He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud. "Arek! is that you?"

"No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you."

HisВ breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light, stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. "I dreamed," he said, "I thought I was at home—"

"You heard me mindspeak."

"You called me— It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He's dead. You called me—you called me Therem? I… This is more terrible than I had thought." He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.

"Harth, I'm very sorry—"

"No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man's voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me “Harth”? Oh, I see why there's no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing… All right. All right, speak to me again."

"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.

I was humiliated. "How much have you—Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister—?"

"Genry, we practice privation until we're experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child at home in Estre, and by the Handdarata in Rotherer Fastness. I got out of practice in Erhenrang, true enough, but I began making up for it in Mishnory… Please do as I say, my friend; I know what I'm doing."

He did, and I did.

We went on for four more days of very bitter cold, never above −25°, and then came another blizzard whooping up in our faces from the east on a gale wind. Within two minutes of the first strong gusts the snow blew so thick that I could not see Estraven six feet away. I had turned my back on him and the sledge and the plastering, blinding, suffocating snow in order to get my breath, and when a minute later I turned around he was gone. The sledge was gone. Nothing was there. I took a few steps to where they had been and felt about. I shouted, and could not hear my own voice. I was deaf and alone in a universe filled solid with small stinging gray streaks. I panicked and began to blunder forward, mindcalling frantically, "Therem! "

Right under my hand, kneeling, he said, "Come on, give me a hand with the tent."

I did so, and never mentioned my minute of panic. No need to.

This blizzard lasted two days; there were five days lost, and there would be more. Nimmer and Anner are the months of the great storms.

"We're beginning to cut it rather fine, aren't we," I said one night as I measured out our gichy-michy ration and put it to soak in hot water.

He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. "With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not."

It was what he had said from the start. With all my anxieties, my sense of taking a last desperate gamble, and so on, I had not been realistic enough to believe him. Even now I thought, Surely when we've worked so hard-

But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.

"How is your luck running, Therem?" I said at last.

He did not smile at that. Nor did he answer. Only after a while he said, "I've been thinking about them all, down there." Down there, for us, had come to mean the south, the world below the plateau of ice, the region of earth, men, roads, cities, all of which had become hard to imagine as really existing. "You know that I sent word to the king concerning you, the day I left Mishnory. I told him what Shusgis told me, that you were going to be sent to Pulefen Farm. At the time I wasn't clear as to my intent, but merely followed my impulse. I have thought the impulse through, since. Something like this may happen: The king will see a chance to play shifgrethor. Tibe will advise against it, but Argaven should be growing a little tired of Tibe by now, and may ignore his counsel. He will inquire. Where is the Envoy, the guest of Karhide? —Mishnory will lie. He died of horm-fever this autumn, most lamentable. —Then how does it happen that we are informed by our own Embassy that he's in Pulefen Farm? —He's not there, look for yourselves. —No, no, of course not, we accept the word of the Commensals of Orgoreyn… But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance you get. Bring your people to Karhide and accomplish your mission, at once, before Argaven has had time to see the possible enemy in you, before Tibe or some other councillor frightens him once more, playing on his madness. If he makes the bargain with you, he will keep it. To break it would be to break his own shifgrethor. The Harge kings keep their promises. But you must act fast, and bring the Ship down soon."