The Shobies’ Story

Ursula K. Le Guin

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In my crustier moments I’ve been known to assert that, while science fiction boasts any number of enthralling yarn spinners, brilliant visionaries, and witty satirists, it has produced only one wholly literary voice. That’s not true, of course. It’s certainly not fair to Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch, Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler, Judith Moffet, Michael Bishop, and perhaps a dozen others. And yet if SFWA ever got itself into a literary jousting tournament with some rival guild, the prize being a government grant or a small planet or a subscription to The New Yorker or something, there’s no question whom I’d want to send onto the field.

Ursula K. Le Guin received the National Book Award for The Farthest Shore, the third novel in the Earthsea cycle, as well as a Hugo and a Nebula for The Left Hand of Darkness and the same pair of trophies for The Dispossessed. This volume celebrates her most recent literary honor—a Nebula for Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea—by offering up another Le Guin work from the final ballot, a complex and audacious novelette called “The Shobies’ Story.”

Even if Tehanu had not taken the top prize, I would have accorded “The Shobies’ Story” a prime spot in this volume, for I believe that—through its marvelous conceit of “churten” travel— it raises crucial questions about social hierarchies, interspecies bonding, and the consensus model of reality. Le Guin aficionados will quickly notice that it belongs to the “Hainish League” saga, her ongoing narrative of galactic exploration.

“This story grew out of an idea I have been chewing on for years about the importance of story, of narrative,” Le Guin reports. “Speaking not metaphorically but fairly literally, it seems that people who can see their life as a story, with a ‘plot’ or at least narrative continuity (possibly even a happy ending), get along okay, while people who lose that narrative sense are in a lot of trouble, maybe to the point of psychopathy. I’m not talking about personal control, being the ‘author of your fate,’ because in cultures where individuals don’t control their lives much at all, people can be totally content with the cultural narrative, and live it beautifully. Even if the story itself is stupid or psychopathic, like the war story or the white-supremacy story, if we believe in it and it makes some sense to us we get along, we stay alive, we even think we know what we’re doing.

“Well, then, the idea of using narrative as a means of travel is really just an extension of this basic idea of narrative as means of existence. So the Shobies showed up and started telling their story. Their stories. Of course they were science fiction stories, what else?”

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They met at the Port more than a month before their first flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the Shobies. Their first consensual decision was to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing.

Liden was a fishing port with an eighty-thousand-year history and a population of four hundred. Its fisherfolk farmed the rich shoal waters of their bay, shipped the catch inland to the cities, and managed the Liden Resort for vacationers and tourists and new space crews on isyeye (the word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two). The fisherwomen and fishermen of Liden were as weathered as driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who had misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. “Nope,” she said.

Like most crews, the Shobies used Hainish as their common language. So the name of the one Hainish crew member, Sweet Today, carried its meaning as words as well as name, and at first seemed a silly thing to call a big, tall, heavy woman in her late fifties, imposing of carriage and almost as taciturn as the villagers. But her reserve proved to be a deep well of congeniality and tact, to be called upon as needed, and her name soon began to sound quite right. She had family—all Hainish have family—kinfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines, scattered all over the Ekumen, but no relatives in this crew. She asked to be Grandmother to Rig, Asten, and Betton, and was accepted.

The only Shoby older than Sweet Today was the Terran Lidi, who was seventy-two EYs and not interested in grandmothering. Lidi had been navigating for fifty years, and there was nothing she didn’t know about NAFAL ships, although occasionally she forgot that their ship was the Shoby and called it the Soso or the Alterra. And there were things she didn’t know, none of them knew, about the Shoby.

They talked, as human beings do, about what they didn’t know.

Churten theory was the main topic of conversation, evenings at the driftwood fire on the beach after dinner. The adults had read whatever there was to read about it, of course, before they ever volunteered for the test mission. Gveter had more recent information and presumably a better understanding of it than the others, but it had to be pried out of him. Only twenty-five, the only Cetian in the crew, much hairier than the others, and not gifted in language, he spent a lot of time on the defensive. Assuming that as an Anarresti he was more proficient at mutual aid and more adept at cooperation than the others, he lectured them about their propertarian habits; but he held tight to his knowledge, because he needed the advantage it gave him. For a while he would speak only in negatives: don’t call it the churten “drive,” it isn’t a drive, don’t call it the churten “effect,” it isn’t an effect. What is it, then? A long lecture ensued, beginning with the rebirth of Cetian physics since the revision of Shevekian temporalism by the Intervallists, and ending with the general conceptual framework of the churten. Everyone listened very carefully, and finally Sweet Today spoke, carefully. “So the ship will be moved,” she said, “by ideas?”

