Where Did the Future Go? Parts Unknown
Compared to the ship Genry had arrived on, the NAFAL ship that was to take me off of Gethen was huge. It had more passenger-berths than the largest land-caravan crawling across Karhide could ever hope to attain. It was so large that, standing in front of it on the newly-built airfield, I couldn’t see its entire length from side to side unless I craned my neck and walked backwards across the ankle-deep snow, the last one of the early spring.
I had already said my goodbyes— to everyone in my Hearth, to the remainder of my Indwelling, to everyone I considered a friend, save one. Genry Ai stood beside me as we watched the rest of the passengers board, walking up the long ramp and carrying their meager possessions in hand.
Many of those leaving Gethen with us were bundled up like they were preparing to face the harshest winter weather that Karhide had ever seen, despite the mildness of the spring. It was Gethen practicality, though we were heading for a planet with weather that even Genry described as mild. It was better to be too prepared than caught naked in the storm. I would have joined them up the ramp, but Genry was hesitating, leaning on the low wooden fence and tasting the wind.
On the other side of the field, sledge-trucks hauled crates into the holds of the ship. They were Gethen stonecraft, Gethen furs, breadapple tree saplings— the types of thing that were staples of life to me, but that to people elsewhere in the universe would be prized and rare goods. It was a curious type of trade, one that would take years to see any return on. But, of course, the ship that had arrived had delivered equal quantities of goods from some other distant planet. If ships could be sent back and forth starting this year, in a hundred years it would be a regular flow of trade.
I mentioned this strangeness to Genry. “It seems difficult for people to plan what they want to sell or receive in a hundred year’s time. No other way to do it, but still odd.”
“On Terra, many years before we joined the Ekumen, our economy used to run half on promises of future sales— ‘futures’. It still might in part, for all I know.” She laughed. “You should be grateful— Foretellers will never be out of a job, being told what the people of the future will want to receive, and what they’ll be willing to trade for it today.”
I made a dismissive noise, but my hand went to the gold chain of the Foretellers that hung heavy around my neck. Although in the seventeen years since Gethen had joined the Ekumen, people from other planets had asked the Foretellers of Gethen questions, the experience had been muted by distance. I was to Terra, with my own set. There were other ships heading elsewhere, arriving later, but I had wanted to see Genry’s homeworld.
There were those on other worlds who wished to know if the matter of Foretelling could be learned or taught by people who lacked our wholeness — the mystics of other worlds seemed to think that our ability to center ourselves in time, equally of the past and of the future, always perceiving the Year One. Nusuth. Whatever the reasons that we had developed Foretelling and they had not, it mattered little to me. I had no idea if they would get any satisfaction from the exercise, but I was willing to try to teach.
Though academic curiosity and a love of teaching was not the reason I had become a Foreteller. I had a far baser reason. Genry warned me— though at the time she was still trying to preserve my shifgrethor, and she maintained her own aversion to speaking about kemmer frankly— that I would be as alone on Terra as she was on Gethen. Foretellers, remaining celibate in their practice, might have an easier way than others unused to that type of loneliness. Perhaps I should have found someone to vow kemmering with, and convinced her to come with me— but what use would that be? The only thing worse than having no one to kemmer with would be to raise a child without a Hearth.
So, there would be no Hearth, and no child, and no kemmer. I was curious about what else awaited me on Terra, and I tried not to think if it would be enough to make up for what I was leaving behind. I should have asked Genry, but she wouldn’t have answered. I tried to let these questions of gain and loss slip from my mind: nusuth, I was a Foreteller; I should care very little about what the future held.
“It’s too difficult a thing to waste on trivialities,” I murmured.
“The universe is built on trivialities,” Genry said. “Trivialities, mistakes, miscommunications…”
“No shortage of those.” I thought about all the people who had disembarked from the ship, hundreds of them, heading to staff the embassies from other worlds. Although any business worth conducting could be done over the ansible, their presence was proof that they were real, that there were more worlds out there than just Genry’s strange one. Misunderstandings would be unavoidable, I was sure, though how much, it remained to be seen.
