Five Ways to Forgiveness Page 13

  At first such knowledge had been intensely distressing. It had been painful. It had made him ashamed and angry. First he thought the historians kept their knowledge from the pueblos, then he thought the pueblos kept knowledge from their own people. He accused; his teachers mildly denied. No, they said. You were taught that certain things were true, or necessary; and those things are true and necessary. They are the local knowledge of Stse.

  They are childish, irrational beliefs! he said. They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational.

  Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned. The way they know in the Household isn’t taught in the pueblos, but it wasn’t hidden from you, by your people or by us. Everybody anywhere on Hain has access to all the information in the temple.

  This was true; he knew it to be true. He could have found out for himself, on the screens of the temple of Stse, what he was learning now. Some of his fellow students from other pueblos had indeed taught themselves how to learn from the screens, and had entered history before they ever met a historian.

  Books, however, books that were the body of history, the durable reality of it, barely existed in Stse, and his anger sought justification there. You keep the books from us, all the books in the Library of Hain! No, they said mildly. The pueblos choose not to have many books. They prefer the live knowledge, spoken or passing on the screens, passing from the breath to the breath, from living mind to living mind. Would you give up what you learned that way? Is it less than, is it inferior to what you’ve learned here from books? There’s more than one kind of knowledge, said the historians.

  By his third year, Hav­zhiva had decided that there was more than one kind of people. The pueblans, able to accept that existence is fundamentally arbitrary, enriched the world intellectually and spiritually. Those who couldn’t be satisfied with mystery were more likely to be of use as historians, enriching the world intellectually and materially.

  Meanwhile he had got quite used to people who had no lineage, no relatives, and no religion. Sometimes he said to himself with a glow of pride, “I am a citizen of all history, of the millions of years of Hainish history, and my country is the whole galaxy!” At other times he felt miserably small, and he would leave his screens or his books and go look for company among his fellow students, especially the young women who were so friendly, so companionable.

  At the age of twenty-four Hav­zhiva, or Zhiv as he was now called, had been at the Ekumenical School on Ve for a year.

  Ve, the next planet out from Hain, was colonised eons ago, the first step in the vast Hainish expansion of the Fore-Eras. It has gone through many phases as a satellite or partner of Hainish civilizations; at this period it is inhabited entirely by historians and Aliens.

  In their current (that is, for at least the past hundred millennia) mood of not tampering, the Hainish have let Ve return to its own norms of coldness, dryness, and bleakness—a climate within human tolerance, but likely to truly delight only people from the Terran Altiplano or the uplands of Chiffewar. Zhiv was out hiking through this stern landscape with his companion, friend, and lover, Tiu.

  They had met two years before, in Kathhad. At that point Zhiv had still been reveling in the availability of all women to himself and himself to all women, a freedom that had only gradually dawned on him, and about which Mezha had warned him gently. “You will think there are no rules,” she said. “There are always rules.” He had been conscious mainly of his own increasingly fearless and careless transgression of what had been the rules. Not all the women wanted to have sex, and not all the women wanted to have sex with men, as he had soon discovered, but that still left an infinite variety. He found that he was considered attractive. And being Hainish was a definite advantage with the Alien women.

  The genetic alteration that made the Hainish able to control their fertility was not a simple bit of gene-splicing; involving a profound and radical reconstruction of human physiology, it had probably taken up to twenty-five generations to establish—so say the historians of Hain, who think they know in general terms the steps such a transformation must have followed. However the ancient Hainish did it, they did not do it for any of their colonists. They left the peoples of their colony worlds to work out their own solutions to the First Heterosexual Problem. These have been, of course, various and ingenious; but in all cases so far, to avoid conception you have to do something or have done something or take something or use something—unless you have sex with the Hainish.

  Zhiv had been outraged when a girl from Beldene asked him if he was sure he wouldn’t get her pregnant. “How do you know?” she said. “Maybe I should take a zapper just to be safe.” Insulted in the quick of his manhood, he disentangled himself, said, “Maybe it is only safe not to be with me,” and stalked out. Nobody else questioned his integrity, fortunately, and he cruised happily on, until he met Tiu.

  She was not an Alien. He had sought out women from offworld; sleeping with Aliens added exoticism to transgression, or, as he put it, was an enrichment of knowledge such as every historian should seek. But Tiu was Hainish. She had been born and brought up in Darranda, as had her ancestors before her. She was a child of the Historians as he was a child of the People. He realised very soon that this bond and division was far greater than any mere foreignness: that their unlikeness was true difference and their likeness was true kinship. She was the country he had left his own country to discover. She was what he sought to be. She was what he sought.

