The Very Best of F & SF v1 (49 page)

She had told
them, too, that the first child she bore was a boy, and she drowned it, because
she didn’t want to bring up a boy and send him away. They felt queer about that
and so did I, but it wasn’t an uncommon thing. One of the stories we learned
was about a drowned boy who grew up underwater, and seized his mother when she
came to bathe, and tried to hold her under till she too drowned; but she
escaped.

At any rate,
after the Downriver Lame Man had sat around for several days on the hillsides,
singing long songs and braiding and unbraiding his hair, which was long too,
and shone black in the sun, Aunt Sadne always went off for a night or two with
him, and came back looking cross and self-conscious.

Aunt Noyit
explained to me that Downriver Lame Man’s songs were magic; not the usual bad
magic, but what she called the great good spells. Aunt Sadne never could resist
his spells. “But he hasn’t half the charm of some men I’ve known,” said Aunt
Noyit, smiling reminiscently.

Our diet, though
excellent, was very low in fat, which Mother thought might explain the rather
late onset of puberty; girls seldom menstruated before they were fifteen, and
boys often weren’t mature till they were considerably older than that. But the
women began looking askance at boys as soon as they showed any signs at all of
adolescence. First Aunt Hedimi, who was always grim, then Aunt Noyit, then even
Aunt Sadne began to turn away from Borny, to leave him out, not answering when
he spoke. “What are you doing playing with the children?” old Aunt Dnemi asked
him so fiercely that he came home in tears. He was not quite fourteen.

Sadne’s younger
daughter Hyuru was my soul mate, my best friend, you would say. Her elder
sister Didsu, who was in the singing circle now, came and talked to me one day,
looking serious. “Borny is very handsome,” she said. I agreed proudly.

“Very big, very
strong,” she said, “stronger than I am.”

I agreed proudly
again, and then I began to back away from her.

“I’m not doing
magic, Ren,” she said.

“Yes you are,” I
said. “I’ll tell your mother!”

Didsu shook her
head. “I’m trying to speak truly. If my fear causes your fear, I can’t help it.
It has to be so. We talked about it in the singing circle. I don’t like it,” she
said, and I knew she meant it; she had a soft face, soft eyes, she had always
been the gentlest of us children. “I wish he could be a child,” she said. “I
wish I could. But we can’t.”

“Go be a stupid
old woman, then,” I said, and ran away from her. I went to my secret place down
by the river and cried. I took the holies out of my soulbag and arranged them.
One holy—it doesn’t matter if I tell you—was a crystal that Borny had given me,
clear at the top, cloudy purple at the base. I held it a long time and then I
gave it back. I dug a hole under a boulder, and wrapped the holy in duhur
leaves inside a square of cloth I tore out of my kilt, beautiful, fine cloth
Hyuru had woven and sewn for me. I tore the square right from the front, where
it would show. I gave the crystal back, and then sat a long time there near it.
When I went home I said nothing of what Didsu had said. But Borny was very
silent, and my mother had a worried look. “What have you done to your kilt,
Ren?” she asked. I raised my head a little and did not answer; she started to
speak again, and then did not. She had finally learned not to talk to a person
who chose to be silent.

Borny didn’t
have a soulmate, but he had been playing more and more often with the two boys
nearest his age, Ednede who was a year or two older, a slight, quiet boy, and
Bit who was only eleven, but boisterous and reckless. The three of them went off
somewhere all the time. I hadn’t paid much attention, partly because I was glad
to be rid of Bit. Hyuru and I had been practicing being aware, and it was
tiresome to always have to be aware of Bit yelling and jumping around. He never
could leave anyone quiet, as if their quietness took something from him. His
mother, Hedimi, had educated him, but she wasn’t a good singer or story-teller
like Sadne and Noyit, and Bit was too restless to listen even to them. Whenever
he saw me and Hyuru trying to slow-walk or sitting being aware, he hung around
making noise till we got mad and told him to go, and then he jeered, “Dumb
girls!”

