A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Down below, yes, but here, in the Colony, in Spes—”

  “Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed? Very elitist people. How could we be anything but?”

  “Conservative? Conventional? What are you talking about?”

  “Well, look at us! Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century! I’m not complaining, you know. I chose it too. I love feeling safe. I wanted the kids to be safe. But you pay for safety.”

  “I don’t understand your attitude. We risked everything for Spes—because we’re future-oriented. These are the people who chose to leave the past behind, to start fresh. To form a true human community and to do it right, to do it right, for once! These people are innovators, intellectually courageous, not a bunch of gutbrains sunk in their bigotries! Our average IQ is 165—”

  “Ike, I know. I know the average IQ.”

  “The boy is rebelling,” Ike said after a short silence. “Just as Esther is. Using the foulest language they know, trying to shock the adults. It’s meaningless.”

  “And John Kelly tonight?”

  “Look, Mo was going on and on. All that about his damned souvenir pebble—he plays cute a good deal, you know. The kids he teaches eat it up, but it gets pretty tiresome in committee. If John cut him off, he asked for it.”

  They were at the door of their unit. It looked like the door of a New England frame house, though it hissed open sideways when Ike touched the doorbell.

  Esther had gone to her cube, of course. Lately she spent as little time as possible with them in the livingcube. Noah and Jason had spread their diagrams, printouts, workbooks, a tri-di checkerboard all over the builtins and the floor, and sat in the middle of it eating prochips and chattering away. “Tom’s sister says she saw her in the O.R.,” Jason was saying. “Hi, Ike, hi, Susan. I don’t know, you can’t believe something some six-year-old says.”

  “Yeah, she’s probably just imitating what Linda said, trying to get attention. Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. Hey, did you hear about this burned woman Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack say they saw?”

  “What do you mean, a burned woman?”

  “Over by school in C-1 Corridor. They were going along, going to some girls’ meeting thing—”

  “Dahncing clahss,” Jason interjected, striking a pose somewhere between a dying swan and a vomiting twelve-year-old.

  “—and they claim they saw this woman they’d never seen before, how about that? How could there be anybody in Spes they’d never even seen? And she was like burned all over, and sort of lurking along the side of the corridor like she was afraid of being seen. And they say she went down C-3 just before they got there, and when they did they couldn’t see her. And she wasn’t in any of the cubes along C-3. And then Tom Fort’s little sister says she saw her in the O.R., Jason says, but she’s probably just trying to get attention too.”

  “She said she had white eyes,” Jason said, rolling his own blue ones. “Really gutwrenching.”

  “Did the girls report this to anybody?” Ike asked.

  “Treese and Linda? I don’t know,” Noah said, losing interest. “So, are we going to get more hands-on time with the Schoenfeldt?”

  “I requested it,” Ike said. He was upset, disturbed. Esther’s unjustifiable anger, Susan’s lack of sympathy, and now Noah and Jason telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls about white-eyed phantoms: it was discouraging.

  He went into his studycube and got to work projecting designs for the second ship, following Levaitis’s proposals. No fake scenery, no props; the curves and angles of the structure exposed. The structural elements were rationally beautiful in their necessity. Form follows function. Instead of an illusion like the Common, the major space in each quadrant would be just that, a big space; call it the quad, maybe. Ten meters high, two hundred across, the arches of the hull reaching across it magnificently. He sketched it out on the holo, viewed it from different angles, walked around it. … It was past three when he went to bed, excited and satisfied by his work. Susan was fast asleep. He lay by her inert warmth and looked back on the events of the evening; his mind was clearer in the dark. There was no anti-Semitism in Spes. Look how many of the colonists were Jews. He was going to count, but found that he didn’t have to; the number seventeen was ready in his mind. It seemed less somehow than he had thought. He ran through the names and came out with seventeen. Not as many as it might have been, out of eight hundred, but a lot better than some other groups. There had been no problem recruiting people of Asiatic ancestry, in fact it seemed the reverse, but the lack of African-ancestry colonists had caused long and bitter struggles of conscience over policy, back in the Union. But there had been no way around the fact that in a closed community of only eight hundred, every single person must be fit, not only genetically, but intellectually. And after the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training. There had been few black applicants, even, and almost none of them had passed the rigorous tests. They had been wonderful people, of course, but that wasn’t enough. Every adult on board had to be outstandingly competent in several areas of expertise. There was no time to train people who had, through no fault of their own, been disadvantaged from the start. It came down to what D.H. Maston, the “Father of Spes,” called the cold equations, from an old story he liked to tell. “No dead weight on board!” was the moral of the story. “Too many lives depend on every choice we make! If we could afford to be sentimental—if we could take the easy way—nobody would rejoice more sincerely than I. But we can have only one criterion: excellence. Physical and mental excellence in every respect. Any applicant who meets that criterion is in. Any one who doesn’t, is out.”

