The Very Best of F & SF v1 (48 page)

As I write this,
it plays on my stereo. If anyone has a right to bitterness at thwarted dreams,
a black man in 1934 has that right. That such men can, in such conditions, make
this music opens a world of possibilities.

Through the
music speaks a truth about art that Wells does not understand, but that I hope
to: that art doesn’t have to deliver a message in order to say something
important. That art isn’t always a means to an end but sometimes an end in
itself. That art may not be able to change the world, but it can still change
the moment.

Through the
music speaks a truth about life that Kessel, sixteen years before my birth,
doesn’t understand, but that I hope to: that life constrained is not life
wasted. That despite unfulfilled dreams, peace is possible.

Listening, Wells
feels that peace steal over his soul. Kessel feels it too.

And so they
wait, poised, calm, before they move on into their respective futures, into our
own present. Into the world of limitation and loss. Into Buffalo.

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I’ve found that a lot of people seem to
hold in mind some ideal—almost a Platonic ideal—science fiction story.
Fortunately for us all, no two people can agree on what form this ideal story
should take. Some say it should feature a granite-jawed Hero with a blaster in
hand, others contend it needn’t have any characters at all except the universe
in all its glory, and thus the debate begins.

While I have no proof of it, I suspect
there are a lot of people who would (consciously or not) take one of Ursula Le
Guin’s brilliant, beautiful tales and say, “There—
that
is
what a science fiction story should be.”

An addition to “POVERTY: The Second
Report on Eleven-Soro” by Mobile Entselenne’temharyonoterregwis Leaf, by her
daughter, Serenity.

My mother, a field ethnologist, took the
difficulty of learning anything about the people of Eleven-Soro as a personal
challenge. The fact that she used her children to meet that challenge might be
seen as selfishness or as selflessness. Now that I have read her report I know
that she finally thought she had done wrong. Knowing what it cost her, I wish she
knew my gratitude to her for allowing me to grow up as a person.

Shortly after a
robot probe reported people of the Hainish Descent on the eleventh planet of
the Soro system, she joined the orbital crew as backup for the three First
Observers down on planet. She had spent four years in the tree-cities of nearby
Huthu. My brother In Joy Born was eight years old and I was five; she wanted a
year or two of ship duty so we could spend some time in a Hainish-style school.
My brother had enjoyed the rainforests of Huthu very much, but though he could
brachiate he could barely read, and we were all bright blue with skin-fungus.
While Borny learned to read and I learned to wear clothes and we all had
antifungus treatments, my mother became as intrigued by Eleven-Soro as the
Observers were frustrated by it.

All this is in
her report, but I will say it as I learned it from her, which helps me remember
and understand. The language had been recorded by the probe and the Observers
had spent a year learning it. The many dialectical variations excused their
accents and errors, and they reported that language was not a problem. Yet
there was a communication problem. The two men found themselves isolated, faced
with suspicion or hostility, unable to form any connection with the native men,
all of whom lived in solitary houses as hermits or in pairs. Finding
communities of adolescent males, they tried to make contact with them, but when
they entered the territory of such a group the boys either fled or rushed
desperately at them trying to kill them. The women, who lived in what they
called “dispersed villages,” drove them away with volleys of stones as soon as
they came anywhere near the houses. “I believe,” one of them reported, “that
the only community activity of the Sorovians is throwing rocks at men.”

Neither of them
succeeded in having a conversation of more than three exchanges with a man. One
of them mated with a woman who came by his camp; he reported that though she
made unmistakable and insistent advances, she seemed disturbed by his attempts
to converse, refused to answer his questions, and left him, he said, “as soon
as she got what she came for.”

The woman
Observer was allowed to settle in an unused house in a “village” (auntring) of
seven houses. She made excellent observations of daily life, insofar as she
could see any of it, and had several conversations with adult women and many
with children; but she found that she was never asked into another woman’s
house, nor expected to help or ask for help in any work. Conversation
concerning normal activities was unwelcome to the other women; the children,
her only informants, called her Aunt Crazy-Jabber. Her aberrant behavior caused
increasing distrust and dislike among the women, and they began to keep their
children away from her. She left. “There’s no way,” she told my mother, “for an
adult to learn anything. They don’t ask questions, they don’t answer questions.
Whatever they learn, they learn when they’re children.”

