Jackie’s arm tightened. Her eyes pleaded. Ann watched Harry closely. He felt as if he were drowning.
“I know this must come as a shock to you,” Jackie went on, “but I also know you’ve always wanted me to be happy. So I hope you’ll come to love her the way I do.”
Harry stared at the red-haired woman. He knew what was being asked of him, but he didn’t believe in it, it wasn’t real, in the same way weather going on in other countries wasn’t really real. Hurricanes. Drought. Sunshine. When what you were looking at was a cold drizzle.
“I think that of all the people I’ve ever known, Ann is the most together. The most compassionate. And the most moral.”
“Ummm,” Harry said.
“Popsy?”
Jackie was looking right at him. The longer he was silent, the more her smile faded. It occurred to him that the smile had showed her teeth. They were very white, very even. Also very sharp.
“I . . . I . . . hello, Ann.”
“Hello,” Ann said.
“See, I told you he’d be great!” Jackie said to Ann. She let go of Harry and jumped up from the bench, all energy and lightness. “You’re wonderful, Popsy! You, too, Manny! Oh, Ann, this is Popsy’s best friend, Manny Feldman. Manny, Ann Davies.”
“Happy to meet you,” Ann said. She had a low, rough voice and a sweet smile. Harry felt hurricanes, drought, sunshine.
Jackie said, “I know this is probably a little unexpected—”
Unexpected. “Well—” Harry said, and could say no more.
“It’s just that it was time for me to come out of the closet.”
Harry made a small noise. Manny managed to say, “So you live here, Ann?”
“Oh, yes. All my life. And my family, too, since forever.”
“Has Jackie . . . has Jackie met any of them yet?”
“Not yet,” Jackie said. “It might be a little . . . tricky, in the case of her parents.” She smiled at Ann. “But we’ll manage.”
“I wish,” Ann said to her, “that you could have met my grandfather. He would have been just as great as your Popsy here. He always was.”
“Was?” Harry said faintly.
“He died a year ago. But he was just a wonderful man. Compassionate and intelligent.”
“What . . . what did he do?”
“He taught history at the university. He was also active in lots of organizations—Amnesty International, the ACLU, things like that. During World War II he worked for the Jewish rescue leagues, getting people out of Germany.”
Manny nodded. Harry watched Jackie’s teeth.
“We’d like you both to come to dinner soon,” Ann said. She smiled. “I’m a good cook.”
Manny’s eyes gleamed.
Jackie said, “I know this must be hard for you—” but Harry saw that she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think it was hard. For her it was so real that it was natural weather, unexpected maybe, but not strange, not out of place, not out of time. In front of the bench, sunlight striped the pavement like bars.
Suddenly Jackie said, “Oh, Popsy, did I tell you that it was your friend Robert who introduced us? Did I tell you that already?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” Harry said. “You did.”
“He’s kind of a nerd, but actually all right.”
After Jackie and Ann left, the two old men sat silent a long time. Finally Manny said diplomatically, “You want to get a snack, Harry?”
“She’s happy, Manny.”
“Yes. You want to get a snack, Harry?”
“She didn’t even recognize him.”
“No. You want to get a snack?”
“Here, have this. I got it for you this morning.” Harry held out an orange, a deep-colored navel with flawless rind: seedless, huge, guaranteed juicy, nurtured for flavor, perfect.
“Enjoy,” Harry said. “It cost me ninety-two cents.”
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The term “visionary” is applicable to very few writers, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s intellectually provocative fiction has earned her the accolade in general literary circles as well as the fields of fantasy and science fiction. Though she has taken a variety of approaches to a wide range of ideas, the cornerstone of her distinguished body of fiction is her series of Hainish novels, set on different planets in a pangalactic empire. The alien cultures on these planets share a common origin, but have developed differently over time, in ways both striking and subtle. Le Guin juxtaposes alien and earthly viewpoints in these stories with an eye toward showing the plurality of possible perspectives on the themes they address. Her Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet whose androgynous humanoids unpredictably shift sexual identities, a process that undermines all preconceptions of identity based on gender differences. In other Hainish novels, which include Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Word for World Is Forest, and The Telling, Le Guin has used contrasting civilizations to measure the impact of a variety of science-fictional devices, including telepathy, instantaneous communication, and space travel.
