Hugo awards the short st.., p.165
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 165
Once, when we rested and ate, I told him how important it was that we continue pursuing the horizon. I even recited to him from Arthur's favorite poem. And Bracero seemed to respond to the lines as if he understood and even approved the sentiment.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are— One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
More than I ever thought I could lose has been taken from me, but Bracero's companionship and my own strength remain. These things abide. They make it possible to go on with free hearts, free foreheads, toward the westering sun of Cathadonia.
So be it, Arthur, so be it. . . .
And so they went on, day after day, seeing no one, encountering terrain that repeated itself over and over again—though the fact that they now and again came across a tree that bore different kinds of fruit, or blossoms, or nut capsules, convinced Maria Jill Ian that they were actually making progress.
At last Maria remembered that Cathadonia had an ocean, that eventually these endlessly recurring pools would send out tentacles, link arms, and spill into one another like countless telepathic beings sharing a single liquid mind.
Fischelson, Arthur, and she had made one complete orbit of the planet in their descentcraft before attempting to land, and, she remembered, they had seen the great ocean from the air. How had they fallen so short of their goal? Indeed, what force had so cruelly wrenched the descentcraft from them and sped it raging planet-ward?
Such things never happened.
Now all Maria Jill Ian had to live for was her march upon that ocean. The ocean. The Sea of Stagnation, Fischelson had suggested before something unprecedented wiped out the two men's lives and her own memory. But now, but now, it couldn't be far, that ocean.
Day by day, Bracero kept pace with her—loping, swimming, outdistancing her when he wished, sometimes lagging playfully behind.
Then he began to lag behind more often, and there was nothing playful in it. Frequently Maria had to call him, almost scold, in order to summon him on.
He came, but he came reluctantly. At each new pool he plunged in and made her wait while he swam five or six more turns than he had taken in the early days of their journeying.
But Maria Jill Ian always waited for him. To leave Bracero now would be to default on a trust. The two of them, after all, still belonged together. Despite his now chronic straggling, even Bracero seemed to recognize this.
One evening, as they prepared for sleep, Maria looked out over their pond and was struck by its size. It was several times larger than the one beside which their descentcraft had crashed. In fact, it had the dimensions of a small lake.
The sentinel tree that bordered this pool trailed its long leaves only in the shallows of the pool's margin, not out over the center.
Why hadn't she noticed before? All of the pools they had passed recently were at least of this size, the trees all as proportionately dwindled in stature as the one she leaned against now. Looking westward, she saw the silhouettes of far fewer trees etched into the lavender sky, than she had seen at twilight only a few days past. The change had occurred so gradually, so imperceptibly, that it was only now apparent to her.
"Bracero!" she called.
The lithe Cathadonian, who had long since learned his name, dropped gracefully from the tree and sat inches away from her.
"We're approaching the ocean, aren't we? Is that why you've been lagging? Does that have something to do with it?"
Bracero looked at her. His stare attempted both to answer her and to comprehend whatever it was compelling her toward the sea. Maria Jill Ian could read these things in the creature's face.
"Let me try to explain," she said. "I'm going toward your great ocean because Arthur, Nathan Fischelson, and I were trying to reach it when something happened to us. Second, I'm going there because all life on Earth, my own planet, arose in the seas. Do you understand, Bracero? That cellular memory is all I have left of home, a little planet in this spiral arm, ninety light-years distant.
"To me, your ocean represents ours.
"That must be how it is. And our oceans whisper to me across the light-years—-with the surf noises of Earth, the seething of our species's spawning place."
Maria Jill Ian put her hand to her face. What she had just spoken filled her with an indefinable fear of the cosmos—of its infinite capacity to awe, to stagger, to overwhelm.
"And third," she said finally, "your ocean draws me on because it lies there, to the west. . . ."
I'm afraid. This time is like the other, when I awoke and saw Arthur floating above the dawnlitpool.
But it isn't dawn, it's late afternoon, and in our slender willow Bracero hangs suspended with the glazed look and the catatonic rigidity of that last time. But this, this is the fifth day, and he hasn't eaten or drunk since this violent trance began. His body is incredibly hot.
I'm afraid because the planet seems to be in sympathy with Bracero's efforts, whatever they are.
Two days ago I deserted Bracero and began walking again, in hopes that he would come out of his trance and follow. Instead, when I reached the one semifirm passageway between the two lakes west of here, their surfaces were suddenly riven with roaring waterspouts that reared up taller than the sentinel willows on their banks. The waterspouts rained torrents on the isthmus where I hoped to pass.
I had to turn back. When I reached Bracero, he was swinging more violently than ever, rocking feverishly.
I'm afraid because even though he calmed a little after my departure-and-return, all of Cathadonia still seems a part of his effort.
Several times a day a waterspout forms on this lake and on all the lakes that I can see from here. These funnels snarl and pirouette, flashing light and color like giant prisms.
I think perhaps Bracero has enlisted, telepathically, the aid of all his people. From all their individual pools they strain with him in this new enterprise, working through Bracero as if he were the principal unit in their mind link.