Aha! said my
mother to herself, looking at Borny and me. And she requested a family transfer
to Eleven-Soro with Observer status. The Stabiles interviewed her extensively
by ansible, and talked with Borny and even with me—I don’t remember it, but she
told me I told the Stabiles all about my new stockings—and agreed to her
request. The ship was to stay in close orbit, with the previous Observers in
the crew, and she was to keep radio contact with it, daily if possible.

I have a dim
memory of the tree-city, and of playing with what must have been a kitten or a
ghole-kit on the ship; but my first clear memories are of our house in the
auntring. It is half underground, half aboveground, with wattle-and-daub walls.
Mother and I are standing outside it in the warm sunshine. Between us is a big
mudpuddle, into which Borny pours water from a basket; then he runs off to the
creek to get more water. I muddle the mud with my hands, deliciously, till it
is thick and smooth. I pick up a big double handful and slap it onto the walls
where the sticks show through. Mother says, “That’s good! That’s right!” in our
new language, and I realize that this is work, and I am doing it. I am
repairing the house. I am making it right, doing it right. I am a competent
person.

I have never
doubted that, so long as I lived there.

We are inside
the house at night, and Borny is talking to the ship on the radio, because he
misses talking the old language, and anyway he is supposed to tell them stuff.
Mother is making a basket and swearing at the split reeds. I am singing a song
to drown out Borny so nobody in the auntring hears him talking funny, and
anyway I like singing. I learned this song this afternoon in Hyuru’s house. I
play every day with Hyuru. “Be aware, listen, listen, be aware,” I sing. When
Mother stops swearing she listens, and then she turns on the recorder. There is
a little fire still left from cooking dinner, which was lovely pigi-root, I
never get tired of pigi. It is dark and warm and smells of pigi and of burning
duhur, which is a strong, sacred smell to drive out magic and bad feelings, and
as I sing “Listen, be aware,” I get sleepier and sleepier and lean against
Mother, who is dark and warm and smells like Mother, strong and sacred, full of
good feelings.

Our daily life
in the auntring was repetitive. On the ship, later, I learned that people who
live in artificially complicated situations call such a life “simple.” I never
knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a
time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks
smooth, from orbit.

Certainly our
life in the auntring was easy, in the sense that our needs came easily to hand.
There was plenty of food to be gathered or grown and prepared and cooked,
plenty of temas to pick and rett and spin and weave for clothes
and
bedding, plenty of reeds to make baskets and thatch with; we children had other
children to play with, mothers to look after us, and a great deal to learn.
None of this is simple, though it’s all easy enough, when you know how to do
it, when you are aware of the details.

It was not easy
for my mother. It was hard for her, and complicated. She had to pretend she
knew the details while she was learning them, and had to think how to report
and explain this way of living to people in another place who didn’t understand
it. For Borny it was easy until it got hard because he was a boy. For me it was
all easy. I learned the work and played with the children and listened to the
mothers sing.

The First
Observer had been quite right: there was no way for a grown woman to learn how
to make her soul. Mother couldn’t go listen to another mother sing, it would
have been too strange. The aunts all knew she hadn’t been brought up well, and
some of them taught her a good deal without her realizing it. They had decided
her mother must have been irresponsible and had gone on scouting instead of
settling in an auntring, so that her daughter didn’t get educated properly.
That’s why even the most aloof of the aunts always let me listen with their
children, so that I could become an educated person. But of course they couldn’t
ask another adult into their houses. Borny and I had to tell her all the songs
and stories we learned, and then she would tell them to the radio, or we told
them to the radio while she listened to us. But she never got it right, not
really. How could she, trying to learn it after she’d grown up, and after she’d
always lived with magicians?

