“Why?”
“How shall we deal with strangers, except as brothers? How shall Gethen treat with a union of eighty worlds, except as a world?”
“Eighty worlds?” said Yegey, and laughed uneasily. Obsle stared at me athwart and said, “I’d like to think that you’ve been too long with the madman in his palace and had gone mad yourself… Name of Meshe! What’s this babble of alliances with the suns and treaties with the moon? How did the fellow come here, riding on a comet? astride a meteor? A ship, what sort of ship floats on air? On void space? Yet you’re no madder than you ever were, Estraven, which is to say shrewdly mad, wisely mad. All Karhiders are insane. Lead on, my lord, I follow. Go on!”
“I go nowhere, Obsle. Where have I to go? You, however, may get somewhere. If you should follow the Envoy a little way, he might show you a way out of the Sinoth Valley, out of the evil course we’re caught in.”
“Very good. I’ll take up astronomy in my old age. Where will it lead me?”
“Toward greatness, if you go more wisely than I went. Gentlemen, I’ve been with the Envoy, I’ve seen his ship that crossed the void, and I know that he is truly and exactly a messenger from elsewhere than this earth. As to the honesty of his message and the truth of his descriptions of that elsewhere, there is no knowing; one can only judge as one would judge any man; if he were one of us I should call him an honest man. That you’ll judge for yourselves, perhaps. But this is certain: in his presence, lines drawn on the earth make no boundaries, and no defense. There is a greater challenger than Karhide at the doors of Orgoreyn. The men who meet that challenge, who first open the doors of earth, will be the leaders of us all. All: the Three Continents: all the .earth. Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes in circling the Sun. To stake shifgrethor on any lesser chance is a fool’s doing, now.”
I had Yegey, but Obsle sat sunk in his fat, watching me from his small eyes. “This will take a month’s believing,” he said. “And if it came from anyone’s mouth but yours, Estraven, I’d believe it to be pure hoax, a net for our pride woven out of starshine. But I know your stiff neck. Too stiff to stoop to an assumed disgrace in order to fool us. I can’t believe you’re speaking truth and yet I know a lie would choke you… Well, well. Will he speak to us, as it seems he spoke to you?”
“That’s what he seeks: to speak, to be heard. There or here. Tibe will silence him if he tries to be heard again in Karhide. I am afraid for him, he seems not to understand his danger.”
“Will you tell us what you know?”
“I will; but is there a reason why he can’t come here and tell you himself?”
Yegey said, biting his fingernail delicately, “I think not. He has requested permission to enter the Commensality. Karhide makes no objection. His request is under consideration…”
7. The Question of Sex
From field notes of Ong Tot Oppong, Investigator, of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen/ Winter, Cycle 93 E.Y. 1448.
day 81. It seems likely that they were an experiment. The thought is unpleasant. But now that there is evidence to indicate that the Terran Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on a world with its own proto-hominid autochthones, the possibility cannot be ignored. Human genetic manipulation was certainly practiced by the Colonizers; nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids of Rokanan; will anything else explain Gethenian sexual physiology? Accident, possibly; natural selection, hardly. Their ambisexuality has little or no adaptive value.
Why pick so harsh a world for an experiment? No answer. Tinibossol thinks the Colony was introduced during a major Interglacial. Conditions may have been fairly mild for their first 40 or 50,000 years here. By the time the ice was advancing again, the Hainish Withdrawal was complete and the Colonists were on their own, an experiment abandoned.