Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  DOCUMENT 2.

  A response to the notice concerning the Condor people from Shor’ki Ti’ of Rekwit from Reads of the Serpentine of the Valley of the Na:

  Your request is entirely appropriate. We have talked about it here and have seen that we have been self-concerned to an excessive degree, and have wanted mindfulness. Condor people, all men without women, have been coming into this Valley from the north for seventeen years. We have shared food and roof with them at request but have not worked, married, or danced with them. Nevertheless much infection has taken place. Cults have arisen. When a large group of Condor men stayed in the Lower Valley for a half-year, much dissension arose, superstitions were increased, and trust was weakened. If fighting a war is necessary people will come from here to the fighting. If quarantine is possible it would be better. We request the peoples living northwest of us and near the Lava Beds, and the Information Services of the Exchange, to notify through the Exchange of any aggressive acts by the Condor people.

  DOCUMENT 3.

  From Vavats of Tahets concerning the Condor people:

  We have been fighting a war with these sick people for two lifetimes.

  From this point on there was a flurry and then a steady crossflow of messages through the Exchanges of twenty-two different peoples of the region. Many of these were recriminatory or panicky; the bitterest was from Wemewe Mag, a village southeast of North Mountain:

  Two years ago they killed eleven people and stole eight women and all the horses. They come every winter and take our food. If you try to fight them you had better have guns and bullets. They do.

  Ethical counsel from the Under White Mountain people, far down the eastern coast of the Inland Sea, was not very well received. They advised: “Do not fight these sick people, cure them with human behavior,” to which Rekwit responded tersely, “You come up north here and do that.”

  In the event, no war was mounted. If the Condor’s City had made an attempt to increase its territory or to move its people southwestward, it would have met with concerted resistance by an alliance of all the people of the region. But the Condor dreams of empire were self-defeated.

  The causes of this collapse may seem obscure, particularly when the Condor people had all the resources of the Exchange to call upon. For one thing, the Condor could in theory follow all the discussions and plans of the other peoples in the Exchange. There was no “classified information” in the Memory, and no way to seal information off; a coded message was accompanied by the explanation of the code. It would appear that the Condor’s use of the Exchange was very limited; only a priest caste was permitted to use it at all, and they apparently drew upon it for information on material resources and technologies, without listening in much on the local section of the endless flow of worldwide message-sending. The Condor people seem to have been unusually self-isolated; their form of communication with other peoples was through aggression, domination, exploitation, and enforced acculturation. In this respect they were at a distinct disadvantage among the introverted but cooperative peoples native to the region.

  Again it might be asked why they failed in their attempt to make powerful weapons of war, and why that attempt was so inept, when they had available in the Memory of the Exchange instructions for the production of every imaginable weapon from Greek fire through machine guns to hydrogen bombs, and beyond?

  Tempting answers come to mind: the great City of Mind had decided long ago that such toys were not good for mankind, and would not release instructions for making them…Or perhaps would release only garbled instructions, thus ensuring ineffective weapons…But the City of Mind took no responsibility for its parent stock. If the humans got hold of nuclear weapons and blew up the planet, so be it; the deep-space stations of the Exchange would survive, each of them containing the Memory and capable of replicating the rest of the network, and indeed a good part of the universe—though, if humanity did dispose of itself, there is some question whether the computer would see fit to duplicate it. It was not the City of Mind, then, that kept the City of the Condor from success with its tanks and airplanes. Undoubtedly, if asked, it would have produced for the Condor a study of what we would call the cost-effectiveness of tanks, airplanes, missiles, or other elaborate weaponry, and demonstrated the hopelessness of the project, in the absence of the worldwide technological web, the “technological ecosystem,” of the Industrial Age, and on a planet almost depleted of many of the fossil fuels and other materials from which the Industrial Age made itself. All that had been replaced by the almost ethereal technology of the City, on the one hand, which had no use for heavy machinery, even their spaceships and stations being mere nerve and gossamer, and on the other hand by the very loose, light, soft network of the human cultures, which in their small scale, great number, and endless diversity, manufactured and traded more or less actively, but never centralised their industry, did not ship goods and parts far, did not maintain roads well, and were not engaged in enterprises requiring heroic sacrifice, at least on the material plane. To construct, say, a battery to power a flashlight was not an easy matter, though at need it was done: the technology of the Valley was completely adequate to the needs of the people. To construct a tank or a bomber was so difficult and so unnecessary that it really cannot be spoken of in terms of the Valley economy. After all, the cost of making, maintaining, fueling, and operating such machines at the very height of the Industrial Age was incalculable, impoverishing the planet’s substance forever and requiring the great majority of humankind to live in servitude and poverty. Perhaps the question concerning the Condor’s failure to build an empire with its advanced weapons is not why did they fail, but why did they try. But it is not a question to which the people of the Valley could provide an answer.

