In the winter evenings I talked with my sister and Suudi, serious, long talks by the fire. I watched my
mother’s beautiful hands work on the embroidery of new curtains for the wide windows of the dining room, which my father had
sewn on the four-hundred-year-old sewing machine of Udan. I worked with him on reprogramming the fertilizer systems for the
east fields and the yama rotations, according to our thick-planning council’s directives. Now and then he and I talked a little,
never very much. In the evenings we had music; Cousin Had’d was a drummer, much in demand for dances, who could always gather
a group. Or I would play Word-Thief with Tubdu, a game she adored and always lost at because she was so intent to steal my
words that she forgot to protect her own. “Got you, got you!” she would cry, and melt into The Great Giggle, seizing my letterblocks
with her fat, tapering, brown fingers; and next move I would take all my letters back along with most of hers. “How did you
see that?” she would ask, amazed, studying the scattered words. Sometimes my otherfather Kap played with us, methodical, a
bit mechanical, with a small smile for both triumph and defeat.
Then I would go up to my room under the eaves, my room of dark wood walls and dark red curtains, the smell of rain coming
in the window, the sound of rain on the tiles of the roof. I would lie there in the mild darkness and luxuriate in sorrow,
in great, aching, sweet, youthful sorrow for this ancient home that I was going to leave, to lose forever, to sail away from
on the dark river of time. For I knew, from my eighteenth birthday on, that I would leave Udan, leave O, and go out to the
other worlds. It was my ambition. It was my destiny.
I have not said anything about Isidri, as I described those winter holidays. She was there. She played in the Plays, worked
on the farm, went to the dances, sang the choruses, joined the hiking parties, swam in the river in the warm rain with the
rest of us. My first winter home from Ran’n, as I swung off the train at Derdan’nad Station, she greeted me with a cry of
delight and a great
embrace, then broke away with a strange, startled laugh and stood back, a tall, dark, thin girl with an intent, watchful face.
She was quite awkward with me that evening. I felt that it was because she had always seen me as a little boy, a child, and
now, eighteen and a student at Ran’n, I was a man. I was complacent with Isidri, putting her at her ease, patronizing her.
In the days that followed, she remained awkward, laughing inappropriately, never opening her heart to me in the kind of long
talks we used to have, and even, I thought, avoiding me. My whole last tenday at home that year, Isidri spent visiting her
father’s relatives in Sabtodiu Village. I was offended that she had not put off her visit till I was gone.
The next year she was not awkward, but not intimate. She had become interested in religion, attending the shrine daily, studying
the Discussions with the elders. She was kind, friendly, busy. I do not remember that she and I ever touched that winter until
she kissed me good-bye. Among my people a kiss is not with the mouth; we lay our cheeks together for a moment, or for longer.
Her kiss was as light as the touch of a leaf, lingering yet barely perceptible.
My third and last winter home, I told them I was leaving: going to Hain, and that from Hain I wanted to go on farther and
forever.
How cruel we are to our parents! All I needed to say was that I was going to Hain. After her half-anguished, half-exultant
cry of “I knew it!” my mother said in her usual soft voice, suggesting not stating, “After that, you might come back, for
a while.” I could have said, “Yes.” That was all she asked. Yes, I might come back, for a while. With the impenetrable self-centeredness
of youth, which mistakes itself for honesty, I refused to give her what she asked. I took from her the modest hope of seeing
me after ten years, and gave her the desolation of believing that when I left she would never see me again. “If I qualify,
I want to be a Mobile,” I said. I had steeled myself to speak without palliations. I prided
myself on my truthfulness. And all the time, though I didn’t know it, nor did they, it was not the truth at all. The truth
is rarely so simple, though not many truths are as complicated as mine turned out to be.
She took my brutality without the least complaint. She had left her own people, after all. She said that evening, “We can
talk by ansible, sometimes, as long as you’re on Hain.” She said it as if reassuring me, not herself. I think she was remembering
how she had said good-bye to her people and boarded the ship on Terra, and when she landed a few seeming hours later on Hain,
her mother had been dead for fifty years. She could have talked to Terra on the ansible; but who was there for her to talk
to? I did not know that pain, but she did. She took comfort in knowing I would be spared it, for a while.
Everything now was “for a while.” Oh, the bitter sweetness of those days! How I enjoyed myself—standing, again, poised on
the slick boulder amidst the roaring water, spear raised, the hero! How ready, how willing I was to crush all that long, slow,
deep, rich life of Udan in my hand and toss it away!
Only for one moment was I told what I was doing, and then so briefly that I could deny it.
I was down in the boathouse workshop, on the rainy, warm afternoon of a day late in the last month of winter. The constant,
hissing thunder of the swollen river was the matrix of my thoughts as I set a new thwart in the little red rowboat we used
to fish from, taking pleasure in the task, indulging my anticipatory nostalgia to the full by imagining myself on another
planet a hundred years away remembering this hour in the boathouse, the smell of wood and water, the river’s incessant roar.
A knock at the workshop door. Isidri looked in. The thin, dark, watchful face, the long braid of dark hair, not as black as
mine, the intent, clear eyes. “Hideo,” she said, “I want to talk to you for a minute.”
“Come on in!” I said, pretending ease and gladness,
though half-aware that in fact I shrank from talking with Isidri, that I was afraid of her—why?
She perched on the vise bench and watched me work in silence for a little while. I began to say something commonplace, but
she spoke: “Do you know why I’ve been staying away from you?”
Liar, self-protective liar, I said, “Staying away from me?”
At that she sighed. She had hoped I would say I understood, and spare her the rest. But I couldn’t. I was lying only in pretending
that I hadn’t noticed that she had kept away from me. I truly had never, never until she told me, imagined why.
“I found out I was in love with you, winter before last,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it because—well,
you know. If you’d felt anything like that for me, you’d have known I did. But it wasn’t both of us. So there was no good
in it. But then, when you told us you’re leaving … At first I thought, all the more reason to say nothing. But then I thought,
that wouldn’t be fair. To me, partly. Love has a right to be spoken. And you have a right to know that somebody loves you.
That somebody has loved you, could love you. We all need to know that. Maybe it’s what we need most. So I wanted to tell you.
And because I was afraid you thought I’d kept away from you because I didn’t love you, or care about you, you know. It might
have looked like that. But it wasn’t that.” She had slipped down off the table and was at the door.
“Sidi!” I said, her name breaking from me in a strange, hoarse cry, the name only, no words—I had no words. I had no feelings,
no compassion, no more nostalgia, no more luxurious suffering. Shocked out of emotion, bewildered, blank, I stood there. Our
eyes met. For four or five breaths we stood staring into each other’s soul. Then Isidri looked away with a wincing, desolate
smile, and slipped out.
I did not follow her. I had nothing to say to her: literally. I felt that it would take me a month, a year, years,
to find the words I needed to say to her. I had been so rich, so comfortably complete in myself and my ambition and my destiny,
five minutes ago; and now I stood empty, silent, poor, looking at the world I had thrown away.
That ability to look at the truth lasted an hour or so. All my life since I have thought of it as “the hour in the boathouse.”
I sat on the high bench where Isidri had sat. The rain fell and the river roared and the early night came on. When at last
I moved, I turned on a light, and began to try to defend my purpose, my planned future, from the terrible plain reality. I
began to build up a screen of emotions and evasions and versions; to look away from what Isidri had shown me; to look away
from Isidri’s eyes.
By the time I went up to the house for dinner I was in control of myself. By the time I went to bed I was master of my destiny
again, sure of my decision, almost able to indulge myself in feeling sorry for Isidri—but not quite. Never did I dishonor
her with that. I will say that much for myself. I had had the pity that is self-pity knocked out of me in the hour in the
boathouse. When I parted from my family at the muddy little station in the village, a few days after, I wept, not luxuriously
for them, but for myself, in honest, hopeless pain. It was too much for me to bear. I had had so little practice in pain!
I said to my mother, “I will come back. When I finish the course—six years, maybe seven—I’ll come back, I’ll stay a while.”
“If your way brings you,” she whispered. She held me close to her, and then released me.
So, then: I have come to the time I chose to begin my story, when I was twenty-one and left my home on the ship
Terraces of Darranda
to study at the Schools on Hain.
