Faxe smiled. “And kings?”
“We have no more kings.”
“Yes. I see that… Well, I thank you, Genry. But my business is unlearning, not learning. And I’d rather not yet learn an art that would change the world entirely.”
“By your own foretelling this world will change, and within five years.”
“And I’ll change with it, Genry. But I have no wish to change it.”
It was raining, the long, fine rain of Gethenian summer. We walked under the hemmen-trees on the slopes above the Fastness, where there were no paths. Light fell gray among dark branches, clear water dropped from the scarlet needles. The air was chill yet mild, and full of the sound of rain.
“Faxe, tell me this. You Handdarata have a gift that men on every world have craved. You have it. You can predict the future. And yet you live like the rest of us— it doesn’t seem to matter—”
.”How should it matter, Genry?”
“Well, look. For instance, this rivalry between Karhide and Orgoreyn, this quarrel about the Sinoth Valley. Karhide has lost face badly these last weeks, I gather. Now why didn’t King Argaven consult his Foretellers, asking which course to take, or which member of the kyorremy to choose as prime minister, or something of that sort?”
“The questions are hard to ask.”
“I don’t see why. He might simply ask, Who’ll serve me best as prime minister?—and leave it at that.”
“He might. But he doesn’t know what serving him best may mean. It might mean the man chosen would surrender the valley to Orgoreyn, or go into exile, or assassinate the king; it might mean many things he wouldn’t expect or accept.”
“He’d have to make his question very precise.”
“Yes. Then there’d be many questions, you see. Even the king must pay the price.”
“You’d charge him high?”
“Very high,” said Faxe tranquilly. “The Asker pays what he can afford, as you know. Kings have in fact come to the Foretellers; but not very often…”
“What if one of the Foretellers is himself a powerful man?”
“Indwellers of the Fastness have no ranks or status. I may be sent to Erhenrang to the kyorremy; well, if I go, I take back my status and my shadow, but my foretelling’s at an end. If I had a question while I served in the kyorremy, I’d go to Orgny Fastness there, pay my price, and get my answer. But we in the Handdara don’t want answers. It’s hard to avoid them, but we try to.”
“Faxe, I don’t think I understand.”
“Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.”
“But you’re the Answerers!”
“You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”
“No—”
“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side through the rain, under the dark branches of the Forest of Otherhord. Within the white hood Faxe’s face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present…
“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion… Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”
“That we shall die.”
“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. … The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”