Le Guin’s other major story cycle is the Earthsea saga, which includes A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, and Tales from Earthsea. These novels, which break the boundaries between adult and young-adult fiction, comprise a coming-of-age story featuring Ged, an apprentice magician who grows to maturity and faces many challenges as both man and mage over the course of the saga.
Le Guin has been praised for her understanding of the importance of rituals and myths that shape individuals and societies, and for the meticulous detail with which she brings her alien cultures to life. She has written other novels, including The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, Malafrena, and Always Coming Home. Her short fiction has been collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight, and Four Ways to Forgiveness. Le Guin has also written many celebrated essays on the craft of fantasy and science fiction, some of which have been gathered in The Language of the Night and Dancing at the Edge of the World.
Set in the world of her Hainish stories, “Another Story” is an appropriate way to close this book, with the idea of time travel viewed through a common theme of Le Guin’s, that of local folklore, and combining elements of the past, present, and the future into a seamless vision that also, as many of these stories have done, explores a closely cherished dream of humanity: the ability to go back and correct mistakes in our past.
ANOTHER STORY
OR A FISHERMAN
OF THE INLAND SEA
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To the Stabiles of the Ekumen on Hain, and to Gvonesh,
Director of the Churten Field Laboratories at Ve Port:
from Tiokunan’n Hideo, Farmholder of the Second
Sedoretu of Udan, Derdan’nad, Oket, on O.
I shall make my report as if I told a story, this having been the tradition for some time now. You may, however, wonder why a farmer on the planet O is reporting to you as if he were a Mobile of the Ekumen. My story will explain that. But it does not explain itself. Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe.
So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship Terraces of Darranda to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.
The distance between Hain and my home world is just over four light-years, and there has been traffic between O and the Hainish system for twenty centuries. Even before the Nearly As Fast As Light drive, when ships spent a hundred years of planetary time instead of four to make the crossing, there were people who would give up their old life to come to a new world. Sometimes they returned; not often. There were tales of such sad returns to a world that had forgotten the voyager. I knew also from my mother a very old story called “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” which came from her home world, Terra. The life of a ki’O child is fu
ll of stories, but of all I heard told by her and my othermother and my fathers and grandparents and uncles and aunts and teachers, that one was my favorite. Perhaps I liked it so well because my mother told it with deep feeling, though very plainly, and always in the same words (and I would not let her change the words if she ever tried to).
The story tells of a poor fisherman, Urashima, who went out daily in his boat alone on the quiet sea that lay between his home island and the mainland. He was a beautiful young man with long, black hair, and the daughter of the king of the sea saw him as he leaned over the side of the boat and she gazed up to see the floating shadow cross the wide circle of the sky.
Rising from the waves, she begged him to come to her palace under the sea with him. At first he refused, saying, “My children wait for me at home.” But how could he resist the sea king’s daughter? “One night,” he said. She drew him down with her under the water, and they spent a night of love in her green palace, served by strange undersea beings. Urashima came to love her dearly, and maybe he stayed more than one night only. But at last he said, “My dear, I must go. My children wait for me at home.”
“If you go, you go forever,” she said.
“I will come back,” he promised.
She shook her head. She grieved, but did not plead with him. “Take this with you,” she said, giving him a little box, wonderfully carved, and sealed shut. “Do not open it, Urashima.”
So he went up onto the land, and ran up the shore to his village, to his house: but the garden was a wilderness, the windows were blank, the roof had fallen in. People came and went among the familiar houses of the village, but he did not know a single face. “Where are my children?” he cried. An old woman stopped and spoke to him: “What is your trouble, young stranger?”
“I am Urashima, of this village, but I see no one here I know!”
