Dangerous People

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  DANGEROUS PEOPLE

  Brian Attebery, editor

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

  DANGEROUS PEOPLE

  Copyright © 2019 by Literary Classics

  of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

  the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Published in the United States by Library of America.

  Visit our website at www.loa.org.

  Published by arrangement with the Ursula K. Le Guin Estate.

  Distributed to the trade in the United States

  by Penguin Random House Inc.

  and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

  eISBN 978–1–59853–605–8

  Contents

  DANGEROUS PEOPLE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chronology

  Note on the Text

  DANGEROUS PEOPLE

  By Arravna

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  NOBODY KNOWS WHY the house named Hardcinder stands by itself on a rise of slaggy basalt, inside the curve of the other houses of that arm of the town.* Maybe at some time they enlarged the common place of Telina† but left the old house standing the way it does, sticking out into the common; or maybe some hard-headed people built the house there on the common because they wanted a foundation of rock. Nobody knows now. What happened a long time ago, or even not long ago at all, even what happens now, is a matter of memories and inventions and mostly has to be taken on somebody’s word.

  So I give you my word:‡ a good many years ago§ a family¶ was living upstairs in Hardcinder House, in the five southeast rooms with the deep balcony that goes around the corner of the house. The railing of the balcony is carved with grape stakes and grape vines and goats kneeling and standing up to eat the grapes. The children who grew up there knew each wooden goat, the grinning billy, the staring kid, the dancing nanny with her tongue sticking out, the lopsided goat missing one horn, cracked off maybe by some other child playing there some other time. A little girl** who lived in that household thought the grinning goat kept his mouth open because he was hungry for the wooden grapes that hung just out of his reach, so she put wild oats and parsley in his wooden mouth. Later on, her little son found the fat flank of the dancing nanny a place of comfort to lean on when he needed comforting, and soon after that, her little daughter tried hard to break the one horn off the one-horned goat so it would come out even, but she couldn’t do it. A few years later there was a second daughter waving her legs and reaching her arms out to the goats and the grapes. And a few more years later the children of those two daughters were hauling themselves up to stand by holding on to the wooden leaves, learning how to walk, running about the balcony, feeding the he-goat wild oats and parsley. So Shamsha saw green stuff drooping out of his mouth as she came back from the Oak Society workshop, and said, “Still hungry, are you, goat?” The goat grinned. Shamsha stood a moment at the railing looking down at the common where her grandchildren and other children were playing, and then went indoors, eager for shade and cool water. It was a hot afternoon in a hot summer.

  Nobody was in the house but Shamsha’s elder daughter’s husband Vavetaiveda, asleep on the front-room windowseat. As she walked across town, Shamsha had imagined lying down on that windowseat where the south wind would flow sweetly over her. She had a long drink of water from the cooler†† and went on to her own room to lie down, but it was so close and stuffy there that she soon got up, bathed and changed, and went into the kitchen. She was restless, wanting work to do. She was chopping mint and chervil for salad when her younger daughter came into the room. Hwette did not speak. On the oaken counter, beside the board on which her mother was chopping herbs, she laid down a plant of chicory: the root, the tough stalk and leaves, the flower stalk at the top, all the flowers but one closed and that one closing, for it was late in the day and chicory is a morning flower.‡‡

  “That’s too old for salad, soubí!”§§ said Shamsha. She looked around, but Hwette had already gone through to another room.