I knew that it was because all our planets’ sentient life had been descended from the same stock long ago, and I had seen pictures of these other races before, but when I laid eyes on them in the flesh, I was not shocked by the differences, but rather the similarities. Some were paler than anyone in Karhide, like blue-eyed albinos, and some were as dark as Genry, and some had Genry’s flat nose rather than the Gethen pointed one, but all of them could have slipped among us without much comment, unless they removed their too-bulky clothing, or until they spoke. Some of them were dressed comically warmly, despite the mild spring weather; the temperature was not even below forty, and yet there was one person wrapped in strange, dark furs that would have been near too warm for trekking across the Pering Ice.
I thought about them, and myself, on Terra. I would have asked a question of Genry for my own sake, but that would have come too close to wanting something from her— something that was dangerous for her pride and my shifgrethor to give.
“And do you think everyone coming here will manage their work without too many world-changing trivialities and mistakes?” I asked. “They dressed like the only mistake they know how to avoid is dying in the snow.”
Genry laughed aloud. “I managed to avoid that— if nothing else.”
“Yes.”
“And I think I was a consummate idiot about it, sometimes. When I was with Therem, I always wanted to take the more dangerous route, get lost out on the ice, keep pushing past my limits until it killed me.”
Therem— my second parent, whom I had met only once. Genry often spoke of her, and I read all the journals that she preserved, but I felt I knew very little of her. She had been so cognizant of her writing being kept as a record, and as a result, she was so careful about safekeeping her reader’s shifgrethor that she did not speak in much beyond fact, and where there was the hint of advice, it was couched in proverbs. There were places where she had written too freely, and then had ripped the pages out and burned them in the stove, or crossed them out with sooty ink so black it would have felt like a violation of privacy to try to peer through it to discern what the original words had been. I sometimes wondered— if she had known that she would die even before she could deliver the journals to our Hearth, would she have left the words whole? I never asked Genry, who had known her, what the pages might have once contained. Nusuth. I turned my thoughts away from the past and towards the future, though the future was as useless to me as anything else.
“I assume none of them will be taking trips across the Gobrin Ice. They’re safe from that, at least.”
“No, probably not,” Genry said. “And if any of them find this place intolerable, as I’m sure many will, they’ll leave.”
“Leave? And take another hundred-year journey back?”
“It’s hours by the NAFAL drive. But I doubt they’d go back to their homeworlds, at least not immediately. They had reason for leaving, after all. And once you’ve taken one trip, it’s easy to do again and again. You lose your sense of attachment. Therem Harth called me an exile— but I’m an exile of time, and not of place. Not many people travel between the stars, and those who do are a different kind of person. I sometimes think the universe is a very small place for us. Smaller than Karhide.”
If Therem were alive, she would be the one going with Genry— I could see that clear enough. I, though of her Hearth, was a poor replacement. “And will I stay on Terra, when we get there? If I can’t teach Terrans anything about harnessing the hunch— as you call it.”
“Foretell it for me, Sorve,” she said. Her way of not answering the question, not telling me if I would like her home and Hearth or not.
“Nusuth,” I said. “And a triviality.”
The NAFAL engine could not be used inside the star system— we needed to get far away from Gethen for it to work. So I had the strange and mixed pleasure of watching the tiny ball of the world that had been my home recede into the blackness of space. The caps were covered in ice, thick and white, and the oceans were veiled in swirling cloud. It was a white place, with just the band of fresh-greening around the equator and the southern hemisphere, where the warmest days had arrived earlier than they did in Karhide.
I floated in the ship’s observation area and watched us leave it behind. (And that was another strange thing— to think that when I had been a child, there had been no flying machines of any kind on Gethen, and here I was moving like a fish through the air. It felt natural in a way that I hadn’t expected.) Others preferred to be on the bridge of the ship, speaking over the ansible to the places we were going, or watching the instruments and listening to the last radio songs in our own tongues that we would hear for some time. I wanted to be alone.
I wasn’t, though. Genry found her way to me— which didn’t surprise me at all. A hunch, perhaps.