“No, no, no, no,” said Gveter. But he hesitated for the next word so long that Karth asked a question: “Well, you haven’t actually talked about any physical, material events or effects at all.” The question was characteristically indirect. Karth and Oreth, the Gethenians who with their two children were the affective focus of the crew, the “hearth” of it, in their terms, came from a not very theoretically minded subculture, and knew it. Gveter could run rings round them with his Cetian physico-philosophico-techno-natter. He did so at once. His accent did not make his explanations any clearer. He went on about coherence and meta-intervals, and at last demanded, with gestures of despair, “Khow can I say it in Khainish? No! It is not physical, it is not not-physical, these are the categories our minds must discard entirely, this is the khole point!”

“Buth-buth-buth-buth-buth-buth,” went Asten, softly, passing behind the half circle of adults at the driftwood fire on the wide, twilit beach. Rig followed, also going, “Buth-buth-buth-buth,” but louder. They were being spaceships, to judge from their maneuvers around a dune and their communications—“Locked in orbit, Navigator!”— but the noise they were imitating was the noise of the little fishing boats of Liden putt-putting out to sea.

“I crashed!” Rig shouted, flailing in the sand. “Help! Help! I crashed!”

“Hold on, Ship Two!” Asten cried. “I’ll rescue you! Don’t breathe! Oh, oh, trouble with the Churten Drive! Buth-buth-ack! Ack! Brrrrmmm-ack-ack-ack-rrrrrmmmmm, buth-buth-buth-buth…”

They were six and four EYs old. Tai’s son Betton, who was eleven, sat at the driftwood fire with the adults, though at the moment he was watching Rig and Asten as if he wouldn’t mind taking off to help rescue Ship Two. The little Getherians had spent more time on ships than on planet, and Asten liked to boast about being “actually fifty-eight,” but this was Betton’s first crew, and his only NAFAL flight had been from Terra to Hain. He and his biomother, Tai, had lived in a reclamation commune on Terra. When she had drawn the lot for Ekumenical service and requested training for ship duty, he had asked her to bring him as family. She had agreed; but after training, when she volunteered for this test flight, she had tried to get Betton to withdraw, to stay in training or go home. He had refused. Shan, who had trained with them, told the others this, because the tension between the mother and son had to be understood to be used effectively in group formation. Betton had requested to come, and Tai had given in, but plainly not with an undivided will. Her relationship to the boy was cool and mannered. Shan offered him fatherly-brotherly warmth, but Betton accepted it sparingly, coolly, and sought no formal crew relation with him or anyone.

Ship Two was being rescued, and attention returned to the discussion. “All right,” said Lidi. “We know that anything that goes faster than light, any thing that goes faster than light, by so doing transcends the material/immaterial category—that’s how we got the ansible, by distinguishing the message from the medium. But if we, the crew, are going to travel as messages, I want to understand how.”

Gveter tore his hair. There was plenty to tear. It grew fine and thick, a mane on his head, a pelt on his limbs and body, a silvery nimbus on his hands and face. The fuzz on his feet was, at the moment, full of sand. “Khow!” he cried. “I’m trying to tell you khow! Message, information, no no no, that’s old, that’s ansible technology. This is transilience! Because the field is to be conceived as the virtual field, in which the unreal interval becomes virtually effective through the mediary coherence—don’t you see?”

“No,” Lidi said. “What do you mean by mediary?”

After several more bonfires on the beach, the consensus opinion was that churten theory was accessible only to minds very highly trained in Cetian temporal physics. There was a less freely voiced conviction that the engineers who had built the Shoby’s churten apparatus did not entirely understand how it worked. Or more precisely, what it did when it worked. That it worked was certain. The Shoby was the fourth ship it had been tested with, using robot crew; so far sixty-two instantaneous trips, or transiliences, had been effected between points from four hundred kilometers to twenty-seven light-years apart, with stopovers of varying lengths. Gveter and Lidi steadfastly maintained that this proved that the engineers knew perfectly well what they were doing, and that for the rest of them the seeming difficulty of the theory was only the difficulty human minds had in grasping a genuinely new concept.

“Like the circulation of the blood,” said Tai. “People went around with their hearts beating for a long time before they understood why.” She did not look satisfied with her own analogy, and when Shan said, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” she looked offended. “Mysticism,” she said, in the tone of voice of one warning a companion about dog shit on the path.

“Surely there’s nothing beyond understanding in this process,” Oreth said, somewhat tentatively. “Nothing that can’t be understood, and reproduced.”

“And quantified,” Gveter said stoutly.

“But even if people understand the process, nobody knows the human response to it—the experience of it. Right? So we are to report on that.”

“Why shouldn’t it be just like NAFAL flight, only even faster?” Betton asked.

