The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,28
charge him high?’
‘Very high,’ said Faxe tranquilly. ‘The Asker pays what he can afford, as you know. Kings have in fact come to the Foretellers; but not very often …’
‘What if one of the Foretellers is himself a powerful man?’
‘Indwellers of the Fastness have no ranks or status. I may be sent to Erhenrang to the kyorremy; well, if I go, I take back my status and my shadow, but my foretelling’s at an end. If I had a question while I served in the kyorremy, I’d go to Orgny Fastness there, pay my price, and get my answer. But we in the Handdara don’t want answers. It’s hard to avoid them, but we try to.’
‘Faxe, I don’t think I understand.’
‘Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.’
‘But you’re the Answerers!’
‘You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?’
‘No—’
‘To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.’
I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side through the rain, under the dark branches of the Forest of Otherhord. Within the white hood Faxe’s face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present …
‘The unknown,’ said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, ‘the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion … Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?’
‘That we shall die.’
‘Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer … The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.’
6: ONE WAY INTO ORGOREYN
The cook, who was always at the house very early, woke me up; I sleep sound, and he had to shake me and say in my ear, ‘Wake up, wake up, Lord Estraven, there’s a runner come from the King’s House!’ At last I understood him, and confused by sleep and urgency got up in haste and went to the door of my room, where the messenger waited, and so I entered stark naked and stupid as a newborn child into my exile.
Reading the paper the runner gave me I said in my mind that I had looked for this, though not so soon. But when I must watch the man nail that damned paper on the door of the house, then I felt as if he might as well be driving the nails into my eyes, and I turned from him and stood blank and bereft, undone with pain, which I had not looked for.
That fit past, I saw to what must be done, and by Ninth Hour striking on the gongs was gone from the Palace. There was nothing to keep me long. I took what I could take. As for properties and banked monies, I could not raise cash from them without endangering the men I dealt with, and the better friends they were to me the worse their danger. I wrote to my old kemmering Ashe how he might get the profit of certain valuable things to keep for our sons’ use, but told him not to try to send me money, for Tibe would have the border watched. I could not sign the letter. To call anyone by telephone would be to send them to jail, and I hurried to be gone before some friend should come in innocence to see me, and lose his money and his freedom as a reward for his friendship.
I set off west through the city. I stopped at a street-crossing and thought, Why should I not go east, across the mountains and the plains back to Kerm Land, a poor man afoot, and so