A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (24 page)

I was alarmed and felt rather dizzy, as if my body had skipped that beat, but I was not yet frightened. I was all right, all
here, all the pieces in the right places, and the mind working. A slight spatial displacement? said the mind.

I went out into the corridor. Perhaps I had myself been disoriented and left the Churten Field Laboratory and come to full
consciousness somewhere else. But my crew would have been there; where were they? And that would have been hours ago; it should
have been just past noon on O when I arrived. A slight temporal displacement? said the mind, working away. I went down the
corridor looking for my lab, and that is when it became like one of those dreams in which you cannot find the room which you
must find. It was that dream. The building was perfectly familiar: it was Tower Hall, the second floor of Tower, but there
was no Churten Lab. All the labs were biology and biophysics, and all were deserted. It was evidently late at night. Nobody
around. At last I saw a light under a door and knocked and opened it on a student reading at a library terminal.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for the Churten Field Lab—”

“The what lab?”

She had never heard of it, and apologized. “I’m not in Ti Phy, just Bi Phy,” she said humbly.

I apologized too. Something was making me shakier, increasing my sense of dizziness and disorientation. Was this the “chaos
effect” the crew of the
Shoby
and perhaps the crew of the
Galba
had experienced? Would I
begin to see the stars through the walls, or turn around and see Gvonesh here on O?

I asked her what time it was. “I should have got here at noon,” I said, though that of course meant nothing to her.

“It’s about one,” she said, glancing at the clock on the terminal. I looked at it too. It gave the time, the ten-day, the
month, the year.

“That’s wrong,” I said.

She looked worried.

“That’s not right,” I said. “The date. It’s not right.” But I knew from the steady glow of the numbers on the clock, from
the girl’s round, worried face, from the beat of my heart, from the smell of the rain, that it was right, that it was an hour
after midnight eighteen years ago, that I was here, now, on the day after the day I called “once upon a time” when I began
to tell this story.

A major temporal displacement, said the mind, working, laboring.

“I don’t belong here,” I said, and turned to hurry back to what seemed a refuge, Biology Lab 6, which would be the Churten
Field Lab eighteen years from now, as if I could re-enter the field, which had existed or would exist for .004 second.

The girl saw that something was wrong, made me sit down, and gave me a cup of hot tea from her insulated bottle.

“Where are you from?” I asked her, the kind, serious student.

“Herdud Farmhold of Deada Village on the South Watershed of the Saduun,” she said.

“I’m from downriver,” I said. “Udan of Derdan’nad.” I suddenly broke into tears. I managed to control myself, apologized again,
drank my tea, and set the cup down. She was not overly troubled by my fit of weeping. Students are intense people, they laugh
and cry, they break down and rebuild. She asked if I had a place to spend the night: a perceptive question. I said I did,
thanked her, and left.

I did not go back to the biology laboratory, but went downstairs and started to cut through the gardens to
my rooms in the New Quadrangle. As I walked the mind kept working; it worked out that somebody else had been/would be in those
rooms then/now.

I turned back towards the Shrine Quadrangle, where I had lived my last two years as a student before I left for Hain. If this
was in fact, as the clock had indicated, the night after I had left, my room might still be empty and unlocked. It proved
to be so, to be as I had left it, the mattress bare, the cyclebasket unemptied.

That was the most frightening moment. I stared at that cyclebasket for a long time before I took a crumpled bit of outprint
from it and carefully smoothed it on the desk. It was a set of temporal equations scribbled on my old pocketscreen in my own
handwriting, notes from Sedharad’s class in Interval, from my last term at Ran’n, day before yesterday, eighteen years ago.

I was now very shaky indeed. You are caught in a chaos field, said the mind, and I believed it. Fear and stress, and nothing
to do about it, not till the long night was past. I lay down on the bare bunk-mattress, ready for the stars to burn through
the walls and my eyelids if I shut them. I meant to try and plan what I should do in the morning, if there was a morning.
I fell asleep instantly and slept like a stone till broad daylight, when I woke up on the bare bed in the familiar room, alert,
hungry, and without a moment of doubt as to who or where or when I was.

