A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Are they all about nurs?” old Un asked. His arthritis kept him from the terraces, but Bu reported her findings to him every day.

  “No,” Bu said, “most of them are about obis and nurs both. And blits, too. But nurs made them. So they’re different. Obl patterns are never really about nurs. Only about obls and what obls think. But when you begin to read the colors they say the most interesting things!”

  Bu was so excited and persuasive that other nurs of Obling began studying the color patterns, learning how to read their meanings. The practice spread to other nests, and soon to other towns. Before long, nurs all up and down the river were discovering that their terraces, too, were full of wild designs in colored stones, and surprising messages concerning obls, nurs, and blits.

  Many nurs, however, upset by the whole idea, steadfastly refused to see patterns in color or to allow that the color of a stone could have any significance at all. “The obls count on us not to change things,” these nurs said. “We are their nurobls. They depend on us to keep their patterns neat, and keep the blits quiet, and maintain order, so that they can do important work. If we start inventing new meanings, changing things, disturbing the patterns, where will it end? It isn’t fair to the obls.”

  Bu, however, would hear none of that; she was full of her discovery. She no longer listened in silence. She spoke. She went about among the workhouses, speaking. And one evening, summoning up her courage, and wearing around her neck on a thong a perfect, polished turquoise that she called her selfstone, she went up onto the terraces. She crossed the terraces among the startled Professors, and came to the Rectory Mosaic, where Astl the Rectoress, a famous scholar, strolled in solitary meditation, her ancient rifle slung on her back, wreaths of smoke trailing from her reeking pipe. Not even a Full Professor would have interrupted the Rectoress at such a sacred time. But Bu went straight to her, crouched, covered her eyes, and said in a tremulous but clear voice, “Lady Rectoress, ma’am! Would the Lady Rectoress in her kindness answer a question I have?”

  The Rectoress was truly displeased and upset by this disorderly behavior. She turned to the nearest Professor and said, “This nur is insane; have it removed, please.”

  Bu was sentenced to ten days in jail, to be raped by Students whenever they pleased, and then sent to the flagstone quarries for a hundred days.

  When she returned to the nest, she was pregnant from one of the rapes, and quite thin from working in the quarries, but she still wore her turquoise stone. All her nest-mates and work-friends greeted her, singing songs which they had made out of the meanings of the colored patterns on the terraces. Ko comforted her with tender affection that night, and told her that her blit would be his blit, and her nest his nest.

  Not many days after, she entered the college (via the kitchens), and made her way (with the assistance of the serving-nurs) to the private room of the Canon.

  The Canon of Obling College was a very old obl, renowned for his knowledge of metaphysical linguistics. He woke slowly, mornings. This morning he woke slowly and gazed with some puzzlement at the servingnur which had come to open his curtains and serve his breakfast. It seemed to be a different one. He almost reached for his gun, but was too sleepy.

  “Hullo,” he said. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “I want you to answer a question I have,” said the nur.

  The Canon woke further, and stared at this amazing creature. “At least have the decency to cover your eyes, nur!” he said, but he was not really very upset. He was so old that he was no longer quite sure what the patterns were, and so a change in them did not trouble him as much as it might have done.

  “Nobody else can answer me,” said the nur. “Please do. Do you know if a blue-green stone in a pattern might be a word?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” said the Canon, becoming alert. “Although, of course, all verbal color-significance is long obsolete. Of mere antiquarian interest, to old fuddy-duddies such as myself, ha. Hue-words don’t occur even in the most archaic patterns. Only in the most ancient Books of Record.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The Canon wondered if he were dreaming—discussing historical linguistics with a nur, before breakfast!—But it was an entertaining dream. “The hue of blue-green— such as that stone you seem to be wearing as an ornament—might, in its adjectival form within a pattern, have indicated a quality of untrammeled volition. As a noun, the color would have functioned to signify, how shall I put it?—an absence of coercion; a lack of control; a condition of self-determination—”

  “Freedom,” the nur said. “Does it mean freedom?”