“This was easier when I was younger,” she said, pulling herself through the air towards me, clinging to the handholds on the floor and wincing when she tried to stop herself and wrenched her arm for her trouble. She righted herself and looked out the window. “I remember seeing your world when I first arrived— such a pure white marble.”
“Are you glad to be going home?” Somehow, on the ship, it was easier to ask these things.
She laughed. “Home? I’m leaving it. I’ve spent more time on Gethen than I have on Terra. I feel like I’ve forgotten my own native language. Nusuth, I suppose. I’ll be back more than two hundred years after I left— things change enough in that time that I’ll have to relearn ways of speaking anyway, if I don’t want to sound like what I am.”
“And what are you?”
“A stranger in a strange land,” Genry said. She switched to the Terran language, the one she had taught me to speak.
Though if I was to go to Terra, I should start trying to think of Genly as what he was. I tried to fit my thoughts into that mental model. No matter how much he stressed it, I had never really grasped the dichotomies that seemed to take hold of the rest of the universe. Genly had said that these differences, this division of people of “like” and “different” was as essential to each person as their own shadow. The way he had described it most clearly was in terms of a country border, the line in the ground that demarcates one’s land of birth, where two people might live only a mile apart but nevertheless think of each other as foreigners, speak a different tongue. Though in Genly’s country of birth, these foreigners lived in your house, were kemmer-vowed to you, were your siblings, your parent. When he had explained this to me, it had struck me as almost poetic that Gethen should become aware of this other way of life at almost exactly the moment in our history when we were becoming nation-states, and not just tribes who welcomed strange travelers as guests. Genly speculated that we had managed to go without those artificial borders tightening like nooses for so long because we lacked this inbuilt awareness of and desire for division— but I couldn’t say if he was correct or not.
“I’ll be moreso,” I said, and switched to his language, which was heavy on my tongue. “Do you think you’ll stay on Terra, once you get there?”
“I don’t know. It depends.” There was a strange light in his eyes as he looked out the window to watch Gethen recede into the distance. “I’m young still. Young enough to travel if I like, take a caravan ship off of Terra and just keep watching time pass me by.” Youth was perhaps a matter of opinion— he was over fifty.
“Would you want that?”
He was quiet for some time— I was afraid that I had made some sort of error and impugned his idiosyncratic sense of shifgrethor, but he was just staring out the window. “It’s an honor to carry memory into the future,” he said. “Like a torch that keeps burning. But perhaps it still only burns for me.”
He was speaking of Therem again. “And carry history,” I said.
“But perhaps it’s just because I enjoy being a stranger.” He closed his eyes. “It’s always been something about me— I wasn’t forced against my will to come to Gethen alone, after all.”
For some reason, I had never before asked my next question. “Are you famous on Terra, or in the Ekumen, for your work on Gethen?”
“Famous? No, I don’t cast a long shadow— not like on Gethen. The history of the Ekumen is so wide that I’m very little in the grand scheme of things— if I’m mentioned by anyone, it’s a footnote. Anyone could have taken my place, and would have, if things had gone wrong for me. The Ekumen is patient, and slow-moving, like a land-caravan carrying every sentient being in the universe. No man’s shadow can go too far without touching someone else and falling into theirs.”
“Gethen was the perfect member-planet, then. We don’t mind a slow pace.”
“Much moreso than Terra— we’re an impatient people.” He was entertained. “Not that usefulness and value are a good way of thinking about these things, but you are unique among the planets, and have a lot that others want.”
I ignored his comment. “Is it uncomfortable, to travel so fast?”
“No— you can’t feel it at all. The NAFAL drive is like a bubble— if it wasn’t, we’d be crushed to death by the acceleration. But it’s strange to look at the stars. The light bends around you.” He illustrated with a curve of his hand, and then he paused for a moment. “Weaver Faxe told me a story, many years ago, hypothesizing that if a Weaver could be put into a vacuum during the Foretelling, they’d go on burning for years…”
“You’re curious about what would happen if I were to Foretell something here on the ship? In the vacuum of space?”
