This route kept us clear from start to finish of inhabited, or inhabitable, country. We would not be meeting any Inspectors. This was indubitably of the first importance. I had no papers, and Estraven said that his wouldn’t hold up under any further forgeries. In any case, though I could pass for a Gethenian when no one expected anything else, I was not disguisable to an eye looking for me. In this respect, then, the way Estraven proposed for us was highly practical.
In all other respects it seemed perfectly insane.
I kept my opinion to myself, for I fully meant what I’d said about preferring to die escaping, if it came down to a choice of deaths. Estraven, however, was still exploring alternatives. Next day, which we spent in loading and packing the sledge very carefully, he said, “If you raised the Star Ship, when might it come?”
“Anywhere between eight days and a halfmonth, depending on where it is in its solar orbit relative to Gethen. It might be on the other side of the sun.”
“No sooner?”
“No sooner. The NAFAL motive can’t be used within a solar system. The ship can come in only on rocket drive, which puts her at least eight days away. Why?”
He tugged a cord tight and knotted it before he answered. “I was considering the wisdom of trying to ask aid from your world, as mine seems unhelpful. There’s a radio beacon in Turuf.”
“How powerful?”
“Not very. The nearest big transmitter would be in Kuhumey, about four hundred miles south of here.”
“Kuhumey’s a big town, isn’t it?”
“A quarter of a million souls.”
“We’d have to get the use of the radio transmitter somehow; then hide out for at least eight days, with the Sarf alerted… Not much chance.”
He nodded.
I lugged the last sack.of kadik-germ out of the tent, fitted it into its niche in the sledge-load, and said, “If I had called the ship that night in Mishnory—the night you told me to—the night I was arrested… But Obsle had my ansible; still has it, I suppose.”
“Can he use it?”
“No. Not even by chance, fiddling about. The coordinate-settings are extremely complex. But if only I’d used it!”
“If only I’d known the game was already over, that day,” he said, and smiled. He was not one for regrets.
“You did, I think. But I didn’t believe you.”
When the sledge was loaded, he insisted that we spend the rest of the day doing nothing, storing energy. He lay in the tent writing, in a little notebook, in his small, rapid, vertical-cursive Karhidish hand, the account that appears as the previous chapter. He hadn’t been able to keep up his journal during the past month, and that annoyed him; he was pretty methodical about that journal. Its writing was, I think, both an obligation to and a link with his family, the Hearth of Estre. I learned that later, however; at the time I didn’t know what he was writing, and I sat waxing skis, or doing nothing. I whistled a dance-tune, and stopped myself in the middle. We only had one tent, and if we were going to share it without driving each other mad, a certain amount of self-restraint, of manners, was evidently required… Estraven had looked up at my whistling, all right, but not with irritation. He looked at me rather dreamily, and said, “I wish I’d known about your Ship last year… Why did they send you onto this world alone?”
“The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.”
“The First Envoy’s life is held cheap.”
“No; the Ekumen really doesn’t hold anybody’s life cheap. So it follows, better to put one life in danger than two, or twenty. It’s also very expensive and time-consuming, you know, shipping people over the big jumps. Anyhow, I asked for the job.”
“In danger, honor,” he said, evidently a proverb, for he added mildly, “We’ll be full of honor when we reach Karhide…”
When he spoke, I found myself believing that we would in fact reach Karhide, across eight hundred miles of mountain, ravine, crevasse, volcano, glacier, ice-sheet, frozen bog or frozen bay, all desolate, shelterless, and lifeless, in the storms of midwinter in the middle of an Ice Age. He sat writing up his records with the same obdurate patient thoroughness I had seen in a mad king up on a scaffolding mortaring a joint, and said, “When we reach Karhide…”