Hugo awards the short st.., p.144
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 144
"But it's nothing to us!" Karl Vlieger suddenly raged out in a chthonic and phallic passion. "We can shatter it! We can shoot it to pieces like a clay pigeon! It cannot rush onto us like a slashing dog. Get down, world! Heel, you cur! Heel, I say!"
"We say to one world 'rise' and it rises, and to another one 'heel' *and it heels," Icarus sky-spoke in his dynamic serenity.
"Not yet," Joseph Alzarsi warned. "Tomorrow we will be total. Today we are not yet. Possibly we could shatter the world like a clay pigeon if we wished, but we would not be lords of it if we had to shatter it."
"We could always make another world," said Welkin reasonably.
"Certainly, but this one is our testing. We will go to it when it is crouched down. We cannot allow it to come ravening to us. Hold! Hold there, we order you!"
And the uprushing world halted, cowed.
"We go down," said Joseph. "We will let it come up only when it is properly broken."
("And they inclined the heavens and came down.")
Once more, three of them pulled the rings. And the chutes unpeeled, flowered and jerked. They had been like a sheaf together in their moment; but now, coming to earth, they were suddenly scattered out over five hundred yards.
"Welkin, you didn't have your chute at all today!" Icarus gaped with some awe when they had assembled again. "That is what was different about you."
"No, I guess I didn't have it. There was no reason to have it if I didn't need it. Really, there was never any reason for me to have used one at all ever."
"Ali, we were total today and didn't know it," Joseph ventured. "Tomorrow none of us will wear chutes. This is easier than I had believed."
Welkin went to the Sky-Seller to buy new Sky that night. Not finding him in the nearer shadows of the Rocks, she went down and down, drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness of the underground. She went through passages that were manmade, through passages that were natural, through passages that were unnatural. Some of these corridors, it is true, had once been built by men, but now they had reverted and become most unnatural deep-earth caverns. Welkin went down into the total blackness where there were certain small things that still mumbled out a faint white color; but it was the wrong color white, and the things were all of a wrong shape.
There was the dead white shape of Mycelium masses, the grotesqueness of Agaricus, the deformity of Deadly Amanita and of Morel. The gray milky Lactarius glowed like lightless lanterns in the dark; there was the blue-white of the Deceiving Clitoeybe and the yellow-white of the Caesar Agaric. There was the insane ghostwhite of the deadliest and queerest of them all, the Fly Amanita, and a mole was gathering this.
"Mole, bring Sky for the Thing Serene, for the Minions tall and the Airy Queen," Welkin jangled. She was still high on Sky, but it had begun to leave her a little and she had the veriest touch of the desolate sickness.
"Sky for the Queen of the buzzing drones, with her hollow heart ` and her hollow bones," the Sky-Seller intoned hollowly.
"And fresh, Oh I want it fresh, fresh Sky!" Welkin cried.
"With these creatures there is no such thing as fresh," the SkySeller told her. "You want it stale, Oh so stale! Ingrown and aged and with its own mold grown moldy."
"Which is it?" Welkin demanded. '.'What is the name of the one you gather it from?"
"The Fly Amanita."
"But isn't that simply a poisonous mushroom?"
"It has passed beyond that. It has sublimated. Its simple poison has had its second fermenting into narcotic."
"But it sounds so cheap that it be merely narcotic."
"Not merely narcotic. It is something very special in narcotic."
"No, no, not narcotic at all!" Welkin protested. "It is liberating, it is world-shattering. It is Height Absolute. It is motion and detachment itself. It is the ultimate. It is mastery."
"Why, then it is mastery, lady. It is the highest and lowest of all ' created things."
"No, no," Welkin protested again, "not created. It is not born, ` it is not made. I couldn't stand that. It is the highest of all uncreated things."
"Take it, take it," the Sky-Seller growled, "and be gone. Something begins to curl up inside me."
"I go!" Welkin said, "and I will be back many times for more."
"No, you will not be. Nobody ever comes back many times for Sky. You will be back never. Or one time. I think that you will be back one time."
They went up again the next morning, the last morning. But why should we say that it was the last morning? Because there would no longer be divisions or days for them. It would be one last eternal day for them now, and nothing could break it.
