“Wait.”
“No. Go on.”
With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: “Therem, my friend, there’s nothing to fear between us.”
He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had. “Ah, but there is,” he said.
After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, “You spoke in my language.”
“Well, you don’t know mine.”
“You said there would be words, I know… Yet I imagined it as—an understanding—”
“Empathy’s another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centers of the brain are activated, as well as—”
“No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?” His voice was strained.
“That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.”
“Nusuth… My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Es-traven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We… I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.”
We were both silent for some time. I could not know, or ask, what lay behind his words: it had cost him too much to say the little he had said.
I said at last, “Bespeak me, Therem. Call me by my name.” I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily. Had I been a Listener, I could have heard him think.
“No,” he said. “Never. Not yet…”
But no amount of shock, awe, terror could restrain that insatiable, outreaching mind for long. After he had cut out the light again I suddenly heard his stammer in my inward hearing—”Genry—” Even mindspeaking he never could say “l” properly.
I replied at once. In the dark he made an inarticulate sound of fear that had in it a slight edge of satisfaction. “No more, no more,” he said aloud. After a while we got to sleep at last.
It never came easy to him. Not that he lacked the gift or could not develop the skill, but it disturbed him profoundly, and he could not take it for granted. He quickly learned to set up the barriers, but I’m not sure he felt he could count on them. Perhaps all of us were so, when the first Educers came back centuries ago from Rokanon’s World teaching the “Last Art” to us. Perhaps a Gethenian, being singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness, a breach of integrity hard for him to tolerate. Perhaps it was Estraven’s own character, in which candor and reserve were both strong: every word he said rose out of a deeper silence. He heard my voice bespeaking him as a dead man’s, his brother’s voice. I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between him and that brother, but I knew that whenever I bespoke him something in him winced away as if I touched a wound. So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.
And day after day we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The midpoint in time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Anner, found us far short of our halfway point in space. By the sledge-meter we had indeed traveled about four hundred miles, but probably only three-quarters of that was real forward gain, and we could estimate only very roughly how far still remained to go. We had spent days, miles, rations in our long struggle to get up onto the Ice. Estraven was not so worried as I by the hundreds of miles that still lay ahead of us. “The sledge is lighter,” he said. “Towards the end it will be still lighter; and we can cut rations, if necessary. We have been eating very well, you know.”
I thought he was being ironic, but I should have known better.
On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he drank orsh or sugar-water at mealtimes. He insisted that I eat, though only half-rations. “You have no experience in starvation,” he said.