Ursula Le Guin - Dancing to Ganam

The clear eyes were amazing in their intensity. It was like being looked at by lightning. Shan wanted to be able to agree, but had to stammer, “I—we, you know, we had some trouble deciding where we were.”

“I think that that’s unnecessary, that confusion. Transilience is a non-experience. I think that normally, nothing happens . Literally nothing. Extraneous events got mixed into it in the Shoby experiment—your interval was queered. This time, I think we can have a non-experience.” He looked at Forest and Riel and laughed. “You’ll not-see what I don’t mean,” he said. “Anyhow, after the bus trip, I hung about annoying them persistently until Gvonesh agreed to let me do a solo exploratory.”

The mezklete bustled up to them, pushing its little cart with its furry paws. Mezkletes love parties, love to give food, love to serve drinks and watch their humans get weird. It stayed about hopefully for a while to see if they would get weird, then bustled back to the Anarresti theorists, who were always weird.

“An exploratory—a first contact?”

Dalzul nodded. His strength and unconscious dignity were daunting, and yet his delight, his simple glee, in what he had done was irresistible. Shan had met brilliant people and wise people, but never one whose energy shone so bright, so clear, so vulnerable.

“We chose a distant one. G-14-214-yomo; it was Tadkla on the maps of the Expansion; the people I met there call it Ganam. A preliminary Ekumen mission is actually on its way there at NAFAL speed. Left Ollul eight years ago, and will get there thirteen years from herenow. Of course there was no way to communicate with them while they’re in transit, to tell them I was going to be there ahead of them. The CRG thought it a good idea that somebody would be dropping in after thirteen years. In case I didn’t report back, maybe they could find out what happened. But it looks now as if the mission will arrive to find Ganam already a member of the Ekumen!” He looked at them all, alight with passion and intention. “You know, churten is going to change everything. When transilience replaces space travel—all travel—when there is no distance between worlds—when we control interval—I keep trying to imagine, to understand what it will mean, to the Ekumen, to us. We’ll be able to make the household of humankind truly one house, one place. But then it goes still deeper! In transilience what we do is to rejoin, restore the primal moment, the beat that is the rhythm…To rejoin unity. To escape time. To use eternity! You’ve been there, Shan—you felt what I’m trying to say?”

“I don’t know,” Shan said, “yes—”

“Do you want to see the tape of my trip?” Dalzul asked abruptly, his eyes shining with a flicker of mischief. “I brought a handview.”

“Yes!” Forest and Riel said, and they crowded in around him in the windows eat like a bunch of conspirators. The mezklete tried in vain to see what they were doing, but was too short, even when it got up on its cart.

While he programmed the little viewer, Dalzul told them briefly about Ganam. One of the outermost seedings of the Hainish Expansion, the world had been lost from the human community for five hundred millennia; nothing was known about it except that it might have a population descended from human ancestors. If it did, the Ekumenical ship on its way to it would in the normal way have observed from orbit for a long time before sending down a few observers, to hide, or to pass if possible, or to reveal their mission if necessary, while gathering information, learning languages and customs, and so on—a process usually of many years. All this had been short-circuited by the unpredictability of the new technology. Dalzul’s small ship had come out of churten not in the stratosphere as intended, but in the atmosphere, about a hundred meters above the ground.

“I didn’t have the chance to make an unobtrusive entrance on the scene,” he said. The audiovisual record his ship’s instruments had made came up on the little screen as he spoke. They saw the grey plains of Ve Port dropping away as the ship left the planet. “Now,” Dalzul said, and in one instant they saw the stars blaze in black space and the yellow walls and orange roofs of a city, the blaze of sunlight on a canal.

“You see?” Dalzul murmured. “Nothing happens.”

The city tilted and settled, sunny streets and squares full of people, all of them looking up and pointing, unmistakably shouting, “Look! Look!”

“Decided I might as well accept the situation,” Dalzul said. Trees and grass rose up around the ship as he brought it on down. People were already hurrying out of the city, human people: terra-cotta-colored, rather massively built, with broad faces, bare-armed, barefoot, wearing kilts and gilets in splendid colors, men with great gold earrings, headdresses of basketry, gold wire, feather plumes.

“The Gaman,” Dalzul said. “The people of Ganam…Grand, aren’t they? And they don’t waste time. They were there within half an hour—there, that’s Ket, see her, that stunning woman?—Since the ship was obviously fairly alarming, I decided that the first point to make was my defenselessness.”

They saw what he meant, as the ship’s camera recorded his exit. He walked slowly out on the grass and stood still, facing the gathering crowd. He was naked. Unarmed, unclothed, alone, he stood there, the fierce sun bright on his white skin and silvery hair, his hands held wide and open in the gesture of offering.

The pause was very long. Talk and exclamation among the Gaman died out as people came near the front of the crowd. Dalzul, in the center of the camera’s field, stood easily, motionless. Then—Shan drew breath sharply as he watched—a woman came forward towards him. She was tall and strongly built, with round arms, black eyes above high cheekbones. Her hair was braided with gold into a coronet on her head. She stood before Dalzul and spoke, her voice clear and full. The words sounded like poetry, like ritual questions, Shan thought. Dalzul responded by bringing his hands toward his heart, then opening them again wide, palm up.

The woman gazed at him a while, then spoke one resonant word. Slowly, with a grave formality, she slipped the dark red gilet from her breasts and shoulders, untied her kilt and dropped it aside with a splendid, conscious gesture, and stood naked before the naked man.

She reached out her hand. Dalzul took it.

They walked away from the ship, towards the city. The crowd closed in behind them and followed them, still quiet, without haste or confusion, as if performing actions they had performed before.

A few people, mostly adolescents, stayed behind, looking at the ship, daring each other to come closer, curious, cautious, but not frightened.

Dalzul stopped the tape.

“You see,” he said to Shan, “the difference?”

Shan, awed, did not speak.

“What the Shoby ’s crew discovered,” Dalzul said to the three of them, “is that individual experiences of transilience can be made coherent only by a concerted effort. An effort to synchronize—to entrain. When they realized that, they were able to pull out of an increasingly dangerously fragmented perception of where they were and what was happening. Right, Shan?”

“They call it the chaos experience now,” Shan said, subdued by the memory of it, and by the difference of Dalzul’s experience.

“The temporalists and psychologists have sweated a lot of theory out of the Shoby trip,” Dalzul said. “My reading of it is pitifully simple: that a great deal of the perceptual dissonance, the anguish and incoherence, was an effect of the disparity of the Shoby crew. No matter how well you had crew-bonded, Shan, you were ten people from four worlds—four different cultures—two very old women, and three young children! If the answer to coherent transilience is entrainment, functioning in rhythm, then we’ve got to make entrainment easy. That you achieved it at all was miraculous. The simplest way to achieve it, of course, is to bypass it: to go alone.”