The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I don’t put myself first—politicians and capitalists do that. I put freedom first. Why can’t you cooperate with me? It goes two ways, Ahas!”

  He left angry, and left me angry.

  I think he missed my dependence on him. Perhaps he was jealous, too, of my independence, for he did remain Lord Erod’s man. His was a loyal heart. Our disagreement gave us both much bitter pain. I wish I knew what became of him in the troubled times that followed.

  There was truth in his accusation. I had found that I had the gift in speaking and writing of moving people’s minds and hearts. Nobody told me that such a gift is as dangerous as it is strong. Ahas said I was putting myself first, but I knew I was not doing that. I was wholly in the service of the truth and of liberty. No one told me that the end cannot purify the means, since only the Lord Kamye knows what the end may be. My grandmother could have told me that. The Arkamye would have reminded me of it, but I did not often read in it, and in the City there were no old men singing the word, evenings. If there had been, I would not have heard them over the sound of my beautiful voice speaking the beautiful truth.

  I believe I did no harm, except as we all did, in bringing it to the attention of the rulers of Voe Deo that the Hame was growing bolder and the Radical Party was growing stronger, and that they must move against us.

  The first sign was a divisive one. In the open compounds, as well as the men’s side and the women’s side there were several apartments for couples. This was a radical thing. Any kind of marriage between assets was illegal. They were allowed to live in pairs only by their owners’ indulgence. Assets’ only legitimate loyalty was to their owner. The child did not belong to the mother, but to the owner. But since gareots were living in the same place as owned assets, these apartments for couples had been tolerated or ignored. Now suddenly the law was invoked, asset couples were arrested, fined if they were wage earners, separated, and sent to company-run compound houses. Ress and the other elderwomen who ran our house were fined and warned that if “immoral arrangements” were discovered again, they would be held responsible and sent to the labor camps. Two little children of one of the couples were not on the government’s list and so were left, abandoned, when their parents were taken off. Keo and Ramayo took them in. They became wards of the women’s side, as orphans in the compounds always did.

  There were fierce debates about this in meetings of the Hame and The Community. Some said the right of assets to live together and to bring up their children was a cause the Radical Party should support. It was not directly threatening to ownership, and might appeal to the natural instincts of many owners, especially the women, who could not vote but who were valuable allies. Others said that private affections must be overridden by loyalty to the cause of liberty, and that any personal issue must take second place to the great issue of emancipation. Lord Erod spoke thus at a meeting. I rose to answer him. I said that there was no freedom without sexual freedom, and that until women were allowed and men were willing to take responsibility for their children, no woman, whether owner or asset, would be free.

  “Men must bear the responsibility for the public side of life, the greater world the child will enter; women, for the domestic side of life, the moral and physical upbringing of the child. This is a division enjoined by God and Nature,” Erod answered.

  “Then will emancipation for a woman mean she’s free to enter the beza, be locked in on the women’s side?”

  “Of course not,” he began, but I broke in again, fearing his golden tongue—“Then what is freedom for a woman? Is it different from freedom for a man? Or is a free person free?”

  The moderator was angrily thumping his staff, but some other asset women took up my question. “When will the Radical Party speak for us?” they said, and one elderwoman cried, “Where are your women, you owners who want to abolish slavery? Why aren’t they here? Don’t you let them out of the beza?”

  The moderator pounded and finally got order restored. I was half-triumphant and half-dismayed. I saw Erod and also some of the people from the Hame now looking at me as an open troublemaker. And indeed my words had divided us. But were we not already divided?

  A group of us women went home talking through the streets, talking aloud. These were my streets now, with their traffic and lights and dangers and life. I was a City woman, a free woman. That night I was an owner. I owned the City. I owned the future.

  The arguments went on. I was asked to speak at many places. As I was leaving one such meeting, the Hainishman Esdardon Aya came to me and said in a casual way, as if discussing my speech, “Rakam, you’re in danger of arrest.”

