A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (23 page)

“Why haven’t you told them ‘The Fisherman of the Inland Sea’?” I asked my mother.

She smiled and said, “Oh, that was your story. You always wanted it.”

I saw Isidri’s eyes on us, clear and tranquil, yet watchful still.

I knew my mother had had repair and healing to her heart a year before, and I asked Isidri later, as we supervised some work
the older children were doing, “Has Isako recovered, do you think?”

“She seems wonderfully well since you came. I don’t know. It’s damage from her childhood, from the poisons in the Terran biosphere;
they say her immune system is easily depressed. She was very patient about being ill. Almost too patient.”

“And Tubdu—does she need new lungs?”

“Probably. All four of them are getting older, and stubborner…. But you look at Isako for me. See if you see what I mean.”

I tried to observe my mother. After a few days I reported back that she seemed energetic and decisive, even imperative, and
that I hadn’t seen much of the patient endurance that worried Isidri. She laughed.

“Isako told me once,” she said, “that a mother is connected to her child by a very fine, thin cord, like the umbilical cord,
that can stretch light-years without any difficulty. I asked her if it was painful, and she said, ‘Oh, no, it’s just there,
you know, it stretches and stretches and never breaks.’ It seems to me it must be painful. But I don’t know. I have no child,
and I’ve never been more than two days’ travel from my mothers.” She smiled and said in her soft, deep voice, “I think I love
Isako more than anyone, more even than my mother, more even than Koneko….”

Then she had to show one of Suudi’s children how to reprogram the timer on the irrigation control. She was the hydrologist
for the village and the oenologist for the farm. Her life was thick-planned, very rich in necessary work and wide relationships,
a serene and
steady succession of days, seasons, years. She swam in life as she had swum in the river, like a fish, at home. She had borne
no child, but all the children of the farmhold were hers. She and Koneko were as deeply attached as their mothers had been.
Her relation with her rather fragile, scholarly husband seemed peaceful and respectful. I thought his Night marriage with
my old friend Sota might be the stronger sexual link, but Isidri clearly admired and depended on his intellectual and spiritual
guidance. I thought his teaching a bit dry and disputatious; but what did I know about religion? I had not given worship for
years, and felt strange, out of place, even in the home shrine. I felt strange, out of place, in my home. I did not acknowledge
it to myself.

I was conscious of the month as pleasant, uneventful, even a little boring. My emotions were mild and dull. The wild nostalgia,
the romantic sense of standing on the brink of my destiny, all that was gone with the Hideo of twenty-one. Though now the
youngest of my generation, I was a grown man, knowing his way, content with his work, past emotional self-indulgence. I wrote
a little poem for the house album about the peacefulness of following a chosen course. When I had to go, I embraced and kissed
everyone, dozens of soft or harsh cheek-touches. I told them that if I stayed on O, as it seemed I might be asked to do for
a year or so, I would come back next winter for another visit. On the train going back through the hills to Ran’n, I thought
with a complacent gravity how I might return to the farm next winter, finding them all just the same; and how, if I came back
after another eighteen years or even longer, some of them would be gone and some would be new to me and yet it would be always
my home, Udan with its wide dark roofs riding time like a dark-sailed ship. I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.

I got back to Ran’n, checked in with my people at the lab in Tower Hall, and had dinner with colleagues, good food and drink—I
brought them a bottle of wine from Udan, for Isidri was making splendid wines, and had
given me a case of the fifteen-year-old Kedun. We talked about the latest breakthrough in churten technology, “continuous-field
sending,” reported from Anarres just yesterday on the ansible. I went to my rooms in the New Quadrangle through the summer
night, my head full of physics, read a little, and went to bed. I turned out the light and darkness filled me as it filled
the room. Where was I? Alone in a room among strangers. As I had been for ten years and would always be. On one planet or
another, what did it matter? Alone, part of nothing, part of no one. Udan was not my home. I had no home, no people. I had
no future, no destiny, any more than a bubble of foam or a whirlpool in a current has a destiny. It is and it isn’t. Nothing
more.

