Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He came to the edge of another, still wider road, full of motors going very fast with a loud noise as far as he could see up into the mountains and down towards the sun setting across the valley full of walls and roofs. Everything on the road was dead. The air was thick and yellow, and he kept looking for the forest fire. But all the time he was there outside the world it was like that.

  He went down among the walls and roofs, the roads and houses, walking on, walking on, and did not come to the end of them. He never came to the end of them.

  In all those houses the backward-head people lived. They had electrical wires in their ears, and were deaf. They smoked tobacco day and night, and were continually making war. He tried to get away from the war by going on, but it was everywhere they lived, and they lived everywhere. He saw them hiding and killing each other. Sometimes the houses burned for miles and miles. But there were so many of those people that there was no end to them.

  The man from Pass River learned how to eat some of their food, and he lived by stealing, and kept walking through those streets looking among those houses for some people who lived inside the world. He thought there had to be some there. He walked singing, so that they could hear him if they were there. Nobody heard him or saw him until the day he turned to go back to the mountains. He was sick from that food and from breathing smoke, and felt as if he might be dying, not outside but inside himself; so he wanted to go back to Pass River, to his own place. As he turned around in the street a woman looked at him. She saw him. He looked at her: she was looking at him over her breasts. He was so glad to see a woman with her head on straight that he ran between the motors and the high houses towards her with his hands held out. She turned and ran away. She was afraid of him. He ran looking for her and calling a long time among the high houses, but never found her. She had hidden away.

  He went back along the roads to the wide road up into the mountains. He was nearly dead when he got past the last houses, into the granite land, and started to climb up Pass River Valley. The river was running very small, almost dry; he could not understand why it was like that. Presently some buzzards came from the granite peaks and began to talk to him. They made the gyre over his head, saying, “We’re dying of hunger. There’s nothing here to eat. Lie down, be dead, be food, and we’ll take you inside the world again.”

  He said to them, “I have another way.”

  But when he came to the place where he had built a pole house to protect the hole in the air, it was gone. The backward-head people had dammed Pass River at the narrow part of the canyon. It was all under water in Pass Valley. The trees and rocks were under the water, the place where the hole in the air had been was under the water. The water was orange-colored and smelled sour. There were no fish in it, but there were huge houses without windows around it.

  That was that man’s river, Pass River. He knew its springs. That was his valley. When he saw that those places in his heart had been destroyed, that they were dead, he suffered great pain. He sat on the white granite rocks weeping in pain. His heart hurt and would not keep time.

  The buzzards came again and stood on the boulders near him. “Let us have you,” they said. “We are dying of hunger.” That seemed good to him, so he lay down in the sunlight on the granite, and waited, and soon he died.

  He came back inside the first pole house he had built. He was very weak and ill, and couldn’t move at all. After a day, somebody from his town came by there, and he called to them. They came, and brought him water from Pass River to drink. They brought his family there. He lived a few days, and told them what he had done and seen and heard outside the world; then he died wholly. He died of grief and poison.

  Nobody else wanted to go through that hole in the air. They took the pole house down and let the wind blow it away.

  Big Man And Little Man

  The stars were his semen, they say. He was really big, so big that he filled up the entire world outside the world, everything there was. There wasn’t room for anything else.

  If he looked around from outside the world he saw the world inside, and he wanted to be in it, get it pregnant with himself, or maybe he wanted to eat it, get it inside himself. But he couldn’t get there. He could only see it backwards. So he made some people to go there, to go across. He made a Little Man and sent him across, inside the world. But he made him with his head on backwards.

  Little Man went across, and he didn’t stay. He came right back complaining, “I don’t like it there,” he said. So Big Man put him to sleep and while he was sleeping made a thing like a woman out of dirt, out of red adobe, they say. It looked like a woman, it fooled Little Man when he woke up. Big Man said, “Now you go there and breed.” So Little Man took the thing and went back inside the world. He fucked it and it made copies. He kept doing that until there were as many of him as mosquitoes on River of the Marshes—as many as spiders in autumn—more. More than anything except maybe sand. All the same, no matter how many of him there were, he didn’t like it there. He was afraid. He didn’t belong there inside the world, he had no mother, only a father. So he killed whatever he was afraid of.

