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I was in the holding facility for, I believe, three days. But it is possible it was four. There were no windows in that white-bricked building, no shadows cast by the bright electric lights, in those long rooms with cots stacked on each other like shekfish stacked in a half remembered Mishnory warehouse. The lights were not dimmed for sleeping. I was treated badly and I submitted to it without protest. I had very little thought for either my body or the shadow attached to it. I had conversations with my sibling, and my hearth lord, and my eldest child. I’m not sure if I saw them and thought they were there with me, or if I merely spoke to comfort myself. Once only I found myself in a conversation with Genly Ai, discussing something absurd, another planet out in the void covered in ocean rather than ice. I panicked, and jolted back to myself, heart pounding in my chest, and was relieved to see no sign of my friend in the hot crowded room. I leaned my head against the whitewashed brick and tried to reach out to Genly in my mind, the way I had so tentatively tried to, now and again on the Gobrin Ice. There was only silence, and this too was a relief. Genly was not there. Genly was in Karhide bringing the universe down to Gethen, and would have no part in my little piece of hell.
But on the fourth day the warders took me from my cot and brought me down a corridor and into a small equally white room with four hard chairs, and in one of the chairs was Genly Ai. They were somewhat changed from how they had appeared when I left them, four days previously. Someone had cut their hair and dressed them in clean and good quality winter clothing. Their skin looked somewhat better, as well, healed a little from the ravages of the Ice. But still, they looked half dead. It was more obvious now, because there was a person at their side dressed in the garb of a secretary of the Commensals, a well-fed healthy person. Next to them Genly was a dark spectre, a skeleton, with eyes that burned, appearing animated only by an intense fiery focus.
Genly was speaking very angrily to a guard when I was escorted in, and they fell silent at once, and stood up, and took a step towards me. The guards holding my arms stopped moving, and the one by the door of the room moved forward a little. Genly stopped. In my mind, I once again heard Arek’s voice, and it truly did sound like them, now, that burning concern. Therem, are you all right?
I tried to answer, in that language where one cannot lie, and could not. I swallowed, and tried to speak aloud, and could not do that either. I simply nodded. I was paralyzed by fear, as though in thangen, but I could not think clearly enough to identify what it was I was afraid of.
Genly spoke again to the guards. The Orgota person accompanying them interjected, and Genly spoke over them, almost shouting. I had never seen my friend like this before. They were always a little brash, awkward and rudely stumbling across others’ shadows, always giving an impression of youth and inexperience. But these features were also always paired with an endearing earnestness and curiosity. Not so now. This person spoke like a queen, expecting their orders to be instantly obeyed.
The guard by the door said something to Genly, and then to the other guards. I was having trouble understanding, but then I felt the grip on my arms tighten as they moved me towards the door again. Genly took a step forward, and shouted at them to stop. Their companion touched their arm, cautioning, and Genly shook them off harshly. Genly reached forward and touched my lower arm, below the hand of the guard. I couldn’t quite feel the touch, but I looked up, into my friend’s eyes, and I said, for Genly only, Genly. Be calm. Don’t worry. It was very strange, speaking in that way in this place, with these people, when before I had only ever done it in the isolated warm darkness of our tent, or out in the empty white of the Ice.
Genly’s eyes closed, and their hand squeezed my arm, once, and then let go. The guards took me away. They took me to an even smaller room, where I was subjected to various pointless indignities, and made to sign some papers, and asked some questions which I probably answered nonsensically. Then they walked me through a set of heavy doors out into a larger, draftier corridor of stone, with windows letting in a cold dawn light, and then out another set of doors into an icy new day. Genly was there, and their Orgota friend as well. They put me in a car, and Genly got in the back with me. When the doors were closed it was very quiet inside, a little like our tent had been.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, abominably rude in the way I had grown to be with them. It was a shock to hear my own voice, even as a hoarse and almost inaudible whisper.
“Did you really expect I would leave you there?” Genly asked, equally rude, and also, I was starting to realize, furious- with me. “I would have hoped you might know me better than that.”
I closed my eyes. “Your starship,” I said.
“It landed two days ago, in Karhide. Outside of Ehrenrang. We have established an embassy in the city- my people are there now.”
I opened my eyes. “They let you come here alone?” I asked. I could not think well of them for that, Genly’s Ekumen, the people from the stars. But of course they had sent Genly alone to my world in the first place, abandoned them to the mercy of Karhide and Orgota and Gethen itself.
“Heo Hew is in Mishnory,” Genly said. “They’ll meet us, and we can rest there for a while before returning to Karhide.”
My silence must have been expressive, because they said, “I promised you I’d make the Queen rescind the exile. I don’t break my promises, Therem.”
“You shouldn’t have made that one,” I said, and then stopped, because their long elegant hand was wrapped around my arm again, and their own arm was trembling. I lifted my other hand to cover theirs. They let go of my arm, and folded their shaking hands around mine, and squeezed it tightly, and this time I felt the touch, and the warmth.
“I won’t leave you alone, Lord Estraven,” Genly said. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. In exile or at home. On the Ice or at the hearth.”
I don’t think they had any idea how closely their words resembled the traditional kemmer oath. Or how intense and passionate they looked, with such a worn and starved face drawn tensely in determination. They were not themself; neither was I. We had used ourselves hard. But perhaps there would be time, now, to learn how to live as kin of the universal hearth, and not as aliens. I closed my eyes and let my head fall against their shoulder, and fell asleep, in the warm car.
When I woke it was in a very warm and comfortable Orgota-style room, to the sound of water being boiled- a muffled, slightly distant sound, in another room perhaps. There was a soft bed under me, and a warm body pressing down on me. I was disoriented. There was an intimate everyday quality to the moment that reminded me of many mornings with Ashe. There was also something about the deep exhaustion in my body, combined with the comfort and warmth I felt, that woke a very old memory, of the first day after Sorve’s birth. I’d forgotten that memory. I’d remembered that month as full of nothing but horror, for so many years. Now it was back, a delicate and transient recollection like the first snowfall of autumn.
I was dressed in a very soft bed-shirt, and there was a warm hand on my chest, over the thin fabric. It was not Ashe’s or Arek’s. It was large and long and dark.
In the other room, the water reached its soft boiling shriek, and then there was a hiss of steam. I shifted, slowly and carefully, propping myself up a little against the headpiece of the bed. From there I had a better view of Genly’s curly hair, a sliver of their face visible as their skull rested against my collar. They made no sound as I moved, and I could hear their breaths, very deep and regular.
Someone came into the room, holding a tray, and placed it on a side table near the bed. The tray held two bowls of orsh and a steaming jug. The person was more interesting. They were dressed simply in nonspecific Karhidish clothing, of good make and quality but unornamented. Physically they appeared to be a short middle-aged person in kemmer, with a bit of a foreign appearance- someone from Perunter, I might guess, if I encountered them on the streets of Erhenrang. But I wasn’t encountering them there, I was encountering them here. “Good morning,” I said, quietly.
They smiled at me, a very direct and beautiful smile that made me think of a Foreteller of my acquaintance. “Good morning, Lord Estraven.” Their voice was very high and musical. “My name is Lang Heo Hew, Second Envoy to Gethen. It’s an honor to meet you.”
It had been many months since I had had to be Lord Estraven. It was a struggle, to try and slip back into a political mode. Especially when I was lying in bed in only my bedwear. “The honor is mine,” I said. “The honor is Gethen’s. I hope my world has treated you well so far.”
They hesitated. “Would you like some orsh?” they said, indicating the bowls. “I may not have made it correctly, but it is warm.”
They were not an accomplished player of shifgrethor, but they were slightly better than Genly. This observation was, to my somewhat horror, accompanied in my heart by a wave of fondness for Genly, and for the way we had pulled together, in a terrible brightness without shadows. “I would,” I said. “Thank you.” I sat up a little more, to take the bowl and sip at it. Genly’s head slid down onto my stomach, but they never stirred. If I had not known full well that they had never received Handaratta training, I would certainly have believed them to be in thangen. Perhaps they had somehow accessed some kind of dothe state, through their desperation and their alien abilities, and that was what had propelled them all the way to the Orgota holding facility.
Lang Heo Hew glanced at Genly, and then after a moment they took the second bowl of orsh themselves. They did not drink it, only held it in their hands and watched me. After I had drunk some of my portion, they said, “Your world has treated me very well, since I arrived several days ago. But I do not think it has treated Genly very well, has it?”
The warmth of the orsh was nothing to the warmth of the anger flickering in my stomach then, and I very nearly said something extremely rude in response. But I remembered my training, and breathed out, and then said, “It is difficult for me to understand why they were sent here alone.”
“To learn,” the alien said. “To increase their own complexity. To meet you.”
