The Field Laboratories were soon moved out to Ve Port, and I went with them. The joint work of the Cetian and Hainish churten
research teams in those first three years was a succession of triumphs, postponements, promises, defeats, breakthroughs, setbacks,
all happening so fast that anybody who took a week off was out-of-date. “Clarity hiding mystery,” Gvonesh called it. Every
time it all came clear it all grew more mysterious. The theory was beautiful and maddening. The experiments were exciting
and inscrutable. The technology worked best when it was most preposterous. Four years went by in that laboratory like no time
at all, as they say.
I had now spent ten years on Hain and Ve, and was thirty-one. On O, four years had passed while my NAFAL ship passed a few
minutes of dilated time going to Hain, and four more would pass while I returned: so when I returned I would have been gone
eighteen of their years. My parents were all still alive. It was high time for my promised visit home.
But though churten research had hit a frustrating setback in the Spring Snow Paradox, a problem the Cetians thought might
be insoluble, I couldn’t stand the thought of being eight years out-of-date when I got back to Hain. What if they broke the
paradox? It was bad enough knowing I must lose four years going to O. Tentatively, not too hopefully, I proposed to the Director
that I carry some experimental materials with me to O and set up a fixed double-field auxiliary to the ansible link between
Ve Port and Ran’n. Thus I could stay in touch with Ve, as Ve stayed in touch with Urras and Anarres; and the fixed ansible
link might be preparatory to a churten link. I remember I said, “If you break the paradox, we might eventually send some mice.”
To my surprise my idea caught on; the temporal engineers wanted a receiving field. Even our Director, who could be as brilliantly
inscrutable as churten theory itself, said it was a good idea. “Mouses, bugs, gholes, who knows what we send you?” she said.
So, then: when I was thirty-one years old I left Ve Port on the NAFAL transport
Lady of Sorra
and returned to O. This time I experienced the near-lightspeed flight the way most people do, as an unnerving interlude in
which one cannot think consecutively, read a clockface, or follow a story. Speech and movement become difficult or impossible.
Other people appear as unreal half presences, inexplicably there or not there. I did not hallucinate, but everything seemed
hallucination. It is like a high fever—confusing, miserably boring, seeming endless, yet very difficult to recall once it
is over, as if it were an episode outside one’s life, encapsulated. I wonder now if its resemblance to the “churten experience”
has yet been seriously investigated.
I went straight to Ran’n, where I was given rooms in the New Quadrangle, fancier than my old student room in the Shrine Quadrangle,
and some nice lab space in Tower Hall to set up an experimental transilience field station. I got in touch with my family
right away and talked to all my parents; my mother had been ill, but
was fine now, she said. I told them I would be home as soon as I had got things going at Ran’n. Every tenday I called again
and talked to them and said I’d be along very soon now. I was genuinely very busy, having to catch up the lost four years
and to learn Gvonesh’s solution to the Spring Snow Paradox. It was, fortunately, the only major advance in theory. Technology
had advanced a good deal. I had to retrain myself, and to train my assistants almost from scratch. I had had an idea about
an aspect of double-field theory that I wanted to work out before I left. Five months went by before I called them up and
said at last, “I’ll be there tomorrow.” And when I did so, I realized that all along I had been afraid.
I don’t know if I was afraid of seeing them after eighteen years, of the changes, the strangeness, or if it was myself I feared.
Eighteen years had made no difference at all to the hills beside the wide Saduun, the farmlands, the dusty little station
in Derdan’nad, the old, old houses on the quiet streets. The village great tree was gone, but its replacement had a pretty
wide spread of shade already. The aviary at Udan had been enlarged. The yama stared haughtily, timidly at me across the fence.
A road gate that I had hung on my last visit home was decrepit, needing its post reset and new hinges, but the weeds that
grew beside it were the same dusty, sweet-smelling summer weeds. The tiny dams of the irrigation runnels made their multiple,
soft click and thump as they closed and opened. Everything was the same, itself. Timeless, Udan in its dream of work stood
over the river that ran timeless in its dream of movement.
But the faces and bodies of the people waiting for me at the station in the hot sunlight were not the same. My mother, forty-seven
when I left, was sixty-five, a beautiful and fragile elderly woman. Tubdu had lost weight; she looked shrunken and wistful.
