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Twice before I had thought I knew what it was to be an exile: once upon parting from Arek, and again on being sent away from Karhide. Yet already, that second occasion, I could not regret the choices that had led me there. I did not think in terms of betraying my country, but rather sought to serve a greater entity. Or perhaps a single person.
And then I found myself farther from home than I had ever imagined possible, on a ship that looked at the planet from above. They artificially regulated the temperature: it hovered near 65 degrees Fahrenheit. No one could see the border between Orgoreyn and Karhide, only the border between land and Ice.
There were other aliens, like Ai. If it was strange to be among them, I reminded myself that Ai spent two years on Gethen, and did not tell many of those they spoke with that they were an alien. (“He,” Ai is always a “he” in his own tongue, but those words flow strangely to me.) I could tolerate these people, who had given me refuge.
“You slept for three years?” I asked Lang Heo Hew. “What sort of drugs enable that?”
A voice that sounded like Tibe whispered in my ear, saying it is the sort of thing they would do in Orgoreyn. Claim that everything was above board, file the requisite paperwork, that the dissident elements are only resting until they can be healed of whatever aberration has caused them to work against the common good.
I dismissed it. Real mindspeech, Ai’s mindspeech, did not permit falsehoods. The ordinary kind of thought, the thoughts one weak person might ponder in the isolation of their own brain, was just as subject to foible and fallibility as anything else. Even, Ai said, in the Ekumen.
Heo Hew smiled. “Actually, the original technology involves lowering our body temperature so we can be frozen in stasis.”
“We have a story like that. Sneran, who slept for three centuries in the ice. Every time they woke, it was always Year One, and they could not tell what had changed.” Heo Hew was looking at me and seemed to expect more, so I continued, “I don’t think there’s much of a moral to the story, except maybe that southerners are too inattentive to know who their chieftains are.”
“There are places where some would think that a luxury, not to have to know or care what your politicians are doing.”
“Is that the kind of place where you come from?”
“Yes,” said Heo Hew. “It was boring, so I joined the Ekumen.”
I counted days on the ship while Argaven and the Open Trade Commensals negotiated terms with the Ekumen. If the people from Ai’s world tried to travel here, only the youngest children on Gethen would still be alive to greet them, but the ansible made communication instantaneous. Argaven was much more interested in speaking with the Stabiles than they had ever been with talking to Orgoreyn.
“I should warn you,” I told Ai. “I am due to enter kemmer tonight or tomorrow.”
Ai winced. “I’m sorry. We should have insisted that you could go planetside, but their shifgrethor is impenetrable—”
“That’s not the issue,” I interrupted. “That is, I am content to remain in my quarters. I only wished to warn you, so you would not be concerned if I avoid others.”
“Concerned!” Ai echoed. “Therem, I spent three months with you. I’m not about to be scandalized by seeing you—altered.”
“That was of necessity.”
“I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide from us. Any of us. The others don’t know you like I do, but they’d be sorry Mobiles if they let kemmer faze them.”
“I am due,” I repeated. “I do not know if it will take effect, off-planet. For all we know, there might be something about the surface of Gethen itself that triggers the cycle.”
“That seems unlikely. We—aliens did not become ambisexual merely by spending time on Gethen.”
“Probably so. But none of us have ever had the chance to confirm.” Ai seemed to be considering this, so I added, “For you Mobiles it would probably very exciting, to be the first to test a new hypothesis. It is not so desirable for us.”
“I see,” said Ai, gravely. “You have sacrificed much on our account. We do not want you to isolate yourself, too.”
“Thank you,” I said, because it seemed like the right thing to say.
Sure enough, when I woke next I had begun to grow a vagina. The Mobiles seemed unsurprised. “If leaving your homeworld was all it took to stop menstruating, women would be lining up left and right to give it a try,” said Heo Hew.
I asked what this was. Heo Hew explained. It sounded very inefficient.
“You didn’t tell me about any of this,” I told Ai.
I had meant it as gentle teasing, but Ai seemed uncomfortable. “I didn’t—Men can be ignorant, at times, of what women undergo.”
“So can women to men,” said Heo Hew.
“That’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said, “I’m just the weird alien.”
I tried to return to my quarters. Ai followed.