“Because it is totally different,” said Gveter.

“What could happen to us?”

Some of the adults had discussed possibilities, all of them had considered them; Karth and Oreth had talked it over in appropriate terms with their children; but evidently Betton had not been included in such discussions.

“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 lives have been on some of the test flights. Crickets. And intelligent ritual animals on the last two Shoby tests. They were all all right.” It was a very long statement for Sweet Today, and carried proportional weight.

“We know,” 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 toward 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 pant 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 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 night 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 neo-cellulose 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…

Another story?

Lidi told about the little desert wolf who lost his wife and went to the land of the dead for her, and found her there dancing with the dead, and nearly brought her back to the land of the living, but spoiled it by trying to touch her before they got all the way back to life, and she vanished, and he could never find the way back to the place where the dead danced, no matter how he looked, and howled, and cried…

Another story!

Shan told about the boy who sprouted a feather every time he told a lie, until his commune had to use him for a duster.

Another!

Gveter told about the winged people called gluns, who were so stupid that they died out, because they kept hitting each other head-on in midair. “They weren’t real,” he added conscientiously. “Only a story.”

Another— No. Bedtime now.

Rig and Asten went round as usual for a good-night hug, and this time Betton followed them. When he came to Tai he did not stop, for she did not like to be touched; but she put out her hand, drew the child to her, and kissed his cheek. He fled in joy.

“Stories,” said Sweet Today. “Ours begins tomorrow, eh?”

A chain of command is easy to describe, a network of response isn’t. To those who live by mutual empowerment, “thick” description, complex and open-ended, is normal and comprehensible, but to those whose only model is hierarchic control, such description seems a muddle, a mess, along with what it describes. Who’s in charge here? Get rid of all these petty details. How many cooks spoil a soup? Let’s get this perfectly clear now. Take me to your leader!

The old navigator was at the NAFAL console, of course, and Gveter at the paltry churten console; Oreth was wired into the AI; Tai, Shan, and Karth were their respective Support, and what Sweet Today did might be called supervising or overseeing if that didn’t suggest a hierarchic function. Interseeing, maybe, or subvising. Rig and Asten always naffled (to use Rig’s word) in the ship’s library, where, during the boring and disorienting experience of travel at near light-speed, Asten could look at pictures or listen to a story tape, and Rig could curl up on and under a certain furry blanket and go to sleep. Betton’s crew function during flight was Elder Sib; he stayed with the little ones, provided himself with a barf bag since he was one of those whom NAFAL flight made queasy, and focused the intervid on Lidi and Gveter so he could watch what they did.

So they all knew what they were doing, as regards NAFAL flight. As regards the churten process, they knew that it was supposed to effectuate their transilience to a solar system seventeen light-years from Ve Port without temporal interval; but nobody, anywhere, knew what they were doing.

So Lidi looked around, like the violinist who raises her bow to poise the chamber group for the first chord, a flicker of eye contact, and sent the Shoby into NAFAL mode, as Gveter, like the cellist whose bow comes down in that same instant to ground the chord, sent the Shoby into churten mode. They entered unduration. They churtened. No long, as the ansible had said.

“What’s wrong?” Shan whispered.

“By damn!” said Gveter.

“What?” said Lidi, blinking and shaking her head.

“That’s it,” Tai said, flicking readouts.

“That’s not A-sixty-whatsit,” Lidi said, still blinking.

Sweet Today was gestalting them, all ten at once, the seven on the bridge and by intervid the three in the library. Betton had cleared a window, and the children were looking out at the murky, brownish convexity that filled half of it. Rig was holding a dirty, furry blanket. Karth was taking the electrodes off Oreth’s temples, disengaging the AI link-up. “There was no interval,” Oreth said.

“We aren’t anywhere,” Lidi said.

“There was no interval,” Gveter repeated, scowling at the console. “That’s right.”

“Nothing happened,” Karth said, skimming through the AI flight report.

Oreth got up, went to the window, and stood motionless looking out.

“That’s it. M-60-340-nolo,” Tai said.

All their words fell dead, had a false sound.

“Well! We did it, Shobies!” said Shan.

Nobody answered.

“Buzz Ve Port on the ansible,” Shan said with determined jollity. “Tell em we’re all here in one piece.”

“All where?” Oreth asked.

“Yes, of course,” Sweet Today said, but did nothing.

“Right,” said Tai, going to the ship’s ansible. She opened the field, centered to Ve, and sent a signal. Ships’ ansibles worked only in the visual mode; she waited, watching the screen. She resignaled. They were all watching the screen.

“Nothing going through,” she said.

