“Well, I don’t know—I don’t know of any,” said my mother, gentle and judicious, and never happy at saying no to me. “But you do have to find the woman, you know.”
“I know,” I said glumly.
“It’s such a problem for you to meet people,” she said. “Perhaps if you went to the fuckery . . . ? I don’t see why your own motherhouse couldn’t guarantee you just as well as a castle. We could try—?”
But I passionately refused. Not being one of Fassaw’s sycophants, I had seldom been allowed to go to the fuckery; and my few experiences there had been unfortunate. Young, inexperienced, and without recommendation, I had been selected by older women who wanted a plaything. Their practiced skill at arousing me had left me humiliated and enraged. They patted and tipped me as they left. That elaborate, mechanical excitation and their condescending coldness were vile to me, after the tenderness of my lover-protectors in the Castle. Yet women attracted me physically as men never had; the beautiful bodies of my sisters and their wives, all around me constantly now, clothed and naked, innocent and sensual, the wonderful heaviness and strength and softness of women’s bodies, kept me continually aroused. Every night I masturbated, fantasising my sisters in my arms. It was unendurable. Again I was a ghost, a raging, yearning impotence in the midst of untouchable reality.
I began to think I would have to go back to the Castle. I sank into a deep depression, an inertia, a chill darkness of the mind.
My family, anxious, affectionate, busy, had no idea what to do for me or with me. I think most of them thought in their hearts that it would be best if I went back through the gate.
One afternoon my sister Pado, with whom I had been closest as a child, came to my room—they had cleared out a dormer attic for me, so that I had room at least in the literal sense. She found me in my now constant lethargy, lying on the bed doing nothing at all. She breezed in, and with the indifference women often show to moods and signals, plumped down on the foot of the bed and said, “Hey, what do you know about the man who’s here from the Ekumen?”
I shrugged and shut my eyes. I had been having rape fantasies lately. I was afraid of her.
She talked on about the offworlder, who was apparently in Rakedr to study the Mutiny. “He wants to talk to the resistance,” she said. “Men like you. The men who opened the gates. He says they won’t come forward, as if they were ashamed of being heroes.”
“Heroes!” I said. The word in my language is gendered female. It refers to the semi-divine, semi-historic protagonists of the Epics.
“It’s what you are,” Pado said, intensity breaking through her assumed breeziness. “You took responsibility in a great act. Maybe you did it wrong. Sassume did it wrong in the Founding of Emmo, didn’t she, she let Faradr get killed. But she was still a hero. She took the responsibility. So did you. You ought to go talk to this Alien. Tell him what happened. Nobody really knows what happened at the Castle. You owe us the story.”
That was a powerful phrase, among my people. “The untold story mothers the lie,” was the saying. The doer of any notable act was held literally accountable for it to the community.
“So why should I tell it to an Alien?” I said, defensive of my inertia.
“Because he’ll listen,” my sister said drily. “We’re all too damned busy.”
It was profoundly true. Pado had seen a gate for me and opened it; and I went through it, having just enough strength and sanity left to do so.
Mobile Noem was a man in his forties, born some centuries earlier on Terra, trained on Hain, widely travelled; a small, yellow-brown, quick-eyed person, very easy to talk to. He did not seem at all masculine to me, at first; I kept thinking he was a woman, because he acted like one. He got right to business, with none of the maneuvering to assert his authority or jockeying for position that men of my society felt obligatory in any relationship with another man. I was used to men being wary, indirect, and competitive. Noem, like a woman, was direct and receptive. He was also as subtle and powerful as any man or woman I had known, even Ragaz. His authority was in fact immense; but he never stood on it. He sat down on it, comfortably, and invited you to sit down with him.
I was the first of the Rakedr mutineers to come forward and tell our story to him. He recorded it, with my permission, to use in making his report to the Stabiles on the condition of our society, “the matter of Seggri,” as he called it. My first description of the Mutiny took less than an hour. I thought I was done. I didn’t know, then, the inexhaustible desire to learn, to understand, to hear all the story, that characterises the Mobiles of the Ekumen. Noem asked questions, I answered; he speculated and extrapolated, I corrected; he wanted details, I furnished them—telling the story of the Mutiny, of the years before it, of the men of the Castle, of the women of the Town, of my people, of my life—little by little, bit by bit, all in fragments, a muddle. I talked to Noem daily for a month. I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.
By the end of the month I had come to love and trust Noem, and of course to depend on him. Talking to him had become my reason for being. I tried to face the fact that he would not stay in Rakedr much longer. I must learn to do without him. Do what? There were things for men to do, ways for men to live, he proved it by his mere existence; but could I find them?
He was keenly aware of my situation, and would not let me withdraw, as I began to do, into the lethargy of fear again; he would not let me be silent. He asked me impossible questions. “What would you be if you could be anything?” he asked me, a question children ask each other.
I answered at once, passionately—“A wife!”
I know now what the flicker that crossed his face was. His quick, kind eyes watched me, looked away, looked back.
