The crooning laugh of the Zany began, “Ah-ah-ah-ah,” and rose higher and higher into a wavering yell that went on and on, much longer than any voice could go on yelling, right across time. There was movement in the darkness, scuffling and shuffling, a redistribution of ancient centuries, an evasion of foreshadows. “Light, light,” said an immense voice in vast syllables once or innumerable times. “Light. Log on the fire, there. Some light.” It was the physician from Spreve. He had entered the circle. It was all broken. He was kneeling by the Zanies, the frailest ones, the fuse-points; both of them lay huddled up on the floor. The kemmerer lay with his head on Faxe’s knees, breathing in gasps, still trembling; Faxe’s hand, with absent gentleness, stroked his hair. The Pervert was off by himself in a corner, sullen and dejected. The session was over, time passed as usual, the web of power had fallen apart into indignity and weariness. Where was my answer, the riddle of the oracle, the ambiguous utterance of prophecy?
I knelt down beside Faxe. He looked at me with his clear eyes. For that instant I saw him as I had seen him in the dark, as a woman armed in light and burning in a fire, crying out, “Yes—”
Faxe’s soft speaking-voice broke the vision. “Are you answered, Asker?”
“I am answered, Weaver.”
Indeed I was answered. Five years from now Gethen would be a member of the Ekumen: yes. No riddles, no hedging. Even then I was aware of the quality of that answer, not so much a prophecy as an observation. I could not evade my own certainty that the answer was right. It had the imperative clarity of a hunch.
We have NAFAL ships and instantaneous transmission and mindspeech, but we haven’t yet tamed hunch to run in harness; for that trick we must go to Gethen.
“I serve as the filament,” Faxe said to me a day or two after the Foretelling. “The energy builds up and builds up in us, always sent back and back, redoubling the impulse every time, until it breaks through and the light is in me, around me, I am the light… The Old Man of Arbin Fastness once said that if the Weaver could be put in a vacuum at the moment of the Answer, he’d go on burning for years. That’s what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth. It’s hard to believe. I doubt a man could endure it. But no matter…”
Nusuth, the ubiquitous and ambiguous negative of the Handdara.
We were strolling side by side, and Faxe looked at me. His face, one of the most beautiful human faces I ever saw, seemed hard and delicate as carved stone. “In the darkness,” he said, “there were ten; not nine. There was a stranger.”
“Yes, there was. I had no barrier against you. You are a Listener, Faxe, a natural empath; and probably a powerful natural telepath as well. That’s why you’re the Weaver, the one who can keep the tensions and responses of the group running in a self-augmenting pattern until the strain breaks the pattern itself and you reach through for your answer.”
He listened with grave interest. “It is strange to see the mysteries of my discipline from outside, through your eyes. I’ve only seen them from within, as a disciple.”
“If you permit—if you wish, Faxe, I should like to communicate with you in mindspeech.” I was sure now that he was a natural Communicant; his consent and a little practice should serve to lower his unwitting barrier.
“Once you did that, I would hear what others think?”
“No, no. No more than you do already as an empath. Mindspeech is communication, voluntarily sent and received.”
“Then why not speak aloud?”
“Well, one can lie, speaking.”
“Not mindspeaking?”
“Not intentionally.”
Faxe considered a while. “That’s a discipline that must arouse the interest of kings, politicians, men of business.”
“Men of business fought against the use of mindspeech when it first was found to be a teachable skill; they outlawed it for decades.”