  I did not understand. He walked along beside me away from the others and went on: “A rumor has come to my attention at the Embassy. . . . The government of Voe Deo is about to change the status of manumitted assets. You’re no longer to be considered gareots. You must have an owner-sponsor.”

  This was bad news, but after thinking it over I said, “I think I can find an owner to sponsor me. Lord Boeba, maybe.”

  “The owner-sponsor will have to be approved by the government. . . . This will tend to weaken The Community both through the asset and the owner members. It’s very clever, in its way,” said Esdardon Aya.

  “What happens to us if we don’t find an approved sponsor?”

  “You’ll be considered runaways.”

  That meant death, the labor camps, or auction.

  “O Lord Kamye,” I said, and took Esdardon Aya’s arm, because a curtain of dark had fallen across my eyes.

  We had walked some way along the street. When I could see again I saw the street, the high houses of the City, the shining lights I had thought were mine.

  “I have some friends,” said the Hainishman, walking on with me, “who are planning a trip to the Kingdom of Bambur.”

  After a while I said, “What would I do there?”

  “A ship to Yeowe leaves from there.”

  “To Yeowe,” I said.

  “So I hear,” he said, as if we were talking about a streetcar line. “In a few years, I expect Voe Deo will begin offering rides to Yeowe. Exporting intractables, troublemakers, members of the Hame. But that will involve recognising Yeowe as a nation state, which they haven’t brought themselves to do yet. They are, however, permitting some semilegitimate trade arrangements by their client states. . . . A couple of years ago, the King of Bambur bought one of the old Corporation ships, a genuine old Colony Trader. The King thought he’d like to visit the moons of Werel. But he found the moons boring. So he rented the ship to a consortium of scholars from the University of Bambur and businessmen from his capital. Some manufacturers in Bambur carry on a little trade with Yeowe in it, and some scientists at the university make scientific expeditions in it at the same time. Of course each trip is very expensive, so they carry as many scientists as they can whenever they go.”

  I heard all this not hearing it, yet understanding it.

  “So far,” he said, “they’ve gotten away with it.”

  He always sounded quiet, a little amused, yet not superior.

  “Does The Community know about this ship?” I asked.

  “Some members do, I believe. And people in the Hame. But it’s very dangerous to know about. If Voe Deo were to find out that a client state was exporting valuable property . . . In fact, we believe they may have some suspicions. So this is a decision that can’t be made lightly. It is both dangerous and irrevocable. Because of that danger, I hesitated to speak of it to you. I hesitated so long that you must make it very quickly. In fact, tonight, Rakam.”

  I looked from the lights of the City up to the sky they hid. “I’ll go,” I said. I thought of Walsu.

  “Good,” he said. At the next corner he changed the direction we had been walking, away from my house, towards the Embassy of the Ekumen.

  I never wondered why he did this for me. He was a secret man, a man of secret power, but he always spoke truth, and I think he followed his own heart when he could.<
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  As we entered the Embassy grounds, a great park softly illuminated in the winter night by ground-lights, I stopped. “My books,” I said. He looked his question. “I wanted to take my books to Yeowe,” I said. Now my voice shook with a rush of tears, as if everything I was leaving came down to that one thing. “They need books on Yeowe, I think,” I said.

  After a moment he said, “I’ll have them sent on our next ship. I wish I could put you on that ship,” he added in a lower voice. “But of course the Ekumen can’t give free rides to runaway slaves. . . .”

  I turned and took his hand and laid my forehead against it for a moment, the only time in my life I ever did that of my own free will.

  He was startled. “Come, come,” he said, and hurried me along.

  The Embassy hired Werelian guards, mostly veots, men of the old warrior caste. One of them, a grave, courteous, very silent man, went with me on the flyer to Bambur, the island kingdom east of the Great Continent. He had all the papers I needed. From the flyer port he took me to the Royal Space Observatory, which the King had built for his spaceship. There without delay I was taken to the ship, which stood in its great scaffolding ready to depart.

