But obviously they don’t go on so. Shusgis was rich, and liberal with his riches. There were luxuries in my rooms that I had not known existed on Winter—for instance, a shower. There was an electric heater as well as a well-stocked fireplace. Shusgis laughed: “They told me, keep the Envoy warm, he’s from a hot world, an oven of a world, and can’t stand our cold. Treat him as if he were pregnant, put furs on his bed and heaters in his room, heat his wash-water and keep his windows shut! Will it do? Will you be comfortable? Please tell me what else you’d like to have here.”
Comfortable! Nobody in Karhide had ever asked me, under any circumstances, if I was comfortable.
“Mr. Shusgis,” I said with emotion, “I feel perfectly at home.”
He wasn’t satisfied till he had got another pesthry-fur blanket on the bed, and more logs into the fireplace. “I know how it is,” he said, “when I was pregnant I couldn’t keep warm-my feet were like ice, I sat over the fire all that winter. Long ago of course, but I remember!” —Gethenians tend to have their children young; most of them, after the age of twenty-four or so, use contraceptives, and they cease to be fertile in the female phase at about forty. Shusgis was in his fifties, therefore his “long ago of course,”! and it certainly was difficult to imagine him as a young mother. He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
“You’re well informed as to my looks and tastes, Mr. Shusgis. I’m flattered; I thought my reputation hadn’t preceded me.”
“No,” he said, understanding me perfectly, “they’d just as soon have kept you buried under a snowdrift, there in Erhenrang, eh? But they let you go, they let you go; and that’s when we realized, here, that you weren’t just another Karhidish lunatic but the real thing.”
“I don’t follow you, I think.”
“Why, Argaven and his crew were afraid of you, Mr. Ai—afraid of you and glad to see your back. Afraid if they mishandled you, or silenced you, there might be retribution. A foray from outer space, eh! So they didn’t dare touch you. And they tried to hush you up. Because they’re afraid of you and of what you bring to Gethen!”
It was exaggerated; I certainly hadn’t been censored out of the Karhidish news, at least so long as Estraven was in power. But I already had the impression that for some reason news hadn’t got around about me much in Orgoreyn, and Shusgis confirmed my suspicions.
“Then you aren’t afraid of what I bring to Gethen?”
“No, we’re not, sir!”
“Sometimes I am.”
He chose to laugh jovially at that. I did not qualify my words. I’m not a salesman, I’m not selling Progress to the Abos. We have to meet as equals, with some mutual understanding and candor, before my mission can even begin.
“Mr. Ai, there are a lot of people waiting to meet you, bigwigs and little ones, and some of them are the ones you’ll be wanting to talk to here, the people who get things done. I asked for the honor of receiving you because I’ve got a big house and because I’m well known as a neutral sort of fellow, not a Dominator and not an Open-Trader, just a plain Commissioner who does his job and won’t lay you open to any talk about whose house you’re staying in.” He laughed. “But that means you’ll be eating out a good deal, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m at your disposal, Mr. Shusgis.”
“Then tonight it’ll be a little supper with Vanake Slose.”
“Commensal from Kuwera—Third District, is it?” Of course I had done some homework before I came. He fussed over my condescension in deigning to learn anything about his country. Manners here were certainly different from manners in Karhide; there, the fuss he was making would either have degraded his own shifgrethor or insulted mine; I wasn’t sure which, but it would have done one or the other—practically everything did.