I went down into the village for breakfast. I didn’t want to meet any colleagues—no, fellow students—who might know me and
say, “Hideo! What are you doing here? You left on the
Terraces of Darranda
yesterday!”

I had little hope they would not recognize me. I was thirty-one now, not twenty-one, much thinner and not as fit as I had
been; but my half-Terran features were unmistakable. I did not want to be recognized, to have to try to explain. I wanted
to get out of Ran’n. I wanted to go home.

O is a good world to time-travel in. Things don’t change. Our trains run on the same schedule to the same places for centuries.
We sign for payment and pay
in contracted barter or cash monthly, so I did not have to produce mysterious coins from the future. I signed at the station
and took the morning train to Saduun Delta.

The little suntrain glided through the plains and hills of the South Watershed and then the Northwest Watershed, following
the ever-widening river, stopping at each village. I got off in the late afternoon at the station in Derdan’nad. Since it
was very early spring, the station was muddy, not dusty.

I walked out the road to Udan. I opened the road gate that I had rehung a few days/eighteen years ago; it moved easily on
its new hinges. That gave me a little gleam of pleasure. The she-yamas were all in the nursery pasture. Birthing would start
any day; their woolly sides stuck out, and they moved like sailboats in a slow breeze, turning their elegant, scornful heads
to look distrustfully at me as I passed. Rain clouds hung over the hills. I crossed the Oro on the humpbacked wooden bridge.
Four or five great blue ochid hung in a backwater by the bridgefoot; I stopped to watch them; if I’d had a spear … The clouds
drifted overhead trailing a fine, faint drizzle. I strode on. My face felt hot and stiff as the cool rain touched it. I followed
the river road and saw the house come into view, the dark, wide roofs low on the tree-crowned hill. I came past the aviary
and the collectors, past the irrigation center, under the avenue of tall bare trees, up the steps of the deep porch, to the
door, the wide door of Udan. I went in.

Tubdu was crossing the hall—not the woman I had last seen, in her sixties, grey-haired and tired and fragile, but Tubdu of
The Great Giggle, Tubdu at forty-five, fat and rosy-brown and brisk, crossing the hall with short, quick steps, stopping,
looking at me at first with mere recognition, there’s Hideo, then with puzzlement, is that Hideo? and then with shock—that
can’t be Hideo!

“Ombu,” I said, the baby word for othermother, “Ombu, it’s me, Hideo, don’t worry, it’s all right, I came back.” I embraced
her, pressed my cheek to hers.

“But, but—” She held me off, looked up at my face. “But
what has happened to you, darling boy?” she cried, and then, turning, called out in a high voice, “Isako! Isako!”

When my mother saw me she thought, of course, that I had not left on the ship to Hain, that my courage or my intent had failed
me; and in her first embrace there was an involuntary reserve, a withholding. Had I thrown away the destiny for which I had
been so ready to throw away everything else? I knew what was in her mind. I laid my cheek to hers and whispered, “I did go,
mother, and I came back. I’m thirty-one years old. I came back—”

She held me away a little just as Tubdu had done, and saw my face. “Oh Hideo!” she said, and held me to her with all her strength.
“My dear, my dear!”

We held each other in silence, till I said at last, “I need to see Isidri.”

My mother looked up at me intently but asked no questions. “She’s in the shrine, I think.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I left her and Tubdu side by side and hurried through the halls to the central room, in the oldest part of the house, rebuilt
seven centuries ago on the foundations that go back three thousand years. The walls are stone and clay, the roof is thick
glass, curved. It is always cool and still there. Books line the walls, the Discussions, the discussions of the Discussions,
poetry, texts and versions of the Plays; there are drums and whispersticks for meditation and ceremony; the small, round pool
which is the shrine itself wells up from clay pipes and brims its blue-green basin, reflecting the rainy sky above the skylight.
Isidri was there. She had brought in fresh boughs for the vase beside the shrine, and was kneeling to arrange them.