  Shamsha went on chopping herbs, and put on a pot of cracked wheat to boil so it would be cool by dinner time, continuing to think about what concerned her. She had been for some years archivist of the Madrone Lodge,¶¶ and last winter in the course of going through old gifts and holdings of the archives had become interested in a manuscript, unsigned, probably written a couple of lifetimes ago, called Controlling. It dealt with aspects of human behavior that interested her, and people of the Madrone and Oak*** had agreed with her that it was a work of originality and insight, worth saving for a while.††† She had been copying and editing it since before the Moon Dancing,‡‡‡ spending several weeks all told at the Exchange§§§ to use the writers there,¶¶¶ and today she had been at the Oak workshops talking with people there about using one of the presses and arranging for the paper, for she wanted to hand-set the piece as a book. By the time the Water was danced**** she would be setting type, but that pleasure would come in its own time. First she must have the text right. That was her concern now. She was thinking about an obscure passage, where the author had missed or miscopied several words through absent-mindedness, or had failed to express the thought in words appropriate to it. She knew how the text might be emended, but not whether she should emend it. Perhaps the obscurity just at this crucial point of the treatise, on which much of the argument hinged,†††† was deliberate. To offer clarity and withdraw it without warning did not seem characteristic of the author, but it was a complex mind that had thought these thoughts, and the subject, after all, was control. So the obscurity might be intentional; or accidental; or non-existent except to Shamsha failing to understand. She was certain only that she must be careful about changing a text which perhaps understood her better than she understood it. So she thought while she carefully rinsed the chopper and the counter, gathered up the bits of stem and wilted leaf, and put them into the compost pail.

  All the same, even if the author was deliberately indulging in a compressed allusive mode, the sentence that most troubled her still troubled her. Was it a clear strand across a gap, or a break in the skein, or a knot, a tangle? “Shattering pressure may induce scattering to find what is traduced.” The chime of shatter and scatter, induce and traduce, were much gaudier than this author’s usual plain style. Perhaps they signified a sleepy moment, copying out late at night, the mind not in control of the hand, picking up rhymes not reasons. The cracked wheat was done; she stirred it up and left the pot half-open on the stove to cool. Turning back to the counter, thinking of that word traduce, she saw the plant of chicory, today’s flower now withered shut and tomorrow’s buds on the stem mere knots, their promise lost. She felt a little annoyance at Hwette’s childishness in forcing her to decide what to do with this small, ungainly, and inappropriate gift. Was she to put it in water root and all? or to dry the one gangling root to roast for chicory tea? To chop the whole thing up for a bitter note in the salad was the only thing that made any sense at all. But the color of the closed flower, the blue-violet color it would be if it were open, was clear in her mind, and in that color the daughter’s gift of that flower to the mother spoke itself, and she understood.

  Shamsha stood looking at the chicory plant, her arms apart and still, and then went hurrying down the hall to Hwette’s room, saying her daughter’s name. But nobody was in the room, or any of the rooms, except in the front room where her son-in-law was still stretched out in the windowse
at, looking soft and moist and breathing in through his nose and out through his lips so that he made a little noise, like a distant engine with a bad valve, puh . . . puh . . . puh. . . . Often at night, too, Tai snored in reverse that way. Shamsha’s room was next to his and Fefinum’s, and once she heard the sound when seeking sleep there was no use trying to think of anything else.

  She hurried noisily through the room now, hoping to disturb him, and out onto the balcony. The air that had come hot all day from the east was beginning to come cooler from the south, though still not very cool. Shamsha sat down in a legless wicker chair behind the wooden goats and vines and looked through them over the common place and across the Valley to the hills south of Odoun.‡‡‡‡ She stretched out her legs and stared at the blue-violet hills. Several times she spoke aloud, saying “How—” or “No,” or made a small, wordless sound, in the busy distress of her thinking.

  Her son-in-law, Hwette’s husband§§§§ Kamedan, came up the outside stairs onto the balcony. He said in his low, gentle voice, “So you’re here, amabí.”¶¶¶¶ She looked at him from clear across the Valley. At last she started a little and said, “Kamedan! Have you seen Hwette?”

