“Well, one can talk to people, set rumors going; I had to do something of the same sort last year in Erhenrang. Get people asking questions to which you have the answer, that is, the Envoy himself.”
“If only he’d bring that damned Ship of his down here, so that we had something to show people! But as it is—”
“He won’t bring his Ship down until he knows that you’re acting in good faith.”
“Am I not?” cries Obsle, fattening out like a great hob-fish- “Haven’t I spent every hour of the past month on this business? Good faith! He expects us to believe whatever he tells us, and then doesn’t trust us in return!”
“Should he?”
Obsle puffs and does not reply.
He comes nearer honesty than any Orgota government official I know.
Odgetheny Susmy. To become a high officer in the Sarf one must have, it seems, a certain complex form of stupidity. Gaum exemplifies it. He sees me as a Karhidish agent attempting to lead Orgoreyn into a tremendous prestige-loss by persuading them to believe in the hoax of the Envoy from the Ekumen; he thinks that I spent my time as Prime Minister preparing this hoax. By God, I have better things to do than play shifgrethor with scum. But that is a simplicity he is unequipped to see. Now that Yegey has apparently cast me off Gaum thinks I must be purchasable, and so prepared to buy me out in his own curious fashion. He has watched me or had me watched close enough that he knew I would be due to enter kemmer on Posthe or Tormenbod; so he turned up last night in full kemmer, hormone-induced no doubt, ready to seduce me. An accidental meeting on Pyenefen Street. “Harth! I haven’t seen you in a halfmonth, where have you been hiding yourself lately? Come have a cup of ale with me.”
He chose an alehouse next door to one of the Commensal Public Kemmerhouses. He ordered us not ale, but lifewater. He meant to waste no time. After one glass he put his hand on mine and shoved his face up close, whispering, “We didn’t’meet by chance, I waited for you: I crave you for my kemmering tonight,” and he called me by my given name. I did not cut his tongue out, because since I left Estre I don’t carry a knife. I told him that I intended to abstain while in exile. He cooed and muttered and held on to my hands. He was going very rapidly into full phase as a woman. Gaum is very beautiful in kemmer, and he counted on his beauty and his sexual insistence, knowing, I suppose, that being of the Handdara I would be unlikely to use kemmer-reduction drugs, and would make a point of abstinence against the odds. He forgot that detestation is as good as any drug. I got free of his pawing, which of course was having some effect on me, and left him, suggesting that he try the public kemmerhouse next door. At that he looked at me with pitiable hatred: for he was, however false his purpose, truly in kemmer and deeply roused.
Did he really think I’d sell myself for his small change? He must think me very uneasy; which, indeed, makes me uneasy.
Damn them, these unclean men. There is not one clean man among them.
Odsordny Susmy. This afternoon Genly Ai spoke in the Hall of the Thirty-Three. No audience was permitted and no broadcast made, but Obsle later had me in and played me his own tape of the session. The Envoy spoke well, with moving candor and urgency. There is an innocence in him that I have found merely foreign and foolish; yet in another moment that seeming innocence reveals a discipline of knowledge and a largeness of purpose that awes me. Through him speaks a shrewd, and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.
He speaks better now than he did in Erhenrang, more simply and more subtly; he has learned his job in doing it, like us all.