The Shobies’ Story

The Shobies’ Story

Ursula K. Le Guin

They met at the 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 or two). The fisherwomen and fishermen of Liden were as weathered ad driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. “Nope”, she said.

Shobies' Story. Photo by Elena

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 onlu 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.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)