Ursula Le Guin: Dancing to Ganam

“I only know a word here and there. Aketa wanted me to have it for a while. He’s been teaching us. Mostly I look at the pictures. Like a baby.” She showed him the small, brightly painted, gilded picture on the open page: men in wonderful robes and headdresses, dancing, under the purple slopes of Iyananam.

“Dalzul thought they were preliterate,” he said. “He has to see this.”

“He has seen it,” Riel said.

“But—” Shan began, and was silent.

“Long long ago on Terra,” Riel said, “one of the first anthropologists took a man from a tiny, remote, isolated Arctic tribe to a huge city, New York City. The thing that most impressed this very intelligent tribesman about New York City were the knobs on the bottom posts of staircases. He studied them with deep interest. He wasn’t interested in the vast buildings, the streets full of crowds, the machines…”

“We wonder if the churten problem centers not on impressions only, but expectations,” Forest said. “We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report. We’re conscious only of what we need to be or want to be conscious of. In churten, the universe dissolves. As we come out, we reconstruct it—frantically. Grabbing at things we recognize. And once one part of it is there, the rest gets built on that.”

“I say ‘I,’” said Riel, “and an infinite number of sentences could follow. But the next word begins to build the immutable syntax. ‘I want—’ By the last word of the sentence, there may be no choice at all. And also, you can only use words you know.”

“That’s how we came out of the chaos experience on the Shoby ,” Shan said. His head had begun suddenly to ache, a painful, irregular throb at the temples. “We talked. We constructed the syntax of the experience. We told our story.”

“And tried very hard to tell it truly,” Forest said.

After a pause, pressing the pressure points on his temples, Shan said, “You’re saying that Dalzul has been lying?”

“No. But is he telling the Ganam story or the Dalzul story? The childlike, simple people acclaiming him king, the beautiful princess offering herself…”

“But she did—”

“It’s her job. Her vocation. She’s one of these priests, an important one. Her title is Anam. Dalzul translated it princess. We think it means earth. The earth, the ground, the world. She is Ganam’s earth, receiving the stranger in honor. But there’s more to it—this reciprocal function, which Dalzul interprets as kingship. They simply don’t have kings. It must be some kind of priesthood role as Anam’s mate. Not Ket’s husband, but her mate when she’s Anam. But we don’t know. We don’t know what responsibility he’s taken on.”

“And we may be inventing just as much of it as Dalzul is,” Riel said. “How can we be sure?”

“If we have you back to compare notes with, it’ll be a big relief,” said Forest. “We need you.”

So does he, Shan thought. He needs my help, they need my help. What help have I to give? I don’t know where I am. I know nothing about this place. I know the stone is warm and rough under the palm of my hand.

I know these two women are sympathetic, intelligent, trying to be honest.

I know Dalzul is a great man, not a foolish egoist, not a liar.

I know the stone is rough, the sun is warm, the shadow cool. I know the slight, sweet taste of tipu seeds, the crunch between the teeth.

I know that when he was thirty, Dalzul was worshiped as God. No matter how he disavowed that worship, it must have changed him. Growing old, he would remember what it was to be a king…

“Do we know anything at all about this priesthood he’s supposed to fill, then?” he asked harshly.

“The key word seems to be ‘todok,’ stick or staff or scepter. Todoghay, the one who holds the scepter, is the title. Dalzul got that right. It does sound like a king. But we don’t think it means ruling people.”

“Day-to-day decisions are made by the councils,” Riel said. “The priests educate and lead ceremony and—keep the city in spiritual balance?”

“Sometimes, possibly, by blood sacrifice,” Forest said. “We don’t know what they’ve asked him to do! But it does seem he’d better find out.”

After a while Shan sighed. “I feel like a fool,” he said.

“Because you fell in love with Dalzul?” Forest’s black eyes gazed straight into his. “I honor you for it. But I think he needs your help.”

When he left, walking slowly, he felt Forest and Riel watch him go, felt their affectionate concern following him, staying with him.

He headed back for the big market square. We must tell our story together, he told himself. But the words were hollow.

I must listen, he thought. Not talk, not tell. Be still.

He listened as he walked in the streets of Ganam. He tried to look, to see with his eyes, to feel, to be in his own skin in this world, in this world, itself. Not his world, not Dalzul’s, or Forest’s or Riel’s, but this world as it was in its recalcitrant and irreducible earth and stone and clay, its dry bright air, its breathing bodies and thinking minds. A vendor was calling wares in a brief musical phrase, five beats, tataBANaba, and an equal pause, and the call again, sweet and endless. A woman passed him and Shan saw her, saw her absolutely for a moment: short, with muscular arms and hands, a preoccupied look on her wide face with its thousand tiny wrinkles etched by the sun on the pottery smoothness of the skin. She strode past him, purposeful, not noticing him, and was gone. She left behind her an indubitable sense of being. Of being herself. Unconstructed, unreadable, unreachable. The other. Not his to understand.

All right then. Rough stone warm against the palm, and a five-beat measure, and a short old woman going about her business. It was a beginning.

I’ve been dreaming, he thought. Ever since we got here. Not a nightmare like the Shoby . A good dream, a sweet dream. But was it my dream or his? Following him around, seeing through his eyes, meeting Viaka and the others, being feasted, listening to the music…Learning their dances, learning to drum with them…Learning to cook…Pruning orchards…Sitting on my terrace, eating tipu seeds…A sunny dream, full of music and trees and simple companionship and peaceful solitude. My good dream, he thought, surprised and wry. No kingship, no beautiful princess, no rivals for the throne. I’m a lazy man. With lazy dreams. I need Tai to wake me up, make me vibrate, irritate me. I need my angry woman, my unforgiving friend.

Forest and Riel weren’t a bad substitute. They were certainly friends, and though they forgave his laziness, they had jolted him out of it.

An odd question appeared in his mind: Does Dalzul know we’re here? Apparently Forest and Riel don’t exist for him as women; do I exist for him as a man?

He did not try to answer the question. My job, he thought, is to try to jolt him. To put a bit of dissonance in the harmony, to syncopate the beat. I’ll ask him to dinner and talk to him, he thought.

Middle-aged, majestic, hawk-nosed, fierce-faced, Aketa was the most mild and patient of teachers. “Todokyu nkenes ebegebyu,” he repeated for the fifth or sixth time, smiling.

“The scepter—something—is full of? has mastery over? represents?” said Forest.

“Is connected with—symbolizes?” said Riel.

“Kenes!” Shan said. “Electric! That’s the word they kept using at the generator. Power!”

“The scepter symbolizes power?” said Forest. “Well, what a revelation. Shit!”

“Shit,” Aketa repeated, evidently liking the sound of the word. “Shit!”