He shrugged. “Moving nearly as fast as light, the past and the future of a hundred years compressed into hours…”
I didn’t answer him immediately. I, of course, was familiar with the legend and speaker he was referring to, but the idea of Foretelling while on the ship disturbed me, and I felt an echo of the fear that had gone through me in my first Foretelling— but the same anticipation and desire, too.
“And what question would you want to ask?”
He laughed. “With what could I pay you?” he asked. “Now that my job is done, the Ekumen doesn’t need to provide me with enough rubies to pay bribes in, in case I need them.”
My lips twitched, an almost cruel smile rising to my lips. “Even the poor can afford a Foretelling— they only must pay in something that they have.”
Genly hesitated, considering it seriously, and considering the price I might ask of him. “And what would I pay with, Weaver Sorve Harth?”
“Join me in the Foretelling.”
A heavy silence fell between them. “Can the one asking the question join in?”
“It’s not often done, but it can be, if the question is not of yourself— having a stake in the future would make the Foretelling difficult, or impossible.” I was surprised that he had a question that he thought worth asking at that price, he was often leery of the subject, and outright dismissive of the idea of Terrans being taught it, or had said as much when he was drunk, once.
“An odd Foretelling,” he said. “You change so many things about it at once— letting an answerer ask the question, having a Terran join, doing it where the past and the future are squeezed together into nothingness.” He looked at me, almost amused. “It’s as though you want it to fail— none of the Gethen slowness in this experiment.”
“No slowness? This would be the slowest Foretelling ever done, taking a hundred years.”
He looked away from me, out at the globe of Gethen slowly leaving sight, shrinking further and further. It would soon be smaller than one’s thumbnail held at arm’s length, then smaller than the eye of a needle, then as small as the fleck of a star, and then it would be gone from sight. But it would take several days of travel for that to happen— the false sense of slowness in the beginning of the journey before we engaged the NAFAL drive. Perhaps it was a mercy, to watch it get smaller, to say our goodbyes.
“ Will you join us, Genry? ” I asked, though I Bespoke her in the way she had taught me, in my native tongue, losing her masculine sense and the letter in her name that sat uncomfortably in the Karhide language. She liked it when I did that, though it taxed me. “ I won’t make you play the Pervert. ”
A smile twitched across her face.
“ It’s my part, even if I was playing it in a Foretelling with all Terrans, ” he said in his own language, though still Besepeaking me. “ I know that well enough. Don’t take it from me to spare my shifgrethor , Sorve. ”
Genry had been right that the switch to the NAFAL drive would feel like nothing at all physically, but I felt it in a different sense. The nowness of the universe that I was used to felt stretched. I gathered my set for the strangest Foretelling the universe had ever seen. We met in the observation room, where we could see the incredible brightness of the stars ahead of us dimmed only by the shields on the windows, and the way the light curved around us, so that we could see some of the stars behind us as well, like looking at the universe like it was reflected in the curve of a spoon.
We couldn’t even sit for this Foretelling. There was no gravity to hold us to the floor. We arranged ourselves in a circle as best we could. My two Zanies, Chemma Lowwet rem ir Salat and Elseth Sain rem ir Hasrenal, were as different as night and day here. Chemma delighted in the lack of gravity, twisting and turning like a fish, and was entranced by the streaks of starlight stretched out like threads, while Elseth tried to tuck herself to the ground in whatever room she was in, and stroked her own hair to comfort herself. I had the sense that Genry’s dichotomies were already imposing themselves on my world, and I wondered what that would do to our Foretelling.
I had spoken with Elseth earlier, to confirm that she was feeling up to it, and she said that she was— I had to take her at her word for that. As hard as the Foretelling was for me as the Weaver, I had to imagine that it was harder for Chemma and Elseth. They were how the light came in, raw and unfiltered.
