A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“I was kidding. Maybe.”

  “It’ll be great if you can see really well,” Noah said, and she heard in his voice for the first time the huskiness like a double-reed instrument, oboe or bassoon, the first breaking.

  “Hey, have you got your Satyagraha tape, I want to hear that,” she said. They shared a passion for twentieth-century opera.

  “It has no intellectual complexity,” Noah said in Ike’s intonation. “I find an absence of thought.”

  “Yeah,” said Esther, “and it’s all in Sanskrit.”

  Noah put on the last act. They listened to the tenor singing ascending scales in Sanskrit. Esther closed her eyes. The high, pure voice went up and up, like mountain peaks above the mists.

  “We can be optimistic,” the doctor said.

  “What do you mean?” Susan said.

  “They can’t guarantee, Sue,” Ike said.

  “Why not? This was presented as a routine procedure!”

  “In an ordinary case—”

  “Are there ordinary cases?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “And this one is extraordinary. The operation was absolutely trouble free. So was the IS prep. However, her current reaction raises the possibility—a low probability but a possibility—of partial or total rejection.”

  “Blindness.”

  “Sue, you know that even if she rejects these implants, they can try again.”

  “Electronic implants might in fact be the better course. They’ll preserve optical function and give spatial orientation. And there are sonar headbands for periods of visual nonfunction.”

  “So we can be optimistic,” Susan said.

  “Guardedly,” said the doctor.

  “I let you do this,” Susan said. “I let you do this, and I could have stopped you.” She turned away from him and went down the corridor.

  He was due at the Bays, overdue in fact, but he walked across Urban to the farther elevator bank instead of dropping straight down from the Health Center. He needed a moment to be alone and think. This whole thing about Esther’s operation was hard to handle, on top of the mass hysteria phenomena, and now if Susan was going to let him down … He kept feeling a driving, aching need to be alone. Not to sit with Esther, not to talk to doctors, not to reason with Susan, not to go to committee meetings, not to listen to hysterics reporting their hallucinations—just to be alone, sitting at his Schoenfeldt screen, in the night, in peace.

  “Look at that,” said a tall man, Laxness of EVAC, stopping beside Ike in Urban Square and staring. “What next? What do you think is really going on, Rose?”

  Ike followed Laxness’s gaze. He saw the high brick and stone facades of Urban and a boy crossing the street-corridor.

  “The kid?”

  “Yes. My God. Look at them.”

  The kid was gone, but Laxness kept staring, and swallowed as if he felt sick.

  “He’s gone, Morten.”

  “They must be from some famine,” Laxness said, his gaze unwavering. “You know, the first couple of times, I thought they were holovid projections. I thought somebody had to be doing this to us. Somebody with a screw loose in Communications or something.”

  “We’ve investigated that possibility,” Ike said.

  “Look at their arms. Jesus!”

  “There’s nothing there, Morten.”

  Laxness looked at him. “Are you blind?”

  “There is nothing there.”

  Laxness stared at him as if he were the hallucination. “What I think it is, is our guilt,” he said, looking back at whatever it was he saw across the Square. “But what are we supposed to do? I don’t understand.” He started forward suddenly, striding with purpose, and then stopped and looked around with the distressed, embarrassed expression Ike was getting used to seeing on people’s faces when their hallucinations popped.

  Ike came on past him. He wanted to say something to Laxness, but did not know what to say.

  As he entered the streetlike corridor he had a curious sensation of pushing into and through a substance, or substances or presences, crowded thickly, not impeding him, not palpable, only many non-touches like very slight electric shocks on his arms and shoulders, breaths across his face, an intangible resistance. He walked ahead, came to the elevators, dropped down to the Bays. The elevator was full but he was the only person in it.

  “Hey Ike. Seen any ghosts yet?” Hal Bauerman said cheerfully.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. I feel sort of left out. Here’s the print on the Driver specs, with the new stuff fed in.”