I'm afraid because the skies have several times clouded over during the middle of the day, eclipsing Ogre's Heart and suffusing the world in indigo blackness.
Then the rains fall.
Then the clouds strip themselves away, as in time-lapse sequences, and shred themselves into thin wisps that let the glaring light of Ogre's Heart pour down again.
Even now I can feel the wind rising, the planet trembling. Bracero seems vexed to nightmare by his own rocking, metronomic ecstasy. I'm afraid, I'm afraid. . . .
On the sixth day the wind was of hurricane force, and Maria Jill Ian heard the voices of Cathadonia's great ocean calling to her
through the gale. She could scarcely hear herself think, but she heard these phantom voices as if they were siren-crooning from the inside of her head.
Astonishingly, Bracero clung with uncanny strength to his branch. Although his head and torso lifted and fell with every gust, it seemed that nothing could shake him loose.
Maria held on to the bole of their willow and kept her eyes closed. Was the world ending? At last she risked being blown to her death; she let go of the tree, pulled off her foil overtunic, stripped it into ragged pieces. With these, she lashed herself to the willow and waited for the storm to end, or for her life to go out of her.
All that day and all that night Cathadonia was riven by merciless tempests.
The great ocean to the west sang hauntingly. Maria Jill Ian had fever visions of gigantic creatures several times Bracero's size, but otherwise just like him, boiling the seas with their prodigious minds and feeding limitless power into the receptacle and conductor that Bracero had become.
A psychic umbilical from the seas fed the poor creature, kept him alive, channeled energy into his every brain cell.
And all through the sixth day and night the voices persisted.
The seventh day broke clear and cold. Ogre's Heart showed its wan, sickly crest on the eastern horizon, and the lake surfaces twinkled with muted light.
Maria unlashed herself and slid down the tree to the wet ground. She slept. She awoke to find Bracero in her lap, the first time he had permitted her to touch him—although he had often come achingly close. His body was rubbery and frail. His eyes were narrow and strange. Nothing about him seemed familiar. Still, she stroked his dry flesh and spoke to him a string of soothing nonsense words.
Together they waited.
At last, far away to the west, she saw a rounded shape rising over the horizon, looming up as if to intercept Ogre's Heart on its afternoon descent. The shape, a planet, cleared Cathadonia's edge and floated up into the sky like a brown and crustily wrinkled balloon.
It was Earth.
She knew at once it was Earth. She knew despite the fact that its atmosphere had been heated up, boiled off, and ripped away in the colossal psychokinetic furnace of Bracero's people's minds. It was a lifeless, battered shell that floated out there now, not an ocean upon it.
Maybe they had brought it to her in hopes that she would rest satisfied with the gift and leave off her assault on the great ocean. They had dislodged Earth from its orbit, hurled it into the continuum of probeships and nothingness, and drawn it through that surreal vacancy to Cathadonia.
Now, for the first time since the creation of its solar system, Cathadonia had a moon.
Bracero is dead. He brought me my planet out of love, I'm sure of it. How do I bear up under this guilt? Tomorrow I walk west again. . . .
Love or vengeance. Which of these prompted Bracero to carry out the will of his people? Maria Jill Ian felt sure it was love. But we, you and I, aware of more substantive factors than this poor Earth woman had at hand, you and I may reach a different conclusion.
The answer, of course, is implicit in the story. Perhaps I ought to stop. Imprudently, I choose to add a sort of epilogue. All stories have sequels, written or unwritten, and I don't want you going away from this one believing it solely a love story with a monstrously ironic conclusion. I'm interested in human as well as alien motivation, and you don't want to believe that all of humankind died as the result of an incomprehensible force, a force superior in kind and in quality to our own technological achievements.
Very well. It wasn't so.
Although Earth was still officially the homeworld of our species, men had not lived there in great numbers for several centuries. The entire planet had become a sanctuary, a preserve seeded back into wilderness, and perhaps only a thousand human beings lived there as wardens, keepers, physicians, gardeners, biologists, ecological experts. Men and women of goodwill.
All of them died, every one of them. Nearly twice as many human beings as (if you'll pardon the expression) squiddles who were slaughtered by the crewmen of the Golden.
It didn't take men long to discover what had happened to their world, the home of the primeval oceans in which we had spawned. The probeship Nobel returned from the Magellanic Clouds and found a double planet where there had once been only Cathadonia. They attempted radio contact with Fischelson and the lans. Nothing. Well away from this puzzling twin system they hovered, mulling over ludicrous stratagems. After a time, they left.
In other vessels men came back.
They bombarded Cathadonia with nukes of every variety, concentrating on "The Sea of Stagnation." Then they swept the atmosphere clean of radiation and permitted men to go down to the surface.
Of course, they never found Maria Jill Ian, nor the apocryphal log from which you have just read.