My Pervert, Wylie Barch rem ir Salat (Chemma’s cousin— they had come to our Indwelling together) was relieved to merely be an observer. She— and I tried using Genly’s language, the feminine pronoun for her, rather than the word for a female animal in our language— had admitted that the idea of doing a Foretelling on the ship scared her. She didn’t want to become one of those groups of legend that had gone insane or died from a Foretelling gone wrong. Though she looked at Genly with some concern when he came into the room, and she seemed half-ready to volunteer to take his place.
But Genly’s participation was the price I had set— for my own curiosity. It was a bad trait in Foretellers. I should try to be ignorant, to let the time pass over me, but I had already made the plan, and since nothing had yet gone wrong, I was compelled to follow through.
We were lucky, or unlucky, that Namar Gole rem ir Esser was going into kemmer, and would make us able to complete a Foretelling. Namar had stayed secluded from everyone else, especially Wylie, to prevent herself from fully entering it, but now she turned to me, with a glance at Genry by the window, and asked, “Ms. Ai isn’t even our species— do you think she’ll be able to move me? Are you sure you don’t want to have Wylie do it?”
“She’s said that it’s happened before. You aren’t bothered by the idea, are you?”
“Bothered, no. Hesitant—” And that was all she would say. It seemed, perhaps, that I was the only one truly confident about this plan. And perhaps it was a false confidence, born of self destruction, though from where that feeling had come, I couldn’t say. I must have wanted to prove that it was possible before I tried to teach it to others, unlike Genly, who had never known our ways at all. I didn’t want to face that disappointment in the place it mattered most. And I would have been disappointed, I admitted to myself.
I wanted, rather desperately, to prove that Genly’s differences from us were immaterial, that we were all pieces of the same whole, sisters or kemmer-vowed. I wanted to participate in the Ekumen’s project, of uniting all the sentient races in the universe. I was less interested in feeling like a stranger than Genly was, and instead had the Gethenian desire to welcome and be welcomed.
It was Therem’s journals that had put this sense in me, I think. She had spoke very well about the falseness of borders, the wages of destruction that nationalism might wreak on Gethen. Although Genly spoke of the Ekumen with pride and confidence, I could not shake the sense that it was a fragile thing, even if all the member planets were too far from each other to war. I made a good Foreteller because I cared little about the future for myself, but a poor one because I cared very much about the distant present, and all the people on all the worlds living in it.
Why, if invasions were not a possibility, would the Ekumen send only one visitor to each planet, to reassure everyone that there was no invasion? I sometimes woke in a cold sweat.
But I pushed the thought out of my mind, focusing on the Ekumen, whole and without war, and our journey to Terra on a mission of peace and friendship and understanding.
I called my group together, and with the clumsy unfamiliarity of navigating without gravity, we formed our circle. The lights in the observation area were dimmed, and only the stars streaking across us like lines of fire lit our circle.
“Are we prepared?” I asked, and got a nod of assent from everyone. In other Foretellings, there were often observers, but I had kept them out. There was no one watching today except my replaced Pervert, Wylie, who would do us the favor of making sure that we were not interrupted. “Then let us begin.”
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Even through my eyelids, I could see the streaks of starlight. I watched them until they merged with the incoherent flashes of false-signals the eyes sent to the brain in darkness, and I sank into the Presence.
“Ask your question, seeker,” I said to Genly, without opening my eyes.
“Will anyone in the worlds of the Ekumen discover a way to travel faster than light?” Genly asked. He spoke his own language.
I almost broke the circle, fear leaping through me, but the Presence already had a hold on me. I tugged on the question, on the lines of stars streaking across my vision, sinking into what Genly called the hunch . Not looking for an answer yet, just looking to know if there was an answer to be had. The feeling came to me like the single snowflake that, when landing on the fragile mountainside, causes an avalanche.
“It is answerable,” I said, though I almost wished it wasn’t. I could not lie. “Take your place, Genly Ai.”
I could feel the brush of air as he moved past me, to take up a position on the other side of Namar, who was at my right hand.
