5-Lo Ana told this story in Meeting, and it went through the whole community causing pleasure, like the flight of one of the creatures with fluttering transparent wings edged with threads of gold, at which everybody looked up and stopped work and said, “Look!” Mariposas, somebody called them, and the pretty name stuck.
There had been a good deal of talk, during the cold weather when work wasn’t so continuous, about the names of things. About naming things. Such as the dogs. People agreed that naming should be done seriously. But it was no good looking in the records and finding that on Dichew there had been creatures that looked something like this brown creature here so we’ll call it beetle. It wasn’t beetle. It ought to have its own name. Tree-crawler, clickclicker, leaf-chewer. And what about us? Ana’s kid is right, you know? 4’s, 5’s, 6’s—what’s that got to do with us now, here? The angels can go on to 100. . . . Lucky if they get to 10. . . . What about Zerin’s baby? She isn’t 6-Lahiri Padma. She’s 1-Shindychew-Lahiri-Padma. . . . Maybe she’s just Lahiri Padma. Why do we need to count the steps? We aren’t going anywhere. She’s here. She lives here. This is Padma’s world.
SHE FOUND LUIS IN THE patty-gardens behind the west compound. It was his day off from the hospital. A beautiful day of early summer. His hair shone in the sunlight. She located him by that silver nimbus.
He was sitting on the ground, on the dirt. On his day off he did a shift at the irrigation system of little ditches, dikes, and watergates, which required constant but unlaborious supervision and maintenance. Patty grew well only when watered but not overwatered. The tubers, baked whole or milled, had become a staple since Liu Yao’s success at breeding the edible strain. People who had trouble digesting native seeds and cereals thrived on patty.
Children of ten or eleven, old people, damaged people, mostly did irrigation shifts; it took no strength, just patience. Luis sat near the watergate that diverted the flow from West Creek into one or the other of the main channel systems. His legs, thin and brown, were stretched out and his crutch lay beside them. He leaned back on his arms, hands flat on the black dirt, face turned to the sun, eyes shut. He wore shorts and a loose, ragged shirt. He was both old and damaged.
Hsing came up beside him and said his name. He grunted but did not move or open his eyes. She squatted down by him. After a while his mouth looked so beautiful to her that she leaned over and kissed it.
He opened his eyes.
“You were asleep.”
“I was praying.”
“Praying!”
“Worshipping?”
“Worshipping what?”
“The sun?” he said, tentative.
“Don’t ask me!”
He looked at her, exactly the Luis look, tenderly inquisitive, noncommittal, unreserved; ever since they were five years old he had been looking at her that way. Looking into her.
“Who else would I ask?” he asked her.
“If it’s about praying and worshipping, not me.”
She made herself more comfortable, settling her rump on the berm of an irrigation channel, facing Luis. The sun was warm on her shoulders. She wore a hat Luisita had inexpertly woven of grain-straw.
“A tainted vocabulary,” he said.
“A suspect ideology,” she said.
And the words suddenly gave her pleasure, the big words—vocabulary! ideology!—Talk was all short, small, heavy words: food, roof, tool, get, make, save, live. The big words they never used any more, the long, airy words carried her mind up for a moment like a mariposa, fluttering aloft on the wind.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know.” He pondered. She watched him ponder. “When I smashed my knee, and had to lie around,” he said, “I decided there was no use living without delight.”
After a silence she said, in a dry tone, “Bliss?”
“No. Bliss is a form of VU. No, I mean delight. I never knew it on the ship. Only here. Now and then. Moments of unconditional existence. Delight.”
Hsing sighed.
“Hard earned,” she said.
“Oh yes.”
They sat in silence for some time. The south wind gusted, ceased, blew softly again. It smelled of wet earth and bean-flowers.
Luis said:
“‘When I am a grandmother, they say, I may walk under heaven,
On another world.’”
“Oh,” Hsing said.
Her breath caught in another, deeper sigh, a sob. Luis put his hand over hers.
“Alejo went fishing with the children, upstream,” she said.
He nodded.
“I worry so much,” she said. “I worry the delight away.”
He nodded again. Presently he said, “But I was thinking . . . when I was worshipping, or whatever, what I was thinking, was about the dirt.” He picked up a palmful of the crumbly, dark flood-plain soil, and let it fall from his hand, watching it fall. “I was thinking that if I could, I’d get up and dance on it. . . . Dance for me,” he said, “will you, Hsing?”
She sat a moment, then stood up—it was a hard push up off the low berm, her own knees were not so good these days—and stood still.
“I feel stupid,” she said.
She raised her arms up and outward, like wings, and looked down at her feet on the dirt. She pushed off her sandals, pushed them aside, and was barefoot. She stepped to the left, to the right, forward, back. She danced up to him holding her hands forward, palms down. He took them, and she pulled him up. He laughed; she did not quite smile. Swaying, she lifted her bare feet from the dirt and set them down again while he stood still, holding her hands. They danced together that way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2017 she will have published twenty-three novels, twelve collections of stories, five books of essays, thirteen books for children, nine volumes of poetry and four of translation. Among her numerous honors and awards are the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, PEN-Malamud Award, National Book Award, and Library of Congress Living Legends, and National Book Foundation Medal.
Her recent publications include Steering the Craft and Late in the Day, as well as the forthcoming title Words Are My Matter.
ALSO BY
URSULA K. LE GUIN
NOVELS
The Books of Earthsea
A Wizard of Earthsea
The Tombs of Atuan
The Farthest Shore
Tehanu
Tales from Earthsea
The Other Wind
NOVELS OF THE EKUMEN
Worlds of Exile and Illusion: City of Illusions, Planet of Exile, and Rocannon’s World
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
The Word for World Is Forest
The Telling
THE ANNALS OF THE WESTERN SHORE
Powers
Voices
Gifts
OTHER NOVELS
The Lathe of Heaven
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
Malafrena
The Beginning Place
The Eye of Heron
Always Coming Home
Lavinia
The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena/Stories and Songs
POETRY
Wild Angels
Hard Words and Other Poems
Wild Oats and Fireweed
Blue Moon over Thurman Street
Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems
Sixty Odd
Incredible Good Fortune
Finding My Elegy
Late in the Day
STORY COLLECTIONS
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
Orsinian Tales
The Compass Rose
Buffalo Gals
Searoad
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Four Ways to Forgiveness
Unlocking the Air
The Birthday of the World
Changing Planes
The Unre
al and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
TRANSLATIONS
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching
The Twins, the Dreams/Las Gemelas, El Sueño (with Diana Bellessi)
Kalpa Imperial
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral
CRITICISM
Dancing at the Edge of the World
The Language of the Night
The Wave in the Mind
Cheek by Jowl
Steering the Craft
Words Are My Matter
We hope you enjoyed reading this Saga Press eBook.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. | Text compilation copyright © 2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin | “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” copyright © 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin; originally appeared in New Dimensions 1, 1970 | “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” copyright © 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nov. 1987 | “Hernes” copyright © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin | “The Matter of Seggri” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Crank!, Spring 1994, issue no. 3 | “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin | “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” and “A Woman’s Liberation” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Asimov’s | “Old Music and the Slave Women” copyright © 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg (Avon Eos) | “The Finder” and “On the High Marsh” copyright © 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin | “Dragonfly” copyright © 1997 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Legends | “Paradises Lost” copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin | Jacket photograph of Thor’s Well copyright © 2016 by Jun Yu/500px | All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Saga Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 | SAGA PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. | For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. | The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. | The text for this book was set in Adobe Garamond Pro. | First Saga Press edition October 2016 | CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress. | ISBN 978-1-4814-5139-0 | ISBN 978-1-4814-5141-3 (eBook)
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