The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,96

sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud, ‘Arek! is that you?’

‘No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you.’

His breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light, stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. ‘I dreamed,’ he said, ‘I thought I was at home—’

‘You heard me mindspeak.’

‘You called me – It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He’s dead. You called me – you called me Therem? I … This is more terrible than I thought.’ He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off his nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.

‘Harth, I’m very sorry—’

‘No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man’s voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me “Harth”? Oh, I see why there’s no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing … All right. All right, speak to me again.’

‘Wait.’

‘No. Go on.’

With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: ‘Therem, my friend, there’s nothing to fear between us.’

He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had. ‘Ah, but there is,’ he said.

After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, ‘You spoke in my language.’

‘Well, you don’t know mine.’

‘You said there would be words, I know … Yet I imagined it as – an understanding—’

‘Empathy’s another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centres of the brain are activated, as well as—’

‘No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?’ His voice was strained.

‘That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.’

‘Nusuth … My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Estraven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We … I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.’

We were both silent for some time. I could not know, or ask, what lay behind his words: it had cost him too much to say the little he had said.

I said at last, ‘Bespeak me, Therem. Call me by my name.’ I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily. Had I been a Listener, I could have heard him think.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Never. Not yet …’

But no amount of shock, awe, terror could restrain that insatiable, outreaching mind for long. After he had cut out the light again I suddenly heard his stammer in my inward hearing – ‘Genry’ – Even mindspeaking he never could say ‘l’ properly.

I replied at once. In the dark he made an inarticulate sound of fear that had in it a slight edge of satisfaction. ‘No more, no more,’ he said aloud. After a while we got to sleep at last.

It never came easy to him. Not that he lacked the gift or could not develop the skill, but it disturbed him profoundly, and he could not take it for granted. He quickly learned to set up the barriers, but I’m not sure he felt he could count on them. Perhaps all of us were so, when the first Educers came back centuries ago from Rokanon’s World teaching the ‘Last Art’ to us. Perhaps a Gethenian, being singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness, a breach of integrity hard for him to tolerate. Perhaps it was Estraven’s own character, in which candour and reserve were both strong: every word he said rose out of a deeper silence. He heard my voice bespeaking him as a dead man’s, his brother’s voice. I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between him and that brother, but I knew that whenever I bespoke him something in him winced away as if I touched a wound. So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.

And day after day we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The midpoint in time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Thanern, found us far short of our halfway point in space.