  Again, we may ask: since the Condor had access to the principal iron, copper, zinc, and gold mines of the Inland Sea area, and did not scruple to take what they wanted by force, why did they not use their superiority in metals not in a misguided effort to build anachronistic tanks and bombers, but in building up a good arsenal of guns, grenades, and other “conventional” weapons until they were invincible among the almost defenseless and poorly armed peoples about them? Then they might truly have made history!

  To this I think the people of the Valley might have an answer, along the lines of “Very sick people tend to die of their sickness,” or “Destruction destroys itself.” This answer, however, involves a reversal from our point of view. What we call strength it calls sickness; what we call success it calls death.

  Is it possible that the genetic changes worked by the residues of the Industrial Era upon the human race, which I saw as disastrous—low birth rate, short life expectancy, high incidence of crippling congenital disease—had a reverse side also? Is it possible that natural selection had had time to work in social, as well as physical and intellectual terms? Were the people of the Na Valley and Rekwit and Fennen and the Amaranth Coast and the Cotton Islands and Cloud River and Dark River and the Marshes and the Range of Light in fact healthier than I realised—healthier than I am capable of fully understanding, so long as I must look at them from outside their world? In leaving progress to the machines, in letting technology go forward on its own terms and selecting from it, with what seems to us excessive caution, modesty, or restraint, the limited though completely adequate implements of their cultures, is it possible that in thus opting not to move “forward” or not only “forward,” these people did in fact succeed in living in human history, with energy, liberty, and grace?

  About a Meeting Concerning the Warriors

  Given to the Archives of the Madrone at Wakwaha and to the Exchange by Bear Man of the Red Adobe of Telina-na, a member of the Doctors Lodge

  A printed notice brought to all towns:

  There is going to be a meeting of people at Cottonwood Flats on the 201st Day to talk about the Warrior Lodge. We will be there: Steady of Kastoha, Chooses and Redwood of Telina, Grey Horse of Chukulmas.

  What
Steady of the Serpentine of Kastoha-na said at the meeting:

  People of the Warrior Lodge and people in the Lamb Lodge are not very likely to agree with what I am going to say. They will deny it, and we will have argument and dissension. Because many of us dislike argument and avoid dissension, we have not said what I am going to say, and in this we have been weak and careless. It is time now, in this place, to talk about these things aloud. I say this now:

  The people of the Condor, those men who have come here from that people, are sick. Their heads are turned backwards. We have let people with the plague come into our house. We should not have done it and will not do it again. But listen! The people of the Warrior Lodge and some people in the Lamb Lodge have been infected. They are sick. Maybe they are willing to be healed, to be cured. If not, if they wish to live sick, then they will have to go where the sickness is, to the country those people came from in the Lava Beds north of Dark River, and stay there. That is what I say; that is what has been decided in talk with these people who came here with me, for whom I have been speaking.

  Other things that were said by different people:

  Four people are going to close the Valley?

  Four people are going to open discussion.

  Who is sick? People are sick who talk about driving people out of their houses, out of their towns, out of the Valley! That is sick-headed talk!

  Yes, who is sick? People are sick who are afraid of fighting!

  It is the nature of the sickness not to know itself. That ignorance is the sickness itself.

  That argument eats itself! If not to know you’re sick is sickness, how do you know you’re not sick yourself?

  Oh, you’ll tell him if he is—you’ll make him a Warrior and blow tobacco smoke at him and give him a sick name—Misery, or Stinks, or Diarrhœa!

  Listen, you are talking foolishly. There is no use in anger. You cannot tell what sickness is until you have become well. Weakness calls itself strong, but strength calls itself weak, glory calls itself vile, and the peacemaker calls himself warrior. Listen: only the warrior can make peace.

  Nobody makes peace. Peace is. Who do you think you are, to make peace? A mountain, a Rainbow Person, Coyote?

  Calm down, you people. I want you to listen and hear me. I am not ashamed of being a Warrior. You want me to be ashamed of it, but it is not possible. I have found strength and knowledge I needed in the Warrior Lodge, and I would share it with you if you let me.

  I too am not ashamed of being a Warrior! It is my pride! You people there, you’re sick, you’re dying and don’t know it. You eat and drink and dance and talk and sleep and die and there is nothing to you, like ants or fleas or gnats, your life is nothing, it goes nowhere, it goes over and over and over nowhere! We are not insects, we are human people. We serve a higher purpose.

  What? What purpose? Whose purpose? Listen to him! That’s Big Man talking! That’s a mouth on the back of a head talking! “I serve, I eat shit,” that’s Big Man saying “I’m better than anything else, I’ll live forever, everything else is shit!”

  Listen. If you wise people have thought that we were sick, why did you not ask us to come to the Doctors Lodge?

  You know an unwanted cure won’t cure.

  You have to dance to be a dancer.

  And you have to fight to be a Warrior!

  Fight whom? Your mothers?