Nobody told her to check the centering coordinates; in a network system nobody gets to dump their anxieties that easily. She checked the coordinates. She signaled; rechecked, reset, resignaled; opened the field and centered to Abbenay on Anarres and signaled. The ansible screen was blank.

“Check the—” Shan said, and stopped himself.

“The ansible is not functioning,” Tai reported formally to her crew.

“Do you find malfunction?” Sweet Today asked.

“No. Nonfunction.”

“We’re going back now,” said Lidi, still seated at the NAFAL console.

Her words, her tone, shook them apart.

“No, we’re not!” Betton said on the intervid while Oreth said, “Back where?”

Tai, Lidi’s Support, moved toward her as if to prevent her from activating the NAFAL drive, but then hastily moved back to the ansible to prevent Gveter from getting access to it. He stopped, taken aback, and said, “Perhaps the churten affected ansible function?”

“I’m checking it out,” Tai said. “Why should it? Robot-operated ansible transmission functioned in all the test flights.”

“Where are the AI reports?” Shan demanded.

“I told you, there are none,” Karth answered sharply.

“Oreth was plugged in.”

Oreth, still at the window, spoke without turning. “Nothing happened.”

Sweet Today came over beside the Gethenian. Oreth looked at her and said, slowly, “Yes. Sweet Today. We cannot… do this. I think. I can’t think.”

Shan had cleared a second window, and stood looking out it. “Ugly,” he said.

“What is?” said Lidi.

Gveter said, as if reading from the Ekumenical Atlas, “Thick, stable atmosphere, near the bottom of the temperature window for life. Microorganisms. Bacterial clouds, bacterial reefs.”

“Germ stew,” Shan said. “Lovely place to send us.”

“So that if we arrived as a neutron bomb or a black-hole event we’d only take bacteria with us,” Tai said. “But we didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” said Lidi.

“Didn’t arrive?” Karth asked.

“Hey,” Betton said, “is everybody going to stay on the bridge?”

“I want to come there,” said Rig’s little pipe, and then Asten’s voice, clear but shaky, “Maba, I’d like to go back to Liden now.”

“Come on,” Karth said, and went to meet the children. Oreth did not turn from the window, even when Asten came close and took Oreth’s hand.

“What are you looking at, maba?”

“The planet, Asten.”

“What planet?”

Oreth looked at the child then.

“There isn’t anything,” Asten said.

“That brown color—that’s the surface, the atmosphere of a planet.”

“There isn’t any brown color. There isn’t anything. I want to go back to Liden. You said we could when we were done with the test.”

Oreth looked around, at last, at the others.

“Perception variation,” Gveter said.

“I think,” Tai said, “that we must establish that we are—that we got here—and then get here.”

“You mean, go back,” Betton said.

“The readings are perfectly clear,” Lidi said, holding on to the rim of her seat with both hands and speaking very distinctly. “Every coordinate in order. That’s M-60-Etcetera down there. What more do you want? Bacteria samples?”

“Yes,” Tai said. “Instrument function’s been affected, so we can’t rely on instrumental records.”

“Oh, shitsake!” said Lidi. “What a farce! All right. Suit up, go down, get some goo, and then let’s get out. Go home. By NAFAL.”

“By NAFAL?” Shan and Tai echoed, and Gveter said, “But we would spend seventeen years, Ve time, and no ansible to explain why.”

“Why, Lidi?” Sweet Today asked.

Lidi stared at the Hainishwoman. “You want to churten again?” she demanded, raucous. She looked round at them all. “Are you people made of stone?” Her face was ashy, crumpled, shrunken. “It doesn’t bother you, seeing through the walls?”

No one spoke, until Shan said cautiously, “How do you mean?”

“I can see the stars through the walls!” She stared round at them again, pointing at the carpet with its woven constellations. “You can’t?” When no one answered, her jaw trembled in a little spasm, and she said, “All right. All right. I’m off duty. Sorry. Be in my room.” She stood up. “Maybe you should lock me in,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Sweet Today.

“If I fall through,” Lidi began, and did not finish. She walked to the door, stiffly and cautiously, as if through a thick fog. She said something they did not understand, “Cause,” or perhaps, “Gauze.”

Sweet Today followed her.

“I can see the stars too!” Rig announced.

“Hush,” Karth said, putting an arm around the child.

“I can! I can see all the stars everywhere. And I can see Ve Port. And I can see anything I want!”

“Yes, of course, but hush now,” the mother murmured, at which the child pulled free, stamped, and shrilled, “I can! I can too! I can see everything! And Asten can’t! And there is a planet, there is too! No, don’t hold me! Don’t! Let me go!”

Grim, Karth carried the screaming child off to their quarters. Asten turned around to yell after Rig, “There is not any planet! You’re just making it up!”

