A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “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 Bet-ton’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 Tai’s 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 burn 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 inte
raction 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 non-existence, into silence. “What happened?” they asked. “What happened?” And the Shobies looked at one another and said, “Well, it’s quite a story….”

  DANCING TO GANAM

  “Power is the great drumming,” Aketa said. “The thunder. The noise of the waterfall that makes the electricity. It fills you till there’s no room for anything else.”

  Ket poured a few drops of water onto the ground, murmuring, “Drink, traveler.” She sprinkled pollen meal over the ground, murmuring, “Eat, traveler.” She looked up at Iyananam, the mountain of power. “Maybe he only listened to the thunder, and couldn’t hear anything else,” she said. “Do you think he knew what he was doing?”

  “I think he knew what he was doing,” Aketa said.

  Since the successful though problematic transilience of the Shoby to and from a nasty little planet called M-60-340-nolo, a whole wing of Ve Port had been given over to churten technology. The originators of churten theory on Anarres and the engineers
of transilience on Urras communicated constantly by ansible with the theorists and engineers on Ve, who set up experiments and investigations designed to find out what, in fact, happened when a ship and its crew went from one place in the universe to another without taking any time at all to do so. “You cannot say ‘went,’ you cannot say ‘happened,’“ the Cetians chided. “It is here not there in one moment and in that same moment it is there not here. The non-interval is called, in our language, churten.”

  Interlocking with these circles of Cetian temporalists were circles of Hainish psychologists, investigating and arguing about what, in fact, happened when intelligent life-forms experienced the churten. “You cannot say ‘in fact,’ you cannot say ‘experienced,’“ they chided. “The reality point of ‘arrival’ for a churten crew is obtained by mutual perception-comparison and adjustment, so that for thinking beings construction of event is essential to effective transilience,” and so on, and on, for the Hainish have been talking for a million years and have never got tired of it. But they are also fond of listening, and they listened to what the crew of the Shoby had to tell them. And when Commander Dalzul arrived, they listened to him.

  “You have to send one man alone,” he said. “The problem is interference. There were ten people on the Shoby. Send one man. Send me.”

  “You ought to go with Shan,” Betton said.