  I imagine that they had made comfortable apartments up front for the King when he went to see the moons. The body of the ship, which had belonged to the Agricultural Plantation Corporation, still consisted of great compartments for the produce of the Colony. It would be bringing back grain from Yeowe in four of the cargo bays that now held farm machinery made in Bambur. The fifth compartment held assets.

  The cargo bay had no seats. They had laid felt pads on the floor, and we lay down and were strapped to stanchions, as cargo would have been. There were about fifty “scientists.” I was the last to come aboard and be strapped in. The crew were hasty and nervous and spoke only the language of Bambur. I could not understand the instructions we were given. I needed very badly to relieve my bladder, but they had shouted “No time, no time!” So I lay in torment while they closed the great doors of the bay, which made me think of the doors of Shomeke compound. Around me people called out to one another in their language. A baby screamed. I knew that language. Then the great noise began, beneath us. Slowly I felt my body pressed down on the floor, as if a huge soft foot were stepping on me, till my shoulder blades felt as if they were cutting into the mat, and my tongue pressed back into my throat as if to choke me, and with a sharp stab of pain and hot relief my bladder released its urine.

  Then we began to be weightless—to float in our bonds. Up was down and down was up, either was both or neither. I heard people all around me calling out again, saying one another’s names, saying what must be, “Are you all right? Yes, I’m all right.” The baby had never ceased its fierce, piercing yells. I began to feel at my restraints, for I saw the woman next to me sitting up and rubbing her arms and chest where the straps had held her. But a great blurry voice came bellowing over the loudspeaker, giving orders in the language of Bambur and then in Voe Dean: “Do not unfasten the straps! Do not attempt to move about! The ship is under attack! The situation is extremely dangerous!”

  So I lay floating in my little mist of urine, listening to the strangers around me talk, understanding nothing. I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.

  The ship moved strangely, shuddering, seeming to turn. Several people were sick. The air filled with the smell and tiny droplets of vomit. I freed my hands enough to draw the scarf I was wearing up over my face as a filter, tucking the ends under my head to hold it.

  Inside the scarf I could no longer see the huge vault of the cargo bay stretching above or below me, making me feel I was about to fly or fall into it. It smelled of myself, which was comforting. It was the scarf I often wore when I dressed up to give a talk, fine gauze, pale red with a silver thread woven in at intervals. When I bought it at a City market, paying my own earned money for it, I had thought of my mother’s red scarf, given her by Lady Tazeu. I thought she would have liked this one, though it was not as bright. Now I lay and looked into the pale red dimness it made of the vault, starred with the lights at the hatches, and thought of my mother, Yowa. She had probably been killed that morning in the compound. Perhaps she had been carried to another estate as a use-woman, but Ahas had never found any trace of her. I thought of the way she had of carrying her head a little to the side, deferent yet alert, gracious. Her eyes had been full and bright, “eyes that hold the seven moons,” as the song says. I thought then: But I will never see the moons again.

  At that I felt so strange that to comfort myself and distract my mind I began to sing under my breath, there alone in my tent of red gauze warm with my own breath. I sang the freedom songs we sang in the Hame, and then I sang the love songs Lady Tazeu had taught me. Finally I sang “O, O, Yeowe,” softly at first, then a little louder. I heard a voice somewhere out in that soft red mist world join in with me, a man’s voice, then a woman’s. Assets from Voe Deo all know that song. We sang it together. A Bambur man’s voice picked it up and put words in his own language to it, and others joined in singing it. Then the singing died away. The baby’s crying was weak now. The air was very foul.

  We learned many hours later, when at last clean air entered the vents and we were told we could release our bonds, that a ship of the Voe Dean Space Defense Fleet had intercepted the freighter’s course just above the atmosphere and ordered it to stop. The captain chose to ignore the signal. The warship had fired, and though nothing hit the freighter the blast had damaged the controls. The freighter had gone on, and had seen and heard nothing more of the warship. We were now about eleven days from Yeowe. The warship, or a group of them, might be in wait for us near Yeowe. The reason they gave for ordering the freighter to halt was “suspected contraband merchandise.”