Grim, Oreth said, “Go to our room, please, Asten.”

Asten burst into tears and obeyed. Oreth, with a glance of apology to the others, followed the short, weeping figure across the bridge and out into the corridor.

The four remaining on the bridge stood silent.

“Canaries,” Shan said.

“Khallucinations?” Gveter proposed, subdued. “An effect of the churten on extrasensitive organisms—maybe?”

Tai nodded.

“Then is the ansible not functioning or are we hallucinating non-function?” Shan asked after a pause.

Gveter went to the ansible; this time Tai walked away from it, leaving it to him. “I want to go down,” she said.

“No reason not to, I suppose,” Shan said unenthusiastically.

“Khwat reason to?” Gveter asked over his shoulder.

“It’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? It’s what we volunteered to do, isn’t it? To test instantaneous—transilience—prove that it worked, that we are here! With the ansible out, it’ll be seventeen years before Ve gets our radio signal!”

“We can just churten back to Ve and tell them,” Shan said. “If we did that now, we’d have been… here… about eight minutes.”

“Tell them—tell them what? What kind of evidence is that?”

“Anecdotal,” said Sweet Today, who had come back quietly to the bridge; she moved like a big sailing ship, imposingly silent.

“Is Lidi all right?” Shan asked.

“No,” Sweet Today answered. She sat down where Lidi had sat, at the NAFAL console.

“I ask a consensus about going down onplanet,” Tai said.

“I’ll ask the others,” Gveter said, and went out, returning presently with Karth. “Go down, if you want,” the Gethenian said. “Oreth’s staying with the children for a bit. They are—we are extremely disoriented.”

“I will come down,” Gveter said.

“Can I come?” Betton asked, almost in a whisper, not raising his eyes to any adult face.

“No,” Tai said, as Gveter said, “Yes.”

Betton looked at his mother, one quick glance.

“Khwy not?” Gveter asked her.

“We don’t know the risks.”

“The planet was surveyed.”

“By robot ships—”

“We’ll wear suits.” Gveter was honestly puzzled.

“I don’t want the responsibility,” Tai said through her teeth.

“Khwy is it yours?” Gveter asked, more puzzled still. “We all share it; Betton is crew. I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t understand,” Tai said, turned her back on them both, and went out. The man and the boy stood staring, Gveter after Tai, Betton at the carpet.

“I’m sorry,” Betton said.

“Not to be,” Gveter told him.

“What is… what is going on?” Shan asked in an over-controlled voice. “Why are we—we keep crossing, we keep—coming and going—”

“Confusion due to the churten experience, “ Gveter said.

Sweet Today turned from the console. “I have sent a distress signal,” she said. “I am unable to operate the NAFAL system. The radio—” She cleared her throat. “Radio function seems erratic.”

There was a pause.

“This is not happening,” Shan said, or Oreth said, but Oreth had stayed with the children in another part of the ship, so it could not have been Oreth who said, “This is not happening,” it must have been Shan.

A chain of cause and effect is an easy thing to describe; a cessation of cause and effect is not. To those who live in time, sequency is the norm, the only model, and simultaneity seems a muddle, a mess, a hopeless confusion, and the description of that confusion hopelessly confusing. As the members of the crew network no longer perceived the network steadily, and were unable to communicate their perceptions, an individual perception is the only clue to follow through the labyrinth of their dislocation. Gveter perceived himself as being on the bridge with Shan, Sweet Today, Betton, Karth, and Tai. He perceived himself as methodically checking out the ship’s systems. The NAFAL he found dead, the radio functioning in erratic bursts, the internal electrical and mechanical systems of the ship all in order. He sent out a lander unmanned and brought it back, and perceived it as functioning normally. He perceived himself discussing with Tai her determination to go down onplanet. Since he admitted his unwillingness to trust any instrumental reading on the ship, he had to admit her point that only material evidence would show that they had actually arrived at their destination, M-60-340-nolo. If they were going to have to spend the next seventeen years traveling back to Ve in real time, it would be nice to have something to show for it, even if only a handful of slime.

He perceived this discussion as perfectly rational.

It was, however, interrupted by outbursts of egoizing not characteristic of the crew.

“If you’re going, go!” Shan said.

“Don’t give me orders,” Tai said.

“Somebody’s got to stay in control here,” Shan said.

“Not the men!” Tai said.

“Not the Terrans,” Karth said. “Have you people no self-respect?”

“Stress,” Gveter said. “Come on, Tai, Betton, all right, let’s go, all right?”

In the lander, everything was clear to Gveter. One thing happened after another just as it should. Lander operation is very simple, and he asked Betton to take them down. The boy did so. Tai sat, tense and compact as always, her strong fists clenched on her knees. Betton managed the little ship with aplomb, and sat back, tense also, but dignified: “We’re down,” he said.