I turned the light on because I could not bear the darkness, but the light was worse. I sat huddled up in the bed and began
to cry. I could not stop crying. I became frightened at how the sobs racked and shook me till I was sick and weak and still
could not stop sobbing. After a long time I calmed myself gradually by clinging to an imagination, a childish idea: in the
morning I would call Isidri and talk to her, telling her that I needed instruction in religion, that I wanted to give worship
at the shrines again, but it had been so long, and I had never listened to the Discussions, but now I needed to, and I would
ask her, Isidri, to help me. So, holding fast to that, I could at last stop the terrible sobbing and lie spent, exhausted,
until the day came.

I did not call Isidri. In daylight the thought which had saved me from the dark seemed foolish; and I thought if I called
her she would ask advice of her husband, the religious scholar. But I knew I needed help. I went to the shrine in the Old
School and gave worship. I asked for a copy of the First Discussions, and read it. I joined a Discussion group, and we read
and talked together. My religion is godless, argumentative, and mystical. The name of our world is the first word of its first
prayer. For human beings its vehicle is the human voice and mind. As I began to rediscover it, I found it
quite as strange as churten theory and in some respects complementary to it. I knew, but had never understood, that Cetian
physics and religion are aspects of one knowledge. I wondered if all physics and religion are aspects of one knowledge.

At night I never slept well and often could not sleep at all. After the bountiful tables of Udan, college food seemed poor
stuff; I had no appetite. But our work, my work went well—wonderfully well.

“No more mouses,” said Gvonesh on the voice ansible from Hain. “Peoples.”

“What people?” I demanded.

“Me,” said Gvonesh.

So our Director of Research churtened from one corner of Laboratory One to another, and then from Building One to Building
Two—vanishing in one laboratory and appearing in the other, smiling, in the same instant, in no time.

“What did it feel like?” they asked, of course, and Gvonesh answered, of course, “Like nothing.”

Many experiments followed; mice and gholes churtened halfway around Ve and back; robot crews churtened from Anarres to Urras,
from Hain to Ve, and then from Anarres to Ve, twenty-two light-years. So, then, eventually the
Shoby
and her crew of ten human beings churtened into orbit around a miserable planet seventeen light-years from Ve and returned
(but words that imply coming and going, that imply distance traveled, are not appropriate) thanks only to their intelligent
use of entrainment, rescuing themselves from a kind of chaos of dissolution, a death by unreality, that horrified us all.
Experiments with high-intelligence life-forms came to a halt.

“The rhythm is wrong,” Gvonesh said on the ansible (she said it “rithkhom.”) For a moment I thought of my mother saying, “It
can’t be right to have event without interval.” What else had Isako said? Something about dancing. But I did not want to think
about Udan. I did not think about Udan. When I did I felt, far down deeper
inside me than my bones, the knowledge of being no one, no where, and a shaking like a frightened animal.

My religion reassured me that I was part of the Way, and my physics absorbed my despair in work. Experiments, cautiously resumed,
succeeded beyond hope. The Terran Dalzul and his psychophysics took everyone at the research station on Ve by storm; I am
sorry I never met him. As he predicted, using the continuity field he churtened without a hint of trouble, alone, first locally,
then from Ve to Hain, then the great jump to Tadkla and back. From the second journey to Tadkla, his three companions returned
without him. He died on that far world. It did not seem to us in the laboratories that his death was in any way caused by
the churten field or by what had come to be known as “the churten experience,” though his three companions were not so sure.

“Maybe Dalzul was right. One people at a time,” said Gvonesh; and she made herself again the subject, the “ritual animal,”
as the Hainish say, of the next experiment. Using continuity technology she churtened right round Ve in four skips, which
took thirty-two seconds because of the time needed to set up the coordinates. We had taken to calling the non-interval in
time/real interval in space a “skip.” It sounded light, trivial. Scientists like to trivialize.

I wanted to try the improvement to double-field stability that I had been working on ever since I came to Ran’n. It was time
to give it a test; my patience was short, life was too short to fiddle with figures forever. Talking to Gvonesh on the ansible
I said, “I’ll skip over to Ve Port. And then back here to Ran’n. I promised a visit to my home farm this winter.” Scientists
like to trivialize.