Foretellings were often slow affairs— it took time for the web to weave itself, for all the members to find the correct positions in the mental space. My Zanies were already beginning their roles, finding the rhythm easily, as was their duty and sometimes pleasure. Chemma’s laughter was loud, easily entertained, as she watched Elseth over and over pull her own hair down towards her shoulders, from where it drifted up in coils, loosed with the lack of gravity. Elseth reached her right hand up to grab her braid, patted it down against her chest, then her left hand to take the braid on the other side, and as she did, the right braid freed itself and floated up once more. A steady pattern, not unlike the drumming on the floor she might have done if we were in our usual Indwelling.
Genly was leaning towards Namar, speaking to her in low tones. Genly was too proud to admit to fear, but I could hear the discomfort in his voice, being cast in this role that, although he had asked for it, clearly meant something to him— about him— more than what I could understand. The exaggeration inherent in the Foretelling ritual, every member playing a caricature of a social role rather than themselves, was a heavy mantle to wear, and it caused discomfort for everyone. Outside the Foretelling, Namar and Genly could speak cordially, and Chemma and Elseth’s repetitive motions were simply motions, not imbued with a supernatural gravitas.
But here, none of us were friends and fellow Indwellers. We were something else entirely, captured by the animalistic energy of kemmer, the pure heat of desire that tied us as living beings to the string of evolution, parents and children and parents again, an inexorable line stretching past and future, with us perfectly positioned in the center of all things. And yet it was the stifling of that desire, the celibacy of the Foretellers, that separated us from animals, while raising the desire to a white heat. Even though I was not in kemmer, half a month away, I could feel Namar’s, and it stirred something inside of me, a kemmer of the mind and not the body.
There was no sense of time passing, neither the years that were whizzing by outside our ship, nor the seconds and minutes and hours that we alone could feel on board. I gathered time in my hands like a skein of yarn, traced it down its winding passageways. For me, the fear and even the question were forgotten as I lost myself in it.
I could feel the moment when Namar was overcome with the kemmer, Genly’s masculinity, alien as it was, coming over her and forcing a change. In the distant corner of my mind that was still my own and not the gestalt-mind of the animal we had all become, I wondered if Genly could feel the moment too, despite not being one of us. He was in the circle— we were no different from one another here.
Once, years ago, a little while after our Pervert Wylie had joined our Indwelling, I had asked her why she had come. What was she getting out of the experience, when it was often so painful and uncomfortable for us all? She had given me a pointed stare and said, “If you were halfdead, wouldn’t you want to know what the other half is like?”
Genly must have been able to feel it, that change come over the group, because I could feel his terror and disgust— fresh as though he had landed on Gethen for the first time yesterday. Rather than shaking me out of the circle, it drew me tighter, rolling my mind up with his horror at the anatomical changes coming over Namar, the disgust at the lust she felt for him. I knew I had made a mistake in inviting Genly to the circle— I wondered if he would forgive me. But there came a point where I could no longer hold these thoughts steady, could no longer grasp myself as anything other than the circle, its beginning and its end, its wholeness unbroken.
Genly cried out, Bespeaking me, “ Therem! Help me! ”
I flew, or fell, the darkness and the stars tumbling around, and I lost myself in the tumult. I reached for the only thing that could steady myself: the single thread of time, which did stretch forwards and backwards, and not twist round and round on itself like the circle.
It was white hot, like holding the stars in my hands. I was burning, a hundred years flowing through me in an hour, burning out— a filament sealed in a vacuum. It was as though I could see the whole universe, every life and every thought for a hundred years to come, or a hundred years past. The animal instincts: kemmer, and birth, and then kemmer, and then death. The cold stars: a gathering of forces beyond my imagination, ignition and burning for untold years, and then a different kind of death entirely. No conscious thought remained— this was a universe that only rewarded spreading itself, self-replication, and thought was a messy byproduct of this biological imperative. Despite not being in kemmer myself, I shook with the desire, my mouth filled with hungry spit, I could feel the ache of a lack of release, years of pent want , the need to continue the circle— but I would not. This was the only control I had, over myself, and over the universe, and over the circle.
The answer to Genly’s question, the point in the line of the future where our circle began and ended. I found it in the roiling mass, the one point of order around which we tumbled. It was a fixed thing, and with it, finding it, I could cut the circle open, lay the future out into a line.