  “No, my dear,” said the Canon. “It did. But it does not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the word is obsolete,” said the Canon, beginning to tire of this inexplicable dialogue. “Now go away like a good nur and tell my servant to bring my breakfast.”

  “Look out the window,” the wild-eyed nur said, in so passionate a voice that the Canon was quite alarmed. “Look out the window at the terraces! Look at the colors of the stones! Look at the patterns the nurs make, the designs we have made, the meanings we have written! Look for the freedom! Oh please do look!”

  And with that final plea, the amazing apparition vanished. The Canon lay staring at his bedroom door, and in a moment it opened. His old serving-nur came in with his tray of stonecrop tea and smoking hot kippered lichen. “Good morning, Lord Canon, sir!” she said cheerfully. “Awake already? A lovely morning!” And after setting down the tray by his bed, she swept the curtains open wide.

  “Was there a young nur in here just now?” the Canon asked, rather nervously.

  “Certainly not, sir. At least, not that I know of,” said the serving-nur. But did she for a moment glance quite directly, knowingly—did she have the audacity to look at him—? Surely not. “Lovely the terraces are this morning,” she went on. “Your Canonitude ought to have a look.”

  “Get out, out,” the Canon growled, and the nur left with a demure curtsy, covering her eyes.

  The Canon ate his breakfast in bed and then got up. He went to the window to look out on the terraces of his college in the morning light.

  For a moment he thought he was dreaming again, seeing entirely different patterns than those he had seen all his long life on those terraces—wild designs of curves and colors, amazing phrases, unimagined significances, a wonderful newness of meaning and beauty—and then he opened all his eyes wide, very wide, and blinked; and it was gone. The familiar, true order of the terraces lay clear and regular in the morning light. And there was nothing else to see. The Canon turned away from the window and opened a book.

  So he did not see the long line of nurobls coming up from the nests and workhouses down below the boulder walls, carrying blits and dancing as they came, dancing and singing across the terraces. He heard the singing, but only as a noise without significance. It was not until the first rock flew through his window that he looked up and cried out in agitation, “What is the meaning of this?”

  THE KERASTION

  For Roussel Sargent, who invented it

  The small caste of the Tanners was a sacred one. To eat food prepared by a Tanner would entail a year’s purification to a Tinker or a Sculptor, and even low-power castes such as the Traders had to be cleansed by a night’s ablutions after dealing for leather goods. Chumo had been a Tanner since she was five years old and had heard the willows whisper all night long at the Singing Sands. She had had her proving day, and since then had worn a Tanner’s madder-red and blue shirt and doublet, woven of linen on a willowwood loom. She had made her masterpiece, and since then had worn the Master Tanner’s neckband of dried vauti-tuber incised with the double line and double circles. So clothed and so ornamented she stood among the willows by the burying ground, waiting for the funeral procession of her brother, who had broken the law and betrayed his caste. She stood erect and silent, gazing towards the village by the river and listening for the drum.

  She did
not think; she did not want to think. But she saw her brother Kwatewa in the reeds down by the river, running ahead of her, a little boy too young to have caste, too young to be polluted by the sacred, a crazy little boy pouncing on her out of the tall reeds shouting, “I’m a mountain lion!”

  A serious little boy watching the river run, asking, “Does it ever stop? Why can’t it stop running, Chumo?”

  A five-year-old coming back from the Singing Sands, coming straight to her, bringing her the joy, the crazy, serious joy that shone in his round face—”Chumo! I heard the sand singing! I heard it! I have to be a Sculptor, Chumo!”

  She had stood still. She had not held out her arms. And he had checked his run towards her and stood still, the light going out of his face. She was only his womb-sister. He would have truesibs, now. He and she were of different castes. They would not touch again.