  “Not since this morning. I’ve been at the looms,” he said. He stood there, hesitant. Kamedan was a tall, well-made man with dark skin, long hair, and clear eyes. He was strong and beautiful in limb and feature. His mother-in-law looked at him now admiringly and with rancor. She thought: He doesn’t know. He won’t know till she tells him. She told me first, as she ought. Hwette always does right, always does as she ought to do.—The thought was complacent and yet heavy, as if it held other thoughts folded inside it. She put it away from her. She said, “She was here, and then I lost her.”

  Kamedan said, “I think she was going to the heyimas***** this afternoon with Fefinum, to Clown practice.”†††††

  “Oh yes, that’s right,” Shamsha said, getting up. She found it hard to get up gracefully from a legless chair, but Kamedan’s beauty made her wish to be graceful in his eyes. “All the same, she was here for a minute,” she said, and so saying thought about the chicory plant. She did not want anybody else seeing it lying wilting on the counter. She went in to the kitchen. Tai was there, still moist and creased, but awake, standing up, and breathing through his nose. She did not see the chicory plant. He had spread out a litter of vegetables and implements all over the counter, being as unable to work in an orderly place as Shamsha was unable to work in a disorderly one.

  Kamedan had followed her, and now the children came running in, Fefinum’s eight-year-old daughter Bolekash and Hwette’s little boy Torip. Torip fastened his arms around his grandmother as high up as he could reach, which was just below the hips, and said earnestly, “Ama! Ama, I’m very hungry, I need to eat!” Kamedan poured them and himself cups of lemonade from the jug in the coolroom, and Shamsha fetched down a great bowl of apricots, the last picking of their five trees‡‡‡‡‡ in Dry Creek orchard, and the children filled their hands and mouths. Pottering at the counter, Tai asked, “Shall I get dinner early?”

  “It’s still too hot. After sunset, maybe,” Shamsha said.

  Bolekash said, “Come on! We’re going to the garden!” and whirled out again. Torip obediently followed her, clutching apricots. Shamsha called after them, “Keep out of the irrigation system, you two!”

  “We will,” Torip called back, sweet as a towhee chirping.

  Shamsha said, “They dammed up the ditches this morning and flooded the salad beds. A pair of wild pigs! The wheat’s on the stove, cooked, Tai, and I left the herbs in oil, there in the brown bowl. Do you want a hand with anything else?”

  After thinking about it for a while, Tai said, “No.” Shamsha was relieved. When he cooked he moved so slowly among such a confusion of implements and unfinished work that it tried her patience, and she often ended up finishing the unfinished for him, which he never seemed to notice. She had already started out of the room when he said, “I guess the peas need to be shelled,” with the air of a person coming slowly upon a concept entirely new to him. Shamsha turned around, picked up the big basket of peas and an empty basket, and went back out on the balcony to shell them.

  Kamedan had brought his lemonade out and was sitting there looking out through the goats to the hills. When she sat down with her baskets he moved closer, took up a handful of peapods, and began shelling, dropping the pods into the empty basket and the peas into his shirt pocket, except for those that went into his mouth.

  “Will any of those come back?” Shamsha asked, and he answered, “Only the ones I don’t eat.”

  “The book I’m working on describes people like Tai,” she said, “who by apparently doing nothing cause other people to do things. The author calls it controlling by receding, an important principle, especially useful for controlling people like me. People like me will always come forward as people like Tai recede.”

  Kamedan smiled, diffident; he seldom analysed ideas or people. They both shelled steadily. The peas were small, crisp, and neat, willingly coming out of their pods under the push of a thumb. They fell musically into the basket in arpeggios as Shamsha shelled, and in a pattering rush when Kamedan leaned forward to empty his pocket. His movements were steady and quiet, reflecting his art as a weaver, and his nature, Shamsha thought as she watched him. Yet she did not trust his quietness, his gentleness. It was real but it was blind. Though his eyes were clear, inwardly the man was blind, eyes clinched shut, forehead wrinkled like a bull’s, helplessly dangerous.

