Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  All the mountains in a little stone.

  Owning is owing, having is hoarding.

  Like and different are quickening words, brooding and hatching.

  Better and worse are eggsucking words, they leave only the shell.

  Care may be questioned with care, joy with joy.

  Read what the worms write on the madrone leaf, and walk sideways.

  Pandora Converses with the Archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na

  PANDORA: Niece, this is a beautiful library!

  ARCHIVIST: In the town at the Springs of the River, it is appropriate that the library be beautiful.

  PAN: This looks like a rare-book cabinet.

  ARC: Old books, fragile ones. Here, this scroll—what strong calligraphy. And good materials. Linen paper; it hasn’t darkened at all. This is milkweed paper, here. A good texture!

  PAN: How old is the scroll?

  ARC: Oh, four hundred years maybe, five hundred.

  PAN: Like a Gutenberg Bible to us. Do you have a lot of such old books and scrolls, then?

  ARC: Well, more here than anywhere else. Very old things are venerable, aren’t they. So people bring things here when they get very old. Some of it’s rubbish.

  PAN: How do you decide what to keep and what to throwaway? The library really isn’t very large, when you consider how much writing goes on here in the Valley—

  ARC: Oh, there’s no end to the making of books.

  PAN: And people give writings to their heyimas as offerings—

  ARC: All gifts are sacred.

  PAN: So the libraries would all get to be enormous, if you didn’t throw most of the books and things out. But how do you decide what to keep and what to destroy?

  ARC: It’s difficult. It’s arbitrary, unjust, and exciting. We clear out the heyimas libraries every few years. Here in the Madrone of Wakwaha the lodge has destruction ceremonies yearly, between the Grass and the Sun dances. They’re secret. Members only. A kind of orgy. A fit of housecleaning—the nesting instinct, the collecting drive, turned inside out, reversed. Unhoarding.

  PAN: You destroy valuable books?

  ARC: Oh, yes. Who wants to be buried under them?

  PAN: But you could keep important documents and valuable literary works in electronic storage, at the Exchange, where they don’t take up any room—

  ARC: The City of Mind does that. They want a copy of everything. We give them some. What is “room”—is it only a piece of space?

  PAN: But intangibles—information—

  ARC: Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it.

  PAN: But that’s the point of information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on—the central act of human culture.

  ARC: “Keeping grows; giving flows.” Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a business it requires a more disciplined intelligence than keeping, perhaps. Disciplined people come here, Oak Lodge people, historians, learned people, scribes and reciters and writers, they’re always here, like those four, you see, going through the books, copying out what they want, annotating. Books no one reads go; books people read go after a while. But they all go. Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.

  PAN: This is the kind of conversation they always have in utopia. I set you up and then you give interesting, eloquent, and almost entirely convincing replies. Surely we can do better than that!

  ARC: Well, I don’t know, aunt. What if I asked the questions? What if I asked you if you had considered my peculiar use of the word “safe,” and if you had considered the danger of storing up information as you do in your society?

  PAN: Well, I—

  ARC: Who controls the storage and the retrieval? To what extent is the material there for anyone who wants and needs it, and to what extent is it “there” only for those who have the information that it is there, the education to obtain that information, and the power to get that education? How many people in your society are literate? How many are computer-competent? How many of them have the competence to use libraries and electronic information storage systems? How much real information is available to ordinary, nongovernment, nonmilitary, nonspecialist, nonrich people? What does “classified” mean? What do shredders shred? What does money buy? In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?

  PAN: Niece, you’re a damned Luddite.

  ARC: No, I’m not. I like machines. My washing machine is an old friend. The printing press here is rather more than a friend. Look; when Mines died last year I printed this poem of his, thirty copies, for people to take home and to give to the heyimas, here, this is the last copy.

  PAN: It’s a nice job. But you cheated. You didn’t ask a question, you asked a rhetorical question.

  ARC: Well, you know, people who live in cultures that have an oral literature as well as a written literature get a good deal of practice in rhetoric. But my question wasn’t just a trick. How do you keep information yet keep it from being the property of the powerful?

  PAN: Through not having censorship. Having free public libraries. Teaching people to read. And to use computers, to plug into the sources. Press, radio, television not fundamentally dependent on government or advertisers. I don’t know. It keeps getting harder.

  ARC: I didn’t mean to make you sad, aunt.

  PAN: I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring.

  ARC: But I have no answers and this isn’t utopia, aunt!

  PAN: The hell it ain’t.

  ARC: This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West.

  PAN: You can’t talk that way!

  ARC: True.

  PAN: Go sing heya, like any savage.

  ARC: Only if you’ll sing with me.

  PAN: I don’t know how to sing heya.

  ARC: I’ll teach you, aunt.

  PAN: I’ll learn, niece.

  PANDORA AND THE ARCHIVIST SING:

  Heya, heya, hey,

  heya, heya.

  Heya, hey, heya,

  heya, heya.

  Hey, heya, heya,

  heya, heya.

  Heya, heya, hey,

  heya, heya.

  (That is the five/four heya sung four times. It may be sung four times, or five times, or nine times, or as many times as you like, or not at all.)

  DANGEROUS PEOPLE

  A NOTE ABOUT THE NOVEL.

  The Valley novel was a novel, not a romance; it was concerned with the daily lives of ordinary people in real places at some time not too far from the readers’ present. Elements in it that we might categorise as fantastical or supernatural were nothing of the kind to the author and readers; indeed a common objection to novels voiced by non-novel-readers was that they were too realistic, without vision, “never going outside the Five Houses.”

  The novel generally contained some element of fact, being based on something that was known to have happened, or at least using real names of people who lived a few generations back. Like almost all Kesh fiction and drama, novels were set in a real town, in existing houses, or houses that were known to have existed. The invention of a tenth town, a nonexistent house, would have been felt to be a misuse of the imagination, a contradiction of realit
y rather than an augmentation of it.

  The long novel Dangerous People by Wordriver of Telina-na was of course particularly popular in the town where it was written and set, but it was well-known all over the Valley in a handset edition that must have run to over a hundred copies, and was regarded with affectionate esteem. It is a pretty good example of the Valley novel. The construction of Chapter Two, which is the section translated for this volume, is exemplary of its kind: the pattern is of two people meeting, or “hinging,” or “turning apart,” one of whom is then followed to the next meeting with a different person, and so on (the pattern of the heyiya-if repeated). This pattern is not followed mechanically in a work as sophisticated as Dangerous People, but it is always present. The most unusual element of the book is Wordriver’s use of ambiguity, red herrings, bum steers, and false witnesses in presenting and continually deepening the mystery of where Kamedan’s wile has “in fact” gone, and with whom, and why.

  My general practice has been to give proper names in translation; it seemed the right thing to do, since Valley names were meaningful, and their meaning was often quite vivid in people’s minds. Translation may lend a false sense of familiarity, however, and may equally cause unnecessary strangeness. For instance, the name Kamedan means “coming into the cattails” or “he comes into the reed-bed”—too long and far too quaint for English; it would have to be abridged to Cattail or Reed. So in this one case I have left the names of the characters in their original form, to give the reader a different feeling, perhaps, of the people who used them. Wordriver’s name in Kesh was Arravna.

  Dangerous People

  CHAPTER TWO

  The dry season was well along into the heat, and the tarweed was blooming, about a month from ripe. When the moon was near full one night the little boy in Shamsha’s household began talking in the dark. He said, “Take away the light, mother! Please, mother, take away the light!” Kamedan went across the room on hands and knees and held the child against his body, saying, “Your mother will be home soon, Monkeyflower. Please go to sleep now.” He sang a rocking song, but the child could not sleep; he stared at the moon through the window and then cried and hid his face. Kamedan held him and felt fever coming into him. When the day began, Monkeyflower was hot and weak and dull-witted.

  Kamedan said to Shamsha, “I think I should go with him to the Doctors Lodge.” She said, “No need of that; don’t fuss; my grandson will sleep this fever off.” Never able to argue with her, he left the child asleep and went to the weaving lofts. They were warping the ten-foot power loom for canvas that morning, and he worked hard, not having the child in his mind at all for some while; but as soon as the warping was completed he started back to Hardcinder House, walking fast.

  Near the Hinge of town he saw Modona going towards the hunting side with his deer bow. He said, “So you are here, man of the Hunters Lodge.” Modona said, “So you are here, Miller,” and was going on, when Kamedan said, “Listen, my wife, Whette, is in the hills somewhere on the hunting side, it seems. I keep thinking maybe she got lost. Please be careful when you shoot.” He knew that they said that Modona would shoot at a falling leaf. He went on, “You might call aloud, in places where you’re not looking for the deer. I keep thinking maybe she’s hurt and not able to make her way back.”

  The hunter said, “I heard people saying that a person who had been in Ounmalin said that they had seen Whette there. No doubt they were mistaken.”

  “1 don’t think they could be altogether correct,” Kamedan said. “Maybe they saw a woman who looked like Whette.”

  The hunter said, “Are there women who look like Whette?”

  Kamedan was at a loss. He said, “I have to go home, the child is sick.” He went on, and Modona went on his way, grinning.

  Sticky Monkeyflower

  Monkeyflower lay hot and miserable in the bed when Kamedan came to him. Shamsha told him there was nothing to worry about, and the other people in the household said the same, but Kamedan stayed around the house. Towards nightfall the fever cooled and the little boy began to talk and smile, and ate some food, and then slept. In the night, when the moon one day from full shone in the northwest window, he cried out, “O mother! come to me! come!” Kamedan, sleeping next to him, woke and reached out to him. He felt the child hot as a coal of fire. He soaked cloths in water and wrapped them around the child’s head and chest and wrists, and gave him sips of cold water in which willowbark extract was infused. The burning lessened until the child could sleep. In the morning he lay sleeping soundly, and Shamsha said, “Last night was the crisis of the fever. Now all he needs is rest. You go on, you’re not needed here.”

  Kamedan went to the lofts, but his mind would not turn fully to his work.

  Sahelm was helping him that day. Usually he observed and followed Kamedan attentively, learning the art; this day he saw Kamedan making mistakes, and once he had to say, “1 think that may be not altogether correct,” to prevent Kamedan from jamming the machine on a miswound bobbin. Kamedan threw the switch to stop the power, and then sat down on the floor with his head between his hands.

  Sahelm sat down not far away from him, crosslegged.

  The sun was at noon. The moon was opposite it, directly opposed, pulling down.

  The air in the high loft was still and hot, and the cloth-dust that always moved in the air while the looms were working hung still.

  Kamedan said, “Five days ago my wife Whette left the Obsidian heyimas. In the heyimas they say that she said she was going up to walk on Spring Mountain. In the Blood Lodge the women say she was going to meet some dancers in a clearing on Spring Mountain, but didn’t come. Her mother says she went to Kastoha-na to stay in her brother’s wife’s household for a few days. Her sister says hat probably she went down the Valley, as she used to do before he married, walking alone to the seacoast and back. Modona says lat people have seen her in Ounmalin.”

  Sahelm listened.

  Kamedan said, “The child wakes in fever under the moon and calls to her. The grandmother says nothing is the matter. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to look for Whette. I don’t want to leave the child, I must do something and there’s nothing I can do. Thank you for listening to me, Sahelm.”

  He got up and turned the power of the loom back on. Sahelm got up, and they worked together. The thread broke and broke again, a bobbin caught and caught again. Sahelm said, “This isn’t a good day for weavers.”

  Kamedan went on working until the loom jammed and he had to stop. He said then, “Leave me to untangle this mess. Maybe I can do that.”

  Sahelm said, “Let me do it. That kid might be glad to see you.”

  Kamedan would not go, and Sahelm thought it better to leave him. He went from the lofts to the herb gardens down by Moon Creek. He had seen Duhe there in the morning, and she was still there. She was sitting under the oak Nehaga, eating fresh lettuce. Sahelm came under the shade of the oak and said, “So you are here, Doctor.” She said, “So you are here, Fourth-House Man, sit down.” He sat down near her. She squeezed lemon juice on lettuce leaves and gave them to him. They finished the lettuce, and Duhe cut the sweet lemon in quarters and they ate it. They went down to Moon Creek to rinse their hands, and returned into the shade of Nehaga. Duhe had been watering, weeding, pruning, and harvesting herbs, and the air was fragrant where she was, and where the baskets she had filled with cuttings were in the shade covered with netting, and where she had laid rosemary and catnip and lemon balm and rue on linen cloth in the sun to dry. Cats kept coming by, wanting to get at the catnip as the sun released its scent. She gave a sprig to each cat once, and if the cat came back she threw pebbles at it to keep it off. An old grey woman-cat kept coming back; she was so fat the pebbles did not sting her and so greedy nothing frightened her.

  Duhe said, “Where has the day taken you on the way here?”

  Sahelm replied, “Into the broadloom lofts with Kamedan of Hardcinder House.”

  “Whette’s husband,” said
Duhe. “Has she come back yet?”

  “Where would she come back from?”

  “Some people were saying that she went to the Springs of the River.”

  “I wonder, did she tell them she was going there?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Did any of them see her going there, I wonder?”

  “Nobody said that,” said Duhe, and laughed.

  Sahelm said, “Here’s how it is: she went five different ways at the same time. People have told Kamedan that she went to walk alone on Spring Mountain, to dance on Spring Mountain, to Kastoha, to Ounmalin, and to the Ocean. His mind keeps trying to follow her. It seems she said nothing to him about going anywhere, before she went.”

  Duhe threw an oakgall at the fat cat, who was coming at the catnip from the southeast. The cat went half a stones’-throw away, sat down with her back turned to them, and began to wash her hind legs. Duhe watched the cat and said, “That’s strange, that story you tell. Are people lying, perhaps?”

  “1 don’t know. Kamedan says the child wakes and cries in the night and the grandmother says nothing is the matter.”

  ‘“Well, very likely she’s right,” said Duhe, whose mind was on the catnip and the cat, the hot sunlight and the shade, Sahelm and herself.

  Duhe had lived about forty years in the Third House at that time. She was a short woman with large breasts, heavy hips, sleek, fine arms and legs, a slow, calm manner, a secretive nature, an intelligent and well-disciplined mind. The Lodge name she had given herself was Sleepwalker. A girl, now adolescent, had made her a mother, but she had not married the father, an Obsidian man, nor any other man. She and the girl lived in her sister’s household in After the Earthquake House, but she was more often than not outdoors or in the Doctors Lodge.

  She said, “You have a gift, Sahelm.”

  He said, “I have a burden.”

  She said, “Bring it to the Doctors, not the Millers.”