A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  His mother shook her head.

  “It’s dumb not to go!”

  “If they don’t want you, they don’t get me,” she said.

  The boy knew better than to hug her, or say anything much. But he did something he seldom did: he made a joke. “You’d be back in no time,” he said.

  “Oh, get along,” Tai said.

  Shan knew that the Hainish did not wear uniforms and did not use status indicators such as “Commander.” But he put on his black-and-silver uniform of the Terran Ekumen to meet Commander Dalzul.

  Born in the barracks of Alberta in the earliest years of Terra’s membership in the Ekumen, Dalzul took a degree in temporal physics at the University of A-Io on Urras and trained with the Stabiles on Hain before returning to his native planet as a Mobile of the Ekumen of the Worlds. During the sixty-seven years of his near-lightspeed journey, a troublesome religious movement escalated into the horrors of the Unist Revolution. Dalzul got the situation under control within months, by a combination of acumen and tactics that won him the respect of those he worked for, and the worship of those he had worked against—for the Unist Fathers decided he was God. The worldwide slaughter of unbelievers devolved into a worldwide novena of adoration of the New Manifestation, before devolving further into schisms and sects intent mainly on killing one another. Dalzul had defused the worst resurgence of theocratic violence since the Time of Pollution. He had acted with grace, with wit, with patience, reliability, resilience, trickiness, and good humor, with all the means the Ekumen most honored.

  As he could not work on Terra, being prey to deification, he was given obscure but significant tasks on obscure but significant planets; one of them was Orint, the only world from which the Ekumen had yet withdrawn. They did so on Dalzul’s advice, shortly before the Orintians destroyed sentient life on their world by the use of pathogens in war. Dalzul had foretold the event with terrible and compassionate accuracy. He had set up the secret, last-minute rescue of a few thousand children whose parents were willing to let them go; Dalzul’s Children, these last of the Orintians were called.

  Shan knew that heroes were phenomena of primitive cultures; but Terra’s culture was primitive, and Dalzul was his hero.

  Tai read the message from Ve Port with disbelief. “What kind of crew is that?” she said. “Who asks parents to leave their kid?”

  Then she looked up at Shan, and saw his face.

  “It’s Dalzul,” he said. “He wants us. In his crew.”

  “Go,” Tai said.

  He argued, of course, but Tai was on the hero’s side. He went. And for the reception at which he was to meet Dalzul, he wore the black uniform with the silver thread down the sleeves and the one silver circle over the heart.

  The commander wore the same uniform. When he saw him Shan’s heart leaped and thudded. Inevitably, Dalzul was shorter than Shan had imagined him: he was not three meters tall. But otherwise he was as he should be, erect and lithe, the long, light hair going grey pulled back from a magnificent, vivid face, the eyes as clear as water. Shan had not realized how white-skinned Dalzul was, but the deformity or atavism was minor and could even be seen as having its own beauty. Dalzul’s voice was warm and quiet; he laughed as he talked to a group of excited Anarresti. He saw Shan, turned, came straight to him. “At last! You’re Shan, I’m Dalzul, we’re shipmates. I am truly sorry your partner couldn’t be one of us. But her replacements are old friends of yours, I think—Forest and Riel.”

  Shan was delighted to see the two familiar faces, Forest’s an obsidian knife with watchful eyes, Riel’s round and shining as a copper sun. He had been in training on Ollul with them. They greeted him with equal pleasure. “This is wonderful,” he said, and then, “So we’re all Terrans?”—a stupid question, since the fact was obvious; but the Ekumen generally favored mixing cultures in a crew.

  “Come on out of this,” Dalzul said, “and I’ll explain.” He signaled a mezklete, which trotted over, proudly pushing a little cart laden with drinks and food. They filled trays, thanked the mezklete, and found themselves a deep windowseat well away from the noisy throng. There they sat and ate and drank and talked and listened. Dalzul did not try to hide his passionate conviction that he was on the right track to solve the “churten problem.”

  “I’ve gone out twice alone,” he said. He lowered his voice slightly as he spoke, and Shan began naively, “Without—?” and stopped.

