“Like the circulation of the blood,” said Tai. “People went around with their hearts beating for a long time before they understood why.” She did not look satisfied with her own analogy, and when Shan said, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” she looked offended. “Mysticism,” she said, in the tone of voice of one warning a companion about dog-shit on the path.
“Surely there’s nothing beyond understanding in this process,” Oreth said, somewhat tentatively. “Nothing that can’t be understood, and reproduced.”
“And quantified,” Gveter said stoutly.
“But, even if people understand the process, nobody knows the human response to it—the experience of it. Right? So we are to report on that.”
“Why shouldn’t it be just like NAFAL flight, only even faster?” Betton asked.
“Because it is totally different,” said Gveter.
“What could happen to us?”
Some of the adults had discussed possibilities, all of them had considered them; Karth and Oreth had talked it over in appropriate terms with their children; but evidently Betton had not been included in such discussions.
“We don’t know,” Tai said sharply. “I told you that at the start, Betton.”
“Most likely it will be like NAFAL flight,” said Shan, “but the first people who flew NAFAL didn’t know what it would be like, and had to find out the physical and psychic effects—”
“The worst thing,” said Sweet Today in her slow, comfortable voice, “would be that we would die. Other living beings have been on some of the test flights. Crickets. And intelligent ritual animals on the last two Shoby tests. They were all right.” It was a very long statement for Sweet Today, and carried proportional weight.
“We are almost certain,” said Gveter, “that no temporal rearrangement is involved in churten, as it is in NAFAL. And mass is involved only in terms of needing a certain core mass, just as for ansible transmission, but not in itself. So maybe even a pregnant person could be a transilient.”
“They can’t go on ships,” Asten said. “The unborn dies if they do.”
Asten was half lying across Oreth’s lap; Rig, thumb in mouth, was asleep on Karth’s lap.
“When we were Oneblins,” Asten went on, sitting up, “there were ritual animals with our crew. Some fish and some Terran cats and a whole lot of Hainish gholes. We got to play with them. And we helped thank the ghole that they tested for lithovirus. But it didn’t die. It bit Shapi. The cats slept with us. But one of them went into kemmer and got pregnant, and then the Oneblin had to go to Hain, and she had to have an abortion, or all her unborns would have died inside her and killed her too. Nobody knew a ritual for her, to explain to her. But I fed her some extra food. And Rig cried.”
“Other people I know cried too,” Karth said, stroking the child’s hair.
“You tell good stories, Asten,” Sweet Today observed.
“So we’re sort of ritual humans,” said Betton.
“Volunteers,” Tai said.
“Experimenters,” said Lidi.
“Experiences,” said Shan.
“Explorers,” Oreth said.
“Gamblers,” said Karth.
The boy looked from one face to the next.
“You know,” Shan said, “back in the time of the League, early in NAFAL flight, they were sending out ships to really distant systems—trying to explore everything—crews that wouldn’t come back for centuries. Maybe some of them are still out there. But some of them came back after four, five, six hundred years, and they were all mad. Crazy!” He paused dramatically. “But they were all crazy when they started. Unstable people. They had to be crazy to volunteer for a time dilation like that. What a way to pick a crew, eh?” He laughed.
“Are we stable?” said Oreth. “I like instability. I like this job. I like the risk, taking the risk together. High stakes! That’s the edge of it, the sweetness of it.”
Karth looked down at their children, and smiled.
“Yes. Together,” Gveter said. “You aren’t crazy. You are good. I love you. We are ammari.”
“Ammar,” the others said to him, confirming this unexpected declaration. The young man scowled with pleasure, jumped up, and pulled off his shirt. “I want to swim. Come on, Betton. Come on swimming!” he said, and ran off towards the dark, vast waters that moved softly beyond the ruddy haze of their fire. The boy hesitated, then shed his shirt and sandals and followed. Shan pulled up Tai, and they followed; and finally the two old women went off into the night and the breakers, rolling up their pants legs, laughing at themselves.
To Gethenians, even on a warm summer night on a warm summer world, the sea is no friend. The fire is where you stay. Oreth and Asten moved closer to Karth and watched the flames, listening to the faint voices out in the glimmering surf, now and then talking quietly in their own tongue, while the little sisterbrother slept on.
After thirty lazy days at Liden the Shobies caught the fish train inland to the city, where a Fleet lander picked them up at the train station and took them to the spaceport on Ve, the next planet out from Hain. They were rested, tanned, bonded, and ready to go.
One of Sweet Today’s hemi-affiliate cousins once removed was on ansible duty in Ve Port. She urged the Shobies to ask the inventors of the churten on Urras and Anarres any questions they had about churten operation. “The purpose of the experimental flight is understanding,” she insisted, “and your full intellectual participation is essential. They’ve been very anxious about that.”
Lidi snorted.
“Now for the ritual,” said Shan, as they went to the ansible room in the sunward bubble. “They’ll explain to the animals what they’re going to do and why, and ask them to help.”
“The animals don’t understand that,” Betton said in his cold, angelic treble. “It’s just to make the humans feel better.”
“The humans understand?” Sweet Today asked.
“We all use each other,” Oreth said. “The ritual says: we have no right to do so; therefore, we accept the responsibility for the suffering we cause.”
Betton listened and brooded.
Gveter addressed the ansible first and talked to it for half an hour, mostly in Pravic and mathematics. Finally, apologizing, and looking a little unnerved, he invited the others to use the instrument. There was a pause. Lidi activated it, introduced herself, and said, “We have agreed that none of us, except Gveter, has the theoretical background to grasp the principles of the churten.”
A scientist twenty-two light-years away responded in Hainish via the rather flat auto-translator voice, but with unmistakable hopefulness, “The churten, in lay terms, may be seen as displacing the virtual field in order to realize relational coherence in terms of the transiliential experientiality.”
“Quite,” said Lidi.
“As you know, the material effects have been nil, and negative effect on low-intelligence sentients also nil; but there is considered to be a possibility that the participation of high intelligence in the process might affect the displacement in one way or another. And that such displacement would reciprocally affect the participant.”
“What has the level of our intelligence got to do with how the churten functions?” Tai asked.
A pause. Their interlocutor was trying to find the words, to accept the responsibility.
“We have been using ‘intelligence’ as shorthand for the psychic complexity and cultural dependence of our species,” said the translator voice at last. “The presence of the transilient as conscious mind nonduring transilience is the untested factor.”
“But if the process is instantaneous, how can we be conscious of it?” Oreth asked.