  “Mort Laxness was seeing things up in Urban just now. He’s not one I would have picked as hysterical.”

  “Ike,” said Larane Gutierrez, the shop assistant, “nobody is hysterical. These people are here.”

  “What people?”

  “The people from earth.”

  “We’re all from earth, as far as I know.”

  “I mean the people everybody sees.”

  “I don’t. Hal doesn’t. Rod doesn’t—”

  “Seen some,” Rod Bond muttered. “I don’t know. It’s real crazy, I know, Ike, but all those people that were hanging around Pueblo Corridor all day yesterday—I know you can walk through them but everybody saw them—they were like washing out a lot of cloths and wringing out the water. It was like some old tape in anthro or something.”

  “A group delusion—”

  “—isn’t what’s going on,” Larane snapped. She was shrill, aggressive. At any disagreement, Ike thought, she always got strident. “These people are here, Ike. And there’s more of them all the time.”

  “So the ship is full of real people that you can walk through?”

  “Good way to get a lot of people in a small space,” Hal observed, with a fixed grin.

  “And whatever you see is real, of course, even if I don’t see it?”

  “I don’t know what you see,” Larane said. “I don’t know what’s real. I know that they’re here. I don’t know who they are; maybe we have to find out. The ones I saw yesterday looked like they were from some really primitive culture, they had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful, the people I mean. Well fed and very alert-looking, watchful. I had a feeling for the first time they might be seeing us, not just us seeing them, but I wasn’t sure.”

  Rod was nodding agreement.

  “Next thing then is you start talking with them, then? Hi folks, welcome to Spes?”

  “So far, if you get close, they just sort of aren’t there, but people are getting closer,” she answered quite seriously.

  “Larane,” Ike said, “do you hear yourself? Rod? Listen, if I came to you and said hey, guess what, a space alien with three heads has beamed aboard from his flying saucer and here he is—What’s wrong? Don’t you see him? Can’t you see him, Larane? Rod? You don’t? But I do! And you do, too, don’t you, Hal, you see the three-headed space alien?”

  “Sure,” Hal said. “Little green bugger.”

  “Do you believe us?”

  “No,” Larane said. “Because you’re lying. But we’re not.”

  “Then you’re insane.”

  “To deny what I and the people with me see, that would be just as insane.”

  “Hey, this is a really interesting ontological debate,” Hal said, “but we’re about twenty-five minutes overdue on the Driver specs report, folks.”

  Working late that night in his cube, Ike felt the soft electric thrilling along his arms and back, the sense of crowding, a murmur below the threshold of hearing, a smell of sweat or musk or human breath. He put his head in his hands for a minute, then looked up again at the Schoen-feldt screen and spoke as if talking to it. “You cannot let this happen,” he said. “This is all the hope we have.”

  The cube was empty, the still air was odorless.

  He worked on for a while. When he came to bed he lay beside his wife’s deep, sleeping silence. She was as far from him as another world.

  And Esther lay in the hospital in her per
manent darkness. No, not permanent. Temporary. A healing darkness. She would see.

  “What are you doing, Noah?”

  The boy was standing at the washstand gazing down into the bowl, which was half full of water. His expression was rapt. He said, “Watching the goldfish. They came out of the tap.”

  “The question is this: To what extent does the concept of illusion usefully describe a shared experience with elements of interactivity?”

  “Well,” Jaime said, “the interactivity could itself be illusory. Joan of Arc and her voices.” But there was no conviction in his own voice, and Helena, who seemed to have taken over the leadership of the Emergency Committee, pursued: “What do you think of inviting some of our guests to sit in on this meeting?”

  “Hold on,” Ike said. “You say ‘shared experience,’ but it’s not a shared experience; I don’t share it; there are others who don’t; and what justification have you for claiming it’s shared? If these phantoms, these ‘guests,’ are impalpable, vanish when you approach, inaudible, they’re not guests, they’re ghosts, you’re abandoning any effort at rationality—”

  “Ike, I’m sorry, but you can’t deny their existence because you are unable to perceive them.”

