The Left Hand of Darkness
Page 26
I found no reply.
“I’ll receive your…countrymen in audience tomorrow afternoon at Second Hour. Is there more needs saying now?”
“My lord, will you revoke the Order of Exile on Estraven, to clear his name?”
“Not yet, Mr. Ai. Don’t rush it. Anything more?”
“No more.”
“Go on, then.”
Even I betrayed him. I had said I would not bring the ship down till his banishment was ended, his name cleared. I could not throw away what he had died for, by insisting on the condition. It would not bring him out of this exile.
The rest of that day went in arranging with Lord Gorchern and others for the reception and lodging of the ship’s company. At Second Hour we set out by powersledge to Athten Fen, about thirty miles northeast of Erhenrang. The landing site was at the near edge of the great desolate region, a peat-marsh too boggy to be farmed or settled, and now in mid-Irrem a flat frozen waste many feet deep in snow. The radio beacon had been functioning all day, and they had received confirmation signals from the ship.
On the screens, coming in, the crew must have seen the terminator lying clear across the Great Continent along the border, from Guthen Bay to the Gulf of Charisune, and the peaks of the Kargav still in sunlight, a chain of stars; for it was twilight when we, looking up, saw the one star descending.
She came down in a roar and glory, and steam went roaring up white as her stabilizers went down in the great lake of water and mud created by the retro; down underneath the bog there was permafrost like granite, and she came to rest balanced neatly, and sat cooling over the quickly refreezing lake, a great, delicate fish balanced on its tail, dark silver in the twilight of Winter.
Beside me Faxe of Otherhord spoke for the first time since the sound and splendor of the ship’s descent. “I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. So Estraven had said when he looked at the Ice, at death; so he should have said this night. To get away from the bitter regret that beset me I started to walk forward over the snow towards the ship. She was frosted already by the interhull coolants, and as I approached the high port slid open and the exitway was extruded, a graceful curve down onto the ice. The first off was Lang Heo Hew, unchanged, of course, precisely as I had last seen her, three years ago in my life and a couple of weeks in hers. She looked at me, and at Faxe, and at the others of the escort who had followed me, and stopped at the foot of the ramp. She said solemnly in Karhidish, “I have come in friendship.” To her eyes we were all aliens. I let Faxe greet her first.
He indicated me to her, and she came and took my right hand in the fashion of my people, looking into my face. “Oh Genly,” she said, “I didn’t know you!” It was strange to hear a woman’s voice, after so long. The others came out of the ship, on my advice: evidence of any mistrust at this point would humiliate the Karhidish escort, impugning their shifgrethor. Out they came, and met the Karhiders with a beautiful courtesy. But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species: great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer…They took my hand, touched me, held me.
I managed to keep myself in control, and to tell Heo Hew and Tulier what they most urgently needed to know about the situation they had entered, during the sledge-ride back to Erhenrang. When we got to the Palace, however, I had to get to my room at once.
The physician from Sassinoth came in. His quiet voice and his face, a young, serious face, not a man’s face and not a woman’s, a human face, these were a relief to me, familiar, right…But he said, after ordering me to get to bed and dosing me with some mild tranquilizer, “I’ve seen your fellow-Envoys. This is a marvelous thing, the coming of men from the stars. And in my lifetime!”
There again was the delight, the courage, that is most admirable in the Karhidish spirit—and in the human spirit—and though I could not share it with him, to deny it would be a detestable act. I said, without sincerity, but with absolute truth, “It is a marvelous thing indeed for them as well, the coming to a new world, a new mankind.”
At the end of that spring, late in Tuwa when the Thaw-floods were going down and travel was possible again, I took a vacation from my little Embassy in Erhenrang, and went east. My people were spread out by now all over the planet. Since we had been authorized to use the aircars, Heo Hew and three others had taken one and flown over to Sith and the Archipelago, nations of the Sea Hemisphere which I had entirely neglected. Others were in Orgoreyn, and two, reluctant, in Perunter, where the Thaws do not even begin until Tuwa and everything refreezes (they say) a week later. Tulier and Ke’sta were getting on very well in Erhenrang, and could handle what might come up. Nothing was urgent. After all, a ship setting out at once from the closest of Winter’s new allies could not arrive before seventeen years, planetary time, had passed. It is a marginal world, on the edge. Out beyond it towards the South Orion Arm no world has been found where men live. And it is a long way back from Winter to the prime worlds of the Ekumen, the hearth-worlds of our race: fifty years to Hain-Davenant, a man’s lifetime to Earth. No hurry.