  Dalzul grinned. “No, no. With the permission of the Churten Research Group. But not really with their blessing. That’s why I tend to whisper and look over my shoulder. There are still some CRG people here who make me feel as if I’d stolen their ship—scoffed at their theories—violated their shifgrethor—peed on their shoes—even after the ship and I round-tripped with no churten problems, no perceptual dissonances at all.”

  “Where?” Forest asked, blade-sharp face intent.

  “First trip, inside this system, from Ve to Hain and back. A bus trip. Everything known, expectable. It was absolutely without incident—as expected. I’m here: I’m there. I leave the ship to check in with the Stabiles, get back in the ship, and I’m here. Hey presto! It is magic, you know. And yet it seems so natural. Where one is, one is. Did you feel that, Shan?”

  The clear eyes were amazing in their intensity. It was like being looked at by lightning. Shan wanted to be able to agree, but had to stammer, “I—we, you know, we had some trouble deciding where we were.”

  “I think that that’s unnecessary, that confusion. Transilience is a non-experience. I think that normally, nothing happens. Literally nothing. Extraneous events got mixed into it in the Shoby experiment—your interval was queered. This time, I think we can have a non-experience.” He looked at Forest and Riel and laughed. “You’ll not-see what I don’t mean,” he said. “Anyhow, after the bus trip, I hung about annoying them persistently until Gvonesh agreed to let me do a solo exploratory.”

  The mezklete bustled up to them, pushing its little cart with its furry paws. Mezkletes love parties, love to give food, love to serve drinks and watch their humans get weird. It stayed about hopefully for a while to see if they would get weird, then bustled back to the Anarresti theorists, who were always weird.

  “An exploratory—a first contact?”

  Dalzul nodded. His strength and unconscious dignity were daunting, and yet his delight, his simple glee, in what he had done was irresistible. Shan had met brilliant people and wise people, but never one whose energy shone so bright, so clear, so vulnerable.

  “We chose a distant one. G-14-214-yomo; it was Tadkla on the maps of the Expansion; the people I met there call it Ganam. A preliminary Ekumen mission is actually on its way there at NAFAL speed. Left Ollul eight years ago, and will get there thirteen years from herenow. Of course there was no way to communicate with them while they’re in transit, to tell them I was going to be there ahead of them. The CRG thought it a good idea that somebody would be dropping in after thirteen years. In case I didn’t report back, maybe they could find out what happened. But it looks now as if the mission will arrive to find Ganam already a member of the Ekumen!” He looked at them all, alight with passion and intention. “You know, churten is going to change everything. When transilience replaces space travel—all travel—when there is no distance between worlds—when we control interval—I keep trying to imagine, to understand what it will mean, to the Ekumen, to us. We’ll be able to make the household of humankind truly one house, one place. But then it goes still deeper! In transilience what we do is to rejoin, restore the primal moment, the beat that is the rhythm…. To rejoin unity. To escape time. To use eternity! You’ve been there, Shan—you felt what I’m trying to say?”

  “I don’t know,” Shan said, “yes—”

  “Do you want to see the tape of my trip?” Dalzul asked abruptly, his eyes shining with a flicker of mischief. “I brought a handview.”

  “Yes!” Forest and Riel said, and they crowded in around him in the windowseat like a bunch of con
spirators. The mezklete tried in vain to see what they were doing, but was too short, even when it got up on its cart.

  While he programmed the little viewer, Dalzul told them briefly about Ganam. One of the outermost seedings of the Hainish Expansion, the world had been lost from the human community for five hundred millennia; nothing was known about it except that it might have a population descended from human ancestors. If it did, the Ekumenical ship on its way to it would in the normal way have observed from orbit for a long time before sending down a few observers, to hide, or to pass if possible, or to reveal their mission if necessary, while gathering information, learning languages and customs, and so on—a process usually of many years. All this had been short-circuited by the unpredictability of the new technology. Dalzul’s small ship had come out of churten not in the stratosphere as intended, but in the atmosphere, about a hundred meters above the ground.

  “I didn’t have the chance to make an unobtrusive entrance on the scene,” he said. The audiovisual record his ship’s instruments had made came up on the little screen as he spoke. They saw the grey plains of Ve Port dropping away as the ship left the planet. “Now,” Dalzul said, and in one instant they saw the stars blaze in black space and the yellow walls and orange roofs of a city, the blaze of sunlight on a canal.