“No, we’re not,” Tai said.

“It—it says ‘contact,’ ” Betton said, losing his assurance.

“An excellent landing,” Gveter said. “Never even felt it.” He was running the usual tests. Everything was in order. Outside the lander ports pressed a brownish darkness, a gloom. When Betton put on the outside lights the atmosphere, like a dark fog, diffused the light into a useless glare.

“Tests all tally with survey reports,” Gveter said. “Will you go out, Tai, or use the servos?”

“Out,” she said.

“Out,” Betton echoed.

Gveter, assuming the formal crew role of Support, which one of them would have assumed if he had been going out, assisted them to lock their helmets and decontaminate their suits; he opened the hatch series for them, and watched them on the vid and from the port as they climbed down from the outer hatch. Betton went first. His slight figure, elongated by the whitish suit, was luminous in the weak glare of the lights. He walked a few steps from the ship, turned, and waited. Tai was stepping off the ladder. She seemed to grow very short—did she kneel down? Gveter looked from the port to the vid screen and back. She was shrinking? Sinking—she must be sinking into the surface—which could not be solid, then, but bog, or some suspension, like quicksand—but Betton had walked on it and was walking back to her, two steps, three steps, on the ground which Gveter could not see clearly but which must be solid, and which must be holding Betton up because he was lighter—but no, Tai must have stepped into a hole, a trench of some land, for he could see her only from the waist up now, her legs hidden in the dark bog or fog, but she was moving, moving quickly, going right away from the lander and from Betton.

“Bring them back,” Shan said, and Gveter said on the suit intercom, “Please return to the lander, Betton and Tai.” Betton at once started up the ladder, then turned to look for his mother. A dim blotch that might be her helmet showed in the brown gloom, almost beyond the suffusion of light from the lander.

“Please come in, Betton. Please return, Tai.”

The whitish suit flickered up the ladder, while Betton’s voice in the intercom pleaded, “Tai—Tai, come back—Gveter, should I go after her?”

“No. Tai, please return at once to lander.”

The boy’s crew integrity held; he came up into the lander and watched from the outer hatch, as Gveter watched from the port. The vid had lost her. The pallid blotch sank into the formless murk.

Gveter perceived that the instruments recorded that the lander had sunk 3.2 meters since contact with planet surface and was continuing to sink at an increasing rate.

“What is the surface, Betton?”

“Like muddy ground—where is she?”

“Please return at once, Tai!”

“Please return to Shoby, Lander One and all crew,” said the ship intercom; it was Tais voice. “This is Tai,” it said. “Please return at once to ship, lander and all crew.”

“Stay in suit, in decon, please, Betton,” Gveter said. “I’m sealing the hatch.”

“But—all right,” said the boy’s voice.

Gveter took the lander up, decontaminating it and Betton’s suit on the way. He perceived that Betton and Shan came with him through the hatch series into the Shoby and along the halls to the bridge, and that Karth, Sweet Today, Shan, and Tai were on the bridge.

Betton ran to his mother and stopped; he did not put out his hands to her. His face was immobile, as if made of wax or wood.

“Were you frightened?” she asked. “What happened down there?” And she looked to Gveter for an explanation.

Gveter perceived nothing. Unduring a nonperiod of no long, he perceived nothing was had happening happened that had not happened. Lost, he groped, lost, he found the word, the word that saved—“You—” he said, his tongue thick, dumb—“You called us.”

It seemed that she denied, but it did not matter. What mattered? Shan was talking. Shan could tell. “Nobody called, Gveter,” he said. “You and Betton went out, I was Support; when I realized I couldn’t get the lander stable, that there’s something funny about that surface, I called you back into the lander, and we came up.”

All Gveter could say was, “Insubstantial…”

“But Tai came—” Betton began, and stopped. Gveter perceived that the boy moved away from his mother’s denying touch. What mattered?

“Nobody went down,” Sweet Today said. After a silence and before it, she said, “There is no down to go to.”

Gveter tried to find another word, but there was none. He perceived outside the main port a brownish, murky convexity, through which, as he looked intently, he saw small stars shining.

He found a word then, the wrong word. “Lost,” he said, and, speaking, perceived how the ship’s lights dimmed slowly into a brownish murk, faded, darkened, were gone, while all the soft hum and busyness of the ship’s systems died away into the real silence that was always there. But there was nothing there. Nothing had happened. We are at Ve Port! he tried with all his will to say; but there was no saying.

The suns burns through my flesh, Lidi said.

I am the suns, said Sweet Today. Not I, all is.

Don’t breathe! cried Oreth.

It is death, Shan said. What I feared, is: nothing.