They went up in the plane that had once been named Shrike and was now named Eternal Eagle. The plane had repainted itself during the night with new name and new symbols, some of them not immediately understandable. The plane snuffled Sky into its manifolds, and grinned and roared. And the plane went up.
Oh! Jerusalem in the Sky! How it went up!
They were all certainly perfect now and would never need Sky again. They were Sky.
"How little the world is!" Welkin rang out. "The towns are like fly specks and the cities are like flies."
"It is wrong that so ignoble a creature as the Fly should have the exalted name," Icarus complained.
"I'll fix that," Welkin sang. "I give edict: That all the flies on earth be dead!" And all the flies on earth died in that instant.
"I wasn't sure you could do that," said Joseph Alzarsi. "The wrong is righted. Now we ourselves assume the noble name of Flies. There are no Flies but us!"
The five of them, including the pilot Ronald Kolibri, stepped chuteless out of the Eternal Eagle.
"Will you be all right?" Ronald asked the rollicking plane.
"Certainly," the plane said. "I believe I know where there are other Eternal Eagles. I will mate."
It was cloudless, or else they had developed the facility of seeing through clouds. Or perhaps it was that, the earth having become as small as a marble, the clouds around it were insignificant.
Pure light that had an everywhere source! (The sun also had become insignificant and didn't contribute much to the light.) Pure and intense motion that had no location reference. They weren't going anywhere with their intense motion (they already were everywhere, or at the super-charged center of everything).
Pure cold fever. Pure serenity. Impure hyper-space passion of Karl Vlieger, and then of all of them; but it was purely rampant at least. Stunning beauty in all things along with a towering cragginess that was just ugly enough to create an ecstasy.
Welkin Alauda was mythic with nenuphars in her hair. And it shall not be told what Joseph Alzarsi wore in his own hair. An . always-instant, a million or a billion years!
Not monotony, no! Presentation! Living sets! Scenery! The scenes were formed for the splinter of a moment; or they were formed forever. Whole worlds formed in a pregnant void: not spherical worlds merely, but dodecaspherical, and those much more intricate than that. Not merely seven colors to play with, but seven to the seventh and to the seventh again.
Stars vivid in the bright light. You who have seen stars only in darkness be silent! Asteroids that they ate like peanuts, for now they were all metamorphic giants. Galaxies like herds of rampaging elephants. Bridges so long that both ends of them receeded over the light-speed edges. Waterfalls, of a finer water, that . bounced off galaxy clusters as if they were boulders.
Through a certain ineptitude of handling, Welkin extinguished the old sun with one such leaping torrent.
"It does not matter," Icarus told her. "Either a million or a billion years had passed according to the time-scale of the bodies… and surely the sun had already come onto dim days. You can always make other suns."
Karl Vlieger was casting lightning bolts millions of parsecs long and making looping contact with clustered galaxies with them.
"Are you sure that we are not using up any time?" Welkin asked them with some apprehension.
"Oh, time still uses itself up, but we are safely out of the reach of it all," Joseph explained. "Time is only one very inefficient method of counting numbers. It is inefficient because it is limited in its numbers, and because the counter by such a system must die when he has come to the end of his series. That alone should weigh against it as a mathematical system; it really shouldn't be taught." "Then nothing can hurt us ever?" Welkin wanted to be reassured.
"No, nothing can come at us except inside time and we are outside it. Nothing can collide with us except in space and we disdain space. Stop it, Karl! As you do it that's buggery."
"I have a worm in my own tract and it gnaws at me a little," the pilot Ronald Kolibri said. "It's in my internal space and it's crunching along at a pretty good rate."
"No, no, that's impossible. Nothing can reach or hurt us," Joseph insisted.
"I have a worm of my own in a still more interior tract," said Icarus, "the tract that they never quite located in the head or the heart or the bowels. Maybe this tract always was outside space. Oh, my worm doesn't gnaw, but it stirs. Maybe I'm tired of being out of reach of everything."
"Where do these doubts rise from?" Joseph sounded querulous. "You hadn't them an instant ago, you hadn't them as recently as ten million years ago. How can you have them now when there isn't any now?"
