The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,120
your pisser get …’
I nodded.
‘It must be what the Aliens look like,’ Sether said with revulsion. ‘This, this thing sticking out, it gets so big … it gets in the way.’
We exchanged and compared symptoms for a mile or so. It was a relief to talk about it, to find company in misery, but it was also frightening to hear our misery confirmed by the other. Sether burst out, ‘I’ll tell you what I hate, what I really hate about it – it’s dehumanising. To get jerked around like that by your own body, to lose control, I can’t stand the idea. Of being just a sex machine. And everybody just turns into something to have sex with. You know that people in kemmer go crazy and die if there isn’t anybody else in kemmer? That they’ll even attack people in somer? Their own mothers?’
‘They can’t,’ I said, shocked.
‘Yes they can. Tharry told me. This truck driver up in the High Kargav went into kemmer as a male while their caravan was stuck in the snow, and he was big and strong, and he went crazy and he, he did it to his cabmate, and his cabmate was in somer and got hurt, really hurt, trying to fight him off. And then the driver came out of kemmer and committed suicide.’
This horrible story brought the sickness back up from the pit of my stomach, and I could say nothing.
Sether went on, ‘People in kemmer aren’t even human any more! And we have to do that – to be that way!’
Now that awful, desolate fear was out in the open. But it was not a relief to speak it. It was even larger and more terrible, spoken.
‘It’s stupid,’ Sether said. ‘It’s a primitive device for continuing the species. There’s no need for civilised people to undergo it. People who want to get pregnant could do it with injections. It would be genetically sound. You could choose your child’s getter. There wouldn’t be all this inbreeding, people fucking with their sibs, like animals. Why do we have to be animals?’
Sether’s rage stirred me. I shared it. I also felt shocked and excited by the word ‘fucking’, which I had never heard spoken. I looked again at my cousin, the thin, ruddy face, the heavy, long, shining hair. My age, Sether looked older. A half year in pain from a shattered leg had darkened and matured the adventurous, mischievous child, teaching anger, pride, endurance. ‘Sether,’ I said, ‘listen, it doesn’t matter, you’re human, even if you have to do that stuff, that fucking. You’re a mahad.’
‘Getheny Kus,’ Grand said: the first day of the month of Kus, midsummer day.
‘I won’t be ready,’ I said.
‘You’ll be ready.’
‘I want to go into kemmer with Sether.’
‘Sether’s got a month or two yet to go. Soon enough. It looks like you might be on the same moontime, though. Dark-of-the-mooners, eh? That’s what I used to be. So, just stay on the same wavelength, you and Sether …’ Grand had never grinned at me this way, an inclusive grin, as if I were an equal.
My mother’s mother was sixty years old, short, brawny, broad-hipped, with keen clear eyes, a stonemason by trade, an unquestioned autocrat in the Hearth. I, equal to this formidable person? It was my first intimation that I might be becoming more, rather than less, human.
‘I’d like it,’ said Grand, ‘if you spent this halfmonth at the Fastness. But it’s up to you.’
‘At the Fastness?’ I said, taken by surprise. We Thades were all Handdara, but very inert Handdara, keeping only the great festivals, muttering the grace all in one garbled word, practising none of the disciplines. None of my older hearthsibs had been sent off to the Fastness before their kemmerday. Was there something wrong with me?
‘You’ve got a good brain,’ said Grand. ‘You and Sether. I’d like to see some of you lot casting some shadows, some day. We Thades sit here in our Hearth and breed like pesthry. Is that enough? It’d be a good thing if some of you got your heads out of the bedding.’
‘What do they do in the Fastness?’ I asked, and Grand answered frankly, ‘I don’t know. Go find out. They teach you. They can teach you how to control kemmer.’
‘All right,’ I said promptly. I would tell Sether that the Indwellers could control kemmer. Maybe I could learn how to do it and come home and teach it to Sether.