“Be aware!” she
would imitate my solemn and probably irritating imitation of the aunts and the
big girls. “Be aware! How many times a day do they say that? Be aware of
what?
They aren’t aware of
what the ruins are, their own history—they aren’t aware of each other! They don’t
even talk to each other! Be aware, indeed!”

When I told her
the stories of the Before Time that Aunt Sadne and Aunt Noyit told their
daughters and me, she often heard the wrong things in them. I told her about
the People, and she said, “Those are the ancestors of the people here now.” When
I said, “There aren’t any people here now,” she didn’t understand. “There are
persons here now,” I said, but she still didn’t understand.

Borny liked the
story about the Man Who Lived with Women, how he kept some women in a pen, the
way some persons keep rats in a pen for eating, and all of them got pregnant,
and they each had a hundred babies, and the babies grew up as horrible monsters
and ate the man and the mothers and each other.

Mother explained
to us that that was a parable of the human overpopulation of this planet
thousands of years ago. “No, it’s not,” I said, “it’s a moral story.”— “Well,
yes,” Mother said. “The moral is, don’t have too many babies.”—“No, it’s not,” I
said. “Who could have a hundred babies even if they wanted to? The man was a
sorcerer. He did magic. The women did it with him. So of course their children
were monsters.”

The key, of
course, is the word “tekell,” which translates so nicely into the Hainish word “magic,”
an art or power that violates natural law. It was hard for Mother to understand
that some persons truly consider most human relationships unnatural; that
marriage, for instance, or government, can be seen as an evil spell woven by
sorcerers. It is hard for her people to believe magic.

The ship kept
asking if we were all right, and every now and then a Stabile would hook up the
ansible to our radio and grill Mother and us. She always convinced them that
she wanted to stay, for despite her frustrations, she was doing the work the
First Observers had not been able to do, and Borny and I were happy as mudfish,
all those first years. I think Mother was happy too, once she got used to the
slow pace and the indirect way she had to learn things. She was lonely, missing
other grown-ups to talk to, and told us that she would have gone crazy without
us. If she missed sex she never showed it. I think, though, that her Report is
not very complete about sexual matters, perhaps because she was troubled by
them. I know that when we first lived in the auntring, two of the aunts, Hedimi
and Behyu, used to meet to make love, and Behyu courted my mother; but Mother
didn’t understand, because Behyu wouldn’t talk the way Mother wanted to talk.
She couldn’t understand having sex with a person whose house you wouldn’t
enter.

Once when I was
nine or so, and had been listening to some of the older girls, I asked her why
didn’t she go out scouting. “Aunt Sadne would look after us,” I said,
hopefully. I was tired of being the uneducated woman’s daughter. I wanted to
live in Aunt Sadne’s house and be just like the other children.

“Mothers don’t
scout,” she said, scornfully, like an aunt.

“Yes, they do,
sometimes,” I insisted. “They have to, or how could they have more than one
baby?”

“They go to
settled men near the auntring. Behyu went back to the Red Knob Hill Man when
she wanted a second child. Sadne goes and sees Downriver Lame Man when she
wants to have sex. They know the men around here. None of the mothers scout.”

I realized that
in this case she was right and I was wrong, but I stuck to my point. “Well, why
don’t you go see Downriver Lame Man? Don’t you ever want sex? Migi says she
wants it all the time.”

“Migi is
seventeen,” Mother said drily. “Mind your own nose.” She sounded exactly like
all the other mothers.

Men, during my
childhood, were a kind of uninteresting mystery to me. They turned up a lot in
the Before Time stories, and the singing-circle girls talked about them; but I
seldom saw any of them. Sometimes I’d glimpse one when I was foraging, but they
never came near the auntring. In summer the Downriver Lame Man would get
lonesome waiting for Aunt Sadne and would come lurking around, not very far
from the auntring—not in the bush or down by the river, of course, where he
might be mistaken for a rogue and stoned—but out in the open, on the hillsides,
where we could all see who he was. Hyuru and Didsu, Aunt Sadne’s daughters,
said she had had sex with him when she went out scouting the first time, and
always had sex with him and never tried any of the other men of the settlement.