Nothing, they said.

Unbreathing, the ghosts flitted, shifted, in the ghost shell of a cold, dark hull floating near a world of brown fog, an unreal planet. They spoke, but there were no voices. There is no sound in vacuum, nor in nontime.

In her cabined solitude, Lidi felt the gravity lighten to the half-G of the ship’s core mass; she saw them, the nearer and the farther suns, burn through the dark gauze of the walls and hulls and the bedding and her body. The brightest, the sun of this system, floated directly under her navel. She did not know its name.

I am the darkness between the suns, one said.

I am nothing, one said.

I am you, one said.

You— one said—You—

And breathed, and reached out, and spoke: “Listen!” Crying out to the other, to the others, “Listen!”

“We have always known this. This is where we have always been, will always be, at the hearth, at the center. There is nothing to be afraid of, after all.”

“I can’t breathe,” one said.

“I am not breathing,” one said.

“There is nothing to breathe,” one said.

“You are, you are breathing, please breathe!” said another.

“We’re here, at the hearth,” said another.

Oreth had laid the fire, Karth lit it. As it caught they both said softly, in Karhidish, “Praise also the light, and creation unfinished.”

The fire caught with spark spits, crackles, sudden flares. It did not go out. It burned. The others grouped round.

They were nowhere, but they were nowhere together; the ship was dead, but they were in the ship. A dead ship cools off fairly quickly, but not immediately. Close the doors, come in by the fire; keep the cold night out, before we go to bed.

Karth went with Rig to persuade Lidi from her starry vault. The navigator would not get up. “It’s my fault,” she said.

“Don’t egoize,” Karth said mildly. “How could it be?”

“I don’t know. I want to stay here,” Lidi muttered. Then Karth begged her: “Oh, Lidi, not alone!”

“How else?” the old woman asked coldly.

But she was ashamed of herself, then, and ashamed of her guilt trip, and growled, “Oh, all right.” She heaved herself up and wrapped a blanket around her body and followed Karth and Rig. The child carried a little biolume; it glowed in the black corridors, just as the plants of the aerobic tanks lived on, metabolizing, making an air to breathe, for a while. The light moved before her like a star among the stars through darkness to the room full of books, where the fire burned in the stone hearth. “Hello, children, ‘ Lidi said. “What are we doing here?”

“Telling stories,” Sweet Today replied.

Shan had a little voice-recorder notebook in his hand.

“Does it work?” Lidi inquired.

“Seems to. We thought we’d tell… what happened,” Shan said, squinting the narrow black eyes in his narrow black face at the firelight. “Each of us. What we—what it seemed like, seems like, to us. So that…”

“As a record, yes. In case… How funny that it works, though, your notebook. When nothing else does.”

“It’s voice-activated,” Shan said absently. “So. Go on, Gveter.”

Gveter finished telling his version of the expedition to the planet’s surface. “We didn’t even bring back samples,” he ended. “I never thought of them.”

“Shan went with you, not me,” Tai said.

“You did go, and I did,” the boy said with a certainty that stopped her. “And we did go outside. And Shan and Gveter were Support, in the lander. And I took samples. They’re in the Stasis closet.”

“I don’t know if Shan was in the lander or not,” Gveter said, rubbing his forehead painfully.

“Where would the lander have gone?” Shan said. “Nothing is out there—we’re nowhere—outside time, is all I can think— But when one of you tells how they saw it, it seems as if it was that way, but then the next one changes the story, and I…”

Oreth shivered, drawing closer to the fire.

“I never believed this damn thing would work,” said Lidi, bearlike in the dark cave of her blanket.

“Not understanding it was the trouble,” Karth said. “None of us understood how it would work, not even Gveter. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” Gveter said.

“So that if our psychic interaction with it affected the process—”

“Or is the process,” said Sweet Today, “so far as we’re concerned.”

“Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?”

“You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said.

“No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”

“An analogy,” Gveter offered. “The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a crew—you could call it believing in the crew, or just being it— Right? So, maybe, to churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving ourselves as… as transilient—as being in the other place—the destination?”

“We lost our crewness, certainly, for a—are there whiles?” Karth said. “We fell apart.”

“We lost the thread,” Shan said.

“Lost,” Oreth said meditatively, laying another massive, half-weightless log on the fire, volleying sparks up into the chimney, slow stars.

“We lost—what?” Sweet Today asked.

No one answered for a while.

“When I can see the sun through the carpet…” Lidi said.

“So can I,” Betton said, very low.

“I can see Ve Port,” said Rig. “And everything. I can tell you what I can see. I can see Liden if I look. And my room on the Oneblin. And—”

“First, Rig,” said Sweet Today, “tell us what happened.”

