The Compass Rose

by Ursula K LeGuin

  When it was done, the alien picked me up and set me down in the first maze—the short one, the maze for little children who have not yet learned how to talk.

  Was the humiliation deliberate? Now that it is all past, I see that there is no way to know. But it remains very hard to ascribe its behavior to ignorance.

  After all, it is not blind. It has eyes, recognisable eyes. They are enough like our eyes that it must see somewhat as we do. It has a mouth, four legs, can move bipedally, has grasping hands, etc.; for all its gigantism and strange looks, it seems less fundamentally different from us, physically, than a fish. And yet, fish school and dance and, in their own stupid way, communicate!

  The alien has never once attempted to talk with me. It has been with me, watched me, touched me, handled me, for days: but all its motions have been purposeful, not communicative. It is evidently a solitary creature, totally self-absorbed.

  This would go far to explain its cruelty.

  I noticed early that from time to time it would move its curious horizontal mouth in a series of fairly delicate, repetitive gestures, a little like someone eating. At first I thought it was jeering at me; then I wondered if it was trying to urge me to eat the indigestible fodder; then I wondered if it could be communicating labially. It seemed a limited and unhandy language for one so well provided with hands, feet, limbs, flexible spine, and all; but that would be like the creature’s perversity, I thought. I studied its lip motions and tried hard to imitate them. It did not respond. It stared at me briefly and then went away.

  In fact, the only indubitable response I ever got from it was on a pitifully low level of interpersonal aesthetics. It was tormenting me with knob-pushing, as it did once a day. I had endured this grotesque routine pretty patiently for the first several days. If I pushed one knob I got a nasty sensation in my feet, if I pushed a second I got a nasty pellet of dried-up food, if I pushed a third I got nothing whatever. Obviously, to demonstrate my intelligence I was to push the third knob. But it appeared that my intelligence irritated my captor, because it removed the neutral knob after the second day. I could not imagine what it was trying to establish or accomplish, except the fact that I was its prisoner and a great deal smaller than it. When I tried to leave the knobs, it forced me physically to return. I must sit there pushing knobs for it, receiving punishment from one and mockery from the other. The deliberate outrageousness of the situation, the insufferable heaviness and thickness of this air, the feeling of being forever watched yet never understood, all combined to drive me into a condition for which we have no description at all. The nearest thing I can suggest is the last interlude of the Ten Gate Dream, when all the feint-ways are closed and the dance narrows in and in until it bursts terribly into the vertical. I cannot say what I felt, but it was a little like that. If I got my feet stung once more, or got pelted once more with a lump of rotten food, I would go vertical forever... I took the knobs off the wall (they came off with a sharp tug, like flower buds), laid them in the middle of the floor, and defecated on them.

  The alien took me up at once and returned me to my prison. It had got the message, and had acted on it. But how unbelievably primitive the message had had to be! And the next day, it put me back in the knob room, and there were the knobs as good as new, and I was to choose alternate punishments for its amusement... Until then I had told myself that the creature was alien, therefore incomprehensible and uncomprehending, perhaps not intelligent in the same manner as we, and so on. But since then I have known that, though all that may remain true, it is also unmistakably and grossly cruel.

  When it put me into the baby maze yesterday, I could not move. The power of speech was all but gone (I am dancing this, of course, in my mind; “the best maze is the mind,” the old proverb goes) and I simply crouched there, silent. After a while it took me out again, gently enough. There is the ultimate perversity of its behavior: it has never once touched me cruelly.

  It set me down in the prison, locked the gate, and filled up the trough with inedible food. Then it stood two-legged, looking at me for a while.

  Its face is very mobile, but if it speaks with its face I cannot understand it, that is too foreign a language. And its body is always covered with bulky, binding mats, like an old widower who has taken the Vow of Silence. But I had become accustomed to its great size, and to the angular character of its limb positions, which at first had seemed to be saying a steady stream of incoherent and mispronounced phrases, a horrible nonsense dance like the motions of an imbecile, until I realised that they were strictly purposive movements. Now I saw something a little beyond that, in its position. There were no words, yet there was communication. I saw, as it stood watching me, a clear signification of angry sadness—as clear as the Sembrian Stance. There was the same lax immobility, the bentness, the assertion of defeat. Never a word came clear, and yet it told me that it was filled with resentment,pity, impatience, and frustration. It told me it was sick of torturing me, and wanted me to help it. I am sure I understood it. I tried to answer. I tried to say, “What is it you want of me? Only tell me what it is you want.” But I was too weak to speak clearly, and it did not understand. It has never understood.

  And now I have to die. No doubt it will come in to watch me die; but it will not understand the dance I dance in dying.

  The Pathways of Desire

  Tamara had thought he was off taping, but he was in his hut, lying on the cot, looking thin and cold. “Sorry, Ram! I’m after those photographs of the kids.”

  “That box.” His gesture pointing out which box was so uncharacteristically languid that she asked, guardedly, “You all right?”

  “Could be better.” From him, the admission was a catalogue of misery; but still she did not drop her guard. She waited; and he said, “Diarrhoea.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “Humiliation.”

  Bob was wrong, then. He did have a sense of humor.

  “I’ll ask Kara,” she said. “They must have something for the trots.”

  “Anything but hot dogs and milkshakes,” Ramchandra said, and she laughed, for the description was apt; the staple foods of the Ndif were boneless poro meat and the mushy sweet fruit of the lamaba tree.

  “Keep drinking plenty. I’ll refill that. Lomox doesn’t help?”

  “Nothing left for it to work on.” He looked up at her; his eyes were large, black, and clear. “I wish that I throve here,” he said, “like Bob.”

  That took her off guard. Rebuff and aloofness she expected, trust and candor she did not. She was unready, and her response inadequate. “Oh, he’s happy here.”

  “Are you?”

  “I hate it.” She dangled the crude clay water jug, and sought exactness. “Not really. It’s beautiful. But I... get impatient.”

  “Nothing to chew,” Ramchandra said bitterly.

  She laughed again, and went to fill his water jug at the spring a few meters away. The brightness of the sunshine, the perfumes of the air, the gorgeous colors of the lamaba trees, purple trunks, blue and green leaves, red and yellow fruits, all were delightful; the little spring welled up holy and innocent in its bed of clean brown sand. But she returned with gratitude to the hut containing one sullen linguist with diarrhoea. “Take it easy, Ram,” she said, “and I’ll try and get something useful out of Kara and the others.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Lovely words, she thought, as she went down the path through perfumed light and shadows towards the river; lovely in the man’s soft, precise accent. When their team of three had first been put together, at the Base on Ankara, she had been drawn to Ramchandra, a direct, powerful, unmistakable attraction of sex. She had suppressed it, with self-mockery and some shame, for the man was cold, holding himself ostentatiously apart and untouched. And then there was Bob, big beautiful blond Bob, lean tanned tough Bob, perfect hero of male wish fulfilment, irresistible. Why resist? Easier to give the easy pleasure he expected; easy, pleasant, a little depress
ing, but never mind that. Don’t look down into depressions. You might fall in. Live life as it comes, etc. She and Bob would come together inevitably. But they hadn’t; for the three of them had come to Yirdo, and met Yirdo’s inhabitants, the Ndif.

  The Young Women of the Ndif—all females between age twelve and age twenty-two or -three—were sexually available, eager, and adept. They had bright wavy hair of gold or russet, long tilted eyes of green or violet, slender waists and ankles. They wore soft garments of slit pandsu leaves, clinging, modestly parting to reveal the merest glimpse of buttock or nipple. The under fourteens danced the hypnotic saweya dance in long lines, chanting in their soft, light voices, their round faces mischievously serious. From fourteen to eighteen they danced the baliya, leaping naked, one at a time, into the circle of swaying, clapping men, twisting their sinuous bodies into all the postures of practised eroticism, while the girls waiting their turn to dance sang the pulsing chorus, “Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh...” After they were eighteen they no longer danced in public. Tamara left it to Bob to find out what they did in private. After forty-one days on Yirdo he was indubitably an expert in that.

  She saw now that though she hadn’t wanted him, the promptness, the flatness of his loss of interest in her had hurt. Even last night she had been flirting at him; competing; trying to be a dancing girl, with short wiry hair, shit-brindle eyes that tilted the wrong way, muscular wrists... Stupid, stupid her self-mockery, her self-abasement, her self, self, self, swept away now like veils of cobweb as she followed the forest path downward to the washing place at the river thinking, How beautiful the bridge of Ram’s nose is. He can’t weigh much more than I do, maybe less; fine-boned. Thank you, he said. “Askiös, Muna! How’s the baby? Askiös, Vanna! Askiös, Kara!” How beautiful thy nose, my beloved, like unto a promontory between two wells of water, and the water thereof is exceeding black and cold. Thank you, thank you. “Hot today, no?”

  “Hot today, hot today,” all the Middle-Aged Women agreed enthusiastically, as they trampled out the village laundry in the shallow, laughing water. “Put your feet in the river, you’ll get cool,” Vanna encouraged her. Brella patted her shoulder affectionately, murmuring, “Askiös!” as she went by to lay out her portion of the village laundry on a rock to dry.

  The Middle-Aged Women were between twenty-three and (forty? data still uncertain), and some of them,in Tamara’s opinion, were more beautiful than the Young Women, a beauty which included missing teeth, sagging breasts, and stretchy bellies. The gapped smiles were blithe, the drooping tits held the milk of human kindness, the pregnancy-streaked bellies were full of belly laughs. The Young Women giggled; the Middle-Aged Women laughed. They laughed, Tamara thought watching them now, as if they had been set free.

  The Young Men were off hunting poro (the pursuit of the fanged hot dog, she thought, and she too, being a Middle-Aged Woman of twenty-eight, laughed); or they were sitting goggling at the saweya and baliya dancers; or they were sleeping. There were no Middle-Aged Men. Males were Young till about forty, when they stopped hunting, stopped watching the dancers, and became Old. And died.

  “Kara,” she said to her best informant, while she took off her sandals to put her feet in the cool water as Vanna had suggested, “my friend Ram is sick in the belly.”

  “Oh me, oh dear, askiös, askiös,” the nearby women murmured. Kara, who looked to be pretty nearly an Old Woman, her knotted hair thin and greying, demanded practically, “Is it gwullaggh or kafa-faka?”

  Tamara had never heard either word before, but translation was superfluous. “Kafa-faka,” she said.

  “Puti berries, he needs,” said Kara, slapping a loincloth on a wet boulder.

  “The food we eat here, he says it’s very good, too good.”

  “Too much fried poro,” said Kara, nodding. “When children eat too much and spend all night shitting in the bushes, you feed them puti berries and boiled guo for a week. It tastes all right, with honey. I’ll boil Uvana Ram a pot of guo as soon as the washing’s done.”

  “Kara is a beautiful noble person,” Tamara said. It was a stock phrase, the usual Ndif way of saying thank you.

  “Askiös!” said Kara, grinning. That was a much commoner, and more difficult, expression. Ramchandrahad arrived at no set translation for it. Bob had suggested German bitte, but it covered even more ground than bitte. Please, you’re welcome, sorry, wait a minute, never mind, hello, goodbye, yes, no, and maybe, all seemed to fall within the connotations of askiös.

