"I know that. Even in Stse we teamed that," he said patiently. "But I'm superstitious. We die to each other if you go. Even in Kathhad you learned that."
"I didn't. It's not true. How can you ask me to
give up this chance for what you admit is a superstition? Be fair, Zhiv!"
After a long silence, he nodded.
She sat stricken, understanding that she had won. She had won badly.
She reached across to him, trying to comfort him and herself. She was scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But it wasn't betrayal — she rejected the word at once. She wouldn't betray him. They were in love. They loved each other. He would follow her in a year, two years at the most. They were adults, they must not cling together like children. Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust. She told herself all these things as she said them to him. He said yes, and held her, and comforted her. In the night, in the utter silence of the desert, the blood singing in his ears, he lay awake and thought, "It has died unborn. It was never conceived."
They stayed together in their little apartment at
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the School for the few more weeks before Tiu left. They made love cautiously, gently, talked about history and economics and ethnology, kept busy. Tiu had to prepare herself to work with the team she was going with, studying the Terran concepts of hierarchy; Zhiv had a paper to write on social-energy generation on Werel. They worked hard. Their friends gave Tiu a big farewell party. The next day Zhiv went with her to Ve Port. She kissed and held him, telling him to hurry, hurry and come to Terra. He saw her board the flyer that would take her up to the NAFAL ship waiting in orbit. He went back to the apartment on the South Campus of the School. There a friend found him three days later sitting at his desk in a curious condition, passive, speaking very slowly if at all, unable to eat or drink. Being pueblo-born, the friend recognised this state and called in the medicine man (the Hainish do not call them doctors). Having ascertained that he was from one of the Southern pueblos, the medicine man said,
"Havzhiva! The god cannot die in you here!"
After a long silence the young man said softly in a voice which did not sound like his voice, "I need to go home."
"That is not possible now," said the medicine man. "But we can arrange a Staying Chant while I find a person able to address the god." He promptly put out a call for students who were ex-People of the South- Four responded. They sat all night with Havzhiva singing the Staying Chant in two languages and four dialects, until Havzhiva joined them in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarsely, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.
He woke in his own room. An old woman was
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having a conversation with nobody beside him. "You aren't here," she said. "No, you are mistaken. You can't die here. It would not be right, it would be quite wrong. You know that. This is the wrong place. This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the
way home? Here it is. Listen." She began singing in a thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless song that was familiar to Havzhiva, as if he had heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old woman went on talking to nobody.
When he woke again she was gone. He never knew who she was or where she came from; he never asked- She had spoken and sung in his own language, in the dialect of Stse-
He was not going to die now, but he was very unwell. The medicine man ordered him to the Hospital at Tes, the most beautiful place on all Ve, an oasis where hot springs and sheltering hills make a mild local climate and flowers and forests can grow. There are paths endlessly winding under great trees, warm lakes where you can swim forever, little misty ponds from which birds rise crying, steam-shrouded hot springs, and a thousand waterfalls whose voices are the only sound all night. There he was sent to stay till he was recovered.
He began to speak into his noter, after he had been at Tes twenty days or so; he would sit in the
sunlight on the doorstep of his cottage in a glade of grasses and ferns and talk quietly to himself by way of the little recording machine. "What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything," he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. "What you build up
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
your world from, your local, intelligible, rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything.
And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is partial — infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection of . . ." His voice ceased; the silence of the glade among the great trees continued.
After forty-five days he returned to the School.
He took a new apartment. He changed fields, leaving social science, Tiu's field, for Ekumenical service training, which was intellectually closely related but led to a different kind of work. The change would lengthen his time at the School by at least a year, after which if he did well he could hope for a post with the Ekumen. He did well, and after two years was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical councils, if he would care to go to Werel. Yes, he said, he would. His friends gave a big farewell party for him.
"I thought you were aiming for Terra," said one of his less-astute classmates. "All that stuff about war and slavery and class and caste and gender — isn't that Terran history?"
"It's current events in Werel," Havzhiva said.
He was no longer Zhiv. He had come back from the Hospital as Havzhiva.
Somebody else was stepping on the unastute classmate's foot, but she paid no attention. "I thought you were going to follow Tiu," she said. "
I thought that's why you never slept with anybody.
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God, if I'd only known!" The others winced, but Havzhiva smiled and hugged her apologetically.
In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had betrayed and forsaken lyan lyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside.
Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.
He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.
The medicine man came to visit him the day before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a while saying nothing. Havzhiva sat with him. He had long been used to silence, and still sometimes
forgot that it was not customary among historians.
"What's wrong?" the medicine man said. It seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its meditative tone; at any rate, Havzhiva made no answer.
"Please stand up," the medicine man said, and when Havzhiva had done so, "Now walk a tittle." He walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him. "You're out of balance," he said. "Did you know it?"
"Yes."
"I could get a Staying Chant together this evening."
"It's all right," Havzhiva said. "I've always been off-balance."
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"There's no need to be," the medicine man said.
"On the other hand, maybe it's best, since you're going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life."