  So even in the Union days there had only been three blacks in the Society. The genius mathematician Madison Aless had tragically developed slow-rad symptoms, and after his suicide the Vezys, a brilliant young couple from England, had dropped out and gone home; a loss not only to ethnicity but to multinationality in Spes, for it left only a handful from countries other than the Union and the U.S.A. But, as Maston had pointed out, that meant nothing, because the concept of nationality meant nothing, while the concept of community meant everything.

  David Henry Maston had applied the cold equations to himself. Sixty-one when the Colony moved to California, he had stayed behind in the States. “By the time Spes is built,” he had said, “I’ll be seventy. A seventy-year-old man take up the place a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid could fill? Don’t make jokes!” Maston was still alive, down there. Now and then he came in on the Network from Indianapolis with some advice, always masterful, imperative, though sometimes, these days, a bit off the mark.

  But why was Ike lying here thinking about old Maston? His train of thought trailed off into the inco-herencies of advancing sleep. Just as he relaxed, a thrill of terror jolted through him stiffening every muscle for a moment—the old fear from far, far back, the fear of being helpless, mindless, the fear of sleep itself. Then that too was gone. Ike Rose was gone. A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.

  Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack were twelve. When Esther stopped them to ask questions they were partly shy with her, and partly rude, because even if she was sixteen, she was really gutwrenching-looking with those glass things she wore, and Timmy Kelly called her Kikey, and Timmy Kelly was so incredibly gorge. So Linda sort of looked away and acted like she didn’t hear her, but Treese was kind of flattered, actually. She laughed and said yeah they really had absolutely seen this gutwrenching woman and she was really like burned all over, shiny, even her clothes burned off except sort of a rag thing. “Her breasts were just hanging there and they were really weird, really long,” Treese said, “they were really gut, right? Hanging down. God!”

  “Did she have white eyes?”

  “You mean like Punky Fort said she saw? I do
n’t know. We weren’t all that close.”

  “It was her teeth were white,” Linda said, unable to let Treese do all the describing. “They were all white, like a skull would be, right, and like she had too many teeth.”

  “Like in those history vids,” Treese said, “you know, all those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right, Africa? That’s what she looked like. Like those famine people. Do you think there was some accident they didn’t tell us about? Maybe EVA? And she got like fried, and went crazy, and she’s hiding now.”

  They weren’t stupid, Treese and Linda, not at all—no doubt IQs over 150 like everybody else—but they’d been born in the Colony. They’d never lived outside.

  Esther had. She remembered. The Roses had joined when she was seven. She remembered all sorts of stuff about the city where they had lived before they joined, Philadelphia; stuff like cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, and her best friend in the building, Saviora, who had ten million little tiny short braids each one tied with a red thread and a blue bead. Her best friend in the building and in the Building Mothers’ School and in the world. Until she had to go live in the United States and then Bakersfield and be decontaminated, decontaminated of everything, the germs and viruses and funguses, the roaches and the radiation and the rain, the red threads and the blue beads and the bright eyes. “Hey I’ll see for you, ole blindy-eyes,” Saviora had said when Esther had the first operation and it didn’t help. “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK, in arithmetic?”

  It was weird how she could remember that, nearly ten years ago. She could hear Saviora’s voice, the way she sang the word “arithmetic,” with a fall and rise in it so it sounded like something foreign, incomprehensible, marvelous, blue and red….

  “Arith-metic,” she said aloud, going down BB Corridor, but she could not say it right.

  All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman. But that didn’t explain how she got into 2-C, or the O.R., or onto the Plaza in Florida, where a girl called Oona Chang and her little brother claimed to have seen her last night just after sun-out.

  Oh, shit, I just wish I could see, Esther Rose thought as she walked across the Common, which to her was a blue-green blur. What’s the use? That woman could be walking in front of me right now and I wouldn’t even know it, I’d think it was just somebody that belonged. Anyhow how could there be a stowaway? After a year and a half in space? Where’s she been till now? And there hasn’t been any accident. It’s just kids. Playing ghosts, trying to scare each other and getting scared. Getting scared of those old history vids, those black faces, grinning with famine, when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat.

  “The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters,” Esther Rose said aloud. She had pored over the Monuments of Western Art file in the library because even though she couldn’t see the world, or even Spes, she could see pictures if they were close enough. Engravings were the best, they didn’t go all to blobs of color when she enlarged them on the screen, but kept making sense, the strong black lines, the shadows and highlights that built up the forms. Goya, it was. The bat things coming out of the man’s head while he slept at a table full of books, and down below were the words that meant “The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters” in English, the only language she would ever know. Roaches, rain, Spanish, all washed away. Of course Spanish was in the AI. Everything was. You could learn Spanish if you wanted to. But what use could it possibly be, when the AI could translate it into English faster than you could read or think? What use would there be knowing some language that nobody spoke but you?