"Well, as to that-" Icarus began-(and a million years went by) = `as to that I have a sort of cosmic curiosity about an object in my own past "(another million years went by)-"an object called world." '
"Well, satisfy your curiosity then," Karl Vlieger snapped. "Don't you even know how to make a world?"
"Certainly I know how, but will it be the same?"
"Yes, if you're good enough. It will be the same if you make it the same."
Icarus Riley made a world. He wasn't very good at it and it wasn't quite the same, but it did resemble the old world a little.
"I want to see if some things are still there," Welkin clamored. "Bring it closer." '
"It's unlikely your things are still there," Joseph said. "Remember that billions of years may have passed."
"The things will be there if I put them there," Icarus insisted
"And you cannot bring it closer since all distance is now infinite," Karl maintained.
"At least I can focus it better," Icarus insisted, and he did. The world appeared quite near.
"It remembers us like a puppy would," Welkin said. "See, it jumps up at us."
"It's more like a lion leaping for a treed hunter just out of reach," Icarus grudged. "But we are not treed."
"It can't ever reach us, and it wants to," Welkin piqued. "Let's reach down to it."
("And they inclined the heavens and went down.")
A most peculiar thing happened to Ronald Kolibri as he touched earth. He seemed to have a seizure. He went slack-faced, almost horror faced, and he would not answer the others.
"What is it, Ronald?" Welkin begged in kindred anguish. "Oh, what is it? Somebody help him!"
Then Ronald Kolibri did an even more peculiar thing. He began to fold up and break up from the bottom. Bones slowly splintered and pierced out of him and his entrails gushed out. He compressed. He shattered. He splashed. Can a man splash?
The same sort of seizure overtook Karl Vlieger: the identical slack face horror-face, the same folding up and breaking up from the bottom, the same hideous sequence.
And Joseph Alzarsi went into the same sundering state, baffled and breaking up.
"Icarus, what's happened to them?" Welkin 'screamed. "What is that slow loud booming?"
"They're dead. How could that be?" Icarus puzzled, trembling. "Death is in time, and we are not."
Icarus himself passed through time as he crashed earth, breaking up, spilling out more odiously than any of them.
And Welkin touched earth, crashed, then what? She heard her own slow loud booming as she hit.
(Another million years went by, or some weeks.)
A shaky old woman on crutches was going down the middle-of-the-night passages that are under the Rocks. She was too old a woman to be Welkin Alauda, but not too old for a Welkin who had lived millions of years outside of time.
She had not died. She was lighter than the others, and besides she had done it twice before unscathed. But that was before she had known fear.
Naturally they had told her that she would never walk again; and now most unnaturally she was walking with crutches. Drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness she went down in the total dark to where small things were glowing with the wrong color white and were all of the wrong shape. She wanted one thing only, and she would die without it.
"Sky for salving the broken Crone! Sky for the weal of my hollow bone!" she crackled in an old-woman voice. But it was only her own voice that echoed back to her.
Should a Sky-Seller live forever?
VASTER THAN EMPIRES AND MORE SLOW
Ursula K. Le Guin
Hegn is a small country, an island monarchy blessed with a marvelous climate and a vegetation so rich that lunch or dinner there consists of reaching up to a tree to pluck a succulent, sunwarmed, ripe, rare steakfruit, or sitting down under a llumbush and letting the buttery morsels drop onto one’s lap or straight into one’s mouth. And then for dessert there are the sorbice blossoms, tart, sweet, and crunchy.
Four or five centuries ago the Hegnish were evidently an enterprising, stirring lot, who built good roads, fine cities, noble country houses and palaces, all surrounded by literally delicious gardens. Then they entered a settling-down phase, and at present they simply live in their beautiful houses. They have hobbies, pursued with tranquil obsession. Some take up the cultivation and breeding of ever finer varieties of grapes. (The Hegnian grape is self-fermenting; a small cluster of them has the taste, scent, and effect of a split of Veuve Clicquot. Left longer on the vine, the grapes reach 80 or 90 proof, and the taste comes to resemble a good single malt whiskey.) Some raise pet gorkis, an amiable, short-legged domestic animal; others embroider pretty hangings for the churches; many take their pleasure in sports. They all enjoy social gatherings.
