Farmhold of Derdan’nad Village in the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun
River, on Oket, the smallest of the six continents of O. The village comprises seventy-seven farmholds, in a deeply rolling,
stream-cut region of fields and forests on the watershed of the Oro, a tributary of the wide Saduun. It is fertile, pleasant
country, with views west to the Coast Range and south to the great floodplains of the Saduun and the gleam of the sea beyond.
The Oro is a wide, lively, noisy river full of fish and children. I spent my childhood in or on or by the Oro, which runs
through Udan so near the house that you can hear its voice all night, the rush and hiss of the water and the deep drumbeats
of rocks rolled in its current. It is shallow and quite dangerous. We all learned to swim very young in a quiet bay dug out
as a swimming pool, and later to handle rowboats and kayaks in the swift current full of rocks and rapids. Fishing was one
of the children’s responsibilities. I liked to spear the fat, beady-eyed, blue ochid; I would stand heroic on a slippery boulder
in midstream, the long spear poised to strike. I was good at it. But my germane Isidri, while I was prancing about with my
spear, would slip into the water and catch six or seven ochid with her bare hands. She could catch eels and even the darting
ei. I never could do it. “You just sort of move with the water and get transparent,” she said. She could stay underwater longer
than any of us, so long you were sure she had drowned. “She’s too bad to drown,” her mother, Tubdu, proclaimed. “You can’t
drown really bad people. They always bob up again.”
Tubdu, the Morning wife, had two children with her husband Kap: Isidri, a year older than me, and Suudi, three years younger.
Children of the Morning, they were
my germanes, as was Cousin Had’d, Tubdu’s son with Kap’s brother Uncle Tobo. On the Evening side there were two children,
myself and my younger sister. She was named Koneko, an old name in Oket, which has also a meaning in my mother’s Terran language:
“kitten,” the young of the wonderful animal “cat” with the round back and the round eyes. Koneko, four years younger than
me, was indeed round and silky like a baby animal, but her eyes were like my mother’s, long, with lids that went up towards
the temple, like the soft sheaths of flowers before they open. She staggered around after me, calling, “Deo! Deo! Wait!”—while
I ran after fleet, fearless, ever-vanishing Isidri, calling, “Sidi! Sidi! Wait!”
When we were older, Isidri and I were inseparable companions, while Suudi, Koneko, and Cousin Had’d made a trinity, usually
coated with mud, splotched with scabs, and in some kind of trouble—gates left open so the yamas got into the crops, hay spoiled
by being jumped on, fruit stolen, battles with the children from Drehe Farmhold. “Bad, bad,” Tubdu would say. “None of ‘em
will ever drown!” And she would shake with her silent laughter.
My father Dohedri was a hardworking man, handsome, silent, and aloof. I think his insistence on bringing a foreigner into
the tight-woven fabric of village and farm life, conservative and suspicious and full of old knots and tangles of passions
and jealousies, had added anxiety to a temperament already serious. Other ki’O had married foreigners, of course, but almost
always in a “foreign marriage,” a pairing; and such couples usually lived in one of the Centers, where all kinds of untraditional
arrangements were common, even (so the village gossips hissed under the great tree) incestuous couplings between two Morning
people! two Evening people!—Or such pairs would leave O to live on Hain, or would cut all ties to all homes and become Mobiles
on the NAFAL ships, only touching different worlds at different moments and then off again into an endless future with no
past.
None of this would do for my father, a man rooted to the knees in the dirt of Udan Farmhold. He brought his beloved to his
home, and persuaded the Evening People of Derdan’nad to take her into their moiety, in a ceremony so rare and ancient that
a Caretaker had to come by ship and train from Noratan to perform it. Then he had persuaded Tubdu to join the sedoretu. As
regards her Day marriage, this was no trouble at all, as soon as Tubdu met my mother; but it presented some difficulty as
regards her Morning marriage. Kap and my father had been lovers for years; Kap was the obvious and willing candidate to complete
the sedoretu; but Tubdu did not like him. Kap’s long love for my father led him to woo Tubdu earnestly and well, and she was
far too good-natured to hold out against the interlocking wishes of three people, plus her own lively desire for Isako. She
always found Kap a boring husband, I think; but his younger brother, Uncle Tobo, was a bonus. And Tubdu’s relation to my mother
was infinitely tender, full of honor, of delicacy, of restraint. Once my mother spoke of it. “She knew how strange it all
was to me,” she said. “She knows how strange it all is.”
