there more needs saying now?’
‘My lord, will you revoke the Order of Exile on Estraven, to clear his name?’
‘Not yet, Mr. Ai. Don’t rush it. Anything more?’
‘No more.’
‘Go on, then.’
Even I betrayed him. I had said I would not bring the ship down till his banishment was ended, his name cleared. I could not throw away what he had died for, by insisting on the condition. It would not bring him out of his exile.
The rest of that day went in arranging with Lord Gorchern and others for the reception and lodging of the ship’s company. At Second Hour we set out by powersledge to Athten Fen, about thirty miles northeast of Erhenrang. The landing site was at the near edge of the great desolate region, a peat-marsh too boggy to be farmed or settled, and now in mid-Irrem a flat frozen waste many feet deep in snow. The radio beacon had been functioning all day, and they had received confirmation signals from the ship.
On the screens, coming in, the crew must have seen the terminator lying clear across the Great Continent along the border, from Guthen Bay to the Gulf of Charisune, and the peaks of the Kargav still in sunlight, a chain of stars; for it was twilight when we, looking up, saw the one star descending.
She came down in a roar and glory, and steam went roaring up white as her stabilizers went down in the great lake of water and mud created by the retro; down underneath the bog there was permafrost like granite, and she came to rest balanced neatly, and sat cooling over the quickly refreezing lake, a great, delicate fish balanced on its tail, dark silver in the twilight of Winter.
Beside me Faxe of Otherhord spoke for the first time since the sound and splendour of the ship’s descent. ‘I’m glad to have lived to see this,’ he said. So Estraven had said when he looked at the Ice, at death; so he should have said this night. To get away from the bitter regret that beset me I started to walk forward over the snow towards the ship. She was frosted already by the interhull coolants, and as I approached the high port slid open and the exitway was extruded, a graceful curve down onto the ice. The first off was Lang Heo Hew, unchanged, of course, precisely as I had last seen her, three years ago in my life and a couple of weeks in hers. She looked at me, and at Faxe, and at the others of the escort who had followed me, and stopped at the foot of the ramp. She said solemnly in Karhidish, ‘I have come in friendship.’ To her eyes we were all aliens. I let Faxe greet her first.
He indicated me to her, and she came and took my right hand in the fashion of my people, looking into my face. ‘Oh Genly,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know you!’ It was strange to hear a woman’s voice, after so long. The others came out of the ship, on my advice: evidence of any mistrust at this point would humiliate the Karhidish escort, impugning their shifgrethor. Out they came, and met the Karhiders with a beautiful courtesy. But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species: great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer … They took my hand, touched me, held me.
I managed to keep myself in control, and to tell Heo Hew and Tulier what they most urgently needed to know about the situation they had entered, during the sledge-ride back to Erhenrang. When we got to the Palace, however, I had to get to my room at once.
The physician from Sassinoth came in. His quiet voice and his face, a young, serious face, not a man’s face and not a woman’s, a human face, these were a relief to me, familiar, right … But he said, after ordering me to get to bed and dosing me with some mild tranquillizer, ‘I’ve seen your fellow-Envoys. This is a marvellous thing, the coming of men from the stars. And in my lifetime!’
There again was the delight, the courage, that is most admirable in the Karhidish spirit – and in the human spirit – and though I could not share it with him, to deny