“All right,” Rig said agreeably. “Hold on to me harder, maba, I start floating. Well, we went to the liberry, me and Asten and Betton, and Betton was Elder Sib, and the adults were on the bridge, and I was going to go to sleep like I do when we naffle-fly, but before I even lay down there was the brown planet and Ve Port and both the suns and everywhere else, and you could see through everything, but Asten couldn’t. But I can.”

“We never went anywhere,” Asten said. “Rig tells stories all the time.”

“We all tell stories all the time, Asten,” Karth said.

“Not dumb ones like Rig’s!”

“Even dumber,” said Oreth. “What we need… What we need is…”

“We need to know,” Shan said, “what transilience is, and we don’t, because we never did it before, nobody ever did it before.”

“Not in the flesh,” said Lidi,

“We need to know what’s—real—what happened, whether anything happened—” Tai gestured at the cave of firelight around them and the dark beyond it. “Where are we? Are we here? Where is here? What’s the story?”

“We have to tell it,” Sweet Today said. “Recount it. Relate it… Like Rig. Asten, how does a story begin?”

“A thousand winters ago, a thousand miles away,” the child said; and Shan murmured, “Once upon a time…”

“There was a ship called the Shoby,” said Sweet Today, “on a test flight, trying out the churten, with a crew of ten.

“Their names were Rig, Asten, Betton, Karth, Oreth, Lidi, Tai, Shan, Gveter, and Sweet Today. And they related their story, each one and together…”

There was silence, the silence that was always there, except for the stir and crackle of the fire and the small sounds of their breathing, their movements, until one of them spoke at last, telling the story.

“The boy and his mother,” said the light, pure voice, “were the first human beings ever to set foot on that world.”

Again the silence; and again a voice.

“Although she wished… she realized that she really hoped the thing wouldn’t work, because it would make her skills, her whole life, obsolete… all the same she really wanted to learn how to use it, too, if she could, if she wasn’t too old to learn…”

A long, softly throbbing pause, and another voice.

“They went from world to world, and each time they lost the world they left, lost it in time dilation, their friends getting old and dying while they were in NAFAL flight. If there were a way to live in one’s own time, and yet move among the worlds, they wanted to try it…”

“Staking everything on it,” the next voice took up the story, “because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing’s safe except what we put at risk.”

A while, a little while; and a voice.

“It was like a game. It was like we were still in the Shoby at Ve Port just waiting before we went into NAFAL flight. But it was like we were at the brown planet too. At the same time. And one of them was just pretend, and the other one wasn’t, but I didn’t know which. So it was like when you pretend in a game. But I didn’t want to play. I didn’t know how.”

Another voice.

“If the churten principle were proved to be applicable to actual transilience of living, conscious beings, it would be a great event in the mind of his people—for all people. A new understanding. A new partnership. A new way of being in the universe. A wider freedom… He wanted that very much. He wanted to be one of the crew that first formed that partnership, the first people to be able to think this thought, and to… to relate it. But also he was afraid of it. Maybe it wasn’t a true relation, maybe false, maybe only a dream. He didn’t know.”

It was not so cold, so dark, at their backs, as they sat round the fire. Was it the waves of Liden, hushing on the sand?

Another voice.

“She thought a lot about her people, too. About guilt, and expiation, and sacrifice. She wanted a lot to be on this flight that might give people—more freedom. But it was different from what she thought it would be. What happened—what happened wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that she came to be with people who gave her freedom. Without guilt. She wanted to stay with them, to be crew with them… And with her son. Who was the first human being to set foot on an unknown world.”

A long silence; but not deep, only as deep as the soft drum of the ship’s systems, steady and unconscious as the circulation of the blood.

Another voice.

“They were thoughts in the mind; what else had they ever been? So they could be in Ve and at the brown planet, and desiring flesh and entire spirit, and illusion and reality, all at once, as they’d always been. When he remembered this, his confusion and fear ceased, for he knew that they couldn’t be lost.”

“They got lost. But they found the way,” said another voice, soft above the hum and hushing of the ship’s systems, in the warm fresh air and light inside the solid walls and hulls.

Only nine voices had spoken, and they looked for the tenth; but the tenth had gone to sleep, thumb in mouth.

“That story was told and is yet to be told,” the mother said. “Go on. I’ll churten here with Rig.”

They left those two by the fire, and went to the bridge, and then to the hatches to invite on board a crowd of anxious scientists, engineers, and officials of Ve Port and the Ekumen, whose instruments had been assuring them that the Shoby had vanished, forty-four minutes ago, into nonexistence, into silence. “What happened?” they asked. “What happened?” And the Shobies looked at one another and said, “Well, it’s quite a story…”