Robert Silverberg: A Time of Changes

This scheme of bondings allows us a small escape from the constricting solitude in which we of Borthan are expected to live. You must know by now — even if you who read this be a stranger to our planet — that it has long been forbidden by custom for us to open our souls to others. To talk excessively of oneself, so our forefathers believed, leads inevitably to self-indulgence, self-pity, and self-corruption; therefore we are trained to keep ourselves to ourselves, and, so that the prisoning bands of custom may be all the more steely, we are prohibited even from using such words as “I” or “me” in polite discourse. If we have problems, we settle them in silence; if we have ambitions, we fulfill them without advertising our hopes; if we have desires, we pursue them in a selfless and impersonal way. To these harsh rules only two exceptions are made. We may speak our hearts freely to our drainers, who are religious functionaries and mere hirelings; and we may, within limits, open ourselves to our bond-kin. These are the rules of the Covenant.

It is permissible to confide almost anything to a bondsister or a bondbrother, but we are taught to observe etiquette in going about it. For example, proper people consider it improper to speak in the first person even to one’s bond-kin. It is not done, ever. No matter how intimate a confession we make, we must couch it in acceptable grammar, not in the vulgarities of a common selfbarer.

(In our idiom a selfbarer is one who exposes himself to others, by which is meant that he exposes his soul, not his flesh. It is deemed a coarse act and is punished by social ostracism, or worse. Selfbarers use the censured pronouns of the gutter vocabulary, as I have done throughout what you now read. Although one is allowed to bare one’s self to one’s bond-kin, one is not a selfbarer unless one does it in tawdry blurtings of “I” and “me.”)

Also we are taught to observe reciprocity in our dealings with bond-kin. That is, we may not overload them with our woes, while failing to ease them of their own burdens. This is plain civility: the relationship depends on mutuality, and we may make use of them only if we are careful to let them make use of us. Children are often one-sided in their dealings with bondkin; one may dominate his bondbrother, and chatter endlessly at him without pausing to heed the other’s woes. But such things usually come into balance early. It is an unpardonable breach of propriety to show insufficient concern for one’s bond-kin; I know no one, not even the weakest and most slovenly among us, who is guilty of that sin.

Of all the prohibitions having to do with bonding the most severe is the one against physical relationships with our bond-kin. In sexual matters we are generally quite free, only we dare not do this one thing. This struck at me most painfully. Not that I yearned for Noim, for that has never been my path, nor is it a common one among us; but Halum was my soul’s desire, and neither as wife nor as mistress could she ever comfort me. Long hours we sat up together, her hand in mine, telling one another things we could tell no one else, and how easy it would have been for me to draw her close, and part her garments, and slip my throbbing flesh inside hers. I would not attempt it. My conditioning held firm; and, as I hope to survive long enough to tell you, even after Schweiz and his potion had changed my soul, still did I respect the sanctity of Halum’s body, although I was able to enter her in other ways. But I will not deny my desire for her. Nor can I forget the shock I felt when I learned in boyhood that of all Borthan’s women only Halum, my beloved Halum, was denied to me.

I was extraordinarily close to Halum in every but the physical way, and she was for me the ideal bondsister: open, giving, loving, serene, radiant, adaptable. Not only was she beautiful — creamy-skinned, dark-eyed and dark of hair, slender and graceful — but also she was remarkable within herself, for her soul was gentle and sleek and supple, a wondrous mixture of purity and wisdom. Thinking of her, I see the image of a forest glade in the mountains, with black-needled evergreen trees rising close together like shadowy swords springing from a bed of newly fallen snow, and a sparkling stream dancing between sun-spattered boulders, everything clean and untainted and self- contained. Sometimes when I was with her I felt impossibly thick and clumsy, a hulking lumbering mountain of dull meat, with an ugly hairy body and stupid ponderous muscles; but Halum had the skill of showing me, with a word, with a laugh, with a wink, that I was being unjust to myself when I let the sight of her lightness and gaiety lead me to wish I was woman-soft and woman-airy.

On the other side I was equally close to Noim. He was my foil in many ways: slender where I am burly, crafty where I am direct, cautious and calculating where I am rash, bleak of outlook where I am sunny. With him as with Halum I frequently felt awkward, not really in any bodily sense (for, as I have told you, I move well for a man my size) but in my inward nature. Noim, more mercurial than I, livelier, quicker of wit, seemed to leap and cavort where I merely plodded, and yet the prevailing pessimism of his spirit made him appear deeper than I as well as more buoyant. To give myself credit, Noim looked with envy on me just as I did on him. He was jealous of my great strength, and furthermore he confessed that he felt mean-souled and petty when he peered into my eyes. “One sees simplicity and power there,” he admitted, “and one is aware that one often cheats, that one is lazy, that one breaks faith, that one does a dozen wicked things daily, and none of these things is any more natural to you than dining on your own flesh.”

You must understand that Halum and Noim were no bond-kin to one another, and were linked only by way of their common relationship to me. Noim had a bondsister of his own, a certain Thirga, and Halum was bonded to a girl of Manneran, Nald by name. Through such ties the Covenant creates a chain that clasps our society together, for Thirga had a bondsister too, and Nald a bondbrother, and each of them was bonded in turn on the other side, and so on and so on to form a vast if not infinite series. Obviously one comes in contact often with the bond-kin of his own bond-kin, though one is not free to assume with them the same privileges one has with those of his own bonding; I frequently saw Noim’s Thirga and Halum’s Nald, just as Halum saw my Noim and Noim saw my Halum, but there was never anything more than nodding friendship between me and Thirga or me and Nald, while Noim and Halum took to each other with immediate warmth. Indeed I suspected for a time that they might marry one another, which would have been uncommon but not illegal. Noim, though, perceived that it would disturb me if my bondbrother shared my bondsister’s bed, and took care not to let the friendship ripen into love of that sort.

Halum now sleeps forever under a stone in Manneran, and Noim has become a stranger to me, perhaps even an enemy to me, and the red sand of the Burnt Lowlands blows in my face as I set down these lines.

After my brother Stirron became septarch in Salla, I went, as you know, to the province of Glin. I will not say that I fled to Glin, for no one openly compelled me to leave my native land; but call my departure a deed of tact. I left in order to spare Stirron the eventual embarrassment of putting me to death, which would have weighed badly upon his soul. One province cannot hold safely the two sons of a late septarch.

Glin was my choice because it is customary for exiles from Salla to go to Glin, and also because my mother’s family held wealth and power there. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I might gain some advantage from that connection.