  It was not the Warrior Lodge who agreed to let the Condor come here and stay here and come back again. When they come back, it is we, not you, who are ready to drive them away. Why are we Warriors? Because they made war! You let them come and go as they please, and now you talk about sickness, shaming your own people. But you did not listen to us. We have said all along that we would drive them away and keep them away. Now you say you want to do the same thing.

  Yes, I say that, but I do not say it as a Warrior.

  How are you going to meet the Condor, then? With songs and dances?

  1 don’t put a fire out with a match, Warrior.

  Only strength can defeat the strong, Speaker.

  Warrior, if it is war you want, you must fight it with us, your own people, and the people of our fields and barns, and the wild people, and every tree of our orchards and vine of our vineyards and every stem of grass and every stone and grain of dirt in the Valley of the River. This is the first battle of that war. You have let yourself fall sick with the Sickness of Man, and you seek to make us sick: and now you must be the one to choose whether you will be killed or cured or driven out.

  Steady said this, and many other people said:

  The stones speak with that voice. The earth and the River speak in those words. The Lion speaks, the Bear is talking. Listen!

  A description of what happened next:

  After that speech of Steady’s there was a pause for a while because other people were beginning to come to the meeting.

  In the evening people came forward again to speak about the Warrior Lodge in praise or blame and to discuss what others said. After that the meeting went on for four days, many people coming and going with food from the towns and sharing the food with those staying at the Flats. Much was said about the human soul and mind, and sickness and sacredness. The things which were kept secret by the Warrior Lodge and the Lamb Lodge were all spoken of by members of those lodges and made plain and no secret. After hearing these things many people said that the minds of the Warriors were indeed diseased. Some Warriors came up and renounced their membership in that Lodge. Their speeches grew very passionate. Some Madrone Lodge people and Walks Along of the Serpentine of Wakwaha, the Speaker of that heyimas, said that it was better not to deny in public what one had done in secret, and that to be finished with a thing was simply to leave it and go on away from it. So the excitement was calmed down one way and another, and many people began joining in long drum dances, since there were so many gathered there, and the weather was pleasant, and there was a lot of emotion and feeling stirred up, and several very good drummers were present. But still there were more than a hundred men and women who held fast to the Warriors’ way and wished to speak for it. For them, Skull of Telina-na said this:

  Skull’s speech:

  You say that we are sick, mortally sick, dying of our sickness. You say that you fear our sickness. So it may be. Then I say this: Our sickness is our humanity. To be human is to be sick. The lion is well, the hawk is well, the oak is well, they live and die in the mindfulness of the sacred, and need take no care. But from us sacredness has withdrawn care; in us is the mind of the sacred. So all we do is careful, and all our effort is to be mindful, and yet we are not whole. We are not well, and we do not do well. To deny that is careless, mindless folly! You say that human people are no different from the other animals and the plants. You call yourself earth and stone. You deny that you are outcast from that fellowship, you deny that the soul of man has no house on earth. You pretend, you build up houses of desire and imagination, but you cannot live in them. In them is no habitation. And for your denying, your lying, your comfort-seeking, you will be punished. The day of punishment is the day of war. Only in war is redemption; only the victorious warrior will know the truth, and knowing the truth will live forever. For in sickness is our health, in war our peace, and for us there is only one, one house, One Above All Persons, outside whom there is no health, no peace, no life, no thing!

  After Skulls speech.

  To Skull’s speech no direct answer was made. Some people wept, some were frightened, others very angry at hearing a person say what Skull had said. Feelings had run so high that Steady, Walks Along, Obsidian of Ounmalin, and others who were conducting the meeting preferred silence to response, lest there be violence. Only a singer of the Blood Clowns of Chumo began singing:

  “Outside the One there is nothing,

  nothing but women and coyotes.”

  Obsidian of Ounmalin told her to take the song away, and she did so, but many people picked it up and sang it later on. Then Walks Along spoke to Skull and th
e other Warriors, saying that she thought the open meeting had gone on long enough, and inviting the Warriors to come up to Wakwaha and go on talking and seeking what was best to do. The Warriors refused to come to Wakwaha, saying that they wanted to talk among themselves, not with other people. Steady said they should do as they chose.

  Some Madrone Lodge people thought Steady and Walks Along were not being careful enough; they said that people who refused to talk to reach agreement and would talk only when other people agreed with them had better leave the Valley and go talk with the Condor, who agreed with them. This group and the people with Steady came to words, speaking hotly. The Warriors watched them argue, nodding and smiling.

  The argument and the end of it.

  Hawk Cries of Sinshan said, “If they will not talk they must go, and if they will not go they will be driven!” He lifted up the madrone staff he carried as speaker.

  Steady in a passion of anger said, “If you drive them you go with them, driver with driven, beater with beaten!” He came towards Hawk Cries.

  Walks Along said, “Sickness is speaking us.”

  They all heard that. Hawk Cries threw away his staff. Nobody said anything for a while. Presently Hawk Cries said, “They have gone.”