  That fleet of warships had been built centuries ago to protect Werel from the attacks they expected from the Alien Empire, which is what they then called the Ekumen. They were so frightened by that imagined threat that they put all their energy into the technology of space flight; and the colonisation of Yeowe was a result. After four hundred years without any threat of attack, Voe Deo had finally let the Ekumen send envoys and ambassadors. They had used the Defense Fleet to transport troops and weapons during the War of Liberation. Now they were using them the way estate owners used hunting dogs and hunting cats, to hunt down runaway slaves.

  I found the two other Voe Deans in the cargo bay, and we moved our “bedstraps” together so we could talk. Both of them had been brought to Bambur by the Hame, who had paid their fare. It had not occurred to me that there was a fare to be paid. I knew who had paid mine.

  “Can’t fly a spaceship on love,” the woman said. She was a strange person. She really was a scientist. Highly trained in chemistry by the company that rented her, she had persuaded the Hame to send her to Yeowe because she was sure her skills would be needed and in demand. She had been making higher wages than many gareots did, but she expected to do still better on Yeowe. “I’m going to be rich,” she said.

  The man, only a boy, a mill hand in a northern city, had simply run away and had the luck to meet people who could save him from death or the labor camps. He was sixteen, ignorant, noisy, rebellious, sweet-natured. He became a general favorite, like a puppy. I was in demand because I knew the history of Yeowe and through a man who knew both our languages I could tell the Bamburs something about where they were going—the centuries of Corporation slavery, Nadami, the War, the Liberation. Some of them were rentspeople from the cities, others were a group of estate slaves bought at auction by the Hame with false money and under a false name and hurried onto this flight, knowing very little of where they were going. It was that trick that had drawn Voe Deo’s attention to this flight.

  Yoke, the mill boy, speculated endlessly about how the Yeowans would welcome us. He had a story, half a joke, half a dream, about the bands playing and the speeche
s and the big dinner they would have for us. The dinner grew more and more elaborate as the days went on. They were long, hungry days, floating in the featureless great space of the cargo bay, marked only by the alternation every twelve hours of brighter and dimmer lighting and the issuing of two meals during the “day,” food and water in tubes you squeezed into your mouth. I did not think much about what might happen. I was between happenings. If the warships found us, we would probably die. If we got to Yeowe, it would be a new life. Now we were floating.

  4. Yeowe

  THE SHIP CAME DOWN SAFE at the Port of Yeowe. They unloaded the crates of machinery first, then the other cargo. We came out staggering and holding on to one another, not able to stand up to the great pull of this new world drawing us down to its center, blinded by the light of the sun that we were closer to than we had ever been.

  “Over here! Over here!” a man shouted. I was grateful to hear my language, but the Bamburs looked apprehensive.

  Over here—in here—strip—wait—All we heard when we were first on the Free World was orders. We had to be decontaminated, which was painful and exhausting. We had to be examined by doctors. Anything we had brought with us had to be decontaminated and examined and listed. That did not take long for me. I had brought the clothes I wore and had worn for two weeks now. I was glad to get decontaminated. Finally we were told to stand in line in one of the big empty cargo sheds. The sign over the doors still read APCY—Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe. One by one we were processed for entry. The man who processed me was short, white, middle-aged, with spectacles, like any clerk asset in the City, but I looked at him with reverence. He was the first Yeowan I had spoken to. He asked me questions from a form and wrote down my answers. “Can you read?”—“Yes.”—“Skills?”—I stammered a moment and said, “Teaching—I can teach reading and history.” He never looked up at me.

  I was glad to be patient. After all, the Yeowans had not asked us to come. We were admitted only because they knew if they sent us back, we would die horribly in a public execution. We were a profitable cargo to Bambur, but to Yeowe we were a problem. But many of us had skills they must need, and I was glad they asked us about them.