Another story!
Shan told about the boy who sprouted a feather every time he told a lie, until his commune had to use him for a duster.
Another!
Gveter told about the winged people called gluns, who were so stupid that they died out because they kept hitting each other head-on in midair. “They weren’t real,” he added conscientiously. “Only a story.”
Another—No. Bedtime now.
Rig and Asten went round as usual for a good-night hug, and this time Betton followed them. When he came to Tai he did not stop, for she did not like to be touched; but she put out her hand, drew the child to her, and kissed his cheek. He fled in joy.
“Stories,” said Sweet Today. “Ours begins tomorrow, eh?”
A chain of command is easy to describe; a network of response isn’t. To those who live by mutual empowerment, “thick” description, complex and open-ended, is normal and comprehensible, but to those whose only model is hierarchic control, such description seems a muddle, a mess, along with what it describes. Who’s in charge here? Get rid of all these petty details. How many cooks spoil a soup? Let’s get this perfectly clear now. Take me to your leader!
The old navigator was at the NAFAL console, of course, and Gveter at the paltry churten console; Oreth was wired into the AI; Tai, Shan, and Karth were their respective Support, and what Sweet Today did might be called supervising or overseeing if that didn’t suggest a hierarchic function. Interseeing, maybe, or subvising. Rig and Asten always naffled (to use Rig’s word) in the ship’s library, where, during the boring and disorienting experience of travel at near lightspeed, Asten could try to look at pictures or listen to a music tape, and Rig could curl up on and under a certain furry blanket and go to sleep. Betton’s crew function during flight was Elder Sib; he stayed with the little ones, provided himself with a barf bag since he was one of those whom NAFAL flight made queasy, and focused the intervid on Lidi and Gveter so he could watch what they did.
So they all knew what they were doing, as regards NAFAL flight. As regards the churten process, they knew that it was supposed to effectuate their transilience to a solar system seventeen light-years from Ve Port without temporal interval; but nobody, anywhere, knew what they were doing.
So Lidi looked around, like the violinist who raises her bow to poise the chamber group for the first chord, a flicker of eye contact, and sent the Shoby into NAFAL mode, as Gveter, like the cellist whose bow comes down in that same instant to ground the chord, sent the Shoby into churten mode. They entered unduration. They churtened. No long, as the ansible had said.
“What’s wrong?” Shan whispered.
“By damn!” said Gveter.
“What?” said Lidi, blinking and shaking her head.
“That’s it,” Tai said, flicking readouts.
“That’s not A-sixty-whatsit,” Lidi said, still blinking.
Sweet Today was gestalting them, all ten at once, the seven on the bridge and by intervid the three in the library. Betton had cleared a window, and the children were looking out at the murky, brownish convexity that filled half of it. Rig was holding a dirty, furry blanket. Karth was taking the electrodes off Oreth’s temples, disengaging the AI link. “There was no interval,” Oreth said.
“We aren’t anywhere,” Lidi said.
“There was no interval,” Gveter repeated, scowling at the console. “That’s right.”
“Nothing happened,” Karth said, skimming through the AI flight report.
Oreth got up, went to the window, and stood motionless looking out.
“That’s it. M-60-340-nolo,” Tai said.
All their words fell dead, had a false sound.
“Well! We did it, Shobies!” said Shan.
Nobody answered.
“Buzz Ve Port on the ansible,” Shan said with determined jollity. “Tell ’em we’re all here in one piece.”
“All where?” Oreth asked.
“Yes, of course,” Sweet Today said, but did nothing.
“Right,” said Tai, going to the ship’s ansible. She opened the field, centered to Ve, and sent a signal. Ships’ ansibles worked only in the visual mode; she waited, watching the screen. She resignaled. They were all watching the screen.
“Nothing going through,” she said.
Nobody told her to check the centering coordinates; in a network system nobody gets to dump their anxieties that easily. She checked the coordinates. She signaled; rechecked, reset, resignaled; opened the field and centered to Abbenay on Anarres and signaled. The ansible screen was blank.
“Check the—” Shan said, and stopped himself.
“The ansible is not functioning,” Tai reported formally to her crew.
“Do you find malfunction?” Sweet Today asked.
“No. Nonfunction.”
“We’re going back now,” said Lidi, still seated at the NAFAL console.
Her words, her tone, shook them, shook them apart.
“No, we’re not!” Betton said on the intervid while Oreth said, “Back where?”
Tai, Lidi’s Support, moved towards her as if to prevent her from activating the NAFAL drive, but then hastily moved back to the ansible to prevent Gveter from getting access to it. He stopped, taken aback, and said, “Perhaps the churten affected ansible function?”
“I’m checking it out,” Tai said. “Why should it? Robot-operated ansible transmission functioned in all the test flights.”
“Where are the AI reports?” Shan demanded.
“I told you, there are none,” Karth answered sharply.
“Oreth was plugged in.”
Oreth, still at the window, spoke without turning. “Nothing happened.”
Sweet Today came over beside the Gethenian. Oreth looked at her and said, slowly, “Yes. Sweet Today. We cannot…do this. I think. I can’t think.”
Shan had cleared a second window, and stood looking out it. “Ugly,” he said.
“What is?” said Lidi.
Gveter said, as if reading from the Ekumenical Atlas, “Thick, stable atmosphere, near the bottom of the temperature window for life. Micro-organisms. Bacterial clouds, bacterial reefs.”
“Germ stew,” Shan said. “Lovely place to send us.”
“So that if we arrived as a neutron bomb or a black hole event we’d only take bacteria with us,” Tai said. “But we didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” said Lidi.
“Didn’t arrive?” Karth asked.
“Hey,” Betton said, “is everybody going to stay on the bridge?”
“I want to come there,” said Rig’s little pipe, and then Asten’s voice, clear but shaky, “Maba, I’d like to go back to Liden now.”
“Come on,” Karth said, and went to meet the children. Oreth did not turn from the window, even when Asten came close and took Oreth’s hand.
“What are you looking at, Maba?”
“The planet, Asten.”
“What planet?”
Oreth looked at the child then.
“There isn’t anything,” Asten said.
“That brown color—that’s the surface, the atmosphere of a planet.”
“There isn’t any brown color. There isn’t anything. I want to go back to Liden. You said we could when we were done with the test.”
Oreth looked around, at last, at the others.
“Perception variation,” Gveter said.
“I think,” Tai said, “that we must establish that we are—that we got here—and then get here.”
“You mean, go back,” Betton said.
“The readings are perfectly clear,” Lidi said, holding on to the rim of her seat with both hands and speaking very distinctly. “Every coordinate in order. That’s M-60-Etcetera down there. What more do you want? Bacteria samples?”
“Yes,” Tai said. “Instrument function’s been affected, so we can’t rely on instrumental records.”
“Oh, shitsake!” said Lidi. “What a farce! All right. Suit up, go down, get some goo, and then let’s get out. Go home. By NAFAL.”
“By NAFAL?” Shan and Tai echoed, and Gveter said, “But we would spend seventeen years, Ve time, and no ansible to explain why.”