My father was still handsome and bore himself proudly, but his movements were slow and he scarcely spoke at all. My other-father
Kap, seventy now, was a precise, fidgety, little old man. They were still the First Sedoretu of Udan, but the vigor of the
farmhold now lay in the Second and Third Sedoretu.
I knew of all the changes, of course, but being there among them was a different matter from hearing about them in letters
and transmissions. The old house was much fuller than it had been when I lived there. The south wing had been reopened, and
children ran in and out of its doors and across courtyards that in my childhood had been silent and ivied and mysterious.
My sister Koneko was now four years older than I instead of four years younger. She looked very like my early memory of my
mother. As the train drew in to Derdan’nad Station, she had been the first of them I recognized, holding up a child of three
or four and saying, “Look, look, it’s your Uncle Hideo!”
The Second Sedoretu had been married for eleven years: Koneko and Isidri, sister-germanes, were the partners of the Day. Koneko’s
husband was my old friend Sota, a Morning man of Drehe Farmhold. Sota and I had loved each other dearly when we were adolescents,
and I had been grieved to grieve him when I left. When I heard that he and Koneko were in love I had been very surprised,
so self-centered am I, but at least I am not jealous: it pleased me very deeply. Isidri’s husband, a man nearly twenty years
older than herself, named Hedran, had been a traveling scholar of the Discussions. Udan had given him hospitality, and his
visits had led to the marriage. He and Isidri had no children. Sota and Koneko had two Evening children, a boy of ten called
Murmi, and Lasako, Little Isako, who was four.
The Third Sedoretu had been brought to Udan by Suudi, my brother-germane, who had married a woman from Aster Village; their
Morning pair also came from farmholds of Aster. There were six children in that sedoretu. A cousin whose sedoretu at Ekke
had broken had also come to live at Udan with her two chil>dren;
so the coming and going and dressing and undressing and washing and slamming and running and shouting and weeping and laughing
and eating was prodigious. Tubdu would sit at work in the sunny kitchen courtyard and watch a wave of children pass. “Bad!”
she would cry. “They’ll never drown, not a one of ‘em!” And she would shake with silent laughter that became a wheezing cough.
My mother, who had after all been a Mobile of the Ekumen, and had traveled from Terra to Hain and from Hain to O, was impatient
to hear about my research. “What is it, this churtening? How does it work, what does it do? Is it an ansible for matter?”
“That’s the idea,” I said. “Transilience: instantaneous transference of being from one s-tc point to another.”
“No interval?”
“No interval.”
Isako frowned. “It sounds wrong,” she said. “Explain.”
I had forgotten how direct my soft-spoken mother could be; I had forgotten that she was an intellectual. I did my best to
explain the incomprehensible.
“So,” she said at last, “you don’t really understand how it works.”
“No. Nor even what it does. Except that—as a rule—when the field is in operation, the mice in Building One are instantaneously
in Building Two, perfectly cheerful and unharmed. Inside their cage, if we remembered to keep their cage inside the initiating
churten field. We used to forget. Loose mice everywhere.”
“What’s
mice?”
said a little Morning boy of the Third Sedoretu, who had stopped to listen to what sounded like a story.
“Ah,” I said in a laugh, surprised. I had forgotten that at Udan mice were unknown, and rats were fanged, demon enemies of
the painted cat. “Tiny, pretty, furry animals,” I said, “that come from Grandmother Isako’s world. They are friends of scientists.
They have traveled all over the Known Worlds.”
“In tiny little spaceships?” the child said hopefully.
“In large ones, mostly,” I said. He was satisfied, and went away.
“Hideo,” said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because
they have them all present in their mind at once, “you haven’t found any kind of relationship?”
I shook my head, smiling.
“None at all?”
“A man from Alterra and I lived together for a couple of years,” I said. “It was a good friendship; but he’s a Mobile now.
And … oh, you know … people here and there. Just recently, at Ran’n, I’ve been with a very nice woman from East Oket.”
“I hoped, if you intend to be a Mobile, that you might make a couple-marriage with another Mobile. It’s easier, I think,”
she said. Easier than what? I thought, and knew the answer before I asked.
“Mother, I doubt now that I’ll travel farther than Hain. This churten business is too interesting; I want to be in on it.
And if we do learn to control the technology, you know, then travel will be nothing. There’ll be no need for the kind of sacrifice
you made. Things will be different. Unimaginably different! You could go to Terra for an hour and come back here: and only
an hour would have passed.”
She thought about that. “If you do it, then,” she said, speaking slowly, almost shaking with the intensity of comprehension,
“you will … you will shrink the galaxy—the universe?—to… “ and she held up her left hand, thumb and fingers all drawn together
to a point.
I nodded. “A mile or a light-year will be the same. There will be no distance.”
“It can’t be right,” she said after a while. “To have event without interval… Where is the dancing? Where is the way? I don’t
think you’ll be able to control it, Hideo.” She smiled. “But of course you must try.”
And after that we talked about who was coming to the field dance at Drehe tomorrow.
I did not tell my mother that I had invited Tasi, the nice woman from East Oket, to come to Udan with me and that she had
refused, had, in fact, gently informed me that she thought this was a good time for us to part. Tasi was tall, with a braid
of dark hair, not coarse, bright black like mine but soft, fine, dark, like the shadows in a forest. A typical ki’O woman,
I thought. She had deflated my protestations of love skillfully and without shaming me. “I think you’re in love with somebody,
though,” she said. “Somebody on Hain, maybe. Maybe the man from Alterra you told me about?” No, I said. No, I’d never been
in love. I wasn’t capable of an intense relationship, that was clear by now. I’d dreamed too long of traveling the galaxy
with no attachments anywhere, and then worked too long in the churten lab, married to a damned theory that couldn’t find its
technology. No room for love, no time.
But why had I wanted to bring Tasi home with me?
Tall but no longer thin, a woman of forty, not a girl, not typical, not comparable, not like anyone anywhere, Isidri had greeted
me quietly at the door of the house. Some farm emergency had kept her from coming to the village station to meet me. She was
wearing an old smock and leggings like any field worker, and her hair, dark beginning to grey, was in a rough braid. As she
stood in that wide doorway of polished wood she was Udan itself, the body and soul of that thirty-century-old farmhold, its
continuity, its life. All my childhood was in her hands, and she held them out to me.
“Welcome home, Hideo,” she said, with a smile as radiant as the summer light on the river. As she brought me in, she said,
“I cleared the kids out of your old room. I thought you’d like to be there—would you?” Again she smiled, and I felt her warmth,
the solar generosity of a woman in the prime of life, married, settled, rich in her work and being. I had not needed Tasi
as a defense. I had nothing to fear from Isidri. She felt no rancor, no embarrassment. She had loved me when she was young,
another person. It would be altogether inappropriate
for me to feel embarrassment, or shame, or anything but the old affectionate loyalty of the years when we played and worked
and fished and dreamed together, children of Udan.
So, then: I settled down in my old room under the tiles. There were new curtains, rust and brown. I found a stray toy under
the chair, in the closet, as if I as a child had left my playthings there and found them now. At fourteen, after my entry
ceremony in the shrine, I had carved my name on the deep window jamb among the tangled patterns of names and symbols that
had been cut into it for centuries. I looked for it now. There had been some additions. Beside my careful, clear
Hideo,
surrounded by my ideogram, the cloudflower, a younger child had hacked a straggling
Dohedri,
and nearby was carved a delicate three-roofs ideogram. The sense of being a bubble in Udan’s river, a moment in the permanence
of life in this house on this land on this quiet world, was almost crushing, denying my identity, and profoundly reassuring,
confirming my identity. Those nights of my visit home I slept as I had not slept for years, lost, drowned in the waters of
sleep and darkness, and woke to the summer mornings as if reborn, very hungry.
The children were still all under twelve, going to school at home. Isidri, who taught them literature and religion and was
the school planner, invited me to tell them about Hain, about NAFAL travel, about temporal physics, whatever I pleased. Visitors
to ki’O farmholds are always put to use. Evening-Uncle Hideo became rather a favorite among the children, always good for
hitching up the yama-cart or taking them fishing in the big boat, which they couldn’t yet handle, or telling a story about
his magic mice who could be in two places at the same time. I asked them if Evening-Grandmother Isako had told them about
the painted cat who came alive and killed the demon rats—”And his mouf was all BLUGGY in the morning!” shouted Lasako, her
eyes shining. But they didn’t know the tale of Urashima.