  Soul Mountain

  He cut down every tree he saw, he shot every animal he saw, he made war on all the people. He made guns to shoot flies with, bullets to shoot fleas with. He was afraid of mountains and made mashers to flatten them, he was afraid of valleys and made fillers to fill them up, he was afraid of grass and burned it and put stones where it was. He was really afraid of water, because of the way water is. He tried to use it all up, burying springs, damming rivers, making wells. But if you drink, you piss. Water will come back down. As the desert grows so does the sea. So Little Man poisoned the sea. The fish all died.

  Everything was dying then, everybody was poisoned. The clouds were poison.

  That stink of poisoned things, dead things, dead people, that stink was strong. It came outside the world. It came there and filled it up. It filled up Big Man’s nose, that stink, and he said, “It’s nothing but corruption, that world!” He turned away then and went away, farther outside, clean gone. He had nothing more to do with anything.

  When he was gone there was some room left. A buzzard came out of that empty room. A fly came out of it. A coyote came by, sniffing. All that dying and stinking, the death-eaters smelled that. Aaah! They began sneaking into the world at night. Condor and buzzard and vulture and raven and crow and coyote and dog and maggot-fly and blowfly and maggot and worm, they came sneaking around, creeping around, eating the dead. They took that dead meat into their mouths and swallowed it. They made it food.

  There were some human people along with them. Maybe they were some people who had been there all along, hiding. They had lost that war. They were weak, dirty, hungry, no-account people. They must have been born with mothers, somehow, some of them were women. They were so hungry they weren’t afraid to eat carrion with the buzzard and dung with the dogs. They weren’t afraid, they were too low down, too deep inside. But they were cold. They were hungry and cold. They made houses out of rubble and bones. Inside those houses they made fires of bones, and they asked the coyotes to help them, they asked for help.

  Coyote came. Where she walked she made the wilderness. She dug canyons, she shat mountains. Under the buzzard’s wings the forest grew. Where the worm was in the dirt, the spring ran. Things went on, people went on. Only Little Man didn’t go on. He was dead. He died of fear.

  A NOTE ON THE BACKWARD-HEAD PEOPLE.

  The awfulest ghoul of the Valley was a human being with its head on backwards. Backward-Heads populated ghost-stories; in popular tales they lurked all about the poisoned lands and at the brink of polluted waters. An imagined glimpse of one would send a child screaming from the woods—and not without reason, for the most fearful of the White Clowns of the Sun was the unearthly tall, thin, silent Wry Neck, who walked backward and looked forward. In formal drama, for a character merely to look suddenly around over the shoulder was a bad omen. Owls were respected for their
supposed ability to defeat the baleful influence of the Backward-Head people, probably because owls have the same talent for looking straight behind themselves.

  These figures of lore and superstition seem to have been the literalisation of a metaphor.

  In the region of the Na Valley, especially to the immediate south and east, there had been some very large and recent events on the geologic scale: earthquakes and shifts along fault lines, vast subsidences and local elevations, all of which had, among other effects, left most of what we know as the Great Valley of California a shallow sea or salt-marsh, and brought the Gulf of California on up into Arizona and Nevada. Yet even such changes had not effaced or obscured the effects of older human events, the traces of civilisation.

  The people of the Valley did not conceive that such acts as they saw and felt much evidence of in their world—the permanent desolation of vast regions through release of radioactive or poisonous substances, the permanent genetic impairment from which they suffered most directly in the form of sterility, stillbirth, and congenital disease—had not been deliberate. In their view, human beings did not do things accidentally. Accidents happened to people, but what people did they were responsible for. So these things human beings had done to the world must have been deliberate and conscious acts of evil, serving the purposes of wrong understanding, fear, and greed. The people who had done these things had done wrong mindfully. They had had their heads on wrong.

  Beginnings

  FOUR BEGINNINGS.

  Recorded as told by Cooper of the Red Adobe of Ounmalin.

  How could it begin once only? That doesn’t seem sensible. Things must have ended and begun again, so that it can go on, the way people live and die, all the people, the stars also.