I looked up, startled. Their eyes were darker than Genly’s, as dark as any Karhider’s. They looked at me with that steady clear gaze.
“When we parted, Genly had been captured by Tibe’s guards,” I said. “It is very impressive, for so much to have happened in four days.”
“Genly didn’t sleep,” Lang Heo Hew said. “They barely ate. They did a lot of yelling, at a lot of people. I’ve been told they threatened to call our lander down in Orgota if your Queen didn’t rescind the proscription on you. It was clear they wouldn’t rest until we found you, so I assisted as much as I could.”
I didn’t thank them, just lay there in silence. Genly’s arms were wrapped around my torso. Their legs were threaded through mine.
It was beginning to sink in for me that I was alive, and would have to figure out some way to continue to live; and part of that would involve Genly, and the things I was feeling, the fear and anger, hearing how foolish they had been, and the other emotions, prompted by the warmth of their body nestled against me.
“You should rest,” said Lang Heo Hew of the Ekumen. “From what Genly has told me, we are deeply in your debt. If there is anything you need that is in my power to provide, only name it.”
Looking at that strangely human alien, dressed in human clothes, a cup of orsh in their hands, all at once I finally did understand why Genly Ai came alone to my world. I remember when I first heard the reports from Argaven’s scientists, when I heard the statements of the farmers who saw the ship land, I felt a deep flicker of fear, that we had stumbled onto something so much larger than ourselves and would be lost in it. But then I heard that name, the sound of a human cry, and then I met the name’s owner, and my fear almost immediately shifted- fear for Genly, not of them. Because they were so alone, so foreign, their eyes holding the desperation of the exile.
I asked so many questions, often rude ones, and though sometimes I was anxious about the answers- what kind of Handaratta would I be, if I was not?- I never feared the asking.
There were many answers I still wanted. Answers that this person might be more easily able to give me than Genly ever would be. But Lang Heo Hew was not alone, and I would not be asking one exile; I would be asking a political entity. One I still barely knew anything about, and could not say I understood what little I did know.
A body mystic, Genly had said, not a body politic. That didn’t help. An alien Weaver was hardly less intimidating than an alien Commensal.
“Genly has told me much of your Ekumen,” I said. “I would like to learn more.”
They smiled at me, through the steam wavering in the air over the orsh. “As I would like to learn of Gethen,” they said. “Conversational exchange would benefit us both. There will be time.”
“Yes,” I said.
“There is time now to rest,” they said, very gently.
A strange concept. But perhaps, after all these years- perhaps it was time for exactly that. I closed my eyes.
When I woke there was still light streaming in through the windows, but it was quiet, and I was alone. “Genly,” I said, and sat up. “Genly.” I struggled to get up off the bed. I was not quite so weak as thangen usually left me, but I was not very strong. “Genly!” Genly, I called out in my mind.
They came in through the doorway, from the other room, and I stopped moving, half out of bed, and stared at them. “Therem,” they said, distressed, and quickly came towards me, and sat down next to me on the bed, and put their hands on my arms. “I’m here.” Their hands moved, smoothing down the sleeves of my shirt, repetitive soothing motions. “You’re safe.”
You’re safe, Arek’s voice said in my head, and I closed my eyes and wept, breathing in ragged gulps. Genly’s hands grew frantic, patting at my arms and hands and shoulders. It wasn’t fair to them. They did not know how weak I had been, after Sorve’s birth. They didn’t know of the morning I had called for Arek and my lord parent had come into the room and told me that we would not see each other again, that one of us would have to leave the hearth.
I wrapped my arms around Genly’s back, leaning forward so my chin could rest on their shoulder. They made a noise, as though punched in the stomach, and then they were returning my embrace, clinging to me tightly enough to cause discomfort.
We had succeeded, somehow. I had done the most important thing I would ever do. And I was still an exile, and I always would be. But Genly had given me back Karhide, its fields and valleys, its people, its cities.
I had been willing to trade Karhide for Genly. I still would. In an instant. Exile is the bitterest thing in the world, but of all the things I owe to Genly, the greatest is the knowledge that there is something to be gained by choosing it. You for my sake, I for yours, Genly had said, on the Ice. Exile not as a living death, but as a new kind of life.
“Thank you for coming for me,” I said.
”It was only fair,” Genly said. “But let’s not do it again.”
”We could retire to the mountains,” I said. “Live as quietly as pesthry.”
“Sounds good to me,” they said, and pressed their forehead to mine, and we stayed like that, warm and alive, for quite a while.