  Ten years after that day she had come with most of the townsfolk to Kwatewa’s proving day, to see the sand-sculpture he had made in the Great Plain Place where the Sculptors performed their art. Not a breath of wind had yet rounded off the keen edges or leveled the lovely curves of the classic form he had executed with such verve and sureness, the Body of Amakumo. She saw admiration and envy in the faces of his truebrothers and truesisters. Standing aside among the sacred castes, she heard the speaker of the Sculptors dedicate Kwatewa’s proving piece to Amakumo. As his voice ceased a wind came out of the desert north, Amakumo’s wind, the maker hungry for the made—Amakumo the Mother eating her body, eating herself. Even while they watched, the wind destroyed Kwatewa’s sculpture. Soon there was only a shapeless lump and a feathering of white sand blown across the proving ground. Beauty had gone back to the Mother. That the sculpture had been destroyed so soon and so utterly was a great honor to the maker.

  The funeral procession was approaching. She heard or imagined she heard the drumbeat, soft, no more than a heartbeat.

  Her own proving piece had been the traditional one for Tanner women, a drumhead. Not a funeral drum but a dancing drum, loud, gaudy with red paint and tassels. “Your drumhead, your maidenhead!” her true-brothers called it, and made fierce teasing jokes, but they couldn’t make her blush. Tanners had no business blushing. They were outside shame. It had been an excellent drum, chosen at once from the proving ground by an old Musician, who had played it so much she soon wore off the bright paint and lost the red tassels; but the drumhead lasted through the winter and till the Roppi Ceremony, when it finally split wide open during the drumming for the all-night dancing under the moons, when Chumo and Karwa first twined their wristplaits. Chumo had been proud all winter when she heard the voice of her drum loud and clear across the dancing ground, she had been proud when it split and gave itself to the Mother; but that had been nothing to the pride she had felt in Kwatewa’s sculptures. For if the work be well done and the thing made be powerful, it belongs to the Mother. She will desire it; she will not wait for it to give itself, but will take it. So the child dying young is called the Mother’s Child. Beauty, the most sacred of all things, is hers; the body of the Mother is the most beautiful of all things. So all that is made in the likeness of the Mother is made in sand.

  To keep your work, to try to keep it for yourself, to take her body from her, Kwatewa! How could you, how could you, my brother? her heart said. But she put the question back into the silence and stood silent among the willows, the trees sacred to her caste, watching the funeral procession come between the flaxfields. It was his shame, not hers. What was shame to a Tanner? It was pride she felt, pride. For that was her masterpiece that Dastuye the Musician held now and raised to his lips as he walked before the procession, guiding the new ghost to its body’s grave.

  She had made that instrument, the kerastion, the flute that is played only at a funeral. The kerastion is made of leather, and the leather is tanned human skin, and the skin is that of the wombmother or the fore-mother of the dead.

  When Wekuri, wombmother of Chumo and Kwatewa, had died two winters ago, Chumo the Tanner had claimed her privilege. There had been an old, old kerastion to play at Wekuri’s funeral, handed down from her grandmothers; but the Musician, when he had finished playing it, laid it on the mats that wrapped Wekuri in the open grave. For the night before, Chumo had flayed the left arm of the body, singing the songs of power of her caste as she worked, the songs that ask the dead mother to put her voice, her song into the instrument. She had kept and cured the piece of rawhide, rubbing it with the secret cures, wrapping it round a clay cylinder to harden, wetting it, oiling it, forming it and refining its form, till the clay went to powder and was knocked from the tube, which she then cleaned and rubbed and oiled and finished. It was a privilege which only the most powerful, the most truly shameless of the Tanners took, to make a kerastion of the mother’s skin. Chumo had claimed it without fear or doubt. As she worked she had many times pictured the Musician leading the procession, playing the flute, guiding her own spirit to its grave. She had wondered which of the Musicians it might be, and who would follow her, walking in her funeral procession. Never once had she thought that it would be played for Kwatewa before it was played for her. How was she to think of him, so much younger, dying first?