  “You see?” Dalzul murmured. “Nothing happens.”

  The city tilted and settled, sunny streets and squares full of people, all of them looking up and pointing, unmistakably shouting, “Look! Look!”

  “Decided I might as well accept the situation,” Dalzul said. Trees and grass rose up around the ship as he brought it on down. People were already hurrying out of the city, human people: terra-cotta-colored, rather massively built, with broad faces, bare-armed, barefoot, wearing kilts and gilets in splendid colors, men with great gold earrings, headdresses of basketry, gold wire, feather plumes.

  “The Gaman,” Dalzul said. “The people of Ganam… Grand, aren’t they? And they don’t waste time. They were there within half an hour—there, that’s Ket, see her, that stunning woman?—Since the ship was obviously fairly alarming, I decided that the first point to make was my defenselessness.”

  They saw what he meant, as the ship’s camera recorded his exit. He walked slowly out on the grass and stood still, facing the gathering crowd. He was naked. Unarmed, unclothed, alone, he stood there, the fierce sun bright on his white skin and silvery hair, his hands held wide and open in the gesture of offering.

  The pause was very long. Talk and exclamation among the Gaman died out as people came near the front of the crowd. Dalzul, in the center of the camera’s field, stood easily, motionless. Then—Shan drew breath sharply as he watched—a woman came forward towards him. She was tall and strongly built, with round arms, black eyes above high cheekbones. Her hair was braided with gold into a coronet on her head. She stood before Dalzul and spoke, her voice clear and full. The words sounded like poetry, like ritual questions, Shan thought. Dalzul responded by bringing his hands toward his heart, then opening them again wide, palm up.

  The woman gazed at him a while, then spoke one resonant word. Slowly, with a grave formality, she slipped the dark red gilet from her breasts and shoulders, untied her kilt and dropped it aside with a splendid, conscious gesture, and stood naked before the naked man.

  She reached out her hand. Dalzul took it.

  They walked away from the ship, towards the city. The crowd closed in behind them and followed them, still quiet, without haste or confusion, as if performing actions they had performed before.

  A few people, mostly adolescents, stayed behind, looking at the ship, daring each other to come closer, curious, cautious, but not frightened.

  Dalzul stopped the tape.

  “You see,” he said to Shan, “the difference?”

  Shan, awed, did not speak.

  “What the Shoby’s crew discovered,” Dalzul said to the three of them, “is that individual experiences of transilience can be made coherent only by a concerted effort. An effort to synchronize—to entrain. When they realized that, they were able to pull out of an increasingly dangerously fragmented perception of where they were and what was happening. Right, Shan?”

  “They call it the chaos experience now,” Shan said, subdued by the memory of it, and by the difference of Dalzul’s experience.

  “The temporalists and psychologists have sweated a lot of theory out of the Shoby trip,” Dalzul said. “My reading of it is pitifully simple: that a great deal of the perceptual dissonance, the anguish and incoherence, was an effect of the disparity of the Shoby crew. No matter how well you had crew-bonded, Shan, you were ten people from four worlds—four different cultures—two very old women, and three young children! If the answer to coherent transilience is entrainment, functioning in rhythm, then we’ve got to make entrainment easy. That you achieved it at all was miraculous. The simplest way to achieve it, of course, is to bypass it: to go alone.”

  “Then how do you get a cross-check on the experience?” Forest said.

  “You just saw it: the ship’s record of the landing.”

  “But our instruments on the Shoby went out, or were totally erratic,” Shan said. “The readings are as incoherent as our perceptions were.”

  “Exactly! You and the instruments were all in one entrainment field, fouling each other up. But when just two or three of you went down onto the planet’s surface, things were better: the lander functioned perfectly, and its tapes of the surface are clear. Although very ugly.”