  “On what sounder basis could I deny their existence?”

  “But you deny that we can use the same basis for accepting it.”

  “Lack of hallucinations is considered the basis from which one judges another person’s perceptions as hallucinations.”

  “Call them hallucinations, then,” Helena said, “although I liked ghosts better. ‘Ghosts’ may be in fact quite accurate. But we don’t know how to coexist with ghosts. It’s not something we were trained in. We have to learn how to do it as we go along. And believe me, we have to. They are not going away. They are here, and what ‘here’ is is changing too. Maybe you could be very useful to us, if you were willing to be, Ike, just because you aren’t aware of—of our guests, and the changes. But we who are aware of them have to learn what kind of existence they have, and why. For you to go on denying that they have any is obstructive to the work we’re trying to do.”

  “Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad,” Ike said, getting up from his seat at the conference table. Nobody else said anything. They all looked embarrassed, looked down. He left the room in silence.

  There was a group of people in CC Corridor running and laughing. “Head ‘em off at the pass!” yelled a big man, Stiernen of Flight Engineering, waving his arms as if at some horde or crowd, and a woman shouted, “They’re bison! They’re bison! Let ‘em go down C Corridor, there’s more room!” Ike walked straight ahead, looking straight ahead.

  “There’s a vine growing by the front door,” Susan said at breakfast. Her tone was so complacent that he thought nothing of it for a moment except that he was glad to hear her speak normally for once.

  Then he said, “Sue—”

  “What can I do about it, Ike? What do you want? You want me to lie, say nothing, pretend there isn’t a vine growing there? But there is. It looks like a scarlet runner bean. It’s there.”

  “Sue, vines grow in dirt. Earth. There is no earth in Spes.”

  “I know that.”

  “How can you both know it and deny it?”

  “It’s going backwards, Dad,” Noah said in his new, slightly husky voice.

  “What is?”

  “Well, there were the people first. All those weird old women and cripples and things, remember, and then all the other kinds of people. And then there started being animals, and now plants and stuff. Wow, did you know they saw whales in the Reservoirs, Mom?”

  She laughed. “I only saw the horses on the Common,” she said.

  “They were really pretty,” Noah said.

  “I didn’t see them,” Ike said, “I didn’t see horses on the Common.”

  “There were a whole lot of them. They wouldn’t let you get anywhere near, though. I guess they were wild. There were some really neat spotted ones. Appaloosa, Nina said.”

  “I didn’t see horses,” Ike said. He put his face in his hands and began to cry.

  “Hey, Dad,” he heard Noah’s voice, and then Susan’s, “It’s OK, No. It’s OK. Go on to school. It’s all right, sweetie.” The door hissed.

  Her hands were on his head, smoothing his hair, and on his shoulders, gently rocking and shaking him. “It’s OK, Ike… ”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not OK. It’s not all right. It’s all gone crazy. It’s all ruined, ruined, wasted, wrong. Gone wrong.”

  Susan was silent for a long time, kneading and rocking his shoulders. She said at last, “It scares me when I think about it, Ike. It seems like something supernatural, and I don’t think there is anything supernatural. But if I don’t think about it in words like that, if I just look at it, look at the people and the—the horses and the vine by the door—it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are? All it is, is we brought ourselves with us … The horses and the whales and the old women and the sick babies. They’re just us, we’re them, they’re here.”

  He said nothing for a while. Finally he drew a long breath. “So,” he said. “Go with the flow. Embrace the unexplainable. Believe because it’s unbelievable. Who cares about understanding, anyhow? Who needs it? Things make a lot better sense if you just don’t think about them. Maybe we could all have lobotomies and really simplify life.”

  She took her hands from his shoulders and moved away.

  “After the lobotomy, I guess we can have electronic brain implants,” she said. “And sonar headbands. So we don’t bump into ghosts. Is surgery the answer to all our problems?”

