Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

After a long silence the young man said softly in a voice which did not sound like his voice, “I need to go home.”

“That is not possible now,” said the medicine man. “But we can arrange a Staying Chant while I find a person able to address the god.” He promptly put out a call for students who were ex–People of the South. Four responded. They sat all night with Hav­zhiva singing the Staying Chant in two languages and four dialects, until Hav­zhiva joined them in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarsely, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.

He woke in his own room. An old woman was having a conversation with nobody beside him. “You aren’t here,” she said. “No, you are mistaken. You can’t die here. It would not be right, it would be quite wrong. You know that. This is the wrong place. This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the way home? Here it is. Listen.” She began singing in a thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless song that was familiar to Hav­zhiva, as if he had heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old woman went on talking to nobody.

When he woke again she was gone. He never knew who she was or where she came from; he never asked. She had spoken and sung in his own language, in the dialect of Stse.

He was not going to die now, but he was very unwell. The medicine man ordered him to the Hospital at Tes, the most beautiful place on all Ve, an oasis where hot springs and sheltering hills make a mild local climate and flowers and forests can grow. There are paths endlessly winding under great trees, warm lakes where you can swim forever, little misty ponds from which birds rise crying, steam-shrouded hot springs, and a thousand waterfalls whose voices are the only sound all night. There he was sent to stay till he was recovered.

He began to speak into his noter, after he had been at Tes twenty days or so; he would sit in the sunlight on the doorstep of his cottage in a glade of grasses and ferns and talk quietly to himself by way of the little recording machine. “What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything,” he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. “What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible, rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is partial—infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection of…” His voice ceased; the silence of the glade among the great trees continued.

After forty-five days he returned to the School. He took a new apartment. He changed fields, leaving social science, Tiu’s field, for Ekumenical service training, which was intellectually closely related but led to a different kind of work. The change would lengthen his time at the School by at least a year, after which if he did well he could hope for a post with the Ekumen. He did well, and after two years was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical councils, if he would care to go to Werel. Yes, he said, he would. His friends gave a big farewell party for him.

“I thought you were aiming for Terra,” said one of his less­astute classmates. “All that stuff about war and slavery and class and caste and gender—isn’t that Terran history?”

“It’s current events in Werel,” Hav­zhiva said.

He was no longer Zhiv. He had come back from the Hospital as Hav­zhiva.

Somebody else was stepping on the unastute classmate’s foot, but she paid no attention. “I thought you were going to follow Tiu,” she said. “I thought that’s why you never slept with anybody. God, if I’d only known!” The others winced, but Hav­zhiva smiled and hugged her apologetically.

In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had betrayed and forsaken Iyan Iyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.

He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.

The medicine man came to visit him the day before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a while saying nothing. Hav­zhiva sat with him. He had long been used to silence, and still sometimes forgot that it was not customary among historians.

“What’s wrong?” the medicine man said. It seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its meditative tone; at any rate, Hav­zhiva made no answer.

“Please stand up,” the medicine man said, and when Hav­zhiva had done so, “Now walk a little.” He walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him. “You’re out of balance,” he said. “Did you know it?”

“Yes.”

“I could get a Staying Chant together this evening.”

“It’s all right,” Hav­zhiva said. “I’ve always been off-balance.”

“There’s no need to be,” the medicine man said. “On the other hand, maybe it’s best, since you’re going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life.”

They embraced formally, as historians did, especially when as now it was absolutely certain that they would never see one another again. Hav­zhiva had to give and get a good many formal embraces that day. The next day he boarded the Terraces of Darranda and went across the darkness.

During his journey of eighty light-years at NAFAL speed, his mother died, and his father, and Iyan Iyan, everyone he had known in Stse, everyone he knew in Kathhad and on Ve. By the time the ship landed, they had all been dead for years. The child Iyan Iyan had borne had lived and grown old and died.

This was a knowledge he had lived with ever since he saw Tiu board her ship, leaving him to die. Because of the medicine man, the four people who had sung for him, the old woman, and the waterfalls of Tes, he had lived; but he had lived with that knowledge.

Other things had changed as well. At the time he left Ve, We­rel’s colony planet Yeowe had been a slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over, Yeowe had declared its independence, and the institution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to disintegrate.

Hav­zhiva longed to observe this terrible and magnificent process, but the Embassy sent him promptly off to Yeowe. A Hainishman called Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdardon Aya counseled him before he left. “If you want danger, it’s dangerous,” he said, “and if you like hope, it’s hopeful. Werel is unmaking itself, while Yeowe’s trying to make itself. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed. I tell you what, Yehedarhed Hav­zhiva: there are great gods loose on these worlds.”

Yeowe had got rid of its Bosses, its Owners, the Four Corporations who had run the vast slave plantations for three hundred years; but though the thirty years of the War of Liberation were over, the fighting had not stopped. Chiefs and warlords among the slaves who had risen to power during the Liberation now fought to keep and extend their power. Factions had battled over the question of whether to kick all foreigners off the planet forever or to admit Aliens and join the Ekumen. The isolationists had finally been voted down, and there was a new Ekumenical Embassy in the old colonial capital. Hav­zhiva spent a while there learning “the language and the table manners,” as they said. Then the Ambassador, a clever young Terran named Solly, sent him south to the region called Yotebber, which was clamoring for recognition.