  He had killed himself out of shame. He had cut his wrist veins with one of the tools he had made to cut stone.

  His death itself was no shame, since there had been nothing for him to do but die. There was no fine, no ablution, no purification, for what he had done.

  Shepherds had found the cave where he had kept the stones, great marble pieces from the cave walls, carved into copies of his own sandsculptures, his own sacred work for the Solstice and the Hariba: sculptures of stone, abominable, durable, desecrations of the body of the Mother.

  People of his caste had destroyed the things with hammers, beaten them to dust and sand, swept the sand down into the river. She had thought Kwatewa would follow them, but he had gone to the cave at night and taken the sharp tool and cut his wrists and let his blood run. Why can’t it stop running, Chumo?

  The Musician had come abreast of her now as she stood among the willows by the burying ground. Dastuye was old and skillful; his slow dancewalk seemed to float him above the ground in rhythm with the soft heartbeat of the drum that followed. Guiding the spirit and the body on its litter borne by four casteless men, he played the kerastion. His lips lay light on the leather mouthpiece, his fingers moved lightly as he played, and there was no sound at all. The kerastion flute has no stops and both its ends are plugged with disks of bronze. Tunes played on it are not heard by living ears. Chumo, listening, heard the drum and the whisper of the north wind in the willow leaves. Only Kwatewa in his woven grass shroud on the litter heard what song the Musician played for him, and knew whether it was a song of shame, or of grief, or of welcome.

  THE SHOBIES’ STORY

  They met at Ve Port more than a month before their first flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the Shobies. Their first consensual decision was to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing.

  Liden was a fishing port with an eighty-thousand-year history and a population of four hundred. Its fisherfolk farmed the rich shoal waters of their bay, shipped the catch inland to the cities, and managed the Liden Resort for vacationers and tourists and new space crews on isyeye (the word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two). The fisher-women and fishermen of Liden were as weathered as driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who had misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. “Nope,” she said.

  Like most crews, the Shobies used Hainish as their common language. So the name of the one Hainish crew member, Sweet Today, carried its meaning as words as well as name, and at first se
emed a silly thing to call a big, tall, heavy woman in her late fifties, imposing of carriage and almost as taciturn as the villagers. But her reserve proved to be a deep well of congeniality and tact, to be called upon as needed, and her name soon began to sound quite right. She had family—all Hainish have family—kinfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines, scattered all over the Ekumen, but no relatives in this crew. She asked to be Grandmother to Rig, Asten, and Betton, and was accepted.

  The only Shoby older than Sweet Today was the Ter-ran Lidi, who was seventy-two EYs and not interested in grandmothering. Lidi had been navigating for fifty years, and there was nothing she didn’t know about NAFAL ships, although occasionally she forgot that their ship was the Shoby and called it the Soso or the Alterra. And there were things she didn’t know, none of them knew, about the Shoby.

  They talked, as human beings do, about what they didn’t know.

  Churten theory was the main topic of conversation, evenings at the driftwood fire on the beach after dinner. The adults had read whatever there was to read about it, of course, before they ever volunteered for the test mission. Gveter had more recent information and presumably a better understanding of it than the others, but it had to be pried out of him. Only twenty-five, the only Cetian in the crew, much hairier than the others, and not gifted in language, he spent a lot of time on the defensive. Assuming that as an Anarresti he was more proficient at mutual aid and more adept at cooperation than the others, he lectured them about their propertarian habits; but he held tight to his knowledge, because he needed the advantage it gave him. For a while he would speak only in negatives: don’t call it the churten “drive,” it isn’t a drive, don’t call it the churten “effect,” it isn’t an effect. What is it, then? A long lecture ensued, beginning with the rebirth of Cetian physics since the revision of Shevekian temporalism by the Intervalists, and ending with the general conceptual framework of the churten. Everyone listened very carefully, and finally Sweet Today spoke, carefully. “So the ship will be moved,” she said, “by ideas?”