  Shan laughed. “Ugly, yes. A sort of shit-planet. But, Commander, even on the tapes it never is clear who actually went out onto the surface. And that was one of the most chaotic parts of the whole experience. I went down with Gveter and Betton. The surface under the ship was unstable, so I called them back to the lander and we went back up to the ship. That all seems coherent. But Gveter’s perception was that he went down with Betton and Tai, not me, heard Tai call him from the ship, and came back with Betton and me. As for Betton, he went down with Tai and me. He saw his mother walk away from the lander, ignore the order to return, and be left on the surface. Gveter saw that too. They came back without her and found her waiting for them on the bridge. Tai herself has no memory of going down in the lander. Those four stories are all our evidence. They seem to be equally true, equally untrue. And the tapes don’t help—don’t show who was in the suits. They all look alike in that shit soup on the surface.”

  “That’s it—exactly—” Dalzul said, leaning forward, his face alight. “That murk, that shit, that chaos you saw, which the cameras in your field saw—Think of the difference between that and the tapes we just watched! Sunlight, vivid faces, bright colors, everything brilliant, clear—Because there was no interference, Shan. The Cetians say that in the churten field there is nothing but the deep rhythms, the vibration of the ultimate wave-particles. Transilience is a function of the rhythm that makes being. According to Cetian spiritual physics, it’s access to that rhythm which allows the individual to participate in eternity and ubiquity. My extrapolation from that is that individuals in transilience have to be in nearly perfect synchrony to arrive at the same place with a harmonious—that is, an accurate—perception of it. My intuition, as far as we’ve tested it, has been confirmed: one person can churten sanely. Until we learn what we’re doing, ten persons will inevitably experience chaos, or worse.”

  “And four persons?” Forest inquired, drily.

  “—are the control,” said Dalzul. “Frankly, I’d rather have started out by going on more solos, or with one companion at most. But our friends from Anarres, as you know, are very distrustful of what they call egoizing. To them, morality isn’t accessible to individuals, only to groups. Also, they say, maybe something else went wrong on the Shoby experiment, maybe a group can churten just as well as one person, how do we know till we try? So I compromised. I said, send me with two or three highly compatible and highly motivated companions. Send us back to Ganam and let’s see what we s
ee!”

  “‘Motivated’ is inadequate,” Shan said. “I am committed. I belong to this crew.”

  Riel was nodding; Forest, wary and saturnine, said only, “Are we going to practice entrainment, Commander?”

  “As long as you like,” Dalzul said. “But there are things more important than practice. Do you sing, Forest, or play an instrument?”

  “I can sing,” Forest said, and Riel and Shan nodded as Dalzul looked at them.

  “You know this,” he said, and began softly to sing an old song, a song everybody from the barracks and camps of Terra knew, “Going to the Western Sea.” Riel joined in, then Shan, then Forest in an unexpectedly deep, resonant voice. A few people near them turned to hear the harmonies strike through the gabble of speaking voices. The mezklete came hurrying over, abandoning its cart, its eyes large and bright. They ended the song, smiling, on a long soft chord.

  “That is entrainment,” Dalzul said. “All we need to get to Ganam is music. All there is, in the end, is music.”

  Smiling, Forest and then Riel raised their glasses.

  “To music!” said Shan, feeling drunk and wildly happy.

  “To the crew of the Galba,” said Dalzul, and they drank.

  The minimum crew-bonding period of isyeye was of course observed, and during it they had plenty of time to discuss the churten problem, both with Dalzul and among themselves. They watched the ship’s tapes and reread Dalzul’s records of his brief stay on Ganam till they had them memorized, and then argued about the wisdom of doing so. “We’re simply accepting everything he saw and said as objective fact,” Forest pointed out. “What sort of control can we provide?”

  “His report and the ship’s tapes agree completely,” Shan said.

  “Because, if his theory is correct, he and the instruments were entrained. The reality of the ship and the instruments may be perceivable to us only as perceived by the person, the intelligent being, in transilience. If the Cetians are sure of one thing about churten, it’s that when intelligence is involved in the process they don’t understand it any more. Send out a robot ship, no problem. Send out amoebas and crickets, no problem. Send out high-intelligence beings and all the bets are off. Your ship was part of your reality—your ten different realities. Its instruments obediently recorded the dissonances, or were affected by them to the point of malfunction and nonfunction. Only when you all worked together to construct a joint, coherent reality could the ship begin to respond to it and record it. Right?”