How could they? Cathadonia now had tides—colossal, remorseless tides—that swept back and forth across her watery surface with cruel, eroding regularity. To find Maria would have required a miracle. But a legend grew up around her and the two men aboard her descentcraft, the legend you have just read, and almost everyone believed this legend to be true.
Worldshapers came.
In a hundred years they turned our runaway Earth into a paradise; restored to it an atmosphere, mountains, streams, lakes, greenery, everything but oceans; stocked it with every manner of beautiful and awesome beast from the colony worlds. Cathadonia and Earth, the most breathtaking double planet in the universe. When visitors began coming, hotels were built amid the landscaped gardens of our erstwhile spawning place, and people rose early in the morning to watch Ogre's Heart turn the seas of Cathadonia— across three hundred thousand kilometers of space—into mother-of-pearl mirrors.
Eventually, on Cathadonia, the downed descentcraft was recovered.
Men speculated. The legend surrounding Fischelson and the lans took on a mystical quality.
This could not last.
Someone, some enterprising soul, developed the idea of retracing the route Maria Jill Ian had traversed during her abortive "odyssey" and of flying tourists over it in a skimmercraft piloted by a glib well-briefed guide. The idea caught on. Recorded voices now detailed every step of Maria and her Cathadonian sidekick.
" 'Men are hardy creatures,' " the recordings mimicked in their never-varying commentary. " 'Men are the ultimate vermin, Maria, as indefatigable as cockroaches.' "
Everyone aboard the skimmercrafts nodded sagely at the profundity of these observations.
No one ever asked for his money back.
Barefooted, trailing her spear, Theleh crosses the gorge bottom. A rag at the point of her spear, blue and tatter-tipped, whips about in the wind like a sliced iguabi tongue. There are fewer iguabi on Hand than there used to be, and Theleh drags her spear because she has no real expectation of a sighting. Neither does she wish to take herself terribly far from the cliffs, where, at least, water and food are available, and she may benefit from the comforting presence—if not the company—of her few remaining fellows.
Then, a hundred strides from her across the crazed red surface of the gorge, Theleh sees a vigorously growing effigy of Verlis. Stunned, she halts and shields her eyes.
Verlis the Maker has been dead nine turnings of Hond, three sheddings. A long time, it seems. His effigy makes a rustling sound and waves about dryly in the wind, a stalk of stubborn vegetation where vegetation ought not to be. Theleh drops her hand. She resumes walking, a hundred swift thoughtful strides. Then she stops in front of this crippled parody of her mentor and stares at its familiar mummy face. In the lovelorn desert wind the face nods at her blankly, wholly unaware of the cruelty of its imperfection.
THE DAY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
Ursula K. Le Guin
He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying some-:: thing to her. The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached out to catch hold of his hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could not stop. "Oh, Taviri," she said, "it's just on there!". The queer sweet smell of the white weeds was heavy as she went` on. There were thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes.' pits. She feared to fall . . . she stopped.
Sun, bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless.
She had forgotten to pull the blind last night. She turned her back. on the sun, but the right side wasn't comfortable. No use. Day.
She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over the edge of the bed,; and sat hunched in her nightdress looking down at her feet.
The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, we almost square where they touched each other, and bulged out' above in corns; the nails were discolored and shapeless. Between the knoblike ankle bones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin was the color of mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad, depressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the' words, and they all fit, like hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But" then, when she hadn't been hideous, had she sat around and-, stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body's not an: object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it's just you, yourself. Only when it's no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it- Is it in good shape? Will it do?: Will it last?
"Who cares?" said Laia fiercely, and stood up.
It made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her hand to the bed table, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought` of reaching out to Taviri, in the dream.
What had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if she had even touched his hand. She frowned, trying to force' memory. It had been so long since she had dreamed about Taviri; and now not even to remember what he had said!
It was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her nightdress, frowning, one hand on the bed table. How long was it since she had thought of him-let alone dreamed of him-even,. thought of him, as "Taviri"? How long since she had said his name?
Asieo said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before I met Asieo. Asieo's theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about him, talked about him too much no doubt, maundered, dragged him in. But as "Asieo," the last name, the public man. The private man was gone, utterly gone. There were so few left who had even known him. They had all used to be in jail. One laughed about it on those days, all the friends in all the jails. But they weren't even there, these days. They were in the prison cemeteries. Or in the common graves.
"Oh, oh my dear," Laia said out loud, and she sank down onto the bed again because she could not stand up under the remembrance of those first weeks in the Fort, in the cell, those first weeks of the nine years in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, those first weeks after they told her that Asieo had been killed in the fighting in Capitol Square and had been buried with the Fourteen Hundred in the lime-ditches behind Oring Gate. In the cell. Her hands fell into the old position on her lap, the left clenched and locked inside the grip of the right, the right thumb working back and forth a little pressing and rubbing on the knuckle of the left first finger. Hours, days, nights. She had thought of them all, each one, each one of the fourteen hundred, how they lay, how the quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning dark. Who touched him? How did the slender bones of the hand lie now? Hours, years.
