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eBook Category: Science Fiction Locus Poll Award Nominee, Nebula Award(R) Nominee
eBook Description: [A story of the "Hainish" series, set in the same Universe as "The Left Hand of Darkness".] An experimental faster-than-light ship is about to embark on its first test run with a real crew on board. Successful tests have been conducted with robots and non-intelligent animals, but the alien physicists who designed the ship guardedly caution the mixed crew of human and aliens of the temporal risks ... because they are unable to explain how the ship's transilient virtual field actually works.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Universe 1, ed. Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, 1990
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2001

This eBook is also available in the following bundle(s):

• Ursula K. Le Guin Bundle

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [44 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [46 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [30 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [288 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [32 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [78 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [101 KB] , hiebook (KML) [105 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [57 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [26 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [33 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [61 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [47 KB]
Words: 9411
Reading time: 26-37 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

They met at Ve Port more than a month before their first flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the Shobies. Their first consensual decision was to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing.

Liden was a fishing port with an eighty-thousand-year history and a population of four hundred. Its fisherfolk farmed the rich shoal waters of their bay, shipped the catch inland to the cities, and managed the Liden Resort for vacationers and tourists and new space crews on isyeye (the word is Hainish and means "making a beginning together," or "beginning to be together," or, used technically, "the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form." A honeymoon is an isyeye of two). The fisherwomen and fishermen of Liden were as weathered as driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who had misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. "Nope," she said.

Like most crews, the Shobies used Hainish as their common language. So the name of the one Hainish crew member, Sweet Today, carried its meaning as words as well as name, and at first seemed a silly thing to call a big, tall, heavy woman in her late fifties, imposing of carriage and almost as taciturn as the villagers. But her reserve proved to be a deep well of congeniality and tact, to be called upon as needed, and her name soon began to sound quite right. She had family--all Hainish have family--kinfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines, scattered all over the Ekumen, but no relatives in this crew. She asked to be Grandmother to Rig, Asten, and Betton, and was accepted.

The only Shoby older than Sweet Today was the Terran Lidi, who was seventy-two EYs and not interested in grandmothering. Lidi had been navigating for fifty years, and there was nothing she didn't know about NAFAL ships, although occasionally she forgot that their ship was the Shoby and called it the Soso or the Alterra. And there were things she didn't know, none of them knew, about the Shoby.

They talked, as human beings do, about what they didn't know.

Churten theory was the main topic of conversation, evenings at the driftwood fire on the beach after dinner. The adults had read whatever there was to read about it, of course, before they ever volunteered for the test mission. Gveter had more recent information and presumably a better understanding of it than the others, but it had to be pried out of him. Only twenty-five, the only Cetian in the crew, much hairier than the others, and not gifted in language, he spent a lot of time on the defensive. Assuming that as an Anarresti he was more proficient at mutual aid and more adept at cooperation than the others, he lectured them about their propertarian habits; but he held tight to his knowledge, because he needed the advantage it gave him. For a while he would speak only in negatives: don't call it the churten "drive," it isn't a drive, don't call it the churten "effect," it isn't an effect. What is it, then? A long lecture ensued, beginning with the rebirth of Cetian physics since the revision of Shevekian temporalism by the Intervalists, and ending with the general conceptual framework of the churten. Everyone listened very carefully, and finally Sweet Today spoke, carefully. "So the ship will be moved," she said, "by ideas?"