It hurt.
I screamed, and I could have screamed forever. This was different from other Foretellings I had done, and I might have been lost in it, if it had continued for even one more instant. A thousand, hundred thousand years might have passed in the time it took for me to finish screaming. My answer must have come out of me then, though I didn’t have the mind to grasp it.
Wylie, observer, hit the lightswitch on the wall, flooding us with bright, artificial light, stable and steady and unbending, and made by people with minds and not by the cruel cycle of nature.
The laughter of the Zanies had stopped: Elseth and Chemma were unconscious. When I came back to my own body, I found Namar clinging to me in fear. I stroked her hair absently, like Elseth, and tried to calm my own breathing. I looked for Genly.
In his tongue, trying to free myself of the remains of the Gethen circle, I asked, “Are you answered, Asker?” My own voice was rough and painful from screaming. Those were the only words I was capable of speaking, and I would not speak again until we arrived at our destination.
I could see from the fear in his eyes, not just a remnant of his experience in the circle, that he was answered. He was unable to speak, and just nodded.
I didn’t know what the answer was. I had forgotten the question entirely, and couldn’t call it to mind, even if I tried.
We didn’t speak of what we had learned until we were on Terra. Genly had been so disturbed, either by the asking or by the answer, that he shut himself in his room on the ship until after the NAFAL journey had concluded. When we were in the Terran starsystem, he went to the bridge and listened to the radio waves that made it to our ship, listening to a hundred years worth of news, trying to make sense of accents that time had rendered unlike his own.
If he wanted to speak to me, he would. I didn’t press him.
I, too, had been disturbed by the experience. I felt burned out, like a candle with wax that had been laced with pockets of explosive powder. I might recover, but I found it difficult to meditate the remainder of the journey, and, exhausted, all I wanted to do was sleep. It was rather like the exhaustion after dothe, though there was no physical cause.
I should have been glad to see the blue-green Terra come into focus outside our ship, but I was too tired to feel anything. I hardly remembered any of the journey, all of it passing me by without notice.
It was not until we landed on the planet that I began to take stock of myself. Terra, unlike Gethen, was well equipped for seeing visiting ships, and we landed in an airfield that clearly saw heavy traffic and years of use. Other flying machines clustered near the huge building, some even taking off as we landed. I watched them leap into the sky with fascination— the famous Terran impulse for speed. Genly had once said that they could go halfway around the planet in only a few hours.
But although the flying machines were exciting, it was the heat that pressed onto me as we stepped outside the ship for the first time. It was evening, sunset, and a wind blew across the tarmac, carrying smells so strange that I couldn’t begin to pick them apart. The heat was oppressive, and sweat beaded on my forehead immediately. Although I was already wearing my lightest clothing, I wanted to cast it off, and find some snow to roll about in. But there was no snow here.
I glanced at Genly, who, too, had taken off his jacket and draped it over one arm.
“I haven’t been warm in about twenty years,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re going to spend some time not being able to get cool.” I was glad he was willing, or able, to speak to me again.
“Is this normal?” I asked. The temperature must have been over eighty, and the air was sticky and clung to me.
“It’s a beautiful night.”
Genly, either for his own reasons or because he took pity on me, had asked that all of our official meetings and duties be postponed until we had a chance to acclimate to the planet. Which meant that when we left the airfield, it was not with any kind of exuberant entourage, but in a line of silent and sleek cars, ones which moved far, far too fast for my comfort. I clung to the leather of the seat. The neon streaks of city lights (and what a city this was, that we were headed through) were like the bent starlight of the NAFAL drive, and my instinct was to fear a similar time distortion.
To keep my mind off it, I asked Genly, “Is this place familiar, after two hundred years?”
He smiled, a little grimly. “The shape of the coast, the smell of the ocean— yes. But the city streets are all very different.”
