But the faces and bodies of the people waiting for me at the station in the hot sunlight were not the same. My mother, forty-seven when I left, was sixty-five, a beautiful and fragile elderly woman. Tubdu had lost weight; she looked shrunken and wistful. My father was still handsome and bore himself proudly, but his movements were slow and he scarcely spoke at all. My otherfather Kap, seventy now, was a precise, fidgety, little old man. They were still the First Sedoretu of Udan, but the vigor of the farmhold now lay in the Second and Third Sedoretu.
I knew of all the changes, of course, but being there among them was a different matter from hearing about them in letters and transmissions. The old house was much fuller than it had been when I lived there. The south wing had been reopened, and children ran in and out of its doors and across courtyards that in my childhood had been silent and ivied and mysterious.
My sister Koneko was now four years older than I instead of four years younger. She looked very like my early memory of my mother. As the train drew in to Derdan’nad Station, she had been the first of them I recognized, holding up a child of three or four and saying, “Look, look, it’s your Uncle Hideo!”
The Second Sedoretu had been married for eleven years: Koneko and Isidri, sister-germanes, were the partners of the Day. Koneko’s husband was my old friend Sota, a Morning man of Drehe Farmhold, Sota and I had loved each other dearly when we were adolescents, and I had been grieved to grieve him when I left. When I heard that he and Koneko were in love I had been very surprised, so self-centered am I, but at least I am not jealous: it pleased me very deeply. Isidri’s husband, a man nearly twenty years older than herself, named Hedran, had been a traveling scholar of the Discussions. Udan had given him hospitality, and his visits had led to the marriage. He and Isidri had no children. Sota and Koneko had two Evening children, a boy of ten called Murmi, and Lasako, Little Isako, who was four.
The Third Sedoretu had been brought to Udan by Suudi, my brother-germane, who had married a woman from Aster Village; their Morning pair also came from farmholds of Aster. There were six children in that sedoretu. A cousin whose sedoretu at Ekke had broken had also come to live at Udan with her two children; so the coming and going and dressing and undressing and washing and slamming and running and shouting and weeping and laughing and eating was prodigious. Tubdu would sit at work in the sunny kitchen courtyard and watch a wave of children pass. “Bad!” she would cry. “They’ll never drown, not a one of ’em!” And she would shake with silent laughter that became a wheezing cough.
My mother, who had after all been a Mobile of the Ekumen, and had traveled from Terra to Hain and from Hain to O, was impatient to hear about my research. “What is it, this churtenìng? How does it work, what does it do? Is it an ansible for matter?”
“That’s the idea,” I said. “Transilience: instantaneous transference of being from one s-tc point to another.”
“No interval?”
“No interval.”
Isako frowned. “It sounds wrong,” she said. “Explain.”
I had forgotten how direct my soft-spoken mother could be; I had forgotten that she was an intellectual. I did my best to explain the incomprehensible.
“So,” she said at last, “you don’t really understand how it works.”
“No. Nor even what it does. Except that—as a rule—when the field is in operation, the mice in Building One are instantaneously in Building Two, perfectly cheerful and unharmed. Inside their cage, if we remembered to keep their cage inside the initiating churten field. We used to forget. Loose mice everywhere.”
“What’s mice?” said a little Morning boy of the Third Sedoretu, who had stopped to listen to what sounded like a story.
“Ah,” I said in a laugh, surprised. I had forgotten that at Udan mice were unknown, and rats were fanged, demon enemies of the painted cat. “Tiny, pretty, furry animals,” I said, “that come from Grandmother Isako’s world. They are friends of scientists. They have traveled all over the Known Worlds.”
“In tiny little spaceships?” the child said hopefully.
“In large ones, mostly,” I said. He was satisfied, and went away.
“Hideo,” said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once, “you haven’t found any kind of relationship?”
I shook my head, smiling.
“None at all?”
“A man from Alterra and I lived together for a couple of years,” I said. “It was a good friendship; but he’s a Mobile now. And…oh, you know…people here and there. Just recently, at Ran’n, I’ve been with a very nice woman from East Oket.”
“I hoped, if you intend to be a Mobile, that you might make a couple-marriage with another Mobile. It’s easier, I think,” she said. Easier than what? I thought, and knew the answer before I asked.
“Mother, I doubt now that I’ll travel farther than Hain. This churten business is too interesting; I want to be in on it. And if we do learn to control the technology, you know, then travel will be nothing. There’ll be no need for the kind of sacrifice you made. Things will be different. Unimaginably different! You could go to Terra for an hour and come back here: and only an hour would have passed.”
She thought about that. “If you do it, then,” she said, speaking slowly, almost shaking with the intensity of comprehension, “you will…you will shrink the galaxy—the universe?—to…” and she held up her left hand, thumb and fingers all drawn together to a point.
I nodded. “A mile or a light-year will be the same. There will be no distance.”
“It can’t be right,” she said after a while. “To have event without interval…Where is the dancing? Where is the way? I don’t think you’ll be able to control it, Hideo.” She smiled. “But of course you must try.”
And after that we talked about who was coming to the field dance at Drehe tomorrow.
I did not tell my mother that I had invited Tasi, the nice woman from East Oket, to come to Udan with me and that she had refused, had, in fact, gently informed me that she thought this was a good time for us to part. Tasi was tall, with a braid of dark hair, not coarse, bright black like mine but soft, fine, dark, like the shadows in a forest. A typical ki’O woman, I thought. She had deflated my protestations of love skillfully and without shaming me. “I think you’re in love with somebody, though,” she said. “Somebody on Hain, maybe. Maybe the man from Alterra you told me about?” No, I said. No, I’d never been in love. I wasn’t capable of an intense relationship, that was clear by now. I’d dreamed too long of traveling the galaxy with no attachments anywhere, and then worked too long in the churten lab, married to a damned theory that couldn’t find its technology. No room for love, no time.
But why had I wanted to bring Tasi home with me?
Tall but no longer thin, a woman of forty, not a girl, not typical, not comparable, not like anyone anywhere, Isidri had greeted me quietly at the door of the house. Some farm emergency had kept her from coming to the village station to meet me. She was wearing an old smock and leggings like any field worker, and her hair, dark beginning to grey, was in a rough braid. As she stood in that wide doorway of polished wood she was Udan itself, the body and soul of that thirty-century-old farmhold, its continuity, its life. All my childhood was in her hands, and she held them out to me.
“Welcome home, Hideo,” she said, with a smile as radiant as the summer light on the river. As she brought me in, she said, “I cleared the kids out of your old room. I thought you’d like to be there—would you?” Again she smiled, and I felt her warmth, the solar generosity of a woman in the prime of life, married, settled, rich in her work and being. I had not needed Tasi as a defense. I had nothing to fear from Isidri. She felt no rancor, no embarrassment. She had loved me when she was young, another person. It would be altogether inappropriate for me to feel embarrassment, or shame, or anything, but the old affectionate loyalty of the years when we played and worked and fished and dreamed together, children of Udan.