I went straight to her and said, “Isidri, I came back. Listen—”

Her face was utterly open, startled, scared, defenseless, the soft, thin face of a woman of twenty-two, the dark eyes gazing
into me.

“Listen, Isidri: I went to Hain, I studied there, I worked on a new kind of temporal physics, a new theory— transilience—I
spent ten years there. Then we began
experiments, I was in Ran’n and crossed over to the Hainish system in no time, using that technology, in no time, you understand
me, literally, like the ansible—not at lightspeed, not faster than light, but in no time. In one place and in another place
instantaneously, you understand? And it went fine, it worked, but coming back there was … there was a fold, a crease, in my
field. I was in the same place in a different time. I came back eighteen of your years, ten of mine. I came back to the day
I left, but I didn’t leave, I came back, I came back to you.”

I was holding her hands, kneeling to face her as she knelt by the silent pool. She searched my face with her watchful eyes,
silent. On her cheekbone there was a fresh scratch and a little bruise; a branch had lashed her as she gathered the evergreen
boughs.

“Let me come back to you,” I said in a whisper.

She touched my face with her hand. “You look so tired,” she said. “Hideo … Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes. I’m all right.”

And there my story, so far as it has any interest to the Ekumen or to research in transilience, comes to an end. I have lived
now for eighteen years as a farmholder of Udan Farm of Derdan’nad Village of the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of
the Saduun, on Oket, on O. I am fifty years old. I am the Morning husband of the Second Sedoretu of Udan; my wife is Isidri;
my Night marriage is to Sota of Drehe, whose Evening wife is my sister Koneko. My children of the Morning with Isidri are
Latubdu and Tadri; the Evening children are Murmi and Lasako. But none of this is of much interest to the Stabiles of the
Ekumen.

My mother, who had had some training in temporal engineering, asked for my story, listened to it carefully, and accepted it
without question; so did Isidri. Most of the people of my farmhold chose a simpler and far more plausible story, which explained
everything fairly well, even my severe loss of weight and ten-year age gain overnight. At the very last moment, just before
the
space ship left, they said, Hideo decided not to go to the Ekumenical School on Hain after all. He came back to Udan, because
he was in love with Isidri. But it had made him quite ill, because it was a very hard decision and he was very much in love.

Maybe that is indeed the true story. But Isidri and Isako chose a stranger truth.

Later, when we were forming our sedoretu, Sota asked me for that truth. “You aren’t the same man, Hideo, though you are the
man I always loved,” he said. I told him why, as best I could. He was sure that Koneko would understand it better than he
could, and indeed she listened gravely, and asked several keen questions which I could not answer.

I did attempt to send a message to the temporal physics department of the Ekumenical Schools on Hain. I had not been home
long before my mother, with her strong sense of duty and her obligation to the Ekumen, became insistent that I do so.

“Mother,” I said, “what can I tell them? They haven’t invented churten theory yet!”

“Apologize for not coming to study, as you said you would. And explain it to the Director, the Anarresti woman. Maybe she
would understand.”

“Even Gvonesh doesn’t know about churten yet. They’ll begin telling her about it on the ansible from Urras and Anarres about
three years from now. Anyhow, Gvonesh didn’t know me the first couple of years I was there.” The past tense was inevitable
but ridiculous; it would have been more accurate to say, “she won’t know me the first couple of years I won’t be there.”

Or
was
I there on Hain, now? That paradoxical idea of two simultaneous existences on two different worlds disturbed me exceedingly.
It was one of the points Koneko had asked about. No matter how I discounted it as impossible under every law of temporality,
I could not keep from imagining that it was possible, that another I was living on Hain, and would come to Udan
in eighteen years and meet myself. After all, my present existence was also and equally impossible.

When such notions haunted and troubled me I learned to replace them with a different image: the little whorls of water that
slid down between the two big rocks, where the current ran strong, just above the swimming bay in the Oro. I would imagine
those whirlpools forming and dissolving, or I would go down to the river and sit and watch them. And they seemed to hold a
solution to my question, to dissolve it as they endlessly dissolved and formed.

But my mother’s sense of duty and obligation was unmoved by such trifles as a life impossibly lived twice.