'It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You keep it, it gets stopped — that's a heart attack. You die.'
'Will Hezhe-old-man die?' the boy asked. Old Hezhe never spent anything on a ritual or a relative;
and Havzhiva was an observant child.
'Yes,' his father answered. 'His araha is already dead.'
Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular quality of one's gender, manhood or womanhood; generosity; the savor of good food or wine.
It is also the name of the plumed, fire-colored, quick-flying mammal that Havzhiva used to see come to drink at the irrigation ponds, tiny flames darting above the darkening water in the evening.
Stse is an almost-island, separated from the mainland of the great south continent by marshes and tidal bogs, where millions of wading birds gather to mate and nest. Ruins of an enormous bridge are visible on the landward side, and another halfsunk fragment of min is the basis of the town's boat pier and breakwater. Vast works of other ages encumber all Hain, and are no more and no less venerable or interesting to the Hainish than the rest of the landscape. A child standing on the pier to watch his mother sail off to the mainland might wonder why people had bothered to build a bridge when there were boats and flyers to ride. They must
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have liked to walk, he thought. I'd rather sail in a boat. Or fly.
But the silver flyers flew over Stse, not landing, going from somewhere else to somewhere else,
where historians lived. Plenty of boats came in and out of Stse harbor, but the people of his lineage did not sail them. They lived in the Pueblo of Stse and did the things that their people and their lineage did. They learned what people needed to learn, and lived their knowledge.
'People have to learn to be human,' his father said. 'Look at Shell's baby. It keeps saying 'Teach me! Teach me!''
'Teach me,' in the language of Stse, is 'aowa.'
'Sometimes the baby says 'ngaaaaa,'' Havzhiva observed.
Granite nodded. 'She can't speak human words very well yet,' he said.
Havzhiva hung around the baby that winter, teaching her to say human words. She was one of his Etsahin relatives, his second cousin once removed, visiting with her mother and her father and his wife. The family watched Havzhiva with. approval as he patiently said 'baba' and 'gogo' to
the fat, placid, staring baby. Though he had no sister and thus could not be a father, if he went on studying education with such seriousness, he would probably have the honor of being the adopted father of a baby whose mother had no brother.
He also studied at school and in the temple, studied dancing, and studied the local version of soccer. He was a serious student. He was good at soccer but not as good as his best friend, a Buried Cable girl named lyan lyan (a traditional name for Buried
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Cable girls, a seabird name). Until they were twelve, boys and girls were educated together and alike. lyan lyan was the best soccer player on the children's team. They always had to put her on the other side at halftime so that the score would even out and they could go home for dinner without anybody having lost or won badly. Part of her advantage was that she had got her height very early, but most of it was pure skill.
'Are you going to work at the temple?' she asked Havzhiva as they sat on the porch roof of her house watching the first day of the Enactment of the Unusual Gods, which took place every eleven years. No unusual things were happening yet, and the amplifiers weren't working well, so the music in the plaza sounded faint and full of static. The two children kicked their heels and talked quietly. 'No, I think I'll leam weaving from my father,' the boy said.
'Lucky you. Why do only stupid boys get to use looms?' It was a rhetorical question, and Havzhiva paid it no attention. Women were not weavers. Men did not make bricks- Other Sky people did not operate boats but did repair electronic devices. Buried Cable people did not castrate animals but did maintain generators. There were things one could do and things one could not do; one did those things for people and people did those things for one. Coming up on puberty, lyan lyan and Havzhiva were making a first choice of their first profession. lyan lyan had already chosen to apprentice in house-building and repair, although the adult soccer team would probably claim a good deal of her time.
A globular silver person with spidery legs came csAs 129 aA-®
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down the street in long bounds, emitting a shower of sparks each time it landed. Six people in red with tall white masks ran after it, shouting and throwing speckled beans at it. Havzhiva and lyan lyan joined in the shouting and craned from the roof to see it go bounding round the corner towards the plaza. They both knew that this Unusual God was Chert, a young man of the Sky lineage, a goalkeeper for the adult soccer team; they both also knew that it was a manifestation of deity, A god called Zarstsa or Ball-Lighting was using Chert to come into town for the ceremony, and had just bounded down the street pursued by shouts of fear and praise and showers of fertility. Amused and entertained by the spectacle, they judged with some acuteness the quality of the god's costume, the jumping, and the fireworks, and were awed by the strangeness and power of the event. They did not say anything for a long time after the god had passed, but sat dreamily in the
foggy sunlight on the roof. They were children who lived among the daily gods. Now they had seen one of the unusual gods. They were content. Another one would come along, before long. Time is nothing to the gods.
At fifteen, Havzhiva and lyan lyan became gods together.
Stse people between twelve and fifteen were vigilantly watched; there would be a great deal of grief and deep, lasting shame if a child of the house, the family, the lineage, the people, should change being prematurely and without ceremony. Virginity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly abandoned; sexual
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activity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly undertaken. It was assumed that a boy would masturbate and make some homosexual experiments, but not a homosexual pairing; adolescent boys who paired off, and those who incurred suspicion of try-
ing to get alone with a girl, were endlessly lectured and hectored and badgered by older men. A grown man who made sexual advances to a virgin of either sex would forfeit his professional status, his religious offices, and his houseright.
Changing being took a while. Boys and girls had to be taught how to recognise and control their fertility, which in Hainish physiology is a matter of personal decision. Conception does not happen: it is performed. It cannot take place unless both the woman and the man have chosen it. At thirteen, boys began to be taught the technique of deliberately releasing potent sperm. The teachings were full of warnings, threats, and scoldings, though the boys were never actually punished. After a year or two came a series of tests of achieved potency, a threshold ritual, frightening, formal, extremely secret, exclusively male. To have passed the tests was, of course, a matter of intense pride; yet Havzhiva, like most boys, came to his final change-of-being rites very apprehensive, hiding fear under a sullen stoicism.
The girls had been differently taught. The people of Stse believed that a woman's cycle of fertility
made it easy for her to leam when and how to conceive, and so the teaching was easy too- Girls' threshold rituals were celebratory, involving praise rather than shame, arousing anticipation rather than fear. Women had been telling them for years,
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with demonstrations, what a man wants, how to make him stand up tall, how to show him what a woman wants. During this training, most girls asked if they couldn't just go on practicing with each other, and got scolded and lectured. No, they couldn't. Once they had changed status they could do as they pleased, but everybody must go through 'the twofold door' once.
The change-of-being rites were held whenever the people in charge of them could get an equal number of fifteen-year-old boys and girls from the pueblo and its farms. Often a boy or girl had to be borrowed from one of the related pueblos to even out the number or to pair the lineages correctly.
Magnificently masked and costumed, silent, the participants danced and were honored all day in the plaza