Of the journey itself I have no memory whatever. I think I remember entering the ship, yet no details come to mind, visual
or kinetic; I cannot recollect being on the ship. My memory of leaving it is only of an overwhelming
physical sensation, dizziness. I staggered and felt sick, and was so unsteady on my feet I had to be supported until I had
taken several steps on the soil of Hain.
Troubled by this lapse of consciousness, I asked about it at the Ekumenical School. I was told that it is one of the many
different ways in which travel at near-lightspeed affects the mind. To most people it seems merely that a few hours pass in
a kind of perceptual limbo; others have curious perceptions of space and time and event, which can be seriously disturbing;
a few simply feel they have been asleep when they “wake up” on arrival. I did not even have that experience. I had no experience
at all. I felt cheated. I wanted to have felt the voyage, to have known, in some way, the great interval of space: but as
far as I was concerned, there was no interval. I was at the spaceport on O, and then I was at Ve Port, dizzy, bewildered,
and at last, when I was able to believe that I was there, excited.
My studies and work during those years are of no interest now. I will mention only one event, which may or may not be on record
in the ansible reception file at Fourth Beck Tower, EY 21-11-93/1645. (The last time I checked, it was on record in the ansible
transmission file at Ran’n, ET date 30-11-93/1645. Urashima’s coming and going was on record, too, in the Annals of the Emperors.)
1645 was my first year on Hain. Early in the term I was asked to come to the ansible center, where they explained that they
had received a garbled screen transmission, apparently from O, and hoped I could help them reconstitute it. After a date nine
days later than the date of reception, it read:
les oku n hide problem netru emit it hurt di it may not be salv devir
The words were gapped and fragmented. Some were standard Hainish, but
oku
and
netru
mean “north” and “symmetrical” in Sio, my native language.
The ansible centers on O had reported no record of the transmission, but the Receivers thought the message might be from O
because of these two words and because the Hainish phrase “it may not be salvageable” occurred in a transmission received
almost simultaneously from one of the Stabiles on O, concerning a wave-damaged desalinization plant. “We call this a creased
message,” the Receiver told me, when I confessed I could make nothing of it and asked how often ansible messages came through
so garbled. “Not often, fortunately. We can’t be certain where or when they originated, or will originate. They may be effects
of a double field—interference phenomena, perhaps. One of my colleagues here calls them ghost messages.”
Instantaneous transmission had always fascinated me, and though I was then only a beginner in ansible principle, I developed
this fortuitous acquaintance with the Receivers into a friendship with several of them. And I took all the courses in ansible
theory that were offered.
When I was in my final year in the school of temporal physics, and considering going on to the Cetian Worlds for further study—after
my promised visit home, which seemed sometimes a remote, irrelevant daydream and sometimes a yearning and yet fearful need—the
first reports came over the ansible from Anarres of the new theory of transilience. Not only information, but matter, bodies,
people might be transported from place to place without lapse of time. “Churten technology” was suddenly a reality, although
a very strange reality, an implausible fact.
I was crazy to work on it. I was about to go promise my soul and body to the School if they would let me work on churten theory
when they came and asked me if I’d consider postponing my training as a Mobile for a year or so to work on churten theory.
Judiciously and graciously, I consented. I celebrated all over town that night. I remember showing all my friends how to dance
the fen’n, and I remember setting off fireworks in the Great Plaza of the Schools, and I think I remember singing under the
Director’s windows, a little before dawn. I remember what I felt like next day, too; but it didn’t keep me from dragging myself
over to the Ti-Phy building to see where they were installing the Churten Field Laboratory.
Ansible transmission is, of course, enormously expensive, and I had only been able to talk to my family twice during my years
on Hain; but my friends in the ansible center would occasionally “ride” a screen message for me on a transmission to O. I
sent a message thus to Ran’n to be posted on to the First Sedoretu of Udan Farmhold of Derdan’nad Village of the hill district
of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun, Oket, on O, telling them that “although this research will delay my visit home,
it may save me four years’ travel.” The flippant message revealed my guilty feeling; but we did really think then that we
would have the technology within a few months.