“Urashima!” the woman said—and my mother would look far away, and her voice as she said the name made me shiver, tears starting to my eyes—“Urashima! My grandfather told me a fisherman named Urashima was lost at sea, in the time of his grandfather’s grandfather. There has been no one of that family alive for a hundred years.”
So Urashima went back down to the shore; and there he opened the box, the gift of the sea king’s daughter. A little white smoke came out of it and drifted away on the sea wind. In that moment Urashima’s black hair turned white, and he grew old, old, old; and he lay down on the sand and died.
Once, I remember, a traveling teacher asked my mother about the fable, as he called it. She smiled and said, “In the Annals of the Emperors of my nation of Terra it is recorded that a young man named Urashima, of the Yosa district, went away in the year 477, and came back to his village in the year 825, but soon departed again. And I have heard that the box was kept in a shrine for many centuries.” Then they talked about something else.
My mother, Isako, would not tell the story as often as I demanded it. “That one is so sad,” she would say, and tell instead about Grandmother and the rice dumpling that rolled away, or the painted cat who came alive and killed the demon rats, or the peach boy who floated down the river. My sister and my germanes, and older people, too, listened to her tales as closely as I did. They were new stories on O, and a new story is always a treasure. The painted cat story was the general favorite, especially when my mother would take out her brush and the block of strange, black, dry ink from Terra, and sketch the animals—cat, rat—that none of us had ever seen: the wonderful cat with arched back and brave round eyes, the fanged and skulking rats, “pointed at both ends” as my sister said. But I waited always, through all other stories, for her to catch my eye, look away, smile a little and sigh, and begin, “Long, long ago, on the shore of the Inland Sea there lived a fisherman . . .”
Did I know then what that story meant to her? that it was her story? that if she were to return to her village, her world, all the people she had known would have been dead for centuries?
Certainly I knew that she “came from another world,” but what that meant to me as a five-, or seven-, or ten-year-old, is hard for me now to imagine, impossible to remember. I knew that she was a Terran and had lived on Hain; that was something to be proud of. I knew that she had come to O as a Mobile of the Ekumen (more pride, vague and grandiose) and that “your father and I fell in love at the Festival of Plays in Sudiran.” I knew also that arranging the marriage had been a tricky business. Getting permission to resign her duties had not been difficult—the Ekumen is used to Mobiles going native. But as a foreigner, Isako did not belong to a ki’O moiety, and that was only the first problem. I heard all about it from my othermother, Tubdu, an endless source of family history, anecdote, and scandal. “You know,” Tubdu told me when I was eleven or twelve, her eyes shining and her irrepressible, slightly wheezing, almost silent laugh beginning to shake her from the inside out—“you know, she didn’t even know women got married? Where she came from, she said, women don’t marry.”
I could and did correct Tubdu: “Only in her part of it. She told me there’s lots of parts of it where they do.” I felt obscurely defensive of my mother, though Tubdu spoke without a shadow of malice or contempt; she adored Isako. She had fallen in love with her “the moment I saw her—that black hair! that mouth!”—and simply found it endearingly funny that such a woman could have expected to marry only a man.
“I understand,” Tubdu hastened to assure me. “I know—on Terra it’s different, their fertility was damaged, they have to think about marrying for children. And they marry in twos, too. Oh, poor Isako! How strange it must have seemed to her! I remember how she looked at me—” And off she went again into what we children called The Great Giggle, her joyous, silent, seismic laughter.
To those unfamiliar with our customs I should explain that on O, a world with a low, stable human population and an ancient climax technology, certain social arrangements are almost universal. The dispersed village, an association of farms, rather than the city or state, is the basic social unit. The population consists of two halves or moieties. A child is born into its mother’s moiety, so that all ki’O (except the mountain folk of Ennik) belong either to the Morning People, whose time is from midnight to noon, or the Evening People, whose time is from noon to midnight. The sacred origins and functions of the moieties are recalled in the Discussions and the Plays and in the services at every farm shrine. The original social function of the moiety was probably to structure exogamy into marriage and so discourage inbreeding in isolated farmholds, since one can have sex with or marry only a person of the other moiety. The rule is severely reinforced. Transgressions, which of course occur, are met with shame, contempt, and ostracism. One’s identity as a Morning or an Evening Person is as deeply and intimately part of oneself as one’s gender, and has quite as much to do with one’s sexual life.
A ki’O marriage, called a sedoretu, consists of a Morning woman and man and an Evening woman and man; the heterosexual pairs are called Morning and Evening according to the woman’s moiety; the homosexual pairs are called Day—the two women—and Night—the two men.
So rigidly structured a marriage, where each of four people must be sexually compatible with two of the others while never having sex with the fourth—clearly this takes some arranging. Making sedoretu is a major occupation of my people. Experimenting is encouraged; foursomes form and dissolve, couples “try on” other couples, mixing and matching. Brokers, traditionally elderly widowers, go about among the farmholds of the dispersed villages, arranging meetings, setting up field dances, serving as universal confidants. Many marriages begin as a love match of one couple, either homosexual or heterosexual, to which another pair or two separate people become attached. Many marriages are brokered or arranged by the village elders from beginning to end. To listen to the old people under the village great tree making a sedoretu is like watching a master game of chess or tidhe. “If that Evening boy at Erdup were to meet young Tobo during the flour-processing at Gad’d . . .” “Isn�
��t Hodin’n of the Oto Morning a programmer? They could use a programmer at Erdup. . . .” The dowry a prospective bride or groom can offer is their skill, or their home farm. Otherwise undesired people may be chosen and honored for the knowledge or the property they bring to a marriage. The farmhold, in turn, wants its new members to be agreeable and useful. There is no end to the making of marriages on O. I should say that all in all they give as much satisfaction as any other arrangement to the participants, and a good deal more to the marriage-makers.
Of course many people never marry. Scholars, wandering Discussers, itinerant artists and experts, and specialists in the Centers seldom want to fit themselves into the massive permanence of a farmhold sedoretu. Many people attach themselves to a brother’s or sister’s marriage as aunt or uncle, a position with limited, clearly defined responsibilities; they can have sex with either or both spouses of the other moiety, thus sometimes increasing the sedoretu from four to seven or eight. Children of that relationship are called cousins. The children of one mother are brothers or sisters to one another; the children of the Morning and the children of the Evening are germanes. Brothers, sisters, and first cousins may not marry, but germanes may. In some less conservative parts of O germane marriages are looked at askance, but they are common and respected in my region.
My father was a Morning man of Udan Farmhold of Derdan’nad Village in the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun River, on Oket, the smallest of the six continents of O. The village comprises seventy-seven farmholds, in a deeply rolling, stream-cut region of fields and forests on the watershed of the Oro, a tributary of the wide Saduun. It is fertile, pleasant country, with views west to the Coast Range and south to the great floodplains of the Saduun and the gleam of the sea beyond. The Oro is a wide, lively, noisy river full of fish and children. I spent my childhood in or on or by the Oro, which runs through Udan so near the house that you can hear its voice all night, the rush and hiss of the water and the deep drumbeats of rocks rolled in its current. It is shallow and quite dangerous. We all learned to swim very young in a quiet bay dug out as a swimming pool, and later to handle rowboats and kayaks in the swift current full of rocks and rapids. Fishing was one of the children’s responsibilities. I liked to spear the fat, beady-eyed, blue ochid; I would stand heroic on a slippery boulder in midstream, the long spear poised to strike. I was good at it. But my germane Isidri, while I was prancing about with my spear, would slip into the water and catch six or seven ochid with her bare hands. She could catch eels and even the darting ei. I never could do it. “You just sort of move with the water and get transparent,” she said. She could stay underwater longer than any of us, so long you were sure she had drowned. “She’s too bad to drown,” her mother, Tubdu, proclaimed. “You can’t drown really bad people. They always bob up again.”
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