The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,84

he said.

I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

It had not rained, here on these north-facing slopes. Snowfields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off – down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.

16: BETWEEN DRUMNER

AND DREMEGOLE

Odyrny Thern. Ai asks from his sleeping-bag, ‘What is it you’re writing, Harth?’

‘A record.’

He laughs a little. ‘I ought to be keeping a journal for the Ekumenical files; but I never could stick to it without a voice-writer.’

I explain that my notes are intended for my people at Estre, who will incorporate them as they see fit into the Records of the Domain; this turning my thoughts to my Hearth and my son, I seek to turn them away again, and ask, ‘Your parent – your parents, that is – are they alive?’

‘No,’ says Ai. ‘Seventy years dead.’

I puzzled at it. Ai was not thirty years old. ‘You’re counting years of a different length than ours?’

‘No. Oh, I see. I’ve timejumped. Twenty years from Earth to Hain-Davenant, from there fifty to Ellul, from Ellul to here seventeen. I’ve only lived off-Earth seven years, but I was born there a hundred and twenty years ago.’

Long since in Erhenrang he had explained to me how time is shortened inside the ships that go almost as fast as starlight between the stars, but I had not laid this fact down against the length of a man’s life, or the lives he leaves behind him on his own world. While he lived a few hours on one of those unimaginable ships going from one planet to another, everyone he had left behind him at home grew old and died, and their children grew old … I said at last, ‘I thought myself an exile.’

‘You for my sake – I for yours,’ he said, and laughed again, a slight cheerful sound in the heavy silence. These three days since we came down from the pass have been much hard work for no gain, but Ai is no longer downcast, nor overhopeful; and he has more patience with me. Maybe the drugs are sweated out of him. Maybe we have learned to pull together.

We spent this day coming down the basaltic spur which we spent yesterday climbing. From the valley it looked a good road up on to the Ice, but the higher we went the more scree and slick rock-face we met, and a grade ever steeper, till even without the sledge we could not have climbed it. Tonight we are back down at the foot of it in the moraine, the valley of stones. Nothing grows here. Rock, pebble-dump, boulder-fields, clay, mud. An arm of the glacier has withdrawn from this slope within the last fifty or hundred years, leaving the planet’s bones raw to the air; no flesh of earth, of grass. Here and there fumaroles cast a heavy yellowish fog over the ground, low and creeping. The air smells of sulphur. It is 12°, still, overcast. I hope no heavy snow falls until we have got over the evil ground between this place and the glacier-arm we saw some miles to the west from the ridge. It seems to be a wide ice-river running down from the plateau between two mountains, volcanoes, both capped with steam and smoke. If we can get on to it from the slopes of the nearer volcano, it may provide us a road up on to the plateau of ice. To our east a smaller glacier comes down to a frozen lake, but it runs curving and even from here the great crevasses in it can be seen; it is impassable to us, equipped as we are. We agreed to try the glacier between the volcanoes, though by going west to it we lose at least two days’ mileage towards our goal, one in going west and one in regaining the distance.

Opposthe Thern. Snowing neserem* No travel in this. We both slept all day. We have been hauling nearly a halfmonth, the sleep does us good.

Ottormenbod Thern. Snowing neserem. Enough sleep. Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent