were holding out for life when the choice was not between life and death, but between a quick death and a needlessly protracted one. Because they would not let me shoot Genly, he would have to modulate by painful degrees toward his inevitable dying. That process was not one I was going to be able to watch.
“Listen, Helen—”
When she jostled my hand again, I stood up, removed the clip from my pistol, scattered cartridges right and left, and held the weapon before me like a defanged cobra, a creature no less hateful for having been rendered harmless. The night was chilly, probably no more than fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit; and, half-naked to the stars, I was a candidate for either pneumonia or hypothermia. I wanted a good warm, woolen blanket and a bottle of whiskey or ouzo. My tears were streaming, and I tried to staunch them with my forearms and the back of my wrist.
Goddamn rod, I thought. You’ve turned poor Genly into his own assassin. You’ve made me an accomplice. . . .
I stumbled away from the dying habiline and the two Minid women. The other members of the band, wearing expressions of imbecilic incomprehension, reeled back to let me by, and I began circling a small section of the hilltop, winding my body about itself the way a discus thrower does. At last I caught myself up and hurled my pistol out over the savannah toward Mount Tharaka. It spun away into the night like a stone from a catapult. I was rid of it. This knowledge frightened as well as relieved me. For the sake of a quixotic scruple I had set my entire life at risk. Did Genly, or anyone else, give a damn . . . ?
* * *
Genly was a hardy soul. Although he finally fell unconscious, he took all night to die. Considering the nature of his wound, my first-aid kit (a grab bag of bandages, painkillers, and placebos) was powerless to aid or ease him, and I made no second attempt to intervene. Afraid to go too far afield as well as to remain too close at hand, I spent that night hiking up and down the hillside and along its serpentine parapets of stone. At dawn I returned and found only Emily still keeping vigil.
By this time Genly had begun to resemble the mummy that death would make of him. His skin was taut on his bones, his hair brittle and lackluster. When he died, Emily, who knew, made a blood-clabbering keening sound, her head thrown back and her cry half the howl of a canid and half the desperate threnody of a human being. All the Minids came out to listen, and to watch, and to feel the fingers of mutability grapple at the mortal handles of their hearts. One of their own was dead.
Ceremony?
Yes, there was ceremony. To have witnessed it, Alistair Patrick Blair would have given up his post in President Tharaka’s cabinet. To have prevented its cause, I would have foregone the chance to give flesh to my dreams. These were sacrifices that neither Blair nor I had the option of making, however, and the ceremony commemorating Genly’s passage from death to some uncertain transcorporal realm took place in my presence rather than the paleontologist’s.
First, the Minids knew that they must remove the corpse from their city. If they did not, the smell of decomposition would summon vultures, hyenas, and other carrion eaters. Second, the habilines remembered Genly as he had once been. In mourning the rigid, unblinking state into which he had lapsed they also mourned their own mortality. Conscious, or preconscious, our protohuman ancestors suffered an acute tristesse that could only have derived from an intuition of the inevitability of death: “One day Genly’s fate will be mine. What does this mean?”
Not long after sunrise, the women spread out across the steppe and gathered the wild sisal called ol duvai by the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania as well as by their Sambusai cousins in Zarakal. Later the women anointed Genly’s body with the juices of this plant, a natural antiseptic and painkiller. They covered him from head to foot and canted his corpse onto its side in order to reach every part of him. Wherefore medicine for a dead man? Did they wish to spare him the unknown agonies awaiting the newly dead deeper in the domain of nonexistence?
But the females had played out their role. Genly’s body hair was gummy with sisal juice,