  My uncle told us in the heyimas that there are four times the world has ended that we know about. We don’t know very well because these are difficult things to know.

  The first time, he said, there were no human people here, only plants growing, fish, and people with four, six, or eight legs, walking and crawling. At that time balls of fire fell out of the sky, meteorites, huge ones in great numbers, and they set fires all over the world. The air was bad, the smoke was so thick that the sunlight didn’t shine through. Almost everybody died. It was cold for a long, long time after that. But the people that were left learned how to live in the cold. And two-legged people came into the world then, in the cold, when the valleys were filled with ice from the mountains clear down to the sea. The meteor showers late in the dry season, the Puma’s Shootingstars, those are a reminder of that time.

  After that it went on getting warmer and getting warmer, until it got too hot. There were too many volcanoes. The ice all melted so that the seas got deeper and deeper. The sea-clouds rained all the time, the rivers were always in flood, until there was sea everywhere and only some mountains sticking up out of the sea, and mudflats everywhere, and the tides coming across them. The springs were under saltwater then. Almost everybody died on the land. A few people stayed alive in the mudflats, drinking rain, eating shellfish and worms. The rainbow is a reminder of that time, the bridge of the shining people.

  After that it dried out and went on awhile, a long time, but there were only two human people left from the mudflat time, a brother and sister of one House, and they had sex. So those people were born wrong. They were crazy, they tried to make the world. All they could do was make it end again, all they could do was imitate what happened before. So what they did caused fires and smoke and bad air and then ice and cloud and cold, everybody dying again. So they died out. The places people don’t go are the reminders of that time.

  So when it began to get better the people started coming back, but not very many, because there was sickness in the world. Everybody got sick, and no singing or bringing-in could heal them, the plants and animals and humans, all growing things, and even the rocks were sick; even the dirt was poisoned. The moon was dark, like burnt paper, and the sun was like the moon is now. It was the dark, cold time. Nothing was born right. Then something grew up here, something pretty. Another little thing sprouted there. Things began to grow right. The water came out of the rocks clear again. The people began to come back. They are still coming back, my uncle said.

  He was the speaker of the Red Adobe here, a scholar, who lived a long time in Wakwaha, learning.

  THE RED BRICK PEOPLE.

  Recorded in conversation with Giver of the Yellow Adobe of Chukulmas.

  The people who lived around here a long time ago we call the red brick people. They built walls of thin, hard, well-baked brick, a dark red color. In the right place underground those bricks can last a long time. Two heyimas here, the Serpentine and the Yellow Adobe, are built partly with those old bricks, and there are some used for ornament in the Tower. There are records of the red brick people in the Memory of the Exchange, of course, but I don’t think many people have ever looked at them. They would be hard to make sense of. The City mind thinks that sense has been made if a writing is read, if a message is transmitted, but we don’t think that way. In any case, to learn a great deal about those people would be to cry in the ocean; whereas using their bricks in one of our buildings is satisfying to the mind.

  I’m trying to think what anybody has taught about the red brick people. They lived on the coast and inland, before the water came into the Inland Sea; some of the old cities under the water must be theirs. It seems to me they didn’t use wheels. They made complex musical instruments. Their music was recorded and kept in the Memory; there’s a composer here in town, Takulkunno, who’s studied it and used it in making music, the way the builders used the bricks.

  What does it mean to cry in the ocean? Oh, well, you know, to add something where nothing’s needed, or where so much is needed that it’s no use even trying, so you just sit down and cry…

  COYOTE WAS RESPONSIBLE.

  From the written sequence of the Planting Lodge dramatic wakwa “The Bean Flowers.”

  The Five People say, Where did we come from? How did we get here?

  The Wise Old Man replies, From the mind of the Eternal! By the thinking of the Sacred Thought!

  The Five People throw beans at him and say, Where did we come from? How did we get here?

  The Old Talking Woman replies, From the beginnings of the earth! In the sperm, in the egg, in the wombs of all the animals, you were carried, you developed, you came forth!

  The Five People throw beans at her and say, Where did we come from? How did we get here?