“You still got that wrinkle in your field?” Gvonesh asked. “Some kind, you know, like a fold?”

“It’s ironed out, ammar,” I assured her.

“Good, fine,” said Gvonesh, who never questioned what one said. “Come.”

So, then: we set up the fields in a constant stable churten link with ansible connection; and I was standing inside a chalked
circle in the Churten Field Laboratory of Ran’n Center on a late autumn afternoon and standing inside a chalked circle in
the Churten Research Station Field Laboratory in Ve Port on a late summer day at a distance of 4.2 light-years and no interval
of time.

“Feel nothing?” Gvonesh inquired, shaking my hand heartily. “Good fellow, good fellow, welcome, ammar, Hideo. Good to see.
No wrinkle, hah?”

I laughed with the shock and queerness of it, and gave Gvonesh the bottle of Udan Kedun ‘49 that I had picked up a moment
ago from the laboratory table on O.

I had expected, if I arrived at all, to churten promptly back again, but Gvonesh and others wanted me on Ve for a while for
discussions and tests of the field. I think now that the Director’s extraordinary intuition was at work; the “wrinkle,” the
“fold” in the Tiokunan’n Field still bothered her. “Is unaesthetical,” she said.

“But it works,” I said.

“It worked,” said Gvonesh.

Except to retest my field, to prove its reliability, I had no desire to return to O. I was sleeping somewhat better here on
Ve, although food was still unpalatable to me, and when I was not working I felt shaky and drained, a disagreeable reminder
of my exhaustion after the night which I tried not to remember when for some reason or other I had cried so much. But the
work went very well.

“You got no sex, Hideo?” Gvonesh asked me when we were alone in the Lab one day, I playing with a new set of calculations
and she finishing her box lunch.

The question took me utterly aback. I knew it was not as impertinent as Gvonesh’s peculiar usage of the language made it sound.
But Gvonesh never asked questions like that. Her own sex life was as much a mystery as the rest of her existence. No one had
ever heard her mention the word, let alone suggest the act.

When I sat with my mouth open, stumped, she said, “You used to, hah,” as she chewed on a cold varvet.

I stammered something. I knew she was not proposing that she and I have sex, but inquiring after my well-being. But I did
not know what to say.

“You got some kind of wrinkle in your life, hah,” Gvonesh said. “Sorry. Not my business.”

Wanting to assure her I had taken no offense I said, as we say on O, “I honor your intent.”

She looked directly at me, something she rarely did. Her eyes were clear as water in her long, bony face softened by a fine,
thick, colorless down. “Maybe is time you go back to O?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The facilities here—”

She nodded. She always accepted what one said. “You read Harraven’s report?” she asked, changing one subject for another as
quickly and definitively as my mother.

All right, I thought, the challenge was issued. She was ready for me to test my field again. Why not? After all, I could churten
to Ran’n and churten right back again to Ve within a minute, if I chose, and if the Lab could afford it. Like ansible transmission,
churtening draws essentially on inertial mass, but setting up the field, disinfecting it, and holding it stable in size uses
a good deal of local energy. But it was Gvonesh’s suggestion, which meant we had the money. I said, “How about a skip over
and back?”

“Fine,” Gvonesh said. “Tomorrow.”

So the next day, on a morning of late autumn, I stood inside a chalked circle in the Field Laboratory on Ve and stood—

A shimmer, a shivering of everything—a missed beat—skipped—

in darkness. A darkness. A dark room. The lab? A lab—I found the light panel. In the darkness I was sure it was the laboratory
on Ve. In the light I saw it was not. I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know where I was. It seemed familiar yet I could
not place it. What was it?
A biology lab? There were specimens, an old subparticle microscope, the maker’s ideogram on the battered brass casing, the
lyre ideogram…. I was on O. In some laboratory in some building of the Center at Ran’n? It smelled like the old buildings
of Ran’n, it smelled like a rainy night on O. But how could I have not arrived in the receiving field, the circle carefully
chalked on the wood floor of the lab in Tower Hall? The field itself must have moved. An appalling, an impossible thought.