I asked Borny
what he and Bit and Ednede did, and he said, “Boy stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Practicing.”

“Being aware?”

After a while he
said, “No.”

“Practicing
what, then?”

“Wrestling.
Getting strong. For the boygroup.” He looked gloomy, but after a while he said,
“Look,” and showed me a knife he had hidden under his mattress. “Ednede says
you have to have a knife, then nobody will challenge you. Isn’t it a beauty?”
It was metal, old metal from the People, shaped like a reed, pounded out and
sharpened down both edges, with a sharp point. A piece of polished flintshrub
wood had been bored and fitted on the handle to protect the hand. “I found it
in an empty man’s-house,” he said. “I made the wooden part.” He brooded over it
lovingly. Yet he did not keep it in his soulbag.

“What do you
do
with it?” I asked,
wondering why both edges were sharp, so you’d cut your hand if you used it.

“Keep off attackers,”
he said.

“Where was the
empty man’s-house?”

“Way over across
Rocky Top.”

“Can I go with
you if you go back?”

“No,” he said,
not unkindly, but absolutely.

“What happened
to the man? Did he die?”

“There was a
skull in the creek. We think he slipped and drowned.”

He didn’t sound
quite like Borny. There was something in his voice like a grown-up; melancholy;
reserved. I had gone to him for reassurance, but came away more deeply anxious.
I went to Mother and asked her, “What do they do in the boygroups?”

“Perform natural
selection,” she said, not in my language but in hers, in a strained tone. I
didn’t always understand Hainish any more and had no idea what she meant, but
the tone of her voice upset me; and to my horror I saw she had begun to cry
silently. “We have to move, Serenity,” she said—she was still calking Hainish
without realizing it. “There isn’t any reason why a family can’t move, is
there? Women just move in and move out as they please. Nobody cares what
anybody does. Nothing is anybody’s business. Except hounding the boys out of
town!”

I understood
most of what she said, but got her to say it in my language; and then I said, “But
anywhere we went, Borny would be the same age, and size, and everything.”

“Then we’ll
leave,” she said fiercely. “Go back to the ship.”

I drew away from
her. I had never been afraid of her before: she had never used magic on me. A
mother has great power, but there is nothing unnatural in it, unless it is used
against the child’s soul.

Borny had no
fear of her. He had his own magic. When she told him she intended leaving, he
persuaded her out of it. He wanted to go join the boygroup, he said; he’d been
wanting to for a year now. He didn’t belong in the auntring any more, all women
and girls and little kids. He wanted to go live with other boys. Bit’s older
brother Yit was a member of the boygroup in the Four Rivers Territory, and
would look after a boy from his auntring. And Ednede was getting ready to go.
And Borny and Ednede and Bit had been talking to some men, recently. Men weren’t
all ignorant and crazy, the way Mother thought. They didn’t talk much, but they
knew a lot.

“What do they
know?” Mother asked grimly

“They know how
to be men,” Borny said. “It’s what I’m going to be.”

“Not that kind
of man—not if l can help it! In Joy Born, you must remember the men on the
ship, real men—nothing like these poor, filthy hermits. I can’t let you grow up
thinking that that’s what you have to be!”

“They’re not
like that,” Borny said. “You ought to go talk to some of them, Mother.”

“Don’t be naïve,”
she said with an edgy laugh. “You know perfectly well that women don’t go to
men to
talk.”