I crossed the Kargav, this time on lower passes, on a road that winds along above the coast of the southern sea. I paid a visit to the first village I had stayed in, when the fishermen brought me in from Horden Island three years ago; the folk of that Hearth received me, now as then, without the least surprise. I spent a week in the big port city Thather at the mouth of the River Ench, and then in early summer started on foot into Kerm Land.
I walked east and south into the steep harsh country full of crags and green hills and great rivers and lonely houses, till I came to Icefoot Lake. From the lakeshore looking up southward at the hills I saw a light I knew: the blink, the white suffusion of the sky, the glare of the glacier lying high beyond. The Ice was there.
Estre was a very old place. Its Hearth and outbuildings were all of gray stone cut from the steep mountainside to which it clung. It was bleak, full of the sound of wind.
I knocked and the door was opened. I said, “I ask the hospitality of the Domain. I was a friend of Therem of Estre.”
The one who opened to me, a slight, grave-looking fellow of nineteen or twenty, accepted my words in silence and silently admitted me to the Hearth. He took me to the wash-house, the tiring-rooms, the great kitchen, and when he had seen to it that the stranger was clean, clothed, and fed, he left me to myself in a bedroom that looked down out of deep slit-windows over the gray lake and the gray thore-forests that lie between Estre and Stok. It was a bleak land, a bleak house. Fire roared in the deep hearth, giving as always more warmth for the eye and spirit than for the flesh, for the stone floor and walls, the wind outside blowing down off the mountains and the Ice, drank up most of the heat of the flames. But I did not feel the cold as I used to, my first two years on Winter; I had lived long in a cold land, now.
In an hour or so the boy (he had a girl’s quick delicacy in his looks and movements, but no girl could keep so grim a silence as he did) came to tell me that the Lord of Estre would receive me if it pleased me to come. I followed him downstairs, through long corridors where some kind of game of hide-and-seek was going on. Children shot by us, darted around us, little ones shrieking with excitement, adolescents slipping like shadows from door to door, hands over their mouths to keep laughter still. One fat little thing of five or six caromed into my legs, then plunged and grabbed my escort’s hand for protection. “Sorve!” he squeaked, staring up wide-eyed at me all the time, “Sorve, I’m going to hide in the brewery—!” Off he went like a round pebble from a sling. The young man Sorve, not at all discomposed, led me on and brought me into the Inner Hearth to the Lord of Estre.
Esvans Harth rem ir Estraven was an old man, past seventy, crippled by an arthritic disease of the hips. He sat erect in a rolling-chair by the fire. His face was broad, much blunted and worn down by time, like a rock in a torrent: a calm fac
e, terribly calm.
“You are the Envoy, Genry Ai?”
“I am.”
He looked at me, and I at him. Therem had been the son, child of the flesh, of this old lord. Therem the younger son; Arek the elder, that brother whose voice he had heard in mine bespeaking him; both dead now. I could not see anything of my friend in that worn, calm, hard old face that met my gaze. I found nothing there but the certainty, the sure fact of Therem’s death.
I had come on a fool’s errand to Estre, hoping for solace. There was no solace; and why should a pilgrimage to the place of my friend’s childhood make any difference, fill any absence, soothe any remorse? Nothing could be changed now. My coming to Estre had, however, another purpose, and this I could accomplish.
“I was with your son in the months before his death. I was with him when he died. I’ve brought you the journals he kept. And if there’s anything I can tell you of those days—”
No particular expression showed on the old man’s face. That calmness was not to be altered. But the young one with a sudden movement came out of the shadows into the light between the window and the fire, a bleak uneasy light, and he spoke harshly: “In Erhenrang they still call him Estraven the Traitor.”
The old lord looked at the boy, then at me.
“This is Sorve Harth,” he said, “heir of Estre, my sons’ son.”
There is no ban on incest there, I knew it well enough. Only the strangeness of it, to me a Terran, and the strangeness of seeing the flash of my friend’s spirit in this grim, fierce, provincial boy, made me dumb for a while. When I spoke my voice was unsteady. “The king will recant. Therem was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?”
The old lord nodded slowly, smoothly. “It matters,” he said.
“You crossed the Gobrin Ice together,” Sorve demanded, “you and he?”
“We did.”
“I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy,” said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, “Will you tell us how he died?—Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars—the other kinds of men, the other lives?”
The Gethenian Calendar and Clock
The Year. Gethen’s period of revolution is 8401 Terran Standard Hours, or .96 of the Terran Standard Year.
The period of rotation is 23.08 Terran Standard Hours: the Gethenian year contains 364 days.
In Karhide/Orgoreyn years are not numbered consecutively from a base year forward to the present; the base year is the current year. Every New Years Day (Getheny Thern) the year just past becomes the year “one-ago,” and every past date is increased by one. The future is similarly counted, next year being the year “one-to-come,” until it in turn becomes the Year One.
The inconvenience of this system in record-keeping is palliated by various devices, for instance reference to well-known events, reigns of kings, dynasties, local lords, etc. The Yomeshta count in 144-year cycles from the Birth of Meshe (2202 years-ago, in Ekumenical Year 1492), and keep ritual celebrations every twelfth year; but this system is strictly cultic and is not officially employed even by the government of Orgoreyn, which sponsors the Yomesh religion.
The Month. The period of revolution of Gethen’s moon is 26 Gethenian days; the rotation is captured, so that the moon presents the same face to the planet always. There are 14 months in the year, and as solar and lunar calendars concur so closely that adjustment is required only about once in 200 years, the days of the month are invariable, as are the dates of the-phases of the moon. The Karhidish names of the months:
Winter:
1.
Thern
2.
Thanern
3.
Nimmer
4.
Anner
Spring:
5.
Irrem
6.
Moth
7.
Tuwa
Summer:
8.
Osme
9.
Ockre
10.
Kus
11.
Hakanna
Autumn:
12.
Gor
13.
Susmy
14.
Grende
The 26-day month is divided into two halfmonths of 13 days.
The Day. The day (23.08 T.S.H.) is divided into 10 hours (see below); being invariable, the days of the month are generally referred to by name, like our days of the week, not by number. (Many of the names refer to the phase of the moon, e.g. Getheny, “darkness,” Arhad, “first crescent,” etc. The prefix od- used in the second halfmonth is a reversive, giving a contrary meaning, so that Odgetheny might be translated as “undarkness.”) The Karhidish names of the days of the month:
1.
Getheny
14.
Odgetheny
2.
Sordny
15.
Odsordny
3.
Eps
16.
Odeps
4.
Arhad
17.
Odarhad
5.
Netherhad
18.
Onnetherhad
6.
Streth
19.
Odstreth
7.
Berny
20.
Obberny
8.
Orny
21.
Odorny
9.
Harhahad
22.
Odharhahad
10.
Guyrny
23.
Odguyrny
11.
Yrny
24.
Odyrny
12.
Posthe
25.
Opposthe
13.
Tormenbod
26.
Ottormenbod
The Hour. The decimal clock used in all Gethenian cultures converts as follows, very roughly, to the Terran double-twelve-hour clock (Note: This is a mere guide to the time of day implied by a Gethenian “Hour”; the complexities of an exact conversion, given the fact that the Gethenian day contains only 23.08 Terran Standard Hours, are irrelevant to my purpose):
First Hour
noon to 2:30 p.m.
Second Hour
2:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Third Hour
5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Fourth Hour
7:00 to 9:30 p.m.
Fifth Hour
9:30 to midnight
Sixth Hour
midnight to 2:30 a.m.
Seventh Hour
2:30 to 5:00 a.m.
Eighth Hour
5:00 to 7:00 a.m.
Ninth Hour
7:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Tenth Hour
9:30 to noon