  He turned around then, but her back was to him.

  “I’m going to the hospital,” she said, and left.

  “Hey! Look out!” they shouted. He did not know what they saw him walking into—a herd of sheep, a troop of naked dancing savages, a cypress swamp—he did not care. He saw the Common, the corridors, the cubes.

  Noah came in to change his clothes that he said were mud-stained from tag football in the dirt that had covered all the astroturf in the Common, but Ike walked on plastic grass through dustless, germless air. He walked through the great elms and chestnuts that stood twenty meters high, not between them. He walked to the elevators and pressed the buttons and came to the Health Center.

  “Oh, but Esther was released this morning!” the nurse said, smiling.

  “Released?”

  “Yes. The little black girl came with your wife’s note, first thing this morning.”

  “May I see the note?”

  “Sure. It’s in her file, just hold on—” She handed it over. It was not a note from Susan. It was in Esther’s scrawling hand, addressed to Isaac Rose. He unfolded it.

  I am going up in the mountains for a while.

  With love,

  Esther.

  Outside the Health Center he stood looking down the corridors. They ran to left, to right, and straight ahead. They were 2.2 meters high, 2.6 meters wide, painted light tan, with colored stripes on the grey floors. The blue stripes ended at the door of the Health Center, or started there, ending and starting were the same thing, but the white arrows set in the blue stripes every 3 meters pointed to the Health Center, not away from it, so they ended there, where he stood. The floors were light grey, except for the colored stripes, and perfectly smooth and almost level, for in Area 8 the curvature of Spes was barely perceptible. Lights shone from panels in the ceilings of the corridors at intervals of 5 meters. He knew all the intervals, all the specifications, all the materials, all the relationships. He had them all in his mind. He had thought about them for years. He had reasoned them. He had planned them.

  Nobody could be lost in Spes. All the corridors led to known places. You came to those places following the arrows and the colored stripes. If you followed every corridor and took every elevator, you would never get lost and always end up safe where you started from.
And you would never stumble, because all the floors were of smooth metal polished and painted light grey, with colored stripes and white arrows guiding you to the desired end.

  Ike took two steps and stumbled, falling violently forward. Under his hands was something rough, irregular, painful. A rock, a boulder, protruded through the smooth metal floor of the corridor. It was dark brownish grey veined with white, pocked and cracked; a little scurf of yellowish lichen grew near his hands. The heel of his right hand hurt, and he raised it to look at it. He had grazed the skin in falling on the rock. He licked the tiny film of blood from the graze. Squatting there, he looked at the rock and then past it. He saw nothing but the corridor. He would have nothing but the rock, until he found her. The rock and the taste of his own blood. He stood up.

  “Esther!”

  His voice echoed faintly down the corridors.

  “Esther, I can’t see. Show me how to see!”

  There was no answer.

  He set off, walking carefully around the rock, walking carefully forward. It was a long way and he was never sure he was not lost. He was not sure where he was, though the climbing got steeper and harder and the air began to be very thin and cold. He was not sure of anything until he heard his mother’s voice. “Isaac, dear, are you awake?” she asked rather sharply. He turned and saw her sitting beside Esther on an outcropping of granite beside the steep, dusty trail. Behind them, across a great dropping gulf of air, snow peaks shone in the high, clear light. Esther looked at him. Her eyes were clear also, but dark, and she said, “Now we can go down.”

  THE ASCENT OF THE NORTH FACE

  From the diary of Simon Interthwaite of the First Lovejoy Street Expedition

  2/21. Robert has reached Base Camp with five Sherbets. He brought several copies of the Times from last month, which we devoured eagerly. Our team is now complete. Tomorrow the Advance Party goes up. Weather holds.

  2/22. Accompanied Advance Party as far as the col below The Verandah before turning back. Winds up to 40 mph in gusts, but weather holds. Tonight Peter radioed all well at Verandah Camp.

  The Sherbets are singing at their campfires.