I knew she was
wrong; all the women in the auntring knew all the settled men for three days’
walk around. They did talk with them, when they were out foraging. They only
kept away from the ones they didn’t trust; and usually those men disappeared
before long. Noyit had told me, “Their magic turns on them.” She meant the
other men drove them away or killed them. But I didn’t say any of this, and Borny
said only, “Well, Cave Cliff Man is really nice. And he took us to the place
where I found those People things”—some ancient
artifacts
that Mother had been excited about. “The men know things the women don’t,” Borny
went on. “At least I could go to the boygroup for a while, maybe. I ought to. I
could learn a lot! We don’t have any solid information on them at all. All we
know anything about is this auntring. I’ll go and stay long enough to get
material for our report. I can’t ever come back to either the auntring or the
boygroup once I leave them. I’ll have to go to the ship, or else try to be a
man. So let me have a real go at it, please, Mother?”

“I don’t know
why you think you have to learn how to be a man,” she said after a while. “You
know how already.”

He really smiled
then, and she put her arm around him.

What about me? I
thought. I don’t even know what the ship is. I want to be here, where my soul
is. I want to go on learning to be in the world.

But I was afraid
of Mother and Borny, who were both working magic, and so I said nothing and was
still, as I had been taught.

Ednede and Borny
went off together. Noyit, Ednede’s mother, was as glad as Mother was about
their keeping company, though she said nothing. The evening before they left,
the two boys went to every house in the auntring. It took a long time. The
houses were each just within sight or hearing of one or two of the others, with
bush and gardens and irrigation ditches and paths in between. In each house the
mother and the children were waiting to say goodbye, only they didn’t say it;
my language has no word for hello or goodbye. They asked the boys in and gave
them something to eat, something they could take with them on the way to the
Territory. When the boys went to the door everybody in the household came and
touched their hand or cheek. I remembered when Yit had gone around the auntring
that way. I had cried then, because even though I didn’t much like Yit, it
seemed so strange for somebody to leave forever, like they were dying. This time
I didn’t cry; but I kept waking and waking again, until I heard Borny get up
before the first light and pick up his things and leave quietly. I know Mother
was awake too, but we did as we should do, and lay still while he left, and for
a long time after.

I have read her
description of what she calls “An adolescent male leaves the Auntring: a
vestigial survival of ceremony.”

She had wanted
him to put a radio in his soulbag and get in touch with her at least
occasionally. He had been unwilling. “I want to do it right, Mother. There’s no
use doing it if I don’t do it right.”

“I simply can’t
handle not hearing from you at all, Borny,” she had said in Hainish.

“But if the
radio got broken or taken or something, you’d worry a lot more, maybe with no
reason at all.”

She finally
agreed to wait half a year, till the first rain; then she would go to a
landmark, a huge ruin near the river that marked the southern end of the
Territory, and he would try and come to her there. “But only wait ten days,” he
said. “If I can’t come, I can’t.” She agreed. She was like a mother with a
little baby, I thought, saying yes to everything. That seemed wrong to me; but
I thought Borny was right. Nobody ever came back to their mother from boygroup.

But Borny did.

Summer was long,
clear, beautiful. I was learning to starwatch; that is when you lie down
outside on the open hills in the dry season at night, and find a certain star
in the eastern sky, and watch it cross the sky till it sets. You can look away,
of course, to rest your eyes, and doze, but you try to keep looking back at the
star and the stars around it, until you feel the earth turning, until you
become aware of how the stars and the world and the soul move together. After
the certain star sets you sleep until dawn wakes you. Then as always you greet
the sunrise with aware silence. I was very happy on the hills those warm great
nights, those clear dawns. The first time or two Hyuru and I starwatched
together, but after that we went alone, and it was better alone.

I was coming back
from such a night, along the narrow valley between Rocky Top and Over Home Hill
in the first sunlight, when a man came crashing through the bush down onto the
path and stood in front of me. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Listen!” He was
heavyset, half naked; he stank. I stood still as a stick. He had said “Listen!”
just as the aunts did, and I listened. “Your brother and his friend are all
right. Your mother shouldn’t go there. Some of the boys are in a gang. They’d
rape her. I and some others are killing the leaders. It takes a while. Your
brother is with the other gang. He’s all right. Tell her. Tell me what I said.”