We were put up in a hotel, a huge building, different from any of the squat little houses in Karhide where one might find a room and meals. This was glittering and impersonal, and we had rooms high up, with balconies overlooking the nighttime city. Food was delivered to us, after we had been given time to get settled. I ate alone, continuing to glance out the window as I did. The silence was eerie. This room didn’t have a radio in it, and I was a little wary of the television, set into the wall. It was something I would have to get used to— Terrans preferred visual and written information to radio, which was deeply strange to me. It must have been because they liked light: even after the sun went down, the whole city glowed with lights in a three dimensional grid, streets criss-crossing each other, and then buildings rising up from them like pillars of fire. Terrans liked speed, and even moreso they liked the lights to continue to burn, fires to never go out. It made me shiver, despite being too warm.
I had taken off all my clothing, trying to get cool, and I stood on the balcony, having forgotten the Terran social prohibition against nakedness. There was no such prohibition on Gethen— only the practical requirement of being clothed against the cold to not die. I was so hot now, I wanted to strip off even my skin.
There was a knock on my room door. “Come in,” I called. “It’s not locked.”
“Shall I ask you to waive your shifgrethor so that I can advise you to lock your door?” Genly asked, treating me like a child, though he had never even known me in childhood. I tried to ignore the mild slight— it was Genly’s way of expressing friendship.
“We’re not on Gethen. I should permanently waive it, since no one here will care to respect it.”
“But you still have a shadow.” He was carefully looking away from me, down at the floor, where, indeed, my shadow was touching his shoes. I remembered the Terran prohibition on nudity, then, and despite hating it, picked up the light bathrobe that had been left for me in the hotel, and put it on. Genly relaxed after that.
“Did you come here for something other than company?” I asked.
Genly didn’t answer until he had made his way out onto the balcony, and leaned over the railing. “I wanted to speak with you about the Foretelling,” he said.
“What about it?”
“Can you swear your group to secrecy about what was Foretold?” he asked.
I was quiet for a second before I spoke. “It was a strange Foretelling,” I said. “A difficult one. I don’t remember what my answer was.”
“There will be a faster than light engine someday,” he said. “That’s what your harnessed hunch said.” He looked out over the city. “I was very relieved when we arrived here to find that it hadn’t yet happened.”
“Oh.” I could see immediately why he wanted to swear us to secrecy. The Gethen slowness that had prevented our own land from eating itself in war and an endless appetite for expansion was what the NAFAL-drive enforced on the Ekumen. Fast travel made neighbors of people who were otherwise too far apart to be thought of as such, and neighbors made borders, and as Therem had warned in her journals, borders made war.
“Or could you lie about the answer?” he asked. “Otherwise, someone else might ask the same question. It would be better to dissuade them early on.”
I was very quiet, leaning over the balcony. “The price you’ve paid for this Foretelling was too high,” I said. “Don’t ask me for another.”
“Sorve—”
“It would have been better if we had all stayed ignorant.”
“Will you keep the secret?” he asked.
I thought about it. “You trust your masters of the Ekumen very little.”
“I love the Ekumen,” he said. Therem Harth had loved her country, too— in the way that Genly loved his. They loved the country of all the universe, and loved even the fallibility of all the people in it. “That’s why I went to Gethen.”
We were both quiet— I refused to give an answer to his question, and he was thinking deeply.
“ Gethen learned division, ” Genry finally said, Besepeaking me in my native language. “ Perhaps the rest of the universe can learn completeness, before it’s too late. Perhaps I can teach them. Gethen was spared— ”
She didn’t ask me to Foretell if the universe and the Ekumen would be, and I was grateful for that. “What will you do?” I asked.
Her tongue flicked out, tasting the warm breeze, salty with the ocean. “I’ll have to stay an exile in time for as long as I can,” she said. “If I want to do anything about it— I have to keep moving forward. I don’t know what I’ll say to people I meet there, but if it’s the only thing I can do, I have to do it.”
Like doggedly hauling a sledge across eight hundred miles of snow.
“Alone?” I asked.
She had no answer to that. She turned away from the city lights, the balcony. “Think about it, Sorve— and let me know if you’re willing to keep it a secret.”