Bohentin, on all fours, crawled toward the holotanks. The doctor lay slumped on the floor; the other doctor had already reached the platform and its two crumpled figures. Someone was crying, someone else shouting. I rose, fell, dragged myself to the side of the platform and then could not climb it. I could not climb the platform. Hanging with two hands on the edge, hearing the voice crying as my own, I watched the doctor bend shakily to Keith, roll him off Devrie to bend over her, turn back to Keith.
Bohentin cried, “The tapes are intact!”
“Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God,” someone moaned, until abruptly she stopped. I grasped the flesh-colored padding on top of the platform and pulled myself up onto it.
Devrie lay unconscious, pulse erratic, face cast in perfect bliss. The doctor breathed into Keith’s mouth—what strength could the doctor himself have !eft?—and pushed on the naked chest. Breathe, push, breathe, push. The whole length of Keith’s body shuddered; the doctor rocked back on his heels; Keith breathed.
“It’s all on tape!” Bohentin cried. “It’s all on tape!”
“God damn you to hell,” I whispered to Devrie’s blissful face. “It didn’t even know we were there!”
Her eyes opened. I had to lean close to hear her answer.
“But now … we know He … is there.”
She was too weak to smile. I looked away from her, away from that face, out into the tumultuous emptiness of the lab, anywhere.
They will try again.
Devrie has been asleep, fed by glucose solution through an IV, for fourteen hours. I sit near her bed, frowned at by the nurse, who can see my expression as I stare at my sister. Somewhere in another bed Keith is sleeping yet again. His rest is more fitful than Devrie’s; she sinks into sleep as into warm water, but he cannot. Like me, he is afraid of drowning.
An hour ago he came into Devrie’s room and grasped my hand. “How could It—He—It not have been aware that we existed? Not even have known?”
I didn’t answer him.
“You felt it too, Seena, didn’t you? The others say they could, so you must have too. It … created us in some way. No, that’s wrong. How could It create us and not know?”
I said wearily, “Do we always know what we’ve created?” and Keith glanced at me sharply. But I had not been referring to my father’s work in cloning.
“Keith. What’s a Thysania Africana?”
“A what?”
“Think of us,” I said, “as just one more biological side-effect. One type of being acts, and another type of being comes into existence. Man stages something like the African Horror, and in doing so he creates whole new species of moths and doesn’t even discover they exist until long afterward. If man can do it, why not God? And why should He be any more aware of it than we are?”
Keith didn’t like that. He scowled at me, and then looked at Devrie’s sleeping face: Devrie’s sleeping bliss.
“Because she is a fool,” I said savagely, “and so are you. You won’t leave it alone, will you? Having been noticed by It once, you’ll try to be noticed by It again. Even though she promised me otherwise, and even if it kills you both.”
Keith looked at me a long time, seeing clearly—finally—the nature of the abyss between us, and its dimensions. But I already knew neither of us could cross. When at last he spoke, his voice held so much compassion that I hated him. “Seena. Seena, love. There’s no more doubt now, don’t you see? Now rational belief is no harder than rational doubt. Why are you so afraid to even believe?”
I left the room. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, palms spread flat against the tile, and closed my eyes. It seemed to me that I could hear wings, pale and fragile, beating against glass.
They will try again. For the sake of sure knowledge that the universe is not empty, Keith and Devrie and all the others like their type of being will go on pushing their human brains against that biological window. For the sake of sure knowledge: belief founded on experiment and not on faith. And the Other: being/alien/God? It, too, may choose to initiate contact, if It can and now that It knows we are here. Perhaps it will seek to know us, and even beyond the laboratory Devrie and Keith may find any moment of heightened arousal subtly invaded by a shadowy Third. Will they sense It, hovering just beyond consciousness, if they argue fiercely or race a sailboat in rough water or make love? How much arousal will it take, now, for them to sense those huge wings beating on the other side of the window?
And windows can be broken.
Tomorrow I will fly back to New York. To my museum, to my exhibits, to my moths under permaplex, to my empty apartment, where I will keep the heavy drapes drawn tightly across the glass.
For—oh Cod—all the rest of my life.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Trouble with the Cotton People
Ursula K. Le Guin was possibly the most talked-about SF writer of the seventies—rivaled for that position only by Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr., and Philip K. Dick—and is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre; it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed, a few years later. She has also won two other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, and the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for the novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed “Earthsea” trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, and the other two Earthsea novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. She has had three collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, and The Compass Rose. Her latest book is Always Coming Home, a multivoiced, multimedia novel (told by many different characters, and featuring illustrations, music, and even recipes, as well as prose narrative), upcoming from Harper & Row.
Here—in a story which also appears as part of Always Coming Home—she gives us a fascinating and evocative look into another kind of lifestyle, in another and Newer World.
Written by Grey Bull of the Obsidian of Telina-na, as part of an offering to his heyimas.
When I was a young man there was trouble with the people who send us cotton from the South in trade for our wines. We were putting good wines on the train to Sed every spring and autumn, clear Ganais and dark Berrena, Mes from Ounmalin and the Sweet Betebbes they like down there, all good wines, selected because they travel well, and shipped in the best oak and redwood casks. But they had begun sending us short-staple, seedy cotton, full of tares, in short-weight bales. Then one year they sent half in bales and the rest stuff already woven—some of it fair sheeting weight, but some of it sleazy, or worse.
That year was the first I went to Sed, with my teacher in the Cloth Art, Soaring of the Obsidian of Kastoha-na. We went down with the wine, and stayed at the inn at Sed, a wonderful place for seafood and general comfort. She and the Wine Art people had an argument with the foreigners, but it got nowhere, because the people who had brought the cotton to Sed said they were just middlemen—they hadn’t sent the lousy cotton, they just loaded and unloaded it and sailed the ships that carried it and took the wine back South. The only person there, they said, who was actually from the cotton people, wasn’t able to speak any language anybody else spoke. Soaring dragged him over to the Sed Exchange, but he acted as if he’d never heard of TOK; and when she tried to get a message through the Exchange to the place the cotton came from, nobody answered.
The Wine Art people were glad she was there, since they would have taken the sleazy without question and sent all the good wine they had brought in return. She advised them to send two-thirds the usual shipment, and no Sweet Betebbes in it at all, and to take the rest back home and wait to hear from the cotton people. She refused to load the sleazy stuff onto the train, so they put it back into the ships. The ship people said
they didn’t care, so long as they got their usual share of the wine from us for doing the shipping. Soaring wanted to cut that amount, too, to induce the ship people to pay attention to the quality of their cargo; but the other Valley traders said that was unfair, or unwise; so we gave the sailors a half-carload, as usual—all Sweet Betebbes.
When we came home there was discussion among the Cloth and Wine Arts and the Finders Lodge and the councils and interested people of several towns, and some of us said: “Nobody from the Valley has been to that place where the cotton comes from for forty or fifty years. Maybe some people from here should go there, and talk with those people.” The others agreed with that.
So after waiting a while to see if the cotton people would send a message on the Exchange when they got their sleazy back and less wine than usual, we set out, four of us: myself, because I wanted to go, and knew something about cotton and fabrics; and three Finders Lodge people, two who had done a lot of trading and had been across the Inland Sea more than once, and one who wanted to keep up the Finders’ maps of the places we were going. They were named Patience, Peregrine, and Gold. We were all men and all young. I was the youngest. I had come inland the year before with a Blue Clay girl, but when I said I was going to the end of the Inland Sea she said I was crazy and irresponsible, and put my books and bedding out on the landing. So I left from my mothers’ house.
I had been busy learning with the Cloth Art and had not given much thought to joining the Finders Lodge, but the trip to Sed had made me want to travel more, and I knew I had a gift for trading. I saw no reason to be ashamed of it. I have never cared much what people say. So I went as a novice of that Lodge, both a traveller and a trader.
In the books I read and the stories I heard as a kid, the Finders were always travellers, not traders, and they were generally on snowy peaks in the Range of Light singing to the bears or getting toes frozen off or rescuing each other from chasms. The Finders I was with appeared not to favor that style of travel. We took a comfortable single-car down the line to Sed, and stayed at the inn there again, eating like ducks in a slug patch, while we asked around about ships and boats.
Nobody was sailing South. We could get a ship going across to the East coast, to Rekwit, some time in the month; or as soon as we liked, a boat would take us across the Gate to the Falares Islands. From either Rekwit or the Falares we could try to find a coaster going South, or else go on foot down the inner side of the mountains. The Finders decided the chances were better on the West side, and that we should cross the Gate.
I was sorry when I saw the boat.
It was about ten feet long with a little farting engine and one sail. The tidal currents run in and out the Gate at fifty miles an hour, they say, and the winds the same.
The boat’s people were skinny and white with fishy eyes: Falares Islanders. They talked enough TOK that we could understand one another. They had been in Sed to trade fish for grain and brandy. They sailed those little boats way out west of the Gate, out on the open ocean, fishing. They were always saying, “Ho, ha, go out to big waves, ha, yes?” and slapping my back while I was throwing up over the edge of the boat.
A north wind was coming up, and by the time we were out in the middle of the water of the Gate the waves were getting very steep and hard, like bright little cliffs. The boat climbed up and dropped down and jerked and slapped. Then the low fog that had been lying over the Inland Sea, which I had taken for distant land, blew and faded away in a few moments, and there a hundred miles to the east of us was the Range of Light, the far glitter of the peaks of snow.
Underneath the boat there, Patience told me, the bottom of the sea was all buildings. In the old times outside the world the Gate was farther west and narrower, and all its shores and the countries inland were covered with houses. I have heard the same thing told in the Madrone Lodge since then, and there’s the song about the old souls. It is no doubt true, but I had no wish at the time to go down and verify it, though the harder the wind blew the likelier it seemed that we were about to do that. I was too bewildered, however, to be really frightened. With no earth to be seen but those tiny white sawteeth half over the world’s curve, and the hard bright sun and wind and water, it was a good deal like being dead already, I thought.
When the next day we finally got ashore onto one of the Falares Islands, the first thing I felt was lust. I got a big, long hard-on, and couldn’t turn my mind from it. The Falares women all looked beautiful, and I had such rape desires that I was really worried. I got alone, with some difficulty, and masturbated, but it didn’t help. Finally I told Peregrine about it, and he was decent enough not to laugh. He said it had to do with the sea. We talk about living on the coast—being chaste—and coming inland—when you stop being chaste—and all that may be reversal language. Sex is always turning things around and upside down. He said he didn’t know why being on the sea and then coming ashore had that particular effect, but he had noticed it himself. I said I felt as if I’d come back to life with a vengeance. At any rate, a couple of days eating what the Falares people eat cured me. All the women began to look like seaweed, and all I wanted was to go on somewhere else, even on a boat.
They weren’t doing any sailing down the inland coast at that time of the year, but were all going out on the ocean for the big fish. But they were generous people, and some of them said they would take us along the inland coast as far as a place they called Tuburhuny, where one of them had family living. We had to get off the island somehow, so we accepted, although we weren’t sure where Tuburhuny was. The Falares people chart the seas, but not the lands, and none of our place names seemed to fit with theirs. But anything on the South Peninsula suited us.
When we sailed south the weather was quiet and the waves low. The fog never lifted. We passed a few rocks and islands, and around midday, passing a long, low one, the Falares people said, “City.” We couldn’t see much of it in the fog; it looked like bare rock and some yerba buena and beach grass and a couple of tall, slender towers or masts supported by guywires. The Falares people carried on about it: “You touch, you die!” and they acted out electrocution or asphyxiation or getting struck by lightning. I never heard any such thing about the Cities, but I had never seen one before, or since. Whether it was true, or they were having one of their little jokes with us, or they are superstitious, I don’t know. They are certainly rather under-educated and out of touch, on those islands in the fog; they never use the Exchange at Sed, as if it too were dangerous. They are timid people, except on water.
Tuburhuny turned out to be called Gohop on our maps, a little town a short way south of the northern tip of the Peninsula on the inland side. It was sheltered from the everlasting fog of the Gate. Avocadoes grew all over town, and they were just coming ripe when we were there. How the people there could stay thin, I don’t know, but they were thin, and whitish, like the Falares people; but not quite so much out on the edge of things. They were glad to talk to travellers, and helped Gold plan our trip on his maps. They had no boats going out any distance, and said none came by their little port regularly, so we set off south on foot.
The Peninsular Range between the ocean and the Inland Sea is so buckled up by earthquakes and subsidences and so deeply scored by faults and rifts that walking the length of it is like crossing a forest by climbing up every tree you come to and then back down. There was usually no way round. Sometimes we could walk along the beaches, but in many places there wasn’t any beach—the mountains dropped sheer into the sea. So we would plod up and up, clear to the ridge, and from there we saw the ocean to our right and the sea to our left and ahead and behind the land falling away in fold after fold forever. As we went farther south there were more long, narrow sounds and inlets in the faults, and it was hard to know whether we were following the main ridge or had got onto a hogback between two rifts, in which case we would end up on a headland staring at the water, and would have to go back ten or fifteen miles and start over. Nobody knew how old the maps we had
were; they were from the Exchange, some time or other, but they were out of date. Mostly there was nobody to ask directions of but sheep. The human people lived down in the canyons with the water and the trees. They weren’t used to strangers, and we were careful not to alarm them.
In that part of the world the young men, late adolescents and older, often form groups and go out and live a hunting life, like our Bay Lodge, but less responsibly. The bands are allowed to fight each other, and to raid each other and any town except the one they came from, taking tools or food or animals or whatever they want. Those raids lead to killings, of course, sometimes; and some of the men never come back and settle down, but stay out in the hills as forest-living people, and some of them are crazy and kill for the sake of killing. The townspeople make a lot of fuss about these wild men of theirs, and live in fear of them; and so the four of us, young men and strangers, had to behave with notable propriety and good manners even at a distance, so as not to be mistaken for marauders or murderers.
Once they saw we were harmless they were generous and talkative, giving us anything they thought we wanted. Most of their towns were small, pleasant places with wood-beamed adobe houses stuccoed white, shaded by avocado trees. They all stayed in town all year, because in a summer house a family would not be safe from the bands of young men; but they said they used to go to summer houses, and it’s only in the last couple of generations that the young men have got irresponsible. They seemed to me foolish to let such an imbalance occur and continue, but perhaps they had some reason for it. The different peoples of those many canyons speak several different languages, but their towns and way of life were pretty much all alike. There were always people in the towns who could use TOK, so we could converse. At one of their Exchanges we sent messages to the Wakwaha Exchange to tell the Finders and our households that all was well with us, so far.
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 53