People dress nicely for these parties. They eat some grapes, dance a little, and talk. Conversation is desultory and, some would say, vapid. It concerns the kind and quality of the grapes, discussed with much technicality; the weather, which is usually settled fair, but can always be threatening, or have threatened, to rain; and sports, particularly the characteristically Hegnish game of sutpot, which requires a playing field of several acres and involves two teams, many rules, a large ball, several small holes in the ground, a movable fence, a short, flat bat, two vaulting poles, four umpires, and several days. No non-Hegnish person has ever been able to understand it. Hegnishmen discuss the last match played with the same grave deliberation and relentless attention to detail with which they played it. Other subjects of conversation are the behavior of pet gorkis and the decoration of the local church. Religion and politics are never discussed. It may be that they do not exist, having been reduced to a succession of purely formal events and observances, while their place is filled by the central element, the focus and foundation of Hegnish society, which is best described as the Degree of Consanguinity.
It is a small island, and nearly everybody is related. As it is a monarchy, or rather a congeries of monarchies, this means that almost everybody is or is related to a monarch–is a member of the Royal Family.
In earlier times this universality of aristocracy caused trouble and dissension. Rival claimants to the crown tried to eliminate each other; there was a long period of violence referred to as the Purification of the Peerage, a war called the Agnate War, and the brief, bloody Cross-Cousins’ Revolt. But all these family quarrels were settled when the genealogies of every lineage and individual were established and recorded in the great work of the reign of Eduber XII of Sparg, the Book of the Blood.
Now four hundred and eighty-eight years old, this book is, I may say without exaggeration, the centerpiece of every Hegnish household. Indeed it is the only book anybody ever reads. Most people know the sections dealing with their own family by heart. Publication of the annual Addition and Supplements to the Book of the Blood is awaited as the great event of the year. It furnishes the staple of conversation for months, as people discuss the sad extinction of the Levigian House with the death of old Prince Levigvig, the exciting possibility of an heir to the Swads arising from the eminently suitable marriage of Endol IV and the Duchess of Mabuber, the unexpected succession of Viscount Lagn to the crown of East Fob due to the untimely deaths of his great-uncle, his uncle, and his cousin all in the same year, or the re-legitimization (by decree of the Board of Editors-Royal) of the great-grandson of the Bastard of Egmorg.
There are eight hundred and seventeen kings in Hegn. Each has title to certain lands, or palaces, or at least parts of palaces; but actual rule or dominion over a region isn’t what makes a king a king. What matters is having the crown and wearing it on certain occasions, such as the coronation of another king, and having one’s lineage recorded unquestionably in the Book of the Blood, and edging the sod at the first game of the local sutpot season, and being present at the annual Blessing of the Fish, and knowing that one’s wife is the queen and one’s eldest son is the crown prince and one’s brother is the prince royal and one’s sister is the princess royal and all one’s relations and all their children are of the blood royal.
To maintain an aristocracy it is necessary that persons of exalted rank form intimate association only with others of their kind. Fortunately there are plenty of those. Just as the bloodline of a Thoroughbred horse on my planet can be tracked straight back to the Godolphin Arabian, every royal family of Hegn can trace its ancestry back to Rugland of Hegn-Glander, who ruled eight centuries ago. The horses don’t care, but their owners do, and so do the kings and the royal families. In this sense, Hegn may be seen as a vast stud farm.
There is an unspoken consensus that certain royal houses are slightly, as it were, more royal than others, because they descend directly from Rugland’s eldest son rather than one of his eight younger sons; but all the other royal houses have married into the central line often enough to establish an unshakable connection. Each house also has some unique, incomparable claim to distinction, such as descent from Alfign the Ax, the semi-legendary conqueror of North Hegn, or a collateral saint, or a family tree never sullied by marriage with a mere duke or duchess but exhibiting (on the ever-open page of the Book of the Blood in the palace library) a continuous and unadulterated flowering of true blue princes and processes.
