The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,69
dormitory was glaring, crowded, and noisy. During the day the lights were turned off and the big room was dusky, empty, still. We lay close together on the sleeping-shelf and talked softly. Asra liked best to tell long meandering tales about his young days on a Commensal farm in the Kunderer Valley, that broad splendid plain I had driven through coming from the border to Mishnory. His dialect was strong, and he used many names of people, places, customs, tools, that I did not know the meaning of, so I seldom caught more than the drift of his reminiscences. When he was feeling easiest, usually around noon, I would ask him for a myth or tale. Most Gethenians are well stuffed with these. Their literature, though it exists in written form, is in live oral tradition, and they are all in this sense literate. Asra knew the Orgota staples, the Short-Tales of Meshe, the tale of Parsid, parts of the great epics and the novel-like Sea-Traders saga. These, and bits of local lore recalled from his childhood, he would tell in his soft slurry dialect, and then growing tired would ask me for a story. ‘What do they tell in Karhide?’ he would say, rubbing his legs, which tormented him with aches and shooting pains, and turning to me his face with its shy, sly, patient smile.
Once I said, ‘I know a story about people who live on another world.’
‘What kind of world would that be?’
‘One like this one, all in all; but it doesn’t go around the sun. It goes around the star you call Selemy. That’s a yellow star like the sun, and on that world, under that sun, live other people.’
‘That’s in the Sanovy teachings, that about the other worlds. There used to be an old Sanovy crazy-priest would come by my Hearth when I was little and tell us children all about that, where the liars go when they die, and where the suicides go, and where the thieves go – that’s where we’re going, me and you, eh, one of those places?’
‘No, this I’m telling of isn’t a spirit-world. A real one. The people that live on it are real people, alive, just like here. But very-long-ago they learned how to fly.’
Asra grinned.
‘Not by flapping their arms, you know. They flew in machines like cars.’ But it was hard to say in Orgota, which lacks a word meaning precisely ‘to fly’; the closest one can come has more the meaning of ‘glide’. ‘Well, they learned how to make machines that went right over the air as a sledge goes over snow. And after a while they learned how to make them go farther and faster, till they went like the stone out of a sling off the earth and over the clouds and out of the air clear to another world, going around another sun. And when they got to that world, what did they find there but men …’
‘Sliding in the air?’
‘Maybe, maybe not … When they got to my world, we already knew how to get about in the air. But they taught us how to get from world to world, we didn’t yet have the machines for that.’
Asra was puzzled by the injection of the teller into the tale. I was feverish, bothered by the sores which the drugs had brought out on my arms and chest, and I could not remember how I had meant to weave the story.
‘Go on,’ he said, trying to make sense of it. ‘What did they do besides go in the air?’
‘Oh, they did much as people do here. But they’re all in kemmer all the time.’
He chuckled. There was of course no chance of concealment in this life, and my nickname among prisoners and guards was, inevitably, ‘the Pervert’. But where there is no desire and no shame no one, however anamalous, is singled out; and I think Asra made no connection of this notion with myself and my peculiarities. He saw it merely as a variation on an old theme, and so he chuckled a little and said, ‘In kemmer all the time … Is it a place of reward, then? Or a place of punishment?’
‘I don’t know, Asra. Which is this world?’
‘Neither, child. This here is just the world, it’s how it is. You get born into it and … things are as they are …’
‘I wasn’t born into it. I came to it. I chose it.’