  Shamsha believed that men knew their helplessness, since the rules that bound desire were largely of their making and responded to their needs; but she would like to know a man who did not love his helplessness. She wondered if it had been Hwette’s choice to have a second child, or if it was Kamedan’s non-choice, his blind doing, the helpless, driven reassertion of potency as paternity, not wanting the child but the fatherhood of the child that bound him to the mother, his emptiness to her fullness.

  And why had the child chosen to come to them? Had they yet considered that? Shamsha thought that Hwette might not have considered it and yet, when she did, would be able to answer the question. Hwette had that gift, though she seldom used it. Kamedan, if he considered the question, would not care if he could not answer it. He thought it was enough to welcome the child, to love the child, as he loved Torip. The child was a thread in the fabric of his relationship with Hwette, his marriage the warp on the high, broad loom and he the blind shuttle weaving her life into a pattern, a figure—but really, Shamsha thought, what gaudy metaphors! That book is controlling my mind. Here sits the handsomest man in Telina, shelling peas to help me, thoughtful, careful, kind, the perfect husband for my daughter. Why shouldn’t they be having another baby? Kamedan leaned forward to empty a load of peas from his shirt pocket, and the fineness of the corners of his mouth, the innocence of the smile that changed his face from its habitual calm, irresistibly invited her trust and pleasure. Men need marriage, she thought, and it’s foolish to begrudge it to them.

  Looking down through the goats’ legs she saw the two wives, her daughters, coming together across the common from the Naward Bridge. Perhaps because her mind was agitated and she had been thinking about marriage, she saw ghosts: her father walked in his granddaughter Fefinum’s short, assertive stride, on small feet that turned out a little, planting themselves firmly at each step. And it was the grandmother, Shamsha’s mother Wenomal, who turned Hwette’s head, lifting the chin, looking up into the evening sky with a bodily gesture so submissive, so remote, that it frightened Shamsha and made her look away, thinking that it is never an altogether happy thing to see the dead, even in the living.

  Her two daughters came up the stairs to the balcony, Fefinum talking steadily. Shamsha found herself nervous, feeling ashamed that she had not responded at once to Hwette’s message, wanting to make up for that silence now, though she must do so in silence. But Hwette greeted her without the least trace of question or confi
rmation, so that Shamsha felt foolish trying to catch her eye, and thought she must speak to her later, alone. After Hwette had gone indoors and Kamedan had followed her, Shamsha thought that the best thing would have been to get up and touch Hwette, hold her for a moment; that was all that was needed. But she had not done it. Since her marriage Hwette had become not easy to touch. Even as a little child, trusting and affectionate, she had been elusive, like the swallow she had been named for then;§§§§§ and now, like the scrub oak she had named herself for, she was unobtrusive, unwelcoming to the hand.

  But, Shamsha thought, whose reluctance am I really talking about? It was so easy to blame the passive person for one’s own active choice, and Shamsha had chosen for a long time, for years now, since Geseta left, not to touch people or be touched unless custom demanded it.

  “‘The child coming to be born demands that the house be set in order,’” Shamsha thought, and was afraid.

  “Why bother cooking them?” Fefinum said boisterously, scooping a handful of shelled peas from the basket and tossing half the handful in her mouth. She chewed noisily. She was still being a Clown, still enjoying the license to be crude, loud, and greedy, which she thought had been granted her when she joined the Society. That the license was granted only to the Clown, and that so long as she was Fefinum she was not the Clown, was the kind of distinction she did not make. Nor did she observe the distinction between her mother the center of a household, the Archivist of the Madrone Lodge, and her mother the changing, uncertain woman Shamsha. Fefinum saw the role not the person. Her obtuseness was often very restful to her mother. To be treated like a great rock made Shamsha feel like a great rock. To know her control over people and events was taken as a fact made her feel that she was in fact in control. Fefinum loved control, thrived on it; she couldn’t have wanted so badly to be a Clown if she wasn’t controlled by control, as the manuscript Controlling put it.