  What she had—so it seemed to him—was perfect equilibrium. When he was with her he felt that for the first time in his life he was learning to walk. To walk as she did: effortless, unself-conscious as an animal, and yet conscious, careful, keeping in mind all that might unbalance her and using it as tightrope walkers use their long poles. . . . This, he thought, this is a dweller in true freedom of mind, this is a woman free to be fully human, this perfect measure, this perfect grace.

  He was utterly happy when he was with her. For a long time he asked nothing beyond that, to be with her. And for a long time she was wary of him, gentle but distant. He thought she had every right to keep her distance. A pueblo boy, a fellow who couldn’t tell his uncle from his father—he knew what he was, here, in the eyes of the ill-natured and the insecure. Despite their vast knowledge of human ways of being, historians retained the vast human capacity for bigotry. Tiu had no such prejudices, but what did he have to offer her? She had and was everything. She was complete. Why should she look at him? If she would only let him look at her, be with her, it was all he wanted.

  She looked at him, liked him, found him appealing and a little frightening. She saw how he wanted her, how he needed her, how he had made her into the center of his life and did not even know it. That would not do. She tried to be cold, to turn him away. He obeyed. He did not plead. He stayed away.

  But after fifteen days he came to her and said, “Tiu, I cannot live without you,” and knowing that he was speaking the plain truth she said, “Then live with me a while.” For she had missed the passion his presence filled the air with. Everybody else seemed so tame, so balanced.

  Their lovemaking was an immediate, immense, and continual delight. Tiu was amazed at herself, at her obsession with Zhiv, at her letting him pull her out of her orbit so far. She had never expected to adore anybody, let alone to be adored. She had led an orderly life, in which the controls were individual and internal, not social and external as they had been in Zhiv’s life in Stse. She knew what she wanted to be and do. There was a direction in her, a true north, that she would always follow. Their first year together was a series of continual shifts and changes in their relationship, a kind of exciting love dance, unpredictable and ecstatic. Very gradually, she began to resist the tension, the intensity, the ecstasy. It was lovely but it wasn’t righ
t, she thought. She wanted to go on. That constant direction began to pull her away from him again; and then he fought for his life against it.

  That was what he was doing, after a long day’s hike in the Desert of Asu Asi on Ve, in their miraculously warm Gethenian-made tent. A dry, icy wind moaned among cliffs of crimson stone above them, polished by the endless winds to a shine like lacquer and carved by a lost civilization with lines of some vast geometry.

  They might have been brother and sister, as they sat in the glow of the Chabe stove: their red-bronze coloring was the same, their thick, glossy, black hair, their fine, compact body type. The pueblan decorum and quietness of Zhiv’s movements and voice met in her an articulate, quicker, more vivid response.

  But she spoke now slowly, almost stiffly.

  “Don’t force me to choose, Zhiv,” she said. “Ever since I started in the Schools I’ve wanted to go to Terra. Since before. When I was a kid. All my life. Now they offer me what I want, what I’ve worked for. How can you ask me to refuse?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But you want me to put it off. If I do, I may lose the chance forever. Probably not. But why risk it—for one year? You can follow me next year!”

  He said nothing.

  “If you want to,” she added stiffly. She was always too ready to forgo her claim on him. Perhaps she had never believed fully in his love for her. She did not think of herself as lovable, as worthy of his passionate loyalty. She was frightened by it, felt inadequate, false. Her self-respect was an intellectual thing. “You make a god of me,” she had told him, and did not understand when he replied with happy seriousness, “We make the god together.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said now. “It’s a different form of reason. Superstition, if you like. I can’t help it, Tiu. Terra is a hundred and forty light-years away. If you go, when you get there, I’ll be dead.”

  “You will not! You’ll have lived another year here, you’ll be on your way there, you’ll arrive a year after I do!”

  “I know that. Even in Stse we learned that,” he said patiently. “But I’m superstitious. We die to each other if you go. Even in Kathhad you learned that.”

  “I didn’t. It’s not true. How can you ask me to give up this chance for what you admit is a superstition? Be fair, Zhiv!”

  After a long silence, he nodded.

  She sat stricken, understanding that she had won. She had won badly.

  She reached across to him, trying to comfort him and herself. She was scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But it wasn’t betrayal—she rejected the word at once. She wouldn’t betray him. They were in love. They loved each other. He would follow her in a year, two years at the most. They were adults, they must not cling together like children. Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust. She told herself all these things as she said them to him. He said yes, and held her, and comforted her. In the night, in the utter silence of the desert, the blood singing in his ears, he lay awake and thought, “It has died unborn. It was never conceived.”

