The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.

The pause this time lengthened out, stretched around them like a pool in which their last words floated, desultory, vague, fading. The room was full of dusk. Kostant stretched and sighed. Stefan felt peace come into him, as intangible and real as the coming of the darkness. They had talked, and got nowhere; it was not a last step; the next step would come in its time. But for a moment he was at peace with his brother, and with himself.

Someone can learn from this prose.

The Lord keeps the house and knows his servants. If he had sent this innocent and splendid man to live obscure on the plain of stone, it was part of his housekeeping, of the strange economy of the stone and the rose, the rivers that run and do not run dry, the tiger, the ocean, the maggot, and the not eternal stars.

“Clouds make you dizzy,” Martin said, “like looking up a flagpole.” They walked with faces upturned, seeing nothing but the motion of the wind. Rosana realised that though their feet were on the earth they themselves stuck up into the sky, it was the sky they were walking through, just as birds flew through it. She looked over at Martin walking through the sky.

On the platform in rain and steam they ran as others ran, heard whistles shriek and urgent Sanskrit blare from loudspeakers, and lurched exhausted into the first car.

He would get well, would go back a week late to the city, to the three bedsteads and five roommates, shoes on the floor and rust and hairs in the washbasin, classrooms, laboratories, after that employment as an inspector of sanitation on State farms in the north and northeast, a two-room flat in State housing on the outskirts of a town near the State foundries, a black-haired wife who taught the third grade from State-approved textbooks, one child, two legal abortions, and the hydrogen bomb.

THIS IS HISTORY. SOLDIERS STAND in a row before the reddish, almost windowless palace; their muskets are at the ready. Young men walk across the stones towards them, singing, Beyond this darkness is the light, O Liberty, of thine eternal day! The soldiers fire their guns. The young men live happily ever after.

It is a kind of equation, proved by experiments conducted over many years, perhaps not in a wholly scientific or objective spirit but nonetheless presenting a well-documented result confirmed by repetition: there are not enough people in this city to stop a tank. Even in much larger cities it has been authoritatively demonstrated as recently as last spring that there are not enough people to stop a tank.

The palace, whose few lighted windows shone dully above the crowd, was silent. No one came out, no one went in. It was the seat of government; it held the power. It was the powerhouse, the powder magazine, the bomb. Power had been compressed, jammed into those old reddish walls, packed and forced into them over years, over centuries, till if it exploded it would burst with horrible violence, hurling pointed shards of stone. And out here in the twilight in the open there was nothing but soft faces with shining eyes, soft little breasts and stomachs and thighs protected only by bits of cloth.

Her voice was light and plaintive as a bird’s calling in the woods, careless whether anybody heard its plaintiveness, careless of its plaintiveness.

“I don’t want to leave,” she murmured. “Nor I.” “Let’s send the books and clothes on back to town, and stay here without them. . . .” “Forever,” he said; but they could not. In the observance of season lies order, which was their realm.

It is interesting that he asked me to promise. That does not fit a paranoid pattern, you don’t ask for promises from those you can’t trust.

“I can’t win,” he said. “Why do I talk to you? You look so honest, damn you!” I walked away. It is shocking how a patient can hurt one.

Attended the Pos. Thinking session tonight and took notes. Dr. K. spoke on the dangers and falsehoods of liberalism.

“But you wouldn’t betray the nation to an outside enemy.” He said, “Well, if it was a choice between the nation and humanity, or the nation and a friend, I might. If you call that betrayal. I call it morality.” He is a liberal. It is exactly what Dr. Katin was talking about on Sunday.

There is no judge here to give him a life sentence. Only doctors to give death sentences.

I am thankful that I am an oak, and that though I may be wind-broken or uprooted, hewn or sawn, at least I cannot, under any circumstances, be squashed.

“There’ll be sweet rice to eat at the wedding,” Sita said; then she began to cry.

what is music but a little wrinkling of the air?

The thirty years began in pain; they passed in peace, contentment. But they did not end there. They ended where they began.

There’s nothing left for me to do but sing. I never could sing. But you play the instrument you have.”

The first of May’s cows I remember was Pearl, a big, handsome Holstein who gave fourteen or twenty-four or forty gallons or quarts of milk at a milking, whichever is right for a prize milker.

Unreliable narrator

I HAVE TOLD THIS TRUE story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, yet without taking it from her: rather to give it back to her, if I can do so.

Big Fish

and later one coyote down the mountain singing all alone.

Callback to previous story?

“IS THIS A LOONY BIN?” Gideon inquired with perfect clarity. “Mhm.” Anna knitted. “Thought wards.”

Why can’t he be allowed to grieve? Would it destroy the rest of us, his grief? It’s the people who don’t grieve who are destroying us, it seems to me.

but that castle I do not want to enter, brother mine; that is the castle I do not want to enter. It has a dark tower. Who do you think I am, Childe Roland?

“Nobody’s after you. They never were. It was a suicide. You showed me the clipping.” “I burned that,” she said. LOCAL MAN SHOOTS, KILLS DAUGHTER, SELF

And she went down the neatly raked path that winds between the cabins, among the dark old spruce trees, walking carefully, one foot in front of the other. No sudden movements.

Even here in Ether we have, that I know of, Baptists of course, Methodists, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic though no church in town, a Quaker, a lapsed Jew, a witch, the Hohovars, and the gurus or whatever that lot in the grange are.

“What an amazing kind of thing to do,” the girl said, “running a place like that.” Ella could have told her that they had never had a vacation themselves for a quarter of a century and that the hotel had worn her out and finally killed Bill and eaten up their lives for nothing, mortgaged and remortgaged and the payments from the bed and breakfast people not even enough to live on here, but because there was a break or a catch in the girl’s voice that sounded as if she saw the forest ridges and the Inn on its lawns above the river as Ella saw it, as the old, noble, beautiful, remote thing, she said only, “It was hard work,” but smiled a little as she said it.

The origins of fantastic literature are lost to sight, because it is worldwide, and if myth and legend are included in it, it long predates history and literacy. It’s permanent, it thrives, because it’s infinitely adaptable.

The various “genres” are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers, lazy critics, and the Sales Departments of publishers.

In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or at least not ignore them.

What’s the Darwinian profit in having equal numbers of the two genders but making them unequal in power? What if the situation were reversed? . . .

I don’t know anything about reality, but I know what I like.

It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children.

Her windsteed had crept out of some kind of box, with his eyes filmy and his fur rimed with ice, and at first when they had left the caves of the Gdemiar he would not fly. Now he seemed all right again, riding a smooth south wind through the bright sky toward Hallan.

When civilization became a matter of standing in lines, the British had kept queue, and so had replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the fair-minded.

The teacups bounced on the table with a plastic cackle, a litter of papers slid off a box, the skin of the dome swelled and sagged. Underfoot there was a huge noise, half sound, half shaking, a subsonic boom. Kaph sat unmoved. An earthquake does not frighten a man who died in an earthquake.

We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

She understood only that he was deeply upset and probably somewhat mad, and that she had been wrong to goad him. They were both old, both defeated, they had both lost their child. Why did she want to hurt him? She put her hand on his hand for a moment, in silence, before she picked up his tray.

Their gender imbalance has produced a society in which, as far as I can tell, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power. It’s obviously a stable arrangement.

It sounds like a miserable life. All they’re allowed to do after age eleven is compete at games and sports inside the castle, and compete in the fuckeries, after they’re fifteen or so, for money and number of fucks and so on. Nothing else. No options. No trades. No skills of making.

I asked Skodr why an intelligent man couldn’t at least come study in the college, and she told me that learning was very bad for men: it weakens a man’s sense of honor, makes his muscles flabby, and leaves him impotent. “ ‘What goes to the brain takes from the testicles,’ ” she said. “Men have to be sheltered from education for their own good.”

My sister Pado broached the possibility of an apprenticeship in the clayworks, and I leaped at the chance; but the managers of the Pottery, after long discussion, were unable to agree to accept men as employees. Their hormones would make male workers unreliable, and female workers would be uncomfortable, and so on.

I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.