  With her questions about kafa-faka and how to wean babies and when you had to stay in the Unclean Huts and what was the best kind of cooking pot, Tamara was always a welcome excuse for a conversation break. They sat around on hot boulders in the cool water and let the river wash the laundry and the sun dry and bleach it, while they talked. With a part of her mind Tamara listened to Heraclitus telling her that you shall not step twice into the same river; with the rest of it she sought information concerning birth control among the Ndif. The subject once opened, the women discussed it leisurely and frankly, but there wasn’t much to discuss. There were no devices or systems of birth control at all. Nature provided for the Young Women: for all their single-minded devotion to erotic practice, they did not become fertile till they were over twenty. Tamara was incredulous, but the women were perfectly certain: the dividing line between the Young and the Middle-Aged was, in fact, fertility. Once the line was crossed their only protection against perpetual pregnancy was abstinence, which they admitted was boring. Abortion and infanticide were not mentioned. When Tamara cautiously suggested them, heads were shaken. “Women can’t kill babies,” Brella said with horror. Kara observed more dryly, “If they get caught at it, the Men pull out all their hair and send them to the Unclean Huts to stay.”—“Nobody in our village would do such a thing,” Brella said. “Nobody got caught at it,” Kara said.

  A group of Juvenile Males (nine to twelve) came whooping down to the river to swim and fish. They ran right over the drying laundry; the laundresses scolded, unauthoritatively; and the conversation ceased, because the ears of Males were not to be polluted with Unclean talk. The women rescued the laundry and set off back to the village. Tamara looked in on Ramchandra, who was asleep, and went on to take some photographs of Juvenile Males playing bhasto. After supper—communal, cooked and served by the Middle-Aged Women—she saw Kara, Vanna, and old Binira go into Ramchandra’s hut, and followed them.

  They woke him up and fed him boiled guo, pinkish cereal like sticky tapioca; they rubbed his legs, sat on his shoulders, put heated stones on his stomach, rearranged his cot so that he lay with his head to the north, made him drink a sip of something hot, black, and minty-smelling; Binira sang at him for a while; they left him at last with a fresh hot stone, and went off. He accepted all this with ethnological aplomb or with the satisfaction of the invalid being fussed over. When they had gone he looked comfortable, curled up around the large rock, and half asleep. Tamara was going out when he asked in a remote, tranquil voice, “Did you tape the old lady’s song?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Askiös, askiös,” he whispered. Then, propping himself on his elbow, “I am better. Too bad we didn’t tape that. I missed most of the words.”

  “Is Old Ndif a different language?”

  “No. Only much fuller. Complete.”

  “The Middle-Aged Women seem to have a much bigger vocabulary than the Youngs.”

  “At Buvuna, the Young Women averaged 700 words; the Young Men 1,100, since they have the hunting vocabulary; I estimate the Middle-Aged Women here to know at least 2,500 words. I can make no estimate of the Old Men and Women yet. These are odd people.” Ramchandra lay back and cautiously rearranged himself around the hot stone. His tone, also, was cautious. There was a slight pause.

  “Do you want to sleep?”

  “To talk,” he said.

  Tamara sat down on the woven cane stool. Beyond the open doorway the night was growing bright as day had been; Uper, the big gas planet
of which Yirdo was a moon, was rising over the forest like a vast striped balloon. Its silver-gilt light pierced every crack in the mud and wattle walls of the hut and pooled incandescent on the ground outside the doorway. The dusk inside the hut was shot through with gleams, shaft, arrows dazzling the eye, a light that revealed nothing, that dissolved bodies and faces into radiant darkness.

  “Nothing is real,” Tamara said.

  “Of course not,” said the other shadow, amused, precise.

  “They’re like actors.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. I don’t mean consciously acting, deceiving. I mean artificial. Too simple. Beautiful simple people in ever-bountiful paradise.”

  “Ha,” Ramchandra said, and a patch of planet light blazed in his hair as he sat up.

  “Why shouldn’t there be a South-Sea-Island world?” she argued with herself. “Why does it seem too simple—phony? Am I a Puritan, am I looking for original sin?”

  “No, no, of course not, rubbish,” he said. “All that is theories. But listen.” For a minute he said nothing to listen to, then he said some Ndif words: “Vini. Pandsu. Bhasto. Askiös.—Askiös-bhis iyava oe is-bhassa.—What is that in English?”

  “Well—‘please let me get by.’ ”

  “Literal translation!”

  “The great teaching tradition of the Brahman caste,” Tamara said. “I don’t know, the words have so many uses. ‘Sorry, I want to go this way’?”