“Nusuth,” I muttered. “It was a joke.”
“Therem,” said Ai. “I want you to know that I care deeply for you. How deeply, perhaps, I did not realize until I nearly lost you. I desire to know you, not as a man nor a woman, but as yourself.” Ai broke off and switched to mindspeech. “Will you let me touch you? Not out of pity, not because you are in kemmer, but because I have sledged with you and admire nothing more than your strength. Strength of arm and strength of heart.”
I knew it for truth, and it surprised me all the same. “Yes.”
Ai appraised me. “Can I—” they interrupted with a word in their own language “—you?”
“I don’t know that word.”
“You don’t—how do you—here.” Ai stepped forward and raised their lips to mine, then held them there. Nothing happened. I have heard of seabirds that feed their young this way. It was neither arousing nor instinctive.
“Your lips are dimorphic?” I asked, after Ai had stepped back.
“No,” said Ai. “Lips are lips, it’d work exactly the same with two men. Or two women. It’s just—something we do to show fondness. Even if we’re not, uh, going to have sex at the time.”
“You do this.” I repeated the gesture, awkward, alien. “To show fondness.”
“It’s called kissing.”
“Genry,” I said, “I may be in exile, but I am still a Gethenian. If you wish to see me as I am, then accept my instincts, the human and the animal.”
“I would like nothing better,” Ai said.
I, too, wanted to know Ai, in all their—his—fullness. When I had abstained for three long months, across the Ice, it had been for a higher purpose than my own pleasure; I was prepared to give much more, to see Ai’s ship land safely. Yet if the only purpose of the trek had been to make this consummation all the more wondrous—even then, it would have been well worth the wait.
“Tell me about the gnome,” said Heo Hew.
“The gnome?” I repeated.
“When you were crossing in the north?”
“There are tales of little tricksters, but those are more common in Orgoreyn.” I had heard several from my colleagues at the fish-packing facility. “Not north in the Sinoth.”
“Not...little tricksters. I mean, you and Ai. On the sledge.”
I turned to Ai with a helpless shrug. “What?”
Ai considered the matter for a moment, then laughed uproariously. “What?” I repeated.
They exchanged a few words in their own language, which caused Heo Hew to giggle.
Before I could protest further, Ai turned to me. “I have told you that our language has two liquid consonants,” they explained. “When you say my name, Heo Hew and the others are mentally replacing the phoneme you speak with the phoneme they’re used to. But they’re trying to generalize that rule to all of Karhidish. And if you replace the sound in the middle of the name of the glacier—Gobrin—with the other liquid, you get Goblin. In our language, that’s the word for a little gnomelike creature.”
I paused, parsing this, then turned to Heo Hew. “You thought we named the glacier after a gnome?”
“By bisexual standards,” said Heo Hew, “it is far from the strangest thing about your planet.”
Ai stared into the wall of the ship for a moment, then gave a distant smile. “Darkness the right hand of light,” they quoted.
“So I’ve heard,” said Heo Hew. “And?”
“Say it in our language.”
Heo Hew obediently gave what I could only assume was an accurate translation.
“Right, light,” said Ai. “You can’t hear the difference, can you?”
“Of course I can,” I said, and repeated them.
“You said ‘right’ twice,” said Heo Hew.
“No I didn’t.”
“Do it in mindspeech?” Ai suggested.
I sent again. “Right, light. Two different sounds.”
Ai shrugged. “Well, we know they’re not lying. They can hear the distinction, they just can’t articulate it.”
“If you care so much, go kidnap an Orgota,” I said. “I’m sure they’d love to show off by doing something a Karhidish can’t do.”
Ai rolled their eyes, but to me they mindspoke privately. “I think the resonance is lovely. And I want your hand joined in mine, in the day and in the night and on the ship where we cannot see the sun. Not identical, not complementary, but joined together.”
It had been so long since I had made a vow, longer still since I had wanted to make one. We knew the end—that in five years’ time, Gethen would be part of the Ekumen. We did not know the way—whether my exile would ever end, whether Argaven or the Open Trade faction would stay in power.
But Ai would be there with me. “As they say in Eskeve, we do not need to be in kemmer to pull the sledge together. But it doesn’t hurt, either.”