“This world? our ways?” I asked.
My mother shook her head very slightly. “Not so much that,” she said in her quiet voice with the faint foreign accent. “But
men and women, women and women, together—love—It is always very strange. Nothing you know ever prepares you. Ever.”
The saying is, “a marriage is made by Day,” that is, the relationship of the two women makes or breaks it. Though my mother
and father loved each other deeply, it was a love always on the edge of pain, never easy. I have no doubt that the radiant
childhood we had in that household was founded on the unshakable joy and strength Isako and Tubdu found in each other.
So, then: twelve-year-old Isidri went off on the sun-train to school at Herhot, our district educational Center, and I wept
aloud, standing in the morning sunlight in the dust of Derdan’nad Station. My friend, my
playmate, my life was gone. I was bereft, deserted, alone forever. Seeing her mighty eleven-year-old elder brother weeping,
Koneko set up a howl too, tears rolling down her cheeks in dusty balls like raindrops on a dirt road. She threw her arms about
me, roaring, “Hideo! She’ll come back! She’ll come back!”
I have never forgotten that. I can hear her hoarse little voice, and feel her arms round me and the hot morning sunlight on
my neck.
By afternoon we were all swimming in the Oro, Koneko and I and Suudi and Had’d. As their elder, I resolved on a course of
duty and stern virtue, and led the troop off to help Second-Cousin Topi at the irrigation control station, until she drove
us away like a swarm of flies, saying, “Go help somebody else and let me get some work done!” We went and built a mud palace.
So, then: a year later, twelve-year-old Hideo and thirteen-year-old Isidri went off on the suntrain to school, leaving Koneko
on the dusty siding, not in tears, but silent, the way our mother was silent when she grieved.
I loved school. I know that the first days I was achingly homesick, but I cannot recall that misery, buried under my memories
of the full, rich years at Her-hot, and later at Ran’n, the Advanced Education Center, where I studied temporal physics and
engineering.
Isidri finished the First Courses at Herhot, took a year of Second in literature, hydrology, and oenology, and went home to
Udan Farmhold of Derdan’nad Village in the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun.
The three younger ones all came to school, took a year or two of Second, and carried their learning home to Udan. When she
was fifteen or sixteen, Koneko talked of following me to Ran’n; but she was wanted at home because of her excellence in the
discipline we call “thick planning”—farm management is the usual translation, but the words have no hint of the complexity
of factors involved in thick planning, ecology politics profit tradition aesthetics honor and spirit all functioning
in an intensely practical and practically invisible balance of preservation and renewal, like the homeostasis of a vigorous
organism. Our “kitten” had the knack for it, and the Planners of Udan and Derdan’nad took her into their councils before she
was twenty. But by then, I was gone.
Every winter of my school years I came back to the farm for the long holidays. The moment I was home I dropped school like
a book bag and became pure farm boy overnight—working, swimming, fishing, hiking, putting on Plays and farces in the barn,
going to field dances and house dances all over the village, falling in and out of love with lovely boys and girls of the
Morning from Derdan’nad and other villages.
In my last couple of years at Ran’n, my visits home changed mood. Instead of hiking off all over the country by day and going
to a different dance every night, I often stayed home. Careful not to fall in love, I pulled away from my old, dear relationship
with Sota of Drehe Farmhold, gradually letting it lapse, trying not to hurt him. I sat whole hours by the Oro, a fishing line
in my hand, memorizing the run of the water in a certain place just outside the entrance to our old swimming bay. There, as
the water rises in clear strands racing towards two mossy, almost-submerged boulders, it surges and whirls in spirals, and
while some of these spin away, grow faint, and disappear, one knots itself on a deep center, becoming a little whirlpool,
which spins slowly downstream until, reaching the quick, bright race between the boulders, it loosens and unties itself, released
into the body of the river, as another spiral is forming and knotting itself round a deep center upstream where the water
rises in clear strands above the boulders…. Sometimes that winter the river rose right over the rocks and poured smooth, swollen
with rain; but always it would drop, and the whirlpools would appear again.