The Birthday of the World
Ursula LeGuin
Harper Collins, 3/02
ISBN:0066212537
Chapter One
Coming of Age in Karhide
By Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, of Rer, in Karhide, on Gethen.
I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city,
the marketplace and meeting ground for all the Northeast, the Plains, and Kerm Land. The
Fastness of Rer was a center of learning, a refuge, a judgment seat fifteen thousand years ago.
Karhide became a nation here, under the Geger kings, who ruled for a thousand years. In the
thousandth year Sedern Geger, the Unking, cast the crown into the River Arre from the palace
towers, proclaiming an end to dominion. The time they call the Flowering of Rer, the Summer
Century, began then. It ended when the Hearth of Harge took power and moved their capital
across the mountains to Erhenrang. The Old Palace has been empty for centuries. But it stands.
Nothing in Rer falls down. The Arre floods through the street-tunnels every year in the Thaw,
winter blizzards may bring thirty feet of snow, but the city stands. Nobody knows how old the
houses are, because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without respect
to the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient as hills. The roofed streets
and canals angle about among them. Rer is all corners. We say that the Harges left because they
were afraid of what might be around the corner.
Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people
count years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from
it. Here it's always Year One. On Getheny Thern, New Year's Day, the Year One becomes
one-ago, one-to-come becomes One, and so on. It's like Rer, everything always changing but
the city never changing.
When I was fourteen (in the Year One, or fifty-ago) I came of age. I have been thinking about
that a good deal recently.
It was a different world. Most of us had never seen an Alien, as we called them then. We might
have heard the Mobile talk on the radio, and at school we saw pictures of Aliens -- the ones
with hair around their mouths were the most pleasingly savage and repulsive. Most of the
pictures were disappointing. They looked too much like us. You couldn't even tell that they
were always in kemmer. The female Aliens were supposed to have enormous breasts, but my
mothersib Dory had bigger breasts than the ones in the pictures.
When the Defenders of the Faith kicked them out of Orgoreyn, when King Emran got into the
Border War and lost Erhenrang, even when their Mobiles were outlawed and forced into hiding
at Estre in Kerm, the Ekumen did nothing much but wait. They had waited for two hundred
years, as patient as Handdara. They did one thing: they took our young king offworld to foil a
plot, and then brought the same king back sixty years later to end her wombchild's disastrous
reign. Argaven XVII is the only king who ever ruled four years before her heir and forty years
after.
The year I was born (the Year One, or sixty-four-ago) was the year Argaven's second reign
began. By the time I was noticing anything beyond my own toes, the war was over, the West
Fall was part of Karhide again, the capital was back in Erhenrang, and most of the damage
done to Rer during the Overthrow of Emran had been repaired. The old houses had been
rebuilt again. The Old Palace had been patched again. Argaven XVII was miraculously back on
the throne again. Everything was the way it used to be, ought to be, back to normal, just like the
old days -- everybody said so.
Indeed those were quiet years, an interval of recovery before Argaven, the first Gethenian who
ever left our planet, brought us at last fully into the Ekumen; before we, not they, became the
Aliens; before we came of age. When I was a child we lived the way people had lived in Rer
forever. It is that way, that timeless world, that world around the corner, I have been thinking
about, and trying to describe for people who never knew it. Yet as I write I see how also
nothing changes, that it is truly the Year One always, for each child that comes of age, each
lover who falls in love.
There were a couple of thousand people in the Ereb Hearths, and a hundred and forty of them
lived in my Hearth, Ereb Tage. My name is Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, after the old way of
naming we still use in Rer. The first thing I remember is a huge dark place full of shouting and
shadows, and I am falling upward through a golden light into the darkness. In thrilling terror, I
scream. I am caught in my fall, held, held close; I weep; a voice so close to me that it seems to
speak through my body says softly, "Sov, Sov, Sov." And then I am given something wonderful
to eat, something so sweet, so delicate that never again will I eat anything quite so good....
I imagine that some of my wild elder hearthsibs had been throwing me about, and that my
mother comforted me with a bit of festival cake. Later on when I was a wild elder sib we used
to play catch with babies for balls; they always screamed, with terror or with delight, or both.
It's the nearest to flying anyone of my generation knew. We had dozens of different words for
the way snow falls, descends, glides, blows, for the way clouds move, the way ice floats, the
way boats sail; but not that word. Not yet. And so I don't remember "flying." I remember...
The above is excerpted from The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved. No part of
this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd
Street, New York, NY 10022
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