  Coyote replies, From the west you came, from the west, from Ingasi Altai, over the ocean, dancing you came, walking you came.

  The Five People say, What luck, to have got here to the Valley!

  Coyote says, Go back, go jump in the ocean. I wish I had never thought of you. I wish I had never agreed to you. I wish you’d let my country be.

  The Five People throw beans at Coyote and chase her away, shouting, Coyote! Coyote slept with her grandfather! Coyote steals chickens! Coyote has ticks in her asshole!

  Time In The Valley

  “How long have your people lived in the Valley?”

  “All along.”

  But she looks puzzled, a little uncertain of the answer, because the question is strange. You wouldn’t ask, “How long have fish lived in the river? How long has the grass grown on the hills?” and expect an exact answer, a date, a number of years…

  Perhaps you would. Perhaps I would. And not unreasonably. After all, fish have lived in rivers only since fish, in the charted course of evolution, came to be. Most of the grasses that grow on the hills didn’t grow on these hills until Anno Domini 1759, when the Spanish came to sow their wild oats in California.

  And the woman of the Valley is not altogether ignorant of that way of being minded, of the possibility of asking, and answering, those questions. But the use of the question and the truth of the answer might appear to her relative and not at all self-evident. If we kept pushing for dates and epochs, she might say, “You t
alk all beginnings and ends, spring and ocean but no river.”

  A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, Aristotle said, and nobody has proved him wrong yet; and that which has no beginning and no end but is all middle is neither story nor history. What is it, then?

  The universe of seventeenth-century Europe began 4400 years ago in the Middle East, the universe of twentieth-century North America began 24,000,000,000 years ago somewhere else with a big bang AND THERE WAS LIGHT, and they will end; that follows; in judgment with trumpets or in the thin, dark, cold soup of entropy Other times, other places may not begin or end that way at all; consult the Universal History of the Hindus for one of the alternate views. Certainly the Valley doesn’t share those beginnings or those ends; but it seems to have none of its own. It is all middle.

  Surely they have a Creation Myth, an Origin Myth? Oh, yes, indeed they do.

  “How did human people come to live in the Valley?”

  “Oh, Coyote,” she says. We are sitting now amid the alien corn, in the shade of the live oaks on the little slope across the creek just above the Hinge of Sinshan. The town pursues its activities off to our right—not a breakneck pursuit; occasionally a door closes, a hammer knocks, a voice speaks; but it is very quiet in the summer sun. To our left in the grove and meadow where the five roofs of the heyimas are, nobody moves at all, except high overhead the Sinshan hawk crying his melancholy kee-eer! kee-eer!

  “You know, Coyote was going along, and she saw this thing out on the water, on the sea-water, out past Hidai Point. She thought, ‘I never saw anything like that before. I don’t like it,’ and she started throwing rocks at it, trying to sink it before it came to the shore. But it kept coming closer and closer, coming from the west, this thing moving around on the water where it was shining in the sun. Coyote kept picking up clods and rocks and throwing them, and she yelled, ‘Go away! Go back!’ But it came right up to the water just beyond the breakers. Coyote could see then it was people, human people, holding hands and dancing on the water. They were right on the water, like waterskater insects. They were singing, ‘Hey! We’re coming!’ Coyote kept throwing rocks and clods, and they caught them and swallowed them, and kept on singing. They began to sink, they broke through the skin of the water, but by then they were through the breakers and across the bar, in the Mouths of the Na where the water’s shallow, and they kept wading up the channels. Five of them, in the channels of the Mouths of the River. Coyote was scared. She was angry. She ran up into the Northeast Range, setting forest fires; she ran up around the Mountain to Clear Lake and got one of the volcanoes there to erupt, getting the air black with ashes; she ran back down the Southwest Range setting fires, with her tail on fire she came running back down, and at Te Shallows in the middle of the Valley she met those human people coming upstream. They were walking on the river-bottom now. Ahead of them was fire and burning, smoke and ash, heat and darkness, a terrible wind full of embers and gas. Everything was burning. They kept walking on the riverbottom, through the water, very slowly, upstream. They were singing: