A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (15 page)

“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 conspirators. 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 see!”

“‘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?”

“Yes. But it’s very difficult,” Shan said, “to live without the notion that there is, somewhere, if one could just find it,
a fact.”

“Only fiction,” said Forest, unrelenting. “Fact is one of our finest fictions.”

“But music comes first,” Shan said. “And dancing is people being music. I think what Dalzul sees is that we can … we can dance
to Ganam.”

“I like that,” said Riel. “And look: on the fiction theory, we should be careful not to ‘believe’ Dalzul’s records, or his
ship’s tapes. They’re fictions. But, unless we accept the assumption, based only on the
Shoby
experiment, that the churten experience necessarily skews perception or judgment of perception, we have no reason to disbelieve
them. He’s a seasoned observer and a superb gestalter.”

“There are elements of a rather familiar kind of fiction in his report,” Forest said. “The princess who has apparently been
waiting for him, expecting him, and leads him naked to her palace, where after due ceremonies and amenities she has sex with
him—and very good sex too—? I’m not saying I disbelieve it. I don’t. It looks and rings true. But it would be interesting
to know how the princess perceived these events.”

“We can’t know that till we get there and talk to her,” said Riel. “What are we waiting for, anyhow?”

The
Galba
was a Hainish in-system glass ship, newly fitted with churten controls. It was a pretty little bubble, not much bigger than
the
Shoby’s
lander. Entering it, Shan had a few rather bad moments. The chaos, the senseless and centerless experience of churten, returned
vividly to him: must he go through that again? Could he? Very sharp and aching was the thought of Tai, Tai who should be here
now as she had been there then, Tai whom he had come to love aboard the
Shoby,
and Betton, the clear-hearted child—he needed them, they should be here.

Forest and Riel slipped through the hatch, and after them came Dalzul, the concentration of his energy almost visible around
him as an aura or halo, a brightness of being. No wonder the Unists thought he was God, Shan thought, and thought also of
the ceremonial, almost reverent welcome shown Dalzul by the Gaman. Dalzul was charged, full of mana, a power to which others
responded, by which they were entrained. Shan’s anxiety slipped from him. He knew that with Dalzul there would be no chaos.

“They thought we’d be able to control a bubble easier than the ship I had. I’ll try not to bring her out right over the roofs
this time. No wonder they thought I was a god, materializing in full view like that!” Shan had got used to the way Dalzul
seemed to echo his thoughts, and Riel’s and Forest’s, and had come to expect it; they were in synchrony, it was their strength.

They took their places, Dalzul at the churten console, Riel plugged into the AI, Shan at the flight controls, and Forest as
gestalt and Support. Dalzul looked round and nodded, and Shan took them out a few hundred kilometers from Ve Port. The curve
of the planet fell away and the stars shone under his feet, around, above.