“I want my own family,” I said. “Not to live in my mothers’ house, where I’m always a child. Work. A wife, wives—children—to be a mother. I want life, not games!”
“You can’t bear a child,” he said gently.
“No, but I can mother one!”
“We gender the word,” he said. “I like it better your way. . . . But tell me, Ardar, what are the chances of your marrying—meeting a woman willing to marry a man? It hasn’t happened, here, has it?”
I had to say no, not to my knowledge.
“It will happen, certainly, I think,” he said (his certainties were always uncertain). “But the personal cost, at first, is likely to be high. Relationships formed against the negative pressure of a society are under terrible strain; they tend to become defensive, over-intense, unpeaceful. They have no room to grow.”
“Room!” I said. And I tried to tell him my feeling of having no room in my world, no air to breathe.
He looked at me, scratching his nose; he laughed. “There’s plenty of room in the galaxy, you know,” he said.
“Do you mean . . . I could . . . That the Ekumen . . .” I didn’t even know what the question I wanted to ask was. Noem did. He began to answer it thoughtfully and in detail. My education so far had been so limited, even as regards the culture of my own people, that I would have to attend a college for at least two or three years, in order to be ready to apply to an offworld institution such as the Ekumenical Schools on Hain. Of course, he went on, where I went and what kind of training I chose would depend on my interests, which I would go to a college to discover, since neither my schooling as a child nor my training at the Castle had really given me any idea of what there was to be interested in. The choices offered me had been unbelievably limited, addressing neither the needs of a normally intelligent person nor the needs of my society. And so the Open Gate Law instead of giving me freedom had left me “with no air to breathe but airless Space,” said Noem, quoting some poet from some planet somewhere. My head was spinning, full of stars. “Hagka College is quite near Rakedr,” Noem said, “did you never think of applying? If only to escape from yo
ur terrible Castle?”
I shook my head. “Lord Fassaw always destroyed the application forms when they were sent to his office. If any of us had tried to apply . . .”
“You would have been punished. Tortured, I suppose. Yes. Well, from the little I know of your colleges, I think your life there would be better than it is here, but not altogether pleasant. You will have work to do, a place to be; but you will be made to feel marginal, inferior. Even highly educated, enlightened women have difficulty accepting men as their intellectual equals. Believe me, I have experienced it myself! And because you were trained at the Castle to compete, to want to excel, you may find it hard to be among people who either believe you incapable of excellence, or to whom the concept of competition, of winning and defeating, is valueless. But just there, there is where you will find air to breathe.”
Noem recommended me to women he knew on the faculty of Hagka College, and I was enrolled on probation. My family were delighted to pay my tuition. I was the first of us to go to college, and they were genuinely proud of me.
As Noem had predicted, it was not always easy, but there were enough other men there that I found friends and was not caught in the paralysing isolation of the motherhouse. And as I took courage, I made friends among the women students, finding many of them unprejudiced and companionable. In my third year, one of them and I managed, tentatively and warily, to fall in love. It did not work very well or last very long, yet it was a great liberation for both of us, our liberation from the belief that the only communication or commonality possible between us was sexual, that an adult man and woman had nothing to join them but their genitals. Emadr loathed the professionalism of the fuckery as I did, and our lovemaking was always shy and brief. Its true significance was not as a consummation of desire, but as proof that we could trust each other. Where our real passion broke loose was when we lay together talking, telling each other what our lives had been, how we felt about men and women and each other and ourselves, what our nightmares were, what our dreams were. We talked endlessly, in a communion that I will cherish and honor all my life, two young souls finding their wings, flying together, not for long, but high. The first flight is the highest.
Emadr has been dead two hundred years; she stayed on Seggri, married into a motherhouse, bore two children, taught at Hagka, and died in her seventies. I went to Hain, to the Ekumenical Schools, and later to Werel and Yeowe as part of the Mobile’s staff; my record is herewith enclosed. I have written this sketch of my life as part of my application to return to Seggri as a Mobile of the Ekumen. I want very much to live among my people, to learn who they are, now that I know with at least an uncertain certainty who I am.
ANOTHER STORY
OR A FISHERMAN
OF THE INLAND SEA
To the Stabiles of the Ekumen on Hain, and to Gvonesh, Director of the Churten Field Laboratories at Ve Port: from Tiokunan’n Kideo, Farmholder of the Second Sedoretu of Udan, Derdan’nad, Oket, on O.
I SHALL MAKE MY REPORT as if I told a story, this having been the tradition for some time now. You may, however, wonder why a farmer on the planet O is reporting to you as if he were a Mobile of the Ekumen. My story will explain that. But it does not explain itself. Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe.
So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship Terraces of Darranda to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.
The distance between Hain and my home world is just over four light-years, and there has been traffic between O and the Hainish system for twenty centuries. Even before the Nearly As Fast As Light drive, when ships spent a hundred years of planetary time instead of four to make the crossing, there were people who would give up their old life to come to a new world. Sometimes they returned; not often. There were tales of such sad returns to a world that had forgotten the voyager. I knew also from my mother a very old story called “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” which came from her home world, Terra. The life of a ki’O child is full of stories, but of all I heard told by her and my othermother and my fathers and grandparents and uncles and aunts and teachers, that one was my favorite. Perhaps I liked it so well because my mother told it with deep feeling, though very plainly, and always in the same words (and I would not let her change the words if she ever tried to).
