Certainly our life in the auntring was easy, in the sense that our needs came easily to hand. There was plenty of food to be gathered or grown and prepared and cooked, plenty of temas to pick and rett and spin and weave for clothes and bedding, plenty of reeds to make baskets and thatch with; we children had other children to play with, mothers to look after us, and a great deal to learn. None of this is simple, though it’s all easy enough, when you know how to do it, when you are aware of the details.
It was not easy for my mother. It was hard for her, and complicated. She had to pretend she knew the details while she was learning them, and had to think how to report and explain this way of living to people in another place who didn’t understand it. For Borny it was easy until it got hard because he was a boy. For me it was all easy. I learned the work and played with the children and listened to the mothers sing.
The First Observer had been quite right: there was no way for a grown woman to learn how to make her soul. Mother couldn’t go listen to another mother sing, it would have been too strange. The aunts all knew she hadn’t been brought up well, and some of them taught her a good deal without her realizing it. They had decided her mother must have been irresponsible and had gone on scouting instead of settling in an auntring, so that her daughter didn’t get educated properly. That’s why even the most aloof of the aunts always let me listen with their children, so that I could become an educated person. But of course they couldn’t ask another adult into their houses. Borny and I had to tell her all the songs and stories we learned, and then she would tell them to the radio, or we told them to the radio while she listened to us. But she never got it right, not really. How could she, trying to learn it after she’d grown up, and after she’d always lived with magicians?
“Be aware!” she would imitate my solemn and probably irritating imitation of the aunts and the big girls. “Be aware! How many times a day do they say that? Be aware of what? They aren’t aware of what the ruins are, their own history,—they aren’t aware of each other! They don’t even talk to each other! Be aware, indeed!”
When I told her the stories of the Before Time that Aunt Sadne and Aunt Noyit told their daughters and me, she often heard the wrong things in them. I told her about the People, and she said, “Those are the ancestors of the people here now.” When I said, “There aren’t any people here now,” she didn’t understand. “There are persons here now,” I said, but she still didn’t understand.
Borny liked the story about the Man Who Lived with Women, how he kept some women in a pen, the way some persons keep rats in a pen for eating, and all of them got pregnant, and they each had a hundred babies, and the babies grew up as horrible monsters and ate the man and the mothers and each other. Mother explained to us that that was a parable of the human overpopulation of this planet thousands of years ago. “No, it’s not,” I said, “it’s a moral story.”—“Well, yes,” Mother said. “The moral is, don’t have too many babies.”—“No, it’s not,” I said. “Who could have a hundred babies even if they wanted to? The man was a sorcerer. He did magic. The women did it with him. So of course their children were monsters.”
The key, of course, is the word “tekell,” which translates so nicely into the Hainish word “magic,” an art or power that violates natural law. It was hard for Mother to understand that some persons truly consider most human relationships unnatural; that marriage, for instance, or government, can be seen as an evil spell woven by sorcerors. It is hard for her people to believe in magic.
The ship kept asking if we were all right, and every now and then a Stabile would hook up the ansible to our radio and grill Mother and us. She always convinced them that she wanted to stay, for despite her frustrations, she was doing the work the First Observers had not been able to do, and Borny and I were happy as mudfish, all those first years. I think Mother was happy too, once she got used to the slow pace and the indirect way she had to learn things. She was lonely, missing other grown-ups to talk to, and told us that she would have gone crazy without us. If she missed sex she never showed it. I think, though, that her report is not very complete about sexual matters, perhaps because she was troubled by them. I know that when we first lived in the auntring, two of the aunts, Hedimi and Behyu, used to meet to make love, and Behyu courted my mother; but Mother didn’t understand, because Behyu wouldn’t talk the way Mother wanted to talk. She couldn’t understand having sex with a person whose house you wouldn’t
enter.
Once when I was nine or so, and had been listening to some of the older girls, I asked her why didn’t she go out scouting. “Aunt Sadne would look after us,” I said, hopefully. I was tired of being the uneducated woman’s daughter. I wanted to live in Aunt Sadne’s house and be just like the other children.
“Mothers don’t scout,” she said, scornfully, like an aunt.
“Yes, they do, sometimes,” I insisted. “They have to, or how could they have more than one baby?”
“They go to settled men near the auntring. Behyu went back to the Red Knob Hill Man when she wanted a second child. Sadne goes and sees Downriver Lame Man when she wants to have sex. They know the men around here. None of the mothers scout.”
I realized that in this case she was right and I was wrong, but I stuck to my point. “Well, why don’t you go see Downriver Lame Man? Don’t you ever want sex? Migi says she wants it all the time.”
“Migi is seventeen,” Mother said drily. “Mind your own nose.” She sounded exactly like all the other mothers.
Men, during my childhood, were a kind of uninteresting mystery to me. They turned up a lot in the Before Time stories, and the singing-circle girls talked about them; but I seldom saw any of them. Sometimes I’d glimpse one when I was foraging, but they never came near the auntring. In summer the Downriver Lame Man would get lonesome waiting for Aunt Sadne and would come lurking around, not very far from the auntring—not in the bush or down by the river, of course, where he might be mistaken for a rogue and stoned—but out in the open, on the hillsides, where we could all see who he was. Hyuru and Didsu, Aunt Sadne’s daughters, said she had had sex with him when she went out scouting the first time, and always had sex with him and never tried any of the other men of the settlement.
She had told them, too, that the first child she bore was a boy, and she drowned it, because she didn’t want to bring up a boy and send him away. They felt queer about that and so did I, but it wasn’t an uncommon thing. One of the stories we learned was about a drowned boy who grew up underwater, and seized his mother when she came to bathe, and tried to hold her under till she too drowned; but she escaped.
At any rate, after the Downriver Lame Man had sat around for several days on the hillsides, singing long songs and braiding and unbraiding his hair, which was long too, and shone black in the sun, Aunt Sadne always went off for a night or two with him, and came back looking cross and self-conscious.
Aunt Noyit explained to me that Downriver Lame Man’s songs were magic; not the usual bad magic, but what she called the great good spells. Aunt Sadne never could resist his spells. “But he hasn’t half the charm of some men I’ve known,” said Aunt Noyit, smiling reminiscently.
Our diet, though excellent, was very low in fat, which Mother thought might explain the rather late onset of puberty; girls seldom menstruated before they were fifteen, and boys often weren’t mature till they were considerably older than that. But the women began looking askance at boys as soon as they showed any signs at all of adolescence. First Aunt Hedimi, who was always grim, then Aunt Noyit, then even Aunt Sadne began to turn away from Borny, to leave him out, not answering when he spoke. “What are you doing playing with the children?” old Aunt Dnemi asked him so fiercely that he came home in tears. He was not quite fourteen.