crime.’
‘You? No.’ He stared even more closely at me. ‘I don’t know what the devil you are, Mr. Ai, a sexual freak or an artificial monster or a visitor from the Domains of the Void, but you’re not a traitor, you’ve merely been the tool of one. I don’t punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman. Let me give you some advice.’ Argaven said this with curious emphasis and satisfaction, and even then it occurred to me that nobody else, in two years, had ever given me advice. They answered questions, but they never openly gave advice, not even Estraven at his most helpful. It must have to do with shifgrethor. ‘Let no one else use you, Mr. Ai,’ the king was saying. ‘Keep clear of factions. Tell your own lies, do your own deeds. And trust no one. D’you know that? Trust no one. Damn that lying cold-blooded traitor, I trusted him. I put the silver chain around his damned neck. I wish I’d hanged him with it. I never trusted him. Never. Don’t trust anybody. Let him starve in the cesspits of Mishnory hunting garbage, let his bowels rot, never—’ King Argaven shook, choked, caught his breath with a retching sound, and turned his back on me. He kicked at the logs of the great fire till sparks whirled up thick in his face and fell on his hair and his black tunic, and he caught at them with open hands.
Not turning around he spoke in a shrill painful voice: ‘Say what you’ve got to say, Mr. Ai.’
‘May I ask you a question, sir?’
‘Yes.’ He swayed from foot to foot as he stood facing the fire. I had to address his back.
‘Do you believe that I am what I say I am?’
‘Estraven had the physicians send me endless tapes about you, and more from the engineers at the Workshops who have your vehicle, and so on. They can’t all be liars, and they all say you’re not human. What then?’
‘Then, sir, there are others like me. That is, I’m a representative …’
‘Of this union, this Authority, yes, very well. What did they send you here for, is that what you want me to ask?’
Though Argaven might be neither sane nor shrewd, he had had long practice in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation by those whose main aim in life was the achievement and maintenance of the shifgrethor relationship on a high level. Whole areas of that relationship were still blank to me, but I knew something about the competitive, prestige-seeking aspect of it, and about the perpetual conversational duel which can result from it. That I was not duelling with Argaven, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
‘I’ve made no secret of it, sir. The Ekumen wants an alliance with the nations of Gethen.’
‘What for?’
‘Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.’
I was not speaking the tongue spoken by those who rule men, the kings, conquerors, dictators, generals; in that language there was no answer to his question. Sullen and unheeding, Argaven stared at the fire, shifting from foot to foot.
‘How big is this kingdom out of Nowhere, this Ekumen?’
‘There are eighty-three habitable planets in the Ekumenical Scope, and on them about three thousand nations or anthrotypic groups—’
‘Three thousand? I see. Now tell me why we, one against three thousand, should have anything to do with all these nations of monsters living out in the Void?’ He turned around now to look at me, for he was still duelling, posing a rhetorical question, almost a joke. But the joke did not go deep. He was – as Estraven had warned me – uneasy, alarmed.
‘Three thousand nations on eighty-three worlds, sir; but the nearest to Gethen is seventeen years’ journey in ships that go at near lightspeed. If you’ve thought that Gethen might be involved in forays and harassments from such neighbours, consider the distance at which they live. Forays are worth no one’s trouble, across space.’ I did not speak of war, for a good reason, there’s no word for it in Karhidish. ‘Trade, however, is worthwhile. In ideas and techniques, communicated by ansible; in goods and artifacts, sent by manned or unmanned ships. Ambassadors, scholars, and merchants, some of them might come here; some of yours might go offworld.