Ursula Le Guin - Dancing to Ganam

“Then how do you get a cross-check on the experience?” Forest said.

“You just saw it: the ship’s record of the landing.”

“But our instruments on the Shoby went out, or were totally erratic,” Shan said. “The readings are as incoherent as our perceptions were.”

“Exactly! You and the instruments were all in one entrainment field, fouling each other up. But when just two or three of you went down onto the planet’s surface, things were better: the lander functioned perfectly, and its tapes of the surface are clear. Although very ugly.”

Shan laughed. “Ugly, yes. A sort of shit-planet. But, Commander, even on the tapes it never is clear who actually went out onto the surface. And that was one of the most chaotic parts of the whole experience. I went down with Gveter and Betton. The surface under the ship was unstable, so I called them back to the lander and we went back up to the ship. That all seems coherent. But Gveter’s perception was that he went down with Betton and Tai, not me, heard Tai call him from the ship, and came back with Betton and me. As for Betton, he went down with Tai and me. He saw his mother walk away from the lander, ignore the order to return, and be left on the surface. Gveter saw that too. They came back without her and found her waiting for them on the bridge. Tai herself has no memory of going down in the lander. Those four stories are all our evidence. They seem to be equally true, equally untrue. And the tapes don’t help—don’t show who was in the suits. They all look alike in that shit soup on the surface.”

“That’s it—exactly—” Dalzul said, leaning forward, his face alight. “That murk, that shit, that chaos you saw, which the cameras in your field saw—Think of the difference between that and the tapes we just watched! Sunlight, vivid faces, bright colors, everything brilliant, clear—Because there was no interference, Shan. The Cetians say that in the churten field there is nothing but the deep rhythms, the vibration of the ultimate wave-particles. Transilience is a function of the rhythm that makes being. According to Cetian spiritual physics, it’s access to that rhythm which allows the individual to participate in eternity and ubiquity. My extrapolation from that is that individuals in transilience have to be in nearly perfect synchrony to arrive at the same place with a harmonious—that is, an accurate—perception of it. My intuition, as far as we’ve tested it, has been confirmed: one person can churten sanely. Until we learn what we’re doing, ten persons will inevitably experience chaos, or worse.”

“And four persons?” Forest inquired, drily.

“—are the control,” said Dalzul. “Frankly, I’d rather have started out by going on more solos, or with one companion at most. But our friends from Anarres, as you know, are very distrustful of what they call egoizing. To them, morality isn’t accessible to individuals, only to groups. Also, they say, maybe something else went wrong on the Shoby experiment, maybe a group can churten just as well as one person, how do we know till we try? So I compromised. I said, send me with two or three highly compatible and highly motivated companions. Send us back to Ganam and let’s see what we see!”

“‘Motivated’ is inadequate,” Shan said. “I am committed. I belong to this crew.”

Riel was nodding, Forest, wary and saturnine, said only, “Are we going to practice entrainment, Commander?”

“As long as you like,” Dalzul said. “But there are things more important than practice. Do you sing, Forest, or play an instrument?”

“I can sing,” Forest said, and Riel and Shan nodded as Dalzul looked at them.

“You know this,” he said, and began softly to sing an old song, a song everybody from the barracks and camps of Terra knew, “Going to the Western Sea.” Riel joined in, then Shan, then Forest in an unexpectedly deep, resonant voice. A few people near them turned to hear the harmonies strike through the gabble of speaking voices. The mezklete came hurrying over, abandoning its cart, its eyes large and bright. They ended the song, smiling, on a long soft chord.

“That is entrainment,” Dalzul said. “All we need to get to Ganam is music. All there is, in the end, is music.”

Smiling, Forest and then Riel raised their glasses.

“To music!” said Shan, feeling drunk and wildly happy.

“To the crew of the Galba ,” said Dalzul, and they drank.

The minimum crew-bonding period of isyeye was of course observed, and during it they had plenty of time to discuss the churten problem, both with Dalzul and among themselves. They watched the ship’s tapes and reread Dalzul’s records of his brief stay on Ganam till they had them memorized, and then argued about the wisdom of doing so. “We’re simply accepting everything he saw and said as objective fact,” Forest pointed out. “What sort of control can we provide?”

“His report and the ship’s tapes agree completely,” Shan said.

“Because, if his theory is correct, he and the instruments were entrained. The reality of the ship and the instruments may be perceivable to us only as perceived by the person, the intelligent being, in transilience. If the Cetians are sure of one thing about churten, it’s that when intelligence is involved in the process they don’t understand it any more. Send out a robot ship, no problem. Send out amoebas and crickets, no problem. Send out high-intelligence beings and all the bets are off. Your ship was part of your reality—your ten different realities. Its instruments obediently recorded the dissonances, or were affected by them to the point of malfunction and nonfunction. Only when you all worked together to construct a joint, coherent reality could the ship begin to respond to it and record it. Right?”

“Yes. But it’s very difficult,” Shan said, “to live without the notion that there is, somewhere, if one could just find it, a fact.”

“Only fiction,” said Forest, unrelenting. “Fact is one of our finest fictions.”

“But music comes first,” Shan said. “And dancing is people being music. I think what Dalzul sees is that we can…we can dance to Ganam.”

“I like that,” said Riel. “And look: on the fiction theory, we should be careful not to ‘believe’ Dalzul’s records, or his ship’s tapes. They’re fictions. But, unless we accept the assumption, based only on the Shoby experiment, that the churten experience necessarily skews perception or judgment of perception, we have no reason to dis believe them. He’s a seasoned observer and a superb gestalter.”

“There are elements of a rather familiar kind of fiction in his report,” Forest said. “The princess who has apparently been waiting for him, expecting him, and leads him naked to her palace, where after due ceremonies and amenities she has sex with him—and very good sex too—? I’m not saying I disbelieve it. I don’t. It looks and rings true. But it would be interesting to know how the princess perceived these events.”

“We can’t know that till we get there and talk to her,” said Riel. “What are we waiting for, anyhow?”

The Galba was a Hainish in-system glass ship, newly fitted with churten controls. It was a pretty little bubble, not much bigger than the Shoby ’s lander. Entering it, Shan had a few rather bad moments. The chaos, the senseless and centerless experience of churten, returned vividly to him: must he go through that again? Could he? Very sharp and aching was the thought of Tai, Tai who should be here now as she had been there then, Tai whom he had come to love aboard the Shoby , and Betton, the clear-hearted child—he needed them, they should be here.

Forest and Riel slipped through the hatch, and after them came Dalzul, the concentration of his energy almost visible around him as an aura or halo, a brightness of being. No wonder the Unists thought he was God, Shan thought, and thought also of the ceremonial, almost reverent welcome shown Dalzul by the Gaman. Dalzul was charged, full of mana, a power to which others responded, by which they were entrained. Shan’s anxiety slipped from him. He knew that with Dalzul there would be no chaos.