The Chosen stood like a grey stone. After a while he said, "If we come to live as they live in the cities, all we know will be lost." Under his dogmatic tone was fear and grief.
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"Chosen One," Havzhiva said, "you speak the truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only."
"The men of this tribe will not deny our truth," the Chosen said. His unseeing, unwinking central eye was fixed on the sun that hung in a yellow dust-haze above the endless fields, though his own dark eyes gazed downward at the earth.
His guest looked from that alien face to the fierce, white, small sun that still blazed low above the alien land. "I am sure of that," he said.
When he was fifty-five. Stabile Yehedarhed Havzhiva went back to Yotebber for a visit. He had not been there for a long time. His work as Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowan Ministry of Social Justice had kept him in the north, with frequent trips to the other hemisphere. He had lived for years in the Old Capital with his partner, but often visited the New Capital at the request of a new Ambassador who wanted to draw on his
expertise. His partner — they had lived together for eighteen years, but there was no marriage on Yeowe — had a book she was trying to finish, and admitted that she would like to have the apartment to herself for a couple of weeks while she wrote. "Take that trip south you keep mooning about," she said. "I'll fly down as soon as I'm done.
I won't tell any damned politicians where you are. Escape! Go, go, go!"
He went. He had never liked flying, though he had had to do a great deal of it, and so he made the
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long journey by train. They were good, fast trains, terribly crowded, people at every station swarming and rushing and shouting bribes to the conductors, though not trying to ride the roofs of the cars, not at 130 kmh. He had a private room in a through car to Yotebber City. He spent the long hours in silence watching the landscape whirl by, the reclamation projects, the old wastelands, the young forests, the swarming cities, miles of shacks and cabins and cottages and houses and apartment buildings, sprawling Werel-style compounds with connected houses and kitchen gardens and worksheds, factories, huge new plants; and then suddenly the country again, canals and irrigation tanks reflecting the colors of the evening sky, a bare-legged child walking with a great white ox past a field of shadowy grain. The nights were short, a dark, rocking sweetness of sleep.
On the third afternoon he got off the train in Yotebber City Station. No crowds. No chiefs- No bodyguards. He walked through the hot, familiar streets, past the market, through the City Park. A little bravado, there. Gangs, muggers were still about, and he kept his eye alert and his feet on the main pathways. On past the old Tualite temple. He had picked up a white flower that had dropped from a shrub in the park. He set it at the Mother's feet. She smiled, looking cross-eyed at her missing nose. He walked on to the big, rambling new compound where Yeron lived.
She was seventy-four and had retired recently from the hospital where she had taught, practiced,
and been an administrator for the last fifteen years. She was little changed from the woman
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he had first seen sitting by his bedside, only she seemed smaller all over. Her hair was quite gone, and she wore a glittering kerchief tied round her head. They embraced hard and kissed, and she stroked him and patted him, smiling irrepress-ibiy. They had never made love, but there had always been a desire between them, a yearning to the other, a great comfort in touch. "Look at that, look at that grey'." she cried, petting his hair, "how beautiful! Come in and have a glass of wine with mel How is your Araha? When is she coming? You walked right across the city carrying that bag? You're still crazy!"
He gave her the gift he had brought her, a treatise on Certain Diseases of Werel-Yeowe by a team of Ekumenical medical researchers, and she seized it greedily. For some while she conversed only between plunges into the table of contents and the chapter on berlot. She poured out the pale orange wine. They had a second glass. "You look fine, Havzhiva," she said, putting the book down and looking at him steadily. Her eyes had faded to an opaque bluish darkness. "Being a saint agrees with you."
"It's not that bad, Yeron."
"A hero, then. You can't deny that you're a hero."
"No," he said with a laugh. "Knowing what a hero is, 1 won't deny it."
"Where would we be without you?"
"Just where we are now. ..." He sighed.
"Sometimes I think we're losing what little we've ever won. This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don't underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure
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misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up —"
She made a gesture that utterly dismissed the demagogue. "There is no end to that," she said. "But I knew what you were going to be to us. Right away. When I heard your name, even. I knew."
"You didn't give me much choice, you know."
"Bah. You chose, man."
"Yes," he said. He savored the wine. "I did."
After a while he said, "Not many people have the choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose because I grew up where all choices had been made for me."
"So you rebelled, made your own way," she said, nodding.
He smiled. "I'm no rebel."
"Bah!" she said again. "No rebel? You, in the
thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the way?"
"Oh yes," he said. "But not in a rebellious spirit- That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance, To keep an acceptant spirit. That's what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world."
She listened but looked unconvinced. "Sounds like a woman's way of being," she said. "Men generally want to change things to suit."
"Not the men of my people," he said.
She poured them a third glass of wine. "Tell me about your people. I was always afraid to ask. The Hainish are so old! So learned! They know so much history, so many worlds! Us here with our
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three hundred years of misery and murder and ignorance — you don't know how small you make us feel."
"I think I do," Havzhiva said. After a while he said, "I was born in a town called Stse."
He told her about the pueblo, about the Other Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his mother the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about changing being; he told her about the historian's visit, and how he had changed being again, going to Kathhad.
"All those rules!" Yeron said. "So complicated
and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran
away."
"All I did was go team in Kathhad what I wouldn't learn in Stse," he said, smiling. "What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology.
What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules — a pattern that makes sense?" He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, "I'm drunk. Come for a walk with me."
They went out into the sunny gardens of the compound and walked slowly along the paths between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva's arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to hers.
"When you have to sit still, you want to fly," he said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate hand on his arm. "If you have to fly, you want to sit still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with the historians. But I still couldn't keep my balance."