  They stayed together in their little apartment at the School for the few more weeks before Tiu left. They made love cautiously, gently, talked about history and economics and ethnology, kept busy. Tiu had to prepare herself to work with the team she was going with, studying the Terran concepts of hierarchy; Zhiv had a paper to write on social-energy generation on Werel. They worked hard. Their friends gave Tiu a big farewell party. The next day Zhiv went with her to Ve Port. She kissed and held him, telling him to hurry, hurry and come to Terra. He saw her board the flyer that would take her up to the NAFAL ship waiting in orbit. He went back to the apartment on the South Campus of the School. There a friend found him three days later sitting at his desk in a curious condition, passive, speaking very slowly if at all, unable to eat or drink. Being pueblo-born, the friend recognised this state and called in the medicine man (the Hainish do not call them doctors). Having ascertained that he was from one of the Southern pueblos, the medicine man said, “Hav­zhiva! The god cannot die in you here!”

  After a long silence the young man said softly in a voice which did not sound like his voice, “I need to go home.”

  “That is not possible now,” said the medicine man. “But we can arrange a Staying Chant while I find a person able to address the god.” He promptly put out a call for students who were ex–People of the South. Four responded. They sat all night with Hav­zhiva singing the Staying Chant in two languages and four dialects, until Hav­zhiva joined them in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarsely, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.

  He woke in his own room. An old woman was having a conversation with nobody beside him. “You aren’t here,” she said. “No, you are mistaken. You can’t die here. It would not be right, it would be quite wrong. You know that. This is the wrong place. This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the way home? Here it is. Listen.” She began singing in a thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless song that was familiar to Hav­zhiva, as if he had heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old woman went on talking to nobody.

  When he woke again she was gone. He never knew who she was or where she came from; he never asked. She had spoken and sung in his own language, in the dialect of Stse.

  He was not going to die now, but he was very unwell. The medicine man ordered him to the Hospital at Tes, the most beautiful place on all Ve, an oasis where hot springs and sheltering hills make a mild local climate and flowers and forests can grow. There are paths endlessly winding under great trees, warm lakes where you can swim forever, little misty ponds from which birds rise crying, steam-shrouded hot springs, and a thousand waterfalls whose voices are the only sound all night. There he was sent to stay till he was recovered.

  He began to speak into his noter, after he had been at Tes twenty days or so; he would sit in the sunlight on the doorstep of his cottage in a glade of grasses and ferns and talk quietly to himself by way of the little recording machine. “What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything,” he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. “What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible, rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is partial—infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection of . . .” His voice ceased; the silence of the glade among the great trees continued.

  After forty-five days he returned to the School. He took a new apartment. He changed fields, leaving social science, Tiu’s field, for Ekumenical service training, which was intellectually closely related but led to a different kind of work. The change would lengthen his time at the School by at least a year, after which if he did well he could hope for a post with the Ekumen. He did well, and after two years was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical councils, if he would care to go to Werel. Yes, he said, he would. His friends gave a big farewell party for him.

  “I thought you were aiming for Terra,” said one of his less­astute classmates. “All that stuff about war and slavery and class and caste and gender—isn’t that Terran history?”

  “It’s current events in Werel,” Hav­zhiva said.

  He was no longer Zhiv. He had come back from the Hospital as Hav­zhiva.

  Somebody else was stepping on the unastute classmate’s foot, but she paid no attention. “I thought you were going to follow Tiu,” she said. “I thought that’s why you never slept with anybody. God, if I’d only known!” The others winced, but Hav­zhiva smiled and hugged her apologetically.

  In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had betrayed and forsaken Iyan Iyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no goi
ng back and no going forward. So he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.

  He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.

  The medicine man came to visit him the day before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a while saying nothing. Hav­zhiva sat with him. He had long been used to silence, and still sometimes forgot that it was not customary among historians.

  “What’s wrong?” the medicine man said. It seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its meditative tone; at any rate, Hav­zhiva made no answer.

  “Please stand up,” the medicine man said, and when Hav­zhiva had done so, “Now walk a little.” He walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him. “You’re out of balance,” he said. “Did you know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could get a Staying Chant together this evening.”

  “It’s all right,” Hav­zhiva said. “I’ve always been off-balance.”

  “There’s no need to be,” the medicine man said. “On the other hand, maybe it’s best, since you’re going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life.”