  When she got home she was going to ask Susan about going to live in the A-Ed dorm in Boulder. She would do it. Today. When she got home. She had to get out. The dorm couldn’t be worse than home. Their incredible family, Daddy and Mommy and Bubby and Sis, like something from the nineteens! The womb within the womb! And here’s Uterine Rose, Space Heroine, groping home across the plastic grass…. She got there and hissed the door open and, seeing her mother working on her little kitchen computer, faced her heroically and said, “Susan, I want to go live at the dorms. I just think it would be a lot better. Is that going to make Ike go nova?”

  The silence was long enough that she came closer to her mother and made out that she seemed to be crying.

  “Oh,” she said, “oh, I didn’t—”

  “It’s OK. It isn’t you, honey. It’s Eddie.”

  Her mother’s half brother was the only relative she had left. They kept in touch through the Network out-links. Not often, because Ike was so strongly against keeping up personal communication with people down below, and Susan didn’t like doing things she couldn’t tell him she was doing. But she had told Esther, and Esther had treasured her mother’s trust.

  “Is he sick?” she asked, feeling sick.

  “He died. Real fast. One of the RMVs. Bella sent word.”

  Susan spoke softly and quite naturally. Esther stood there a while, then went and touched her mother’s shoulder timidly. Susan turned to her, embraced her, holding on to her, and began to weep aloud and talk. “Oh, Esther, he was so good, he was so good, he was so good! We always stuck it out together, all the stepmothers and the girlfriends and the awful places we had to live, it was always OK because of Eddie, he made it OK. He was my family, Esther. He was my family!”

  Maybe the word did mean something.

  Her mother quieted down and let her go. “Do you have to not tell Ike?” Esther asked, while she made them some tea.

  Susan shook her head. “I don’t care if he knows I talked with Eddie, now. But Bella just put a letter into the Net. We didn’t talk.”

  Esther gave her her tea; she sipped it and sighed.

  “You want to live in the A-Ed dorms,” she said.

  Esther nodded, feeling guilty about talking about it, about deserting her mother. “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s a good idea. Try it out, anyhow.”

  “You do?… But will he, you know, get all… you know.”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “But, so?”

  “I guess I really want to.”

  “So, apply.”

  “Does he have to approve the application?”

  “No. You’re sixteen. Age of reason. Society Code says so.”

  “I don’t always feel so reasonable.”

  “You’ll do. A fair imitation.”

  “It’s when he gets so, you know, like he has to control everything or everything will be out of control, I get sort of out of control.”

  “I know. But he can handle this. He’ll be proud of you for going to A-Ed early. Just let him blow off a while, he’ll calm down.”

  Ike surprised them. He did not blow up or blow off. He met Esther’s demand calmly, “Sure,” he said. “After your eye transplant.”

  “After—?”

  “You don’t intend to start your adult life with a severe, curable handicap. That would be stupid, Esther. You want your independence. So you need physical independence. First get your eyes—then fly. You thought I’d try to hold you back? Daughter, I want to see you flying!”

  “But—”

  He waited.

  “Is she ready?” Susan asked. “Have the doctors said something I hadn’t heard?”

  “Thirty days of immune-system prep, and she can receive a double eye transplant. I talked to Dick after Health Board yesterday. She can go over and choose a pair tomorrow.”

  “Choose eyes?” Noah said. “Gutwrenching!”

  “What if I, what if I don’t want to,” Esther said.

  “Don’t want to? Don’t want to see?”

  She did not look at either of them. Her mother was silent.

  “You would be giving in to fear, which is natural, but unworthy of you. And so you would merely cheat yourself out of so many weeks or months of perfect vision.”

  “But it says I’m at the age of reason. So I can make my own choices.”

  “Of course you can
, and will. You’ll make the reasonable choice. I have confidence in you, daughter. Show me that it’s justified.”

  Immune-system prep was nearly as bad as decontamination. Some days she couldn’t pay attention to anything but the tubes and machines. Other days she felt human enough to get bored and be glad when Noah came to the Health Center to see her. “Hey,” he said, “did you hear about the Hag? All kinds of people over in Urban have seen her. It started with this baby getting excited, and then its mother saw her, and then a whole bunch of people did. She’s supposed to be real small and old and she’s sort of Asian, you know, with those eyes like Yukio and Fred have, but she’s all bent over and her legs are weird. And she goes around picking up stuff off the deck, like it was litter, only nothing’s there, and she puts it in this bag she has. And when they walk towards her she just goes out of sight. And she has this real gut mouth without any teeth in it.”

  “Is the burned woman still around?”

  “Well, some women in Florida were having some committee meeting and all of a sudden there were these other people sitting at the table and they were black. And they all looked at them and they just like went out of sight.”

  “Wow,” Esther said.

  “Dad got himself on this Emergency Committee with mostly psychologists, and they have it all worked out about mass hallucination and environmental deprivation and like that. He’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Yeah, he will.”

  “Hey Es.”

  “Hey No.”

  “Are they, I mean. Is it. Do they.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “First they take out the old ones. Then they put in the new ones. Then they do the wiring.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you really have to like, go and choose… ”

  “No. The meds pick out whatever’s most compatible genetically. They got some nice Jewish eyes for me.”

  “Honest?”