knowledge to our people," she said. I did not answer, because all I had to saywas that they were not my people, that I had no people. I was a person. I hada language that I did not speak. I had my silence. I had nothing else. I went to school; there were children of different ages on the ship, likean auntring, and many of the adults taught us. I learned Ekumenical historyand geography, mostly, and Mother gave me a report to learn about the historyof Eleven-Soro, what my language calls the Before Time. I read that the citiesof my world had been the greatest cities ever built on any world, covering twoof the continents entirely, with small areas set aside for farming, there hadbeen 120 billion people living in the cities, while the animals and the seaand the air and the dirt died, until the people began dying too. It was ahideous story. I was ashamed of it and wished nobody else on the ship or inthe Ekumen knew about it. And yet, I thought, if they knew the stories I knewabout the Before Time, they would understand how magic turns on itself, andthat it must be so. After less than a year, Mother told us we were going toHain. The ship's doctor and his clever machines had repaired Borny's lip; heand Mother had put all the information they had into the records; he was oldenough to begin training for the Ekumenical Schools, as he wanted to do. I wasnot flourishing, and the doctor's machines were not able to repair me. I keptlosing weight, I slept badly, I had terrible headaches. Almost as soon as wecame aboard the ship, I had begun to menstruate; each time the cramps wereagonizing. "This is no good, this ship life," she said. "You need to beoutdoors. On a planet. On a civilized planet." "If I went to Hain," I said, "when I came back, the persons I know would all be dead hundreds of yearsago." "Serenity," she said, "you must stop thinking in terms of Soro. We haveleft Sore. You must stop deluding and tormenting yourself, and look forward, not back. Your whole life is ahead of you. Hain is where you will learn tolive it." I summoned up my courage and spoke in my own language: "I am not achild now. You have no power over me. I will not go. Go without me. You haveno power over me!" Those are the words I had been taught to say to amagician, a sorceror. I don't know if my mother fully understood them, but shedid understand that I was deathly afraid of her, and it struck her intosilence. After a long time she said in Hainish, "I agree. I have no powerover you. But I have certain rights; the right of loyalty; of love." "Nothingis right that puts me in your power," I said, still in my language. She stared at me. "You are like one of them," she said. "You are one of them. Youdon't know what love is. You're closed into yourself like a rock. Ishould never have taken you there. People crouching in the ruins of a society-- brutal, rigid, ignorant, superstitious -- Each one in a terrible solitude-And I let them make you into one of them!" "You educated me," I said, and myvoice began to tremble and my mouth to shake around the words, "and so doesthe school here, but my aunts educated me, and I want to finish my education." I was weeping, but I kept standing with my hands clenched. "I'm not a womanyet. I want to be a woman." "But Ren, you will be! -- ten times the woman youcould ever be on Soro -- you must try to understand, to believe me --" "You have no power over me," I said, shutting my eyes and putting my hands over myears. She came to me then and held me, but I stood stiff, enduring hertouch, until she let me go. The ship's crew had changed entirely while wewere onplanet. The First Observers had gone on to other worlds; our backup wasnow a Gethenian archeologist named Arrem, a mild, watchful person, not young. Arrem had gone down onplanet only on the two desert continents, and welcomedthe chance to talk with us, who had "lived with the living," as heshe said. Ifelt easy when I was with Artera, who was so unlike anybody else. Arrem wasnot a man -- I could not get used to having men around all the time-- yet nota woman; and so not exactly an adult, yet not a child: a person, alone, likeme. Heshe did not know my language well, but always tried to talk it with me. When this crisis came, Arrem came to my mother and took counsel with her, suggesting that she let me go back down onplanet. Borny was in on some ofthese talks, and told me about them. "Arrem says if you go to Hain you'llprobably die," he said. "Your soul will. Heshe says some of what we learned is

like what they learn on Gethen, in their religion. That kind of stopped Motherfrom ranting about primitive superstition .... And Arrem says you could beuseful to the Ekumen, if you stay and finish your education on Soro. You'll bean invaluable resource." Borny sniggered, and after a minute I did too. "They'll mine you like an asteroid," he said. Then he said, "You know, if youstay and I go, we'll be dead." That was how the young people of the shipssaid it, when one was going to cross the lightyears and the other was going tostay. Goodbye, we're dead. It was the truth. "I know," I said. I felt mythroat get tight, and was afraid. I had never seen an adult at home cry, except when Sut's baby died. Sut howled all night. Howled like a dog, Mothersaid, but I had never seen or heard a dog, I heard a woman terribly crying. Iwas afraid of sounding like that. "If I can go home, when I finish making mysoul, who knows, I might come to Hain for a while," I said, in Hainish. "Scouting?" Borny said in my language, and laughed, and made melaugh again. Nobody gets to keep a brother. I knew that. But Borny had comeback from being dead to me, so I might come back from being dead to him; atleast I could pretend I might. My mother came to a decision. She and I wouldstay on the ship for another year while Borny went to Hain. I would keep goingto school; if at the end of the year I was still determined to go backonplanet, I could do so. With me or without me, she would go on to Hain thenand join Borny. If I ever wanted to see them again, I could follow them. Itwas a compromise that satisfied no one, but it was the best we could do, andwe all consented. When he left, Borny gave me his knife. After he left, Itried not to be sick. I worked hard at learning everything they taught me inthe ship school, and I tried to teach Arrem how to be aware and how to avoidwitchcraft. We did slow walking together in the ship's garden, and the firsthour of the untrance movements from the Handdata of Karhide on Gethen. We agreed that they were alike. The ship was staying in the Soro system notonly because of my family, but because the crew was now mostly zoologists whohad come to study a sea animal on Eleven-Soro, a kind of cephalopod that hadmutated toward high intelligence, or maybe it already was highly intelligent; but there was a communication problem. "Almost as bad as with the localhumans," said Steadiness, the zoologist who taught and teased us mercilessly. She took us down twice by lander to the uninhabited islands in the NorthernHemisphere where her station was. It was very strange to go down to my worldand yet be a world away from my aunts and sisters and my soulmate; but I saidnothing. I saw the great, pale, shy creature come slowly up out of the deepwaters with a running ripple of colors along its long coiling tentacles and aringing shimmer of sound, all so quick it was over before you could follow thecolors or hear the tune. The zoologist's machine produced a pink glow and amechanically speeded-up twitter, tinny and feeble in the immensity of the sea. The cephalopod patiently responded in its beautiful silvery shadowy language. "CP," Steadiness said to us, ironic -- Communication Problem. "We don't knowwhat we're talking about." I said, "I learned something in my education here. In one of the songs, it says," and I hesitated, trying to translate it intoHainish, "it says, thinking is one way of doing and words are one way ofthinking." Steadiness stared at me, in disapproval I thought, but probablyonly because I had never said anything to her before except "Yes." Finally shesaid, "Are you suggesting that it doesn't speak in words?" "Maybe it's notspeaking at all. Maybe it's thinking." Steadiness stared at me some more and then said, "Thank you." She looked as if she too might be thinking. I wished Icould sink into the water, the way the cephalopod was doing. The other youngpeople on the ship were friendly and mannerly. Those are words that have notranslation in my language. I was unfriendly and unmannerly, and they let mebe. I was grateful. But there was no place to be alone on the ship. Of coursewe each had a room; though small, the Heyho was a Hainish-built explorer, designed to give its people room and privacy and comfort and variety andbeauty while they hung around in a solar system for years on end. But itwas designed. It was all human-made -- everything was human. I had much moreprivacy than I had ever had at home in our one-room house; yet there I had