The story tells of a poor fisherman, Urashima, who went out daily in his boat alone on the quiet sea that lay between his home island and the mainland. He was a beautiful young man with long, black hair, and the daughter of the king of the sea saw him as he leaned over the side of the boat and she gazed up to see the floating shadow cross the wide circle of the sky.
Rising from the waves, she begged him to come to her palace under the sea with her. At first he refused, saying, “My children wait for me at home.” But how could he resist the sea king’s daughter? “One night,” he said. She drew him down with her under the water, and they spent a night of love in her green palace, served by strange undersea beings. Urashima came to love her dearly, and maybe he stayed more than one night only. But at last he said, “My dear, I must go. My children wait for me at home.”
“If you go, you go forever,” she said.
“I will come back,” he promised.
She shook her head. She grieved, but did not plead with him. “Take this with you,” she said, giving him a little box, wonderfully carved, and sealed shut. “Do not open it, Urashima.”
So he went up onto the land, and ran up the shore to his village, to his house: but the garden was a wilderness, the windows were blank, the roof had fallen in. People came and went among the familiar houses of the village, but he did not know a single face. “Where are my children?” he cried. An old woman stopped and spoke to him: “What is your trouble, young stranger?”
“I am Urashima, of this village, but I see no one here I know!”
“Urashima!” the woman said—and my mother would look far away, and her voice as she said the name made me shiver, tears starting to my eyes—“Urashima! My grandfather told me a fisherman named Urashima was lost at sea, in the time of his grandfather’s grandfather. There has been no one of that family alive for a hundred years.”
So Urashima went back down to the shore; and there he opened the box, the gift of the sea king’s daughter. A little white smoke came out of it and drifted away on the sea wind. In that moment Urashima’s black hair turned white, and he grew old, old, old; and he lay down on the sand and died.
Once, I remember, a traveling teacher asked my mother about the fable, as he called it. She smiled and said, “In the Annals of the Emperors of my nation of Terra it is recorded that a young man named Urashima, of the Yosa district, went away in the year 477, and came back to his village in the year 825, but soon departed again. And I have heard that the box was kept in a shrine for many centuries.” Then they talked about something else.
My mother, Isako, would not tell the story as often as I demanded it. “That one is so sad,” she would say, and tell instead about Grandmother and the rice dumpling that rolled away, or the painted cat who came alive and killed the demon rats, or the peach boy who floated down the river. My sister and my germanes, and older people, too, listened to her tales as closely as I did. They were new stories on O, and a new story is always a treasure. The painted cat story was the general favorite, especially when my mother would take out her brush and the block of strange, black, dry ink from Terra, and sketch the animals—cat, rat—that none of us had ever seen: the wonderful cat with arched back and brave round eyes, the fanged and skulking rats, “pointed at both ends” as my sister said. But I waited always, through all other stories, for her to catch my eye, look away, smile a little and sigh, and begin, “Long, long ago, on the shore of the Inland Sea there lived a fisherman . . . ”
Did I know then what that story meant to her? that it was her story? that if she were to return to her village, her world, all the peop
le she had known would have been dead for centuries?
Certainly I knew that she “came from another world,” but what that meant to me as a five-, or seven-, or ten-year-old, is hard for me now to imagine, impossible to remember. I knew that she was a Terran and had lived on Hain; that was something to be proud of. I knew that she had come to O as a Mobile of the Ekumen (more pride, vague and grandiose) and that “your father and I fell in love at the Festival of Plays in Sudiran.” I knew also that arranging the marriage had been a tricky business. Getting permission to resign her duties had not been difficult—the Ekumen is used to Mobiles going native. But as a foreigner, Isako did not belong to a ki’O moiety, and that was only the first problem. I heard all about it from my othermother, Tubdu, an endless source of family history, anecdote, and scandal. “You know,” Tubdu told me when I was eleven or twelve, her eyes shining and her irrepressible, slightly wheezing, almost silent laugh beginning to shake her from the inside out—“you know, she didn’t even know women got married? Where she came from, she said, women don’t marry.”
I could and did correct Tubdu: “Only in her part of it. She told me there’s lots of parts of it where they do.” I felt obscurely defensive of my mother, though Tubdu spoke without a shadow of malice or contempt; she adored Isako. She had fallen in love with her “the moment I saw her—that black hair! that mouth!”—and simply found it endearingly funny that such a woman could have expected to marry only a man.
“I understand,” Tubdu hastened to assure me. “I know—on Terra it’s different, their fertility was damaged, they have to think about marrying for children. And they marry in twos, too. Oh, poor Isako! How strange it must have seemed to her! I remember how she looked at me—” And off she went again into what we children called The Great Giggle, her joyous, silent, seismic laughter.
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