A Fisherman of the Inland Sea includes two long, nicely done jokes and six short stories, all of interest for a study of Ursula K. Le Guin's teaching works. The stories show a good deal of continuity with and some change from Le Guin's earlier works. They are informed by feminism, but remind us that Le Guin "was a feminist in 1968," following her philosophy as well as she knew how, and with inevitable slips (LoN [1979]: 217). The stories continue to stress "Marriage" as a theme (LoN [1979]: 143), but allow the possibility that a legal marriage might be improved if one partner were out of it-and, more important, greatly expand the possibilities for true marriage.¹ Significantly, we see single-sex marriage and marriages that include homosexual bonding and homosexual sex; and we see the possibility for living in the world in communities where one might commit to marriage or not, where one might commit to a group marriage only partially, attaching oneself "to a brother or sister's marriage as aunt or uncle" (FIS 152). In these stories, Le Guin continues her critique from the 1960s of "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist-West" (LoH [1979]: 82; ch. 6), but Fisherman is less interested in the monotheist Judeo-Christian part than in a critique of Rationalism. Where Le Guin differs from some recent theorists, is in knowing that the Western Rationalist part long preceded René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton and "The Mechanical Universe." ² Two of the stories in Fisherman deal seriously with the postmodern idea, popular in much feminist theory, of the social construction of reality. Dealing explicitly with social construction of reality may be a change for Le Guin, but as change, it is mostly a change of foregrounding what had been background in at least one earlier story: the Old Ones of "Pathways of Desire" (1979) "are gradually making a real language" out of the "fake one" of the world they were born/dreamed-up into (CR 197), and with that language they are creating a culture, a new world among the Ndif. And Le Guin has enough of a background in non-monotheistic, nonrationalist, nonWestern approaches to the world, and in anthropology and recent science, to know, without much help from academic theorists, something of how human consciousness structures the world. What recent work has done quite usefully is stress the social construction of reality, perhaps helping to shift Le Guin's emphasis from The Dream (as in The Lathe of Heaven) to The Story.³

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Prelude 1: "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" (1991), "The Ascent of the North Face" (1983), "Sur" (CR 1982)

The two long jokes in Fisherman are "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" and "The Ascent of the North Face."

The point of view character in "First Contact" is Mrs. Jerry Debree when we first meet her (FIS 13), later, Annie Laurie Debree, the heroine of the great TV documentary shot by her husband, "Grong Crossing, South Australia: The First Contact with the Gorgonids" (20).⁴ Mrs. and Mr. Debree are Americans in Australia, and Mr. Jerry Debree is a very ugly American. He's loud, obnoxious, vulgar, arrogant, sexist. At the beginning of the story, Jerry is complaining about a local Corroboree specifically and putting down Australia more generally to two men at a bar who say their names are Bruce and Bruce (14). ⁵ Bruce-1 tells Jerry that for a real Corroboree he ought to travel to Grong Crossing. Annie notices that Bruce-2 didn't understand what Bruce-1 meant at first, "and that was when her woman's intuition woke up" that the Australians might be putting them on (14).

They are, of course, but Jerry buys an expensive camcorder and resolves "to shoot me some abos" and drives, and drives and refuses to even consider turning back (15), until he gets to what he thinks is Ayer's Rock but which Annie knows from the hotel flyer she read can't be Ayer's Rock; and they arrive at what Jerry thinks is a Corroboree (16). Jerry approaches and starts to record, despite Annie's advice first to ask permission (17) and second, that "They're not natives. They're Space Aliens. That's their saucer," which Annie knows from the Sun (19)-a supermarket tabloid.

The Alien glance turns Jerry to stone, or close enough: "He was just like stone, paralyzed" (19). Annie is very upset and wonders, "Oh, what should I do, what can I do?" and gets a little help from what will turn out to be "our friends from Outer Space," who put Jerry into the car. Annie says thanks and good-bye and drove back, eventually very fast: to get Jerry to a doctor, "of course, but also because she loved driving on long straight roads very fast . . . . Jerry never let her drive except in town." It turns out that "The paralysis was total and permanent, which would have been terrible, except that she could afford full-time, round-the-clock, first-class care for poor Jerry . . ." since it also turns out that the new Annie Laurie Debree is highly skillful on her own with cutting TV and video rights deals, and Jerry's little home video, after the aliens send ambassadors to Canberra and Reykjavik, is worth a fortune. More important to her, she is the first to make contact. "There was only one good shot of her on the film, and Jerry had been sort of shaking, and her highlighter was kind of streaked, but that was all right. She was the heroine" (21). And so ends the story.

As Le Guin says in her Introduction to these collected stories, it is a bad idea to try to explain a joke (9); still, I will try to contextualize this one. Concentrating on Jerry, it is a dumb ______ story, where one can fill in the blank with whatever group one wishes to have a laugh at the expense of. In context, Jerry is a man, an American, and a husband, so "Gorgonids" is, in part, a dumb American-male (husband) joke. Concentrating, as we should, on Annie, it is a wise-fool joke, and a joke in which a persecuted person, of a persecuted people (women generally or wives in particular) gets one up-big-time here-on the persecutor (e.g., see Rugoff 67-71) or any jokes of the weak overcoming the (apparently) strong.⁶ More specific to the main body of Le Guin's work, we have the discomfiting of someone who wants to push things, and Others, around, and the reward of someone who will go with the flow of a situation. More specifically feminist, "Gorgonids" presents what seems to be, and mostly is, a radically unliberated woman gaining her voice and becoming the heroine of what becomes her story.

"The Ascent of the North Face" is a beautiful send-up of the journal of the brave leader, Simon Interthwaite in this case, of, it seems, a WASPish mountain-climbing expedition from Calcutta: e.g., "2/28. Derek, Nigel, Colin, and I went up in blinding snow and wind to plot course and drive pigils [sic]. Visibility very poor. Nigel whined" (FIS 54).⁷ Interthwaite's journal ends on 3/9, with him "alone on the High Roof, his fellows waiting for him below, above him "the sharp Summit, and the Chimney rising sheer against the stars." After that, we get an editor's note (in italics) telling us that Interthwaite never returned from the High Roof Camp and his party abandoned the climb.

The key to the joke is that the ascent is of "the North Face of 2647 Lovejoy Street," a fictitious address of a house that could exist on a street that does (in a residential section in Portland, OR).

"Ascent of the North Face" is a silly story, hence "a gift . . . from the dark side of your soul" (FIS 9). Its significance, beyond self-justifying silliness, is mostly as comic reversal. Instead of very pukka-sahib British gentlemen of the Raj leaving Calcutta for Nepal or the Karakorum range to ascend Everest or K2 or something else highly mountainous, they end up in urban America and try to climb a house. It makes sense: the Himalayas are the "Roof of the World" to the people living there; if Western gentlemen have the right to barge in on the figurative house of the Nepalese and climb their mountains, why not gentlemen from Calcutta barging in on American householders by climbing an American house? "Ascent," from 1983, is an exercise in the mock heroic that nicely balances the true heroism, or nonheroism, in "Sur," from the previous year (collected in Compass Rose [not FIS]).

"Sur" is "A Summary Report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-1910." In the story nine women-nine again in a Le Guin story!-are the first humans (probably) to reach the South Pole. Although it might not have been a good idea to make the last part of the trip: they "were by then all a little crazy with exhaustion and the great altitude," in a place where people have no "business to be," and the Narrator wishes they "had not gone to the Pole" (CR 267-68). The Narrator has a point. In her own voice in "Heroes" (1986), Le Guin says that, with reservations, what she admires in Ernest{sic} Shackleton in his expedition to the South Pole "is that he turned back" (DEW 174).

The women's polar expedition in "Sur" is different from expeditions in men's history. The women select leaders in case of grave emergency, but never have an emergency, and so act in near-perfect anarchy (CR 257); they practice good housekeeping, "the art of the infinite" (260); the explorer Berta creates beautiful sculptures (262-3); and Teresa has a baby (269-70). The Narrator and her friends have their act together. They have their goal and "success crowned our efforts." They are world-class explorers, but also very responsible wives and mothers (256). And they claim no reward, not even fame. They do not proclaim their project, not even so much as to leave at the South Pole a single human footprint. The Narrator was and is glad they "had left no sign there, for some man longing to be the first might come some day, and find it, and know then what a fool he had been, and break his heart" (CR 268).

We will return to "Sur's" themes of heroism and the achievement of transcendent goals-and their gender inflections-with "The Kerastion," and the Churten Drive stories in Fisherman. First, though, I wish to look at another story outside Fisherman; as introduction to "Newton's Sleep," I want to look at "The Eye Altering."

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Prelude 2: "The Eye Altering" (1976, 1978, CR1982)

A textual note to begin with: I am using "The Eye Altering" in the revised version published in The Compass Rose (1982); this seems substantially identical with "The Eye Altering (II)" at the end of The Altered I (168-80) but different in a couple of important ways-primarily greater stress on exile and pattern-from the initial version of "The Eye Altering" in The Altered I (17-28). My references to "Eye Altering" will always be to the revision; the initial version I will refer to as "The Eye Altering [I]."

The setting for "Eye Altering" is the planet New Zion, and the point of view character is Miriam, the physician for one of the Twenty Settlements of humans. She was born on Earth a generation earlier and exiled with other Jews. There are more hints in "Eye Altering" than in "Eye Altering [I]" about exile, but these are only hints. As with the Terrans in Planet of Exile (1966), the characters are exiles on a planet where they had not evolved, and that is all we need to know for the premise of the story.

Miriam finds the planet ugly, and all the exiles have difficulty living there. The local sun (NSC 641) is more orange than yellow and makes the world look strange; and the settlers from Earth are allergic to the native protein and must take pills, called "metas," to eat local food. One of the sickest of Miriam's patients is Gennady Borisovich, a Zionborn young man who goes by the nickname Genya. Genya is a painter.

The story opens with Miriam looking out the window of her infirmary and thinking, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem-" (CR154), followed by a comment by the Narrator about exiles being able to forget pain, hatred, and fear, but not the beauties of one's home. The spare description by the Narrator is highly moving, especially if one knows the source of Miriam's quotation:

The story then moves to Genya, one of Miriam's figurative children, who is again in the infirmary, from what Miriam initially thinks is sun stroke or heatstroke. None of Miriam's own biological children had lived, and she is very concerned about Genya at all times: now a young man of twenty-four whose practicing of "moral genetics" has gotten between him and a desired marriage to Rachel, a healthy woman who loves him but will marry a man who can give her healthy children (158-59). Then Genya tells Miriam he is not taking his meta pills, and she fears for a moment he is allowing himself to die (CR 158). Genya is not giving up, however, and Miriam goes along with an experiment where he will avoid the metas for another two weeks, but under close observation at the infirmary. What did it matter? A quiet voice inside reminds Miriam, "Whatever you do or don't do, he will die. . . . . The sicklies can't adjust to this world. And neither can we, neither can we" (161). The "protein keys" on New Zion do not fit the Terran's metabolic "locks," so the Terrans have to change their metabolism with the metas; but that is just a least bad solution-they still do not fit into New Zion's pattern (162-63).⁸

Meanwhile, paper arrives from Little Tel Aviv, a rare and valuable item, and Genya starts painting (161-62). To Miriam's eye Genya's paintings are ugly. Only one adolescent really thinks highly of Genya's work. Young Moishe had asked "How do you do it, Genya, how do you make it so pretty?" Genya answered "Beauty's in the eye, Moishe" (164). Miriam had not liked Genya's painting when it has been "vague and half created." The painting he finishes during the time of the story, though, is "realistic, all too realistic. Hideously recognizable": a mudscape of their world (164). Still, Miriam suggests hanging it in the Living Room, a kind of commons area loved by the older people, a place with Earthlike lighting and the community's pictures of capital "H" Home. Genya agrees.

The climax of the story comes in the following scene when Genya's painting is found by the old folks of the community in the Living Room. It is beautiful and a mystery. How could an old painting of Earth have been around without their seeing it? Who could paint a new landscape of Earth? And paint it must be, create from experience; the old pilot of the exiles is outraged at the first suggestion that someone copied a photograph: "That is a painting, not a copy! That is a work of art, that was seen, seen with the eyes and the heart!" (166). We know that this is Genya's painting-but it is a painting of New Zion. Miriam solves the riddle.

"Miriam looked, and she saw. She saw what the light of NSC 641 had hidden from her, what the artificial Earth daylight of the room revealed to her. She saw what Genya saw: the beauty of the world." She explains to the other old-timers.

Not just Genya but "All the sicklies," maybe: here Miriam realizes her mistake and that of the settlers. The sicklies are "allergic to Earth proteins," so metas "just foul them up, they're a different pattern . . ." (167). And then a further insight that Genya and Rachel can marry. "They've got to marry, he should have kids. What about Rachel taking metas while she's pregnant, the foetus{sic}. I can work it out"; and shortly thereafter the story ends (168).

Comments:

Miriam is named, appropriately (if coincidentally?) for the sister of Moses and Aaron in the Book of Exodus, and, traditionally, the author of the oldest verse in the bible. When Pharaoh and his cavalry are drowned, Miriam "the prophetess . . . took a trimbel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with trimbels. And Miriam chanted for them: 'Sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously; / Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea" (Ex. 15.20-21, Tanakh). Le Guin's Miriam, thinking of Psalm 137, raises questions that are important for all strangers in strange lands: exiles, envoys, immigrants-but also people moving from oppression into emancipation in their own lands: familiar lands made strange by one's new status, by that kind of altered eye. What should one bring from Egypt into Canaan? From Werel to a postslavery, postcolonial Yeowe? How much of the old life should one bring into the new? The people of New Zion are appropriately Jewish as a people experienced at exile, but, from the view I am taking here, for this reason, too: Jews have been the first of the oppressed in the West to achieve emancipation, and Jewish experience can be useful for peoples of the African Diaspora, women, and colonized people generally.

Again, Le Guin's Miriam looks out of a window and laments the loss of Jerusalem. In her memory she is like the psalmist: "Even when you try to forget it[,] you remember that Jerusalem was golden" (CR 154). The psalmist, though ends with a curse:

The Miriam of Exodus, who did exalt at the death of Pharaoh and a cavalry unit, the Miriam of Exodus had she watched her own children being killed-such a Miriam would be quite capable of wishing payment in kind upon Babylon, and expressing so horrid a wish in excellent poetry. Le Guin's Miriam has let go of hatred and fear, we are told (CR 154), and anyone who knows the psalm should feel grateful.

What should we bring from Old Earth to New Zion? Our feuds we would do well to leave behind, but what should we take care to remember? The people of the Twenty Settlements, we're assured, "remembered the words civilisation, humanity. They remembered Jerusalem" (CR 157). And here, I think, we have another reason for Jews in Le Guin's new world, New Zion: Jews as one of the bearer peoples of "civilisation," one of the peoples of Jerusalem-Jerusalem the golden, the bloody, the fought over: along with Athens and Rome one of the great, complex, contradictory embodiments in the West of "the City as goal and dream" (Introd. CI, LoN [1979]: 147).

In "The Eye Altering," Le Guin strikes an exquisite balance between memory and necessary change, and favors a gentle transition from old to new, one not forced, one going with the Way of things, one mediated by art and the perception of beauty. What Miriam has left is the beauty of Old Earth; she must learn to see the potential for beauty in New Zion. The change-bringer is Genya, "Auntie Doctor's" kid, and also "A native. A feeble and unpromising native" (155), and with all the connotations of native, an appropriate cast-away stone to be the "the chief corner stone" of the new world building on New Zion (Psalm 118.22, quoted Matthew 21.42).

Genya's picture gets Miriam and maybe others to see her world, as Genly Ai finally sees Estraven in his epiphany on the Ice in Left Hand of Darkness (248; ch. 18), as Shevek has his "vision both clear and whole" in The Dispossessed (225; ch. 9). And this vision of the beauty of her very mundane world-the mudscape-correlates with Miriam's insight that Genya can live and reproduce, and that he and Rachel and the other sicklies can fit into the pattern of New Zion and produce a living human presence.

As in Planet of Exile, we get a classic comic-romance ending, with a new and better world coalescing around a fertile central couple, here, Genya and Rachel, bringing together two kinds of humans. But Planet of Exile was 1966, and "The Eye Altering" was a decade later. Rachel is the pretty one among the Mothers of Israel, the younger sister, the desirable one (Genesis 29. 16-18), and Rachel doesn't even appear in "The Eye Altering." In Planet of Exile, Rolery is a featured point-of-view character; in "The Eye Altering," the point of view goes to Miriam, the older woman, the mother-figure, not the wife. In Planet of Exile, the world is interesting and beautiful (after its fashion) to even an unaltered eye. In "The Altered Eye," one must come, as in Eye of the Heron and the later work, to see the beauty in mud.

"Newton's Sleep" (1991)

Readers and authors are collaborators in constructing the meaning of a text (to repeat an assumption of Coyote), and what those readers bring to the text is important: meanings are conditioned by contexts. Obviously, I want to put "Newton's Sleep" in the context of "The Eye Altering," but I'd like the reader to bring to "Newton's Sleep" at least five other works¹⁰ . One of the works Le Guin quotes in the title: William Blake's verses, "With happiness stretch'd across the hills" from his letter to Thomas Butts (Blake 816-19); the other three are Joanna Russ's "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" (1970), and Le Guin's Eye of the Heron, The Lathe of Heaven, and "Buffalo Gals, Won't Your Come Out Tonight."

Whether or not Le Guin knew or recalled "The Man Who Could Not See Devils," it is useful for a reader to put this work in dialog with "Newton's Sleep," or to see it as a kind of pre-existent mirror image. The protagonist-narrator of "The Man Who . . ." lives in a world in which people have a Dark-Side Blakean vision: as part of their normal perceptions, they can see devils, plus "Incubi, succubi, fiends, demons, werewolves, evil creatures of all sorts." They see angels as well, but they are puritanical people who don't see good in the world very often. The protagonist-narrator is the hero of the story. He is a mutant, perceptionally disadvantaged in terms of his world: he cannot see devils (etc.), and, perhaps, they cannot see him (Those Who Can 137 [and passim]). To make Russ's short story even shorter, the hero escapes his narrow, religiously zealous, rural, parochial homelife to a city, where he ends the story about to take up a new life, thinking about the strangeness of a world in which people concern themselves with magic and all and do not "investigate the really compelling questions," what we'd call empirical or scientific questions. The story closes with the hero drifting off to sleep.

I'd like to suggest here an image of a kind of Left-footed Hacky Sack: Blake to Russ to Le Guin (all good Leftists), on the subject of clerics, orthodoxy, reason, vision, and dirt. All oppose clerics and orthodoxy, so it can be a friendly game. Blake, at least in the "Holy, Holy, Holy" passage, doesn't have much use for experiment or "the outward Creation" or for "the Dirt upon my feet." Russ's hero sees a desacralized world, but he does see his world and cares for it enough to want to study it. His mind isn't on the dirt but on the sun and moon and abstract knowledge-but that, in his world, is progress. It is also, in my tentatively teleological view, progress beyond Blake in the passage I quote as a headnote. Blake is in a high Idealist mode in talking about the Vision of the Last Judgment, and Le Guin seems to prefer scientists who work in and with the world, and who are willing to get their hands dirty: if not Russ's proto-astronomer, then biologists who can perceive beauty in a rat running a maze, or work with pear trees to produce a better pear (ACH 273-75). In this context, Le Guin's job can be seen as incorporating a vision that can behold-really see-the wonder in dirt.

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For background for Isaac Rose of "Newton's Sleep," I would like to consider Dr. William Haber from Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and Lev Shults in The Eye of the Heron (1978), as prime examples, for both good and ill, of the results of the ideals of "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (LoH 82; ch. 6). Haber in The Lathe of Heaven (1971) is a benevolent man, but finally a villain who separates himself from the world, would control the world, and nearly destroys his world.¹² Lev in Eye of the Heron (1978) is, on the other hand, a traditional Leftist hero: one of the most admirable of political activists, descended, philosophically, from Russ's unnamed rationalist hero and from such martyrs as Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Mahatma Gandhi (EoH 51-52; ch. 4). Lev is an idealist, and, that far, a rationalist. Lev loves and is loved by, but is contrasted with, the female lead, Luz, who accepts risks but rejects abstract ideals and rejects sacrifice (115; ch. 8). Luz is right in the world of Eye; Lev is wrong, but if anyone « deserves » the Odonian principle, "No man earns punishment" it would be young Lev, getting himself murdered trying hard to do right (see TD 288; ch. 12).

Lev's problem is one of vision; he sees too clearly, too cleanly, too rationally-too much in terms of a theory, however good and true and beautiful that theory is. Both "Eye Altering" and "Buffalo Gals" insist on the importance of seeing the world, really seeing it, and the transformative power of such a vision.¹³ Both stories insist on the necessity of seeing with the eye(s) of a child (Myra in "Buffalo Gals") or with the eye of an artist native to his place: one who can still see the "splendor in the grass" and "glory in the flower"-and not hear in those phrases merely clichés or literary allusions.¹⁴ In "Eye Altering," Genya teaches Miriam and maybe others the beauty of their world, fitting them to live on and in their new world. Myra ends "Buffalo Gals" with a human eye and one of pine pitch. Looking just through her new, pine pitch eye, we may infer, she sees a yellow blur. We're told explicitly the other two options: looking with just her human eye "everything was clear and flat; if she used them both, things were blurry and yellowish, but deep" (BG 26; § ii).

Le Guin's fictional Jews and Leftists, I think, are people who can produce humanist intellectuals who "remembered the words civilisation, humanity. They remembered Jerusalem" (CR 157), including Jerusalem in the sense of the City as ideal, but not necessarily a home. And this is not a bad thing. The 1991 story "Newton's Sleep," though, is in a series of works from The Lathe of Heaven (1971) through "The New Atlantis" (1975) and "Buffalo Gals" (1987) showing the limitations and/or dangers of a single-eyed, nonspiritual view that sees little else except civilization, humanity, the City on the Hill and other ideals. Lev of Eye of the Heron (1978), is best of breed of Le Guin's heroes until Commander Dalzul of "Dancing to Ganam" (1993), but even as best of breed, in an evil world such a (male) hero brings death.¹⁵

In "Newton's Sleep," Le Guin's standard third-person limited narration, but with cinematic precision : with the camera usually focused, so to speak, on Isaac ("Ike") Rose, Susan, or Esther Rose: father, mother, and eldest child in the Rose family, keeping them center screen or showing shots from their point of view. The most general setting is our Earth and the surrounding space in the second quarter or so of the twenty-first century, with all the immediate action taking place in the Spes Colony: i.e., a colony established by the Special Earth Satellite Society, at a gravitational balance point between Earth and the Moon (the "L5" Lagrangian point is a likely spot).

The "back story" is suggested on the first page and filled in with some hints here and there in the rest of "Newton's Sleep." Basically, the political/environmental overplot is Le Guin's usual-and uncomfortably plausible-future history for the turn of the millennium and the first part of the twenty-first century of serious environmental degradation. In "Newton's Sleep," the major results of (hu)mankind's rape of Gaia are famine and plagues, mainly "the fungal plague" ([23]) "slow-rad" death (radiation sickness? [35]) and a series of "RMVs" (39), which I assume to be mutated retro-viruses-plus a breakdown in social order. The situation, and Isaac Rose's response to it, is illustrated, summarized, and perhaps epitomized, with the death of Ike's mother, recalled some four pages into the story. Ike's mother, Sarah Rose, will not go with the rest of the family to the Spes Colony and "Live in that awful little thing, that ball bearing going around in nothing"; she stays on Earth. "She died of RMV-3 less than three years later," and Ike did not attend the funeral. More important, he does not go to see her while his mother is dying. He was on the way to the Colony. Ike "had already been decontaminated; to leave Bakersfield Dome would mean going through decontamination again," an unpleasant process, "as well as exposing himself to infection by this newest and worst form of the rapidly mutating virus which had accounted so far for about two billion human deaths, more than the slowrad syndrome and almost as much as famine." After not attending the funeral, Ike loses contact with his sister on Earth, either because of technological problems or because she never forgives him. "It was an old ache now. They"-Ike and his wife Susan-"had chosen. They had sacrificed" (26): family, roots, life in the world. Sacrifice is problematic in much of Le Guin's work, but the Roses are hardly to be blamed for their choice. The villains in "Newton's Sleep" are those who created the world in which sacrificing living on Earth for life on an artificial satellite is a relatively attractive option; i.e., among others, the villains are us, the generation(s) reading the story. Isaac and Susan Rose and their children had "been spared," Ike thinks, passed over to get to safety.¹⁶

The agent of their salvation is the SPES society and David Henry Maston, "the 'Father of Spes,'" and a relatively admirable fan of Tom Godwin's 1954 story (and strongly 1950s story), "The Cold Equations."¹⁷ "Cold Equations" is a kind of lifeboat story: an emergency rescue ship with limited fuel is the setting; the rescue ship's pilot finds a stowaway whose added mass means that his ship has insufficient fuel to complete the mission, meaning the deaths of those he is to rescue, himself, and the stowaway. Regulations call for him to «space» the stowaway immediately; but the stowaway is a "girl"-young woman, actually-and the plot moves toward the acceptance by all involved of "the cold equations," where the woman dies willingly. Maston gives the moral of "The Cold Equations" story as "No dead weight on board!" which is probably not what Godwin intended. That Maston so oversimplifies a somewhat complex story says much for the limits of his critical abilities as a reader of literature. That Le Guin has him find this moral says much for her abilities not only as crafter of elegant stories but also as a literary critic. Some crucial "cold equations" that Godwin skips over in a few words are commercial equations, from human corporate culture, not The Laws of Nature; and "No dead weight on board!" is indeed a central implicit moral to Godwin's story.¹⁸ Anyway, for Maston, "no dead weight" means multiple "excellence" for all on board, even if that meant, by the Colony's criteria for excellence, "the lack of African-ancestry colonists." On the other hand, in judging Maston, Le Guin allows that he is consistent enough to apply "the cold equations to himself" and rejects the "sentimental" gesture that would have him aboard, an old man taking up a place that could be filled by "a working scientist" or a young genius or, in a significant phrase, "a breeding woman." So Maston disappears from the story, except for a reference from the point of view of Ike Rose that Maston gives advice from Indianapolis that is "always masterful, imperative, though sometimes, these days, a bit off the mark" (35-36). Maston cannot follow, but he has pointed his people to safety.

Safety is the Colony, and it is important for readers to know that Le Guin did not need to make up men like D. H. Maston nor SPES. As a refuge in a dying world, SPES is a literalization of the lifeboat metaphor in Garrett Hardin's conceit of "Lifeboat Ethics" (1975 f.): the idea that, in an overpopulated, overexploited world, those who have food and other resources should hoard them in their metaphorical overcrowded lifeboat-play the folklore role of Holdfast-fighting off those who might force their way on or try to get the well-off to share.¹⁹ And imagining space habitats for humans has been a fictional exercise since at least Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe" (1941)-and for perhaps a decade before "Newton's Sleep," planning real human habitats for Lagrangian points, primarily L5, had become a very earnest exercise.²⁰

The space Colony and the idea of literally transcending the world to get to safety will be very important for the thematic significance of "Newton's Sleep."

*

The plot of "Newton's Sleep" is rich in incident, and therein lies a lesson for authors of SF: If you want "'thick' description" (FIS 88), in a literary sense, people your stories with families; there will be a lot going on in families, especially if those families are both enmeshed in the politics of their world and conscious actors in or observers of those politics. The plot begins in the monitor center of the Colony, with Ike and two of his three children (Esther, fifteen, and Noah, eleven [the youngest is Jason]) watching the destruction of the Bakersfield Dome, the departure port for the Colony, by the "hordes" of one Ramirez. "A hairbreadth escape," is Noah's response, setting up the motif of escapes and alerting us to literary allusions: Noah reads a lot, we're told, and "discovered each literary cliché for himself and used it with solemn pleasure." The monitors occasion a paragraph on sight: Esther has vision problems that, for now, can only be corrected by eyeglasses, "like some slum kid," but in the zero-pollution environment of the Colony, she might lose her allergy problems and be able to accept eye transplants and get 20/20 vision (and maybe blue eyes). We learn Ike's motive for wanting his family to watch the latest horror on Earth's surface: "Some of the women and children on Spes were inclined to be sentimental, 'homesick'" and Ike wants them to see "what earth was and why they left it" (FIS 24).²¹

During this scene in "Newton's Sleep," or at about that time, Esther asks why it was that "everybody" is not off Earth and on Spes. Her mother answers "Money," and her father gives a speech about how few people are willing to trust reason, plan, and wait years. "How many people can stick to a straight course in a disintegrating world?" And, of course, it is reason that, compass-like, keeps them going straight (25). Ike Rose is very much a straight-thinker: into linear thought and planning and proud of it, a "hard-facts" man like Charles Dickens's utilitarian Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854), or, more charitably, like B. F. Skinner's character Frazier, the key founder of Walden Two (Walden Two 167; ch. 20). All in all, sensible Susan is more right than elitist, rationalist Ike; money, having it or lacking it, is the main reason people are or are not able to escape the decline of human culture on Earth.

The conversation in the monitor center leads to further significant information about Ike, including that he does not like the monitors and doesn't like to "look down," seeing the view of Earth as "a tie, an umbilicus."²² He wants to "start fresh. Absolutely clean and clear" (27). This bit of exposition leads in turn to our learning that Ike leads the Environmental Design group for "the second Spes ship," and that a colleague, Al Levaitis, suggested that there be no landscapes: no illusions, no dishonesty, form strictly following function in what I'll call good Modernist, Bauhaus fashion (27-28). Ike would like that, he thinks: "It would-simplify"; Susan is less sure, fearing "oversimplifying." Right after the discussion of spacecraft interior design, Ike says that the worst thing about Earth was weather, and states his happiness at getting "free of that stupid, impossible unpredictability" (28). Weather systems are literally chaotic, and Ike cannot stand such unmanageable disorder. Ike stops looking at the monitor to look over the illusion of New England in his family's part of the Colony, "and saw that true shelter that lay behind it, holding them safe, safe and free, in haven{sic}. The truth shall make you free, he thought," and he puts his arm around his wife and says that. She hugs him back and says, "You're a dear"-which Ike sees as "reducing the great statement to the merely personal," which still "rather pleases him" (29).

The next incident is a school curriculum meeting attended by Ike, Susan, and Esther. The direct issue of discussion is whether or not to continue teaching geology. Ike recognizes that the « real » issue wasn't geology in the curriculum, but the clout of three men on the Education Committee. "The discourse concerned power, and the teachers didn't understand it; few women did." Ike sees what is going on, but goes with the flow of the meeting, not confronting the men on their play for trivial power. In this untroubled acceptance of a power struggle as part of "the politics of reality" (quoting TD 164), Ike makes a familiar mistake, and we should not be too surprised when Ike has an unpleasant surprise: Mo Orenstein went "off into a story of how his chemistry class had learned to identify a whole series of reactions by cooking a pebble, which he had brought from Mount Sinai as a souvenir and as a lab specimen" and John Kelly interrupts abruptly with "All right! The subject's geology, not ethnicity!" (30). Ike understands ape-descended males jostling for status in a space cave, but John Kelly's interruption he does not understand. He mentions to Esther that Orenstein "seems to get under John Kelly's hide," to which Esther replies "Oh, shit, Daddy," and when Ike tries to get her to explain what she means, she just repeats "Oh, shit, Daddy!" Finally Susan explains to him that Timmy Kelly, the son of John and Pat Kelly , calls Ike "Kike Rose" and calls Esther "Kikey Rose," to which Ike replies "Oh-shit." And Susan says, "Exactly" (30-31). Mo Orenstein and his story annoy John Kelly because John Kelly is an antiJewish bigot.

Ike thinks people may have to put up with bigotry on Earth but not among the intellectual elite in the Spes Colony. Susan tells him something he has missed: "Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people," into "Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century!" She is not complaining; she chose safety, "But you pay for safety." Ike doesn't understand her "attitude" toward the Spes colonists and argues that "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" (32-33). Bigotry, however, had made it into a Colony that had kept out even viruses. Indeed, we learn later that antiJewish bigotry may have been around from the beginning: Ike can count only seventeen Jews among a Colony of 800 (for 2.1% [34]). Their discussion ends with Ike and Susan entering their unit, and, significantly, is followed by Noah's mentioning "this burned woman" seen by two girls (33). This sighting by children-with the eyes of children, reported by children-is either the inciting action or turning point in the overplot of the story (33-34).

In terms of the Rose family, the major incident in the plot is also associated with the burned woman. There is a white space, and the primary point of view changes to Esther and her asking two twelve-year old girls about what they claim to have seen. In a paragraph of great technical mastery, Le Guin's Narrator introduces Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack and gives us a glimpse through their eyes of Esther. They are "partly shy" in her presence, "partly rude": "because even if she was sixteen, she was really gutwrenching-looking with those glass things she wore"-Esther's glasses-"and Timmy Kelly called her Kikey, and Timmy Kelly was so incredibly gorge." These are not nice little girls; still, at least Treese is happy for the attention of an older girl, and the two tell her their story.²³ They have seen what appears to be a burned woman who looks like a famine victim from what they think might have been Africa. The girls have a fairly implausible guess about the woman, and Esther rejects it, but allows that they aren't stupid-Colony IQ is high-but they've never lived outside the Colony (FIS 36-37). Esther had lived on Earth, and she remembers. Primarily she remembers Saviora, a Black girl who was Esther's best friend back in their apartment building in Philadelphia.²⁴ In a flashback, Esther remembers "cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts," but her strongest memory is of a lost friend. The memory of the City of (here) Sisterly Love and of Saviora allows Esther to conclude that "maybe this burned woman was a black woman" (37).

Esther doubts there could be a stowaway and thinks "It's just kids" playing ghost-story games, using images from old video records of the famines, a return of (repressed?) images of "black faces, grinning with famine, when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat." And then Esther pronounces a thematically significant line: "'The Sleep of Reason engenders monster,' Esther Rose said aloud," from an engraving she had seen, with difficulty, in the Colony's Monuments of Western Art file. "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"-except for the memories and skills in the AI (38), except for human memory.²⁵

And here Esther decides she has got to leave home and live in a dorm. "The dorm couldn't be worse than home. Their incredible family . . . The womb within the womb!" of the Colony. Esther gets home, faces her mother "heroically," and makes her announcement about the dorm-and is greeted by silence until she moves close enough to see that her mother is crying. The tears are not from Esther's announcement but from news of the death of Eddie, Susan Rose's half brother. Eddie and Susan had been close and "kept in touch." "He was my family," Susan tells Esther, and Esther thinks-or the Narrator just tells us-"Maybe the word," family, "did mean something" (39). Contrary to Esther's fears, her mother thinks it will be fine if she moves into the dorm, and Ike Rose agrees, but with a condition. With only the slightest bit of emotional blackmail, he tells her, "First get your eyes-then fly." Esther may not want the eye transplant, but Ike sees it as the choice dictated by reason, and he's sure his daughter will "make the reasonable choice" (40-41). In this beautiful little sketch Ike Rose is ever so reasonable and rational, but he will get his way on the important issue of the eye operation for Esther. Or on any other issue. If Esther wants a pleasant, nonconfrontational exit to the Colony dorms, she'll get the eye transplants. Ike tends to drive his daughter to rage: as Esther tells Susan, "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" (40).

As Esther is prepared for the operation-a time-consuming and painful process-more and more people see "the Hag," an Asian-looking woman supplementing or supplanting the burned woman (41). The operation is not successful, and correlating with this failure is what Ike sees as the "mass hysteria phenomena" of hag sightings, plus Susan's anger at the operation for Esther (43). Ike is heading for a low point.

Fairly soon, just about everyone in the Colony has seen strange people (43-44). "Newton's Sleep" seems to be literalizing the Freudian slogan of "the return of the repressed": that which has been excluded from the culture and world of the Spes Colony is returning, starting with people, and among the people starting with the burned Black woman and then an Asian-looking Hag.²⁶ Ike insists that what is going on is "A group delusion," but this is denied by Larane Gutierrez, a shop assistant, who tells him that "nobody is hysterical. These people are here. * * * The people from earth." Ike sees and hears her as "shrill aggressive. At any disagreement, Ike thought, she always got strident. 'These people are here, Ike. And there's more of them all the time,'" a thought Rod Bond agrees with. Ike responds to Larane with the challenge, "And whatever you see is real, of course, even if I don't see it?" She responds, "I don't know what you see . . . . I don't know what's real. I know that they're here." She adds that the people she saw yesterday "looked like they were from some really primitive culture, they had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful, the people I mean. Well fed and very alert-looking, watchful. I had the feeling for the first time they might be seeing us . . ." (FIS 45).

This is not the world of "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" (1970), and the perception-impaired rationalist in this story turns out to be a sexist and an exponent of scientific original sin: the denial of data (46). Soon, Noah Rose is watching goldfish come out of the tap at the washstand, and Helena, the woman moving into leadership of the Emergency Committee for the Colony is suggesting "ghosts" for as good a way as any to refer to the Colony's "guests"-and suggests inviting them to join the regular Colonists at a Committee meeting.²⁷ Helena tells Ike the Colonists must learn "how to coexist with ghosts"; it is something they must do. "They are not going away. They are here, and what 'here' is is changing too." As Coyote told Myra, where the "first people" are is "here" (BG 32 § 2), and it looks like the "first people" are (re)taking SPES. Ike replies with the quotation, "Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad" (47) and exits the meeting to find people in the corridors running after bison. "Ike walked straight ahead, looking straight ahead" (48), providing his own « objective correlative» for his linear thinking and tunnel vision.

Soon, possibly the next morning, Susan tells Ike that there is "a vine growing by the front door." Ike notes, rationally, that vines "grow in dirt. Earth. There is no earth in Spes." Noah suggests, "It's going backwards," from people-"weird old women and cripples and things"-then « lower » animals, "and now plants and stuff," including whales in the Reservoirs{sic} and "horses on the Common." Ike didn't see horses, and he begins to cry (48). Susan stands silent and thinks for a while and then admits to Ike she's a little scared,

The Spes colonists have moved into Coyote's world, or Coyote's world has moved in on them. We civilized, rationalist, Cartesian humans are embedded in reality, too, and where we are they are. Ike still doesn't believe; he refuses to "Go with the flow" (49)-to « yield to the Dao, accept what is». His son plays tag football and gets dirt on his clothes; "but Ike walked on plastic grass through dustless, germless air." He walks through the trees-literally-straight to the hospital to see Esther. But Esther isn't there. She's gone with Saviora from Philadelphia to stay "up in the mountains for a while," possibly with her physical vision restored, possibly not (50).

The conclusion of the story has Ike walking along one of the rational ways of Spes, where "All corridors led to known places" and one could go anywhere and "never get lost and always end up safe where you started from. And you would never stumble . . . ." Ike stumbles on a rock. An impossible rock that could not be there. He calls out, "Esther, I can't see. Show me how to see!" And he gets no answer from Esther. Instead he hears his mother's voice asking him, "rather sharply"-"Isaac, dear, are you awake?" Ike does not continue straight forward but literally and symbolically turns and sees his mother "sitting beside Esther on an outcropping of granite beside the steep, dusty trail. Behind them, across a great dropping gulf of air, snow peaks shone in the high, clear light. Esther looked at him. Her eyes were clear also, but dark"-i.e., not blue in the Rose-family fashion? unseeing, physically?-and she said, 'Now we can go down'" (51). And here the story ends.

*

FURTHER COMMENTS:

The phrase "Newton's sleep" comes at the end of the verses William Blake appended to his letter to Thomas Butts of 22 Nov. 1802.²⁸ The poem deals with a very general personal problem: "Must the duties of life each other cross?" (line 43), with our obligation to one friend working against our obligations to another, our love of spouse possibly conflicting with love of sibling (lines 49-51). The problem is not resolved in the poem, but it is sandwiched between a vision and a re-vision, with prayer. The vision is of a world, "With happiness strech'd across the hills" (line 1), and with Angels, God, and Demons about-plus family ghosts (lines 10-12). The "I" of the poem sees his father, Brother Robert, and "Brother John the evil one," although "dead, they appear upon my path" (lines 14-17). The Speaker sees the everyday world, and a good deal more,

By the end of the poem, the Speaker has "a fourfold vision," but drops back to three, "And twofold," at least, "always. / May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton's sleep!" (lines 87-88).

I suggested earlier-very tentatively-a series from Blake to Russ to Le Guin, but the series can be extended backwards and forwards, and in places not so tentatively.

Blake and the Romantics more generally were reacting against the Enlightenment: René Descartes (1596-1650) and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and a mechanical universe that could be analyzed with elegant simplicity through Cartesian philosophy and analytic geometry and Newtonian calculus and physics.²⁹ From my point of view, starting my professional life as a student of the English Renaissance generally and Shakespeare most particularly, the philosophes and the Romantics embody a far older conflict between what seem like a perennial opposition of personality types. "Newton's Sleep" is Le Guin's contribution to this debate as a "Critical Romantic" (to repeat Roland Duerksen's instructive phrase). It is, as she says, "a cautionary tale" responding "to many stories and novels" she has "read over the years" that "consciously or not" seem to "depict people in spaceships and space stations as superior to those on earth" (Introd., FIS 10). This cautionary tale, is also a useful reminder to the "L5" enthusiasts that in some areas they are a whole lot less cutting edge than they may think. Spes colonists are, in their rationalist way, "very conservative, conventional people," very "Cartesian" in values and "totally mid-twentieth century!" (32).

"Newton's Sleep" features another set of Le Guin's exiles (FIS 11) and continues Le Guin's Critical-Romantic, anarchist, Daoist critique of rationalist utopias, a central theme in The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, and among the Terrans in The Word for World Is Forest: Dr. Haber, the Orgota, and Captain Davidson are all, after their fashion, utopians.³⁰ An advantage of "Newton's Sleep" over Lathe of Heaven and Word for World is that Ike Rose is both more normal and normative than Haber or Davidson. Indeed, Le Guin can see Ike as "a tragic character, an admirable overreacher" (Introd., FIS 11), not a loner with megalomania but a family man with more everyday faults. In Le Guin's formulation, he is "a worried, troubled man: a truly rational man who denies the existence of the irrational, which is to say, a true believer who can't see how and why the true belief isn't working" (Introd. 10-11). He wants safety (as does his wife), simplicity, neatness, and Reason. These are not bad things in themselves. The problems come in when he combines such desires and tastes with a desperate need for control. In this he is indeed in the tradition of Christopher Marlowe's arguably tragic overreachers, especially Doctor Faustus, but more in the tradition of Euripides's Pentheus in The Bacchae (after 406 BCE). In Euripides's play, the rationalist Pentheus, who rejects any data that go against his theories and prejudices and royal power-will not accept Dionysos as God of nature and is torn apart when Dionysos possesses him and drives him mad. "Whom the gods will destroy they first drive mad" is one classic « sentence » Le Guin has Ike quote (FIS 47). He might have done well to keep in mind another Latin sentence and the explicit lesson of The Bacchae: Those who will not follow nature or fortune are dragged along; rationalists who deny the power of the unconscious and of Nature themselves risk madness, or are mad, and may find themselves destroyed by that which they have denied.

As an inheritor of the "Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist" Western tradition (LoH 82; ch. 6), Ike Rose wants to transcend everyday immanence-and clutter, dirt, and complexity-and rationally look down at the world and manage a simplified world efficiently and neatly. Except he is in a space craft that literally does transcend the Earth, literalizing an important metaphor-and he doesn't like looking down. Ike will build his utopia in the clean, isolated, ecologically impoverished world of Spes. "To be whole is to be part; true journey is return" (TD 68; ch. 3), and Spes Colony is trying to be not a part: to leave and leave behind the ills of Earth. That which they would repress and leave-the people they have oppressed, the plants and soil they have tried to dominate-those return to Spes. If people are embedded in what really is, our choice is to be part humanly consciously, or to have our embeddedness forced upon us.

Ike Rose is not dragged to destruction but only bent and a little bruised. Miriam in "The Eye Altering" knows enough on her own to let her surrogate child Genya help her learn to see. Ike needs to be knocked around a bit before he will call for aid, almost at the end of the story, from his literal child Esther: "Esther, I can't see. Show me how to see!" Finally, at the very end of the story. we learn that even Ike Rose can return to being Isaac, son of Sarah Rose (26), and awake from Newton's sleep (51).³¹

* * *

"The Kerastion" (1990)

A kerastion, Le Guin tells us in her introduction to A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, is "a musical instrument that cannot be heard" (10, [69]). The story of "The Kerastion" is told in third-person, limited omniscience from the point of view of Chumo, a tanner in a culture whose technological level is low by contemporary American standards but whose level of technique and respect for craft is very high. The story begins almost at the very end of things with Chumo "waiting for the funeral procession of her bother, who had broken the law and betrayed his caste" and had then killed himself in shame ([69], 72). The moment of the shame of her wombbrother, Kwatewa, is also the moment of Chumo's greatest pride: "For that was her masterpiece that Dastuye the Musician held now and raised to his lips as he walked before the procession, guiding the new ghost to its body's grave" (71), Chumo's kerastion. The five pages of the story tells mostly how Chumo came to make the kerastion and how Kwatewa came so young to die.

Chumo's "proving piece had been the traditional one for Tanner women, a drumhead," in this case a drumhead for a dancing drum. Her "truebrothers," those of her caste, had joked with her, punning on "drumhead" and "maidenhead," trying to make her blush. She doesn't blush: "Tanners had no business blushing. They were outside shame." Again, though, not outside or beyond pride, and Chumo is very proud that her drumhead lasts long, and is proud again "when it split and gave itself to the Mother" (70-71). Her masterpiece, the kerastion, she made in the only way such an instrument can be made: a leather flute, "and the leather is tanned human skin, and the skin is that of the wombmother or the foremother of the dead"; it is the skin of the "wombmother of Chumo and Kwatewa. . . . It was a privilege which only the most powerful, the most truly shameless of the Tanners took, to make a kerastion of the mother's skin" (71-72).

Chumo had been a good wombsister to Kwatewa, mostly by taking great joy in him. When he was "a little boy too young to have caste, too young to be polluted by the sacred," he had looked at the river and asked "Does it ever stop? Why can't it stop running, Chumo?" And soon after that he had decided to become a sculptor, making Chumo "only his wombsister. He would have true sibs, now," among the Sculptors. "He and she were of different castes. They would not touch again" ([69]-70).

Without a pause, the story skips forward ten years to Kwatewa's proving day. Chumo comes with most of the other people of her town "to see the sandsculpture he had made in the Great Plain Place where the Sculptors performed their art." The wind had not yet disturbed "the lovely curves of the classic form he had executed with such verve and sureness, the Body of Amakumo." The Sculptors' speaker had barely dedicated Kwatewa's piece when "a wind came out of the desert north, Amakumo's wind, the maker hungry for the made-Amakumo the Mother eating her body, eating herself. Even while they watched, the wind destroyed Kwatewa's sculpture. . . . Beauty had gone back to the Mother. That the sculpture had been destroyed so soon and so utterly was a great honor to the maker" (70).

It is an honor, though, Kwatewa would as soon do without. Seeking something forbidden within his culture, Kwatewa eventually breaks a kind of ultimate taboo.

And here the flashback ends and present-time picks up with a return to the funeral. The Musician had come abreast of her now. "His lips lay light on the leather mouthpiece, his fingers moved lightly as he played, and there was no sound at all." Le Guin told us we would not get to hear it: no stops on a kerastion, and the ends are sealed with bronze disks. In the last sentence of the story we learn that "Only Kwatewa in his woven grass shroud on the litter heard what song the Musician played for him, and knew whether it was a song of shame, or of grief, or of welcome" (73).

*

"The Kerastion" is a beautiful gem of a story, unique in itself and also clearly a Le Guin story. To start, it is an anthropological story: an ethnographic cameo showing a defining and epitomizing moment in a culture. The story earns its keeps in terms of 1990s debates about family values by reminding readers, or teaching them initially, that "family" gets defined in different cultures in different ways, and one's wombmates are not necessarily one's closest relatives. In the culture of "The Kerastion," one's true siblings are one's caste (professional) colleagues. Equally Le Guinian, "The Kerastion" deals with the Daoist theme of the world as a river, never stopping, with each life and each work of art a wave on the river (to combine two images from the Earthsea trilogy [and TD 44; ch. 2]).³³ Or the Hindu image of Shiva/Kali creating and destroying the worlds. Correlating with the river image, the story picks up the ideas from The Dispossessed of both "process is all" (TD 268; ch. 10) and "the deep connection between the aesthetic and the acquisitive" (TD 260, ch. 10; 118, ch. 5).

What I find most fascinating about this story, however, has to do with tone and point of view. In such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare works with an aspect intrinsic in his medium: the tension between the obviously dramatic point of view of drama versus our tendency to identify with some characters rather than others and see the plays, figuratively, from their points of view. This provides a kind of double vision, where we can see Romeo and Juliet as the gods of each other's idolatry and as two kids setting themselves up for disaster; or Herculean Antony with Isis-clothed Cleopatra-Egypt, the woman of "infinite variety"-and see two aging lovers and losing politicians. In "The Kerastion," a similar balance comes from our imaginatively getting inside a culture that gracefully and consciously lives on the Daoist river, where beauty arises out of the Mother, Lao Tzu's Being as the Mother of all individual things (Tao te Ching 1)-and where all things beautiful and useful must return to the Mother. Inside the culture of "The Kerastion," it is firmly and wisely believed that if a work of craft/art "be well done and the thing made be powerful, it belongs to the Mother. . . . . Beauty, the most sacred of all things, is hers; the body of the Mother is the most beautiful of all things. So all that is made in the likeness of the Mother is made in sand" (FIS 71).

So Chumo can exclaim to her dead brother, and then ask rhetorically, "To keep your work, to try to keep it for yourself, to take her body from her, Kwatewa! How could you, how could you, my brother?" And then Chumo even in her heart returns to silence and stands silent among the "trees sacred to her caste" and accepts the death of her brother. Imaginatively getting inside this culture, imaginatively immanent in it, we can accept the death of Kwatewa and the pride of Chumo. In this world it is well for a Tanner to flay off the skin of the arm of her mother's corpse, and it is wrong for Kwatewa to make statue out of rock (72). But from our necessarily transcendent, god-like, vision as readers, always and necessarily not of the world of the story-from there we can take other views, filling in "the silence" with some answers to Chumo's rhetorical question, "How could you, my brother?"

Looking in on the world of "The Kerastion," we could say with John Keats,

And we can add that, however transcendent Keats's things of beauty theoretically may be, mundane beauty is not "a joy forever" because sooner or later it will "Pass into nothingness," whatever "it" might be. Looking in on the world of "Kerastion" we may fill in Chumo's silence with a good deal of sympathy for a sculptor who would like to hold onto his work at least a little while. There is that "deep connection between the aesthetic and the acquisitive" because we would like to keep beauty around. Indeed, we can go further, I think, and fill in the possibility of a story in which Kwatewa is a culture changer, putting his stone sculptures out on the Great Plain Place to be shared with all who care to come out to see them as they slowly return to the Mother.³⁴

Indeed, the Mother will take us all back very soon and all we have made, so we can, looking in on the society of "The Kerastion" from our world, see no big deal if they allow a statue or two. Indeed, we can see the sandsculptures and their other works as sacrifices demanded of artists, and Kwatewa himself as a kind of sacrifice-in the canon of an author who strongly approves of taking risks, but not making sacrifices. But if the story had shown a change in culture that allowed Kwatewa to keep his stone sculptures, it would have been a change with an elitist source, coming from an Artist as Hero, and would be a change that would endanger what is a functioning, living, and admirable culture, risking moving down the slippery slope from artistic preservation to allowing acquisitiveness to (ultimately) capitalism. And so on.

We are not going to resolve this issue any more than we resolve the tensions in Antony and Cleopatra. To resolve the tensions would be to miss the point: the artistic power of the story lies in the balance, in the double and multiple vision. To just say « Good riddance!» to Kwatewa would be not only obscenely insensitive but esthetically dense. To look down on the culture of "The Kerastion" and condemn it for killing an artist is no better. Either way is to fall into "Single vision" and an esthetic variation on "Newton's sleep." In terms of Le Guin's canon, there is on the one side the communist-anarchist Anarresti in The Dispossessed (1974) and the Kesh in Always Coming Home (1985), both privileging theatre as their primary and highly appropriate art, where every theatrical performance is necessarily ephemeral-incapable of being possessed-"such stuff as dreams are made on." There are also the four women in "some kind of sacred space," in "A Man of the People" (1995); producing a sandpainting that is never seen whole and is necessarily ephemeral, except as it exists in the women's hearts (FWF 137-39). On the other side, there is that political radical and (arguably) cultural conservative Rakam in "A Woman's Liberation" (1995), who fears "postliterate information technology" far more than she has any faith in it and greatly values books in spite of the fact and because they preserve the past (FWF 197-200). On this side, too, we get Tolfink, an author whose one surviving work is preserved in Carlisle Cathedral in England: a line of runes Le Guin quotes in translation in "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" (1979): "Tolfink carved these runes in this stone." And Le Guin in this context strongly approves of Tolfink, who "bore witness at least to the existence of Tolfink, a human being unwilling to dissolve entirely into his surroundings" (DEW 29).³⁵

In "The Kerastion," we get this tension between acceptance of the transience of all human works, and of all humans, and our desire to resist-epitomized in little, and very beautifully, and in a story, "The Kerastion," eventually collected in a volume, Fisherman, in its initial edition printed on heavy paper, securely bound.

* * * *

"The Rock that Changed Things" (1992)

Le Guin classifies "The Rock that Changed Things" as a parable and notes that she doesn't "really much like parables" (FIS Introd. 10). I am going to classify "The Rock" as one of Le Guin's mâshâlim: a parable, indeed, plus fable and satire, but satire in the old sense of a verbal attack that can work directly in the world, « magically », to make the world a little less bad. "The Rock" is a mâshâl, like The Word for World Is Forest, and "The Rock's" hero, "the nurobl called Bu," is like Selver in Word for World: a legitimate culture hero, a bringer of true change.³⁶ But Selver's word, if not a sword, inspires arrow and knife and the massacre of Terrans; Bu is more like Le Guin's Odo in being a human(oid) woman and bringing her changes through words and other symbols, without explicit bloodshed. Anyway, all we see of the revolution Bu brings is, "dancing and singing across the terraces" and "the first rock" flying through a window (FIS 67). That rock through a window is going to be one of the rocks that changes things in the world of the story, but it is not the rock that changed things.

The rock that changed things is found by Bu "working one day with her crew on the rock pile of Obling College" in the first sentence of the story ([57]). In the world of "The Rock," obls have towns and quarries and "hunt the rock-coney" with ancient guns "for their meat feasts" while their nurobls-significantly, "Their nurobls" (my emphasis)-"gather and prepare stonecrop and lichen for ordinary food, and build the houses and the colleges, and keep them neat."³⁷ We get the story mostly from the point of view of Bu-this is the story of Bu and her people-so the story's setting is mostly the rock piles and arranged-rock terraces of Obling College, plus a couple scenes within the college ([57] and passim).

The social setup is slavery, apparently with community ownership and quite certainly with obls controlling nurobls-but with less sexism than in the slave cultures of Werel or Yeowe in Four Ways to Forgiveness, or on Terra. The head of Obling College is the Lady Rectoress (65), and she carries a gun and smokes a pipe just like all the professors, which may make her a "male-obl identified" female, or not: the Rectoress's psychology is a silence we are free to fill in as we wish. Among the slaves, female nurs work alongside males, so it is best I think to see them all as a colonized people: figuratively in the story Reason (the Professors) colonizing what they see as mostly bodies, workers merely. The nur gaze is not allowed to be cast upon obls of either gender, and rape is used to control nurs (FIS 58)-with just female nurs being raped or nurs of both sexes.³⁸

All the obls that we see are very professorial intellectuals, not only with their Hemingwayesque long-guns and stereotypical, if soapstone, pipes but also in their delight in "discussing history, natural history, philosophy, and metaphysics." And then, after deep thought, ". . . the wisest old obls enter the colleges and write down the best of what was thought and said"-an allusion to Matthew Arnold's definition of criticism as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."³⁹ Anyway, the wisest old obls select what is best and write it down in the Books of Record, which are then shelved in the college libraries. During the flood season in the spring, the obls "stay inside the colleges," where they "read the Books of Record, discuss and annotate, plan new designs for the terraces, eat meat feasts and smoke." And in an allusion to the feminist question of who served up all those feasts in Lord of the Rings and other heroic romances, we're told, "Their nurs cook and serve the feasts and keep the rooms of the colleges orderly"-and then lines on how nervous (intellectual, professorial) obls beat and rape nurs (58).

We learn that the rock terraces of Obling College are "notable for the perfect order and complex beauty of their pebble-patterns" and that great obls of old spent years in "designing the patterns and choosing the stone." So stones must be exactly the right size and shape to fit the obls' patterns, and Bu was looking for such a one "when she came upon the stone that changed things" (58). The stone itself wasn't some epic-impressive Terrenon stone, as in A Wizard of Earthsea, but a standard large oval serpentinite stone "a palm-and-a quarter wide and a palm-and-a-half long." What was special about this stone was that Bu was "struck by a quality . . . she had never noticed before: color" (58-59, 61). In the culture of the obls, a stone's color "is a matter of absolute indifference" (59), as is the grain and texture (63); what counts is the "arrangement by shape and size"-allowing René Descartes's ultimate attribute of bodies: extension, by which the obls design Euclidean "squares, oblongs, triangles, dodecahedrons, zigzags, and rectilinear designs of great and orderly beauty and significance" (62).⁴⁰ And these rectilinear designs are literally significant: signifying patterns "about obls and what obls think"-which may include nurs and blits (children), but only in terms of patterns about obls (64).

Bu is fascinated by her serpentinite stone, perhaps even obsessed with it. "'This stone is beautiful,'" she thinks. "She was not looking, as she should have been, at the whole design, but at the one stone . . . . 'This stone is significant. It means. It is a word.'" She puts the stone into the Dean's Design, and it fits exactly. But, standing back to study the pattern, Bu thought it scarcely seemed to be the Dean's Design at all. It was not that the new stone changed the design; it simply completed a pattern that Bu had never realized was there: a pattern of color, that had little or no relation to the shape-and-size arrangement of the Dean's Design" (59). Unlike the rectilinear designs of the obls, all designed by individuals, "The new stone completed a spiral of blue-green stones" that was mostly made (unconsciously) by Bu over the last few years but "had been begun by some other nur" (59-60).

The Dean happens to come along just then, and the Narrator assures us that he is "a kind old obl who had never raped Bu, though he had often patted her." Seeing her "crouching and hiding all her eyes," the Lord Dean condescends to answer Bu's question on the "verbal significance of this section of the true pattern" that she had just repaired.⁴¹ "This subsection of my design may be read, on the simplest level, as 'I place stones beautifully,' or 'I place stones in excellent order'"; it is, apparently, a metamosaic, but "There is an immanent high-plane postverbal significance, of course, as well as the Ineffable Arcana"-which Bu "needn't bother" her "little head with." The Dean dismisses as mere « nurish nonsense» the idea of meaning in color. That night, Bu dreams of the blue-green stone and, "In the dream the rock spoke" and the rocks around it also, but "Waking, Bu could not remember the words the stones had said" (60). Bu raises the issue with her fellow workers, and they tell her, orthodoxly, that colors can't mean, that "Colors aren't part of the patterns." She tells them to suppose for a moment that they are and "Just look." Since they are "used to silence and obedience" (and have not been schooled to mistrust empiricism and their senses), the nurs looked, and, across what they still see as "the real pattern," they see "another pattern. A different pattern." Bu suggests that "Maybe it makes an immanent pattern of ineffable significance." Ko, Bu's best friend and mate, tells her to "come off it," but she goes on and wonders if the blue-green rock could change the meaning of the Dean's design (FIS 61).

And at this point a wise, old nur, so excellent at maintaining patterns that the obls let him live even after he was maimed, enters the discussion to do some pattern criticism. For a first-order approximation reading, he suggests "It might say, 'The nur places stones,'" and others fill in that the nur would be Bu. Ko corrects them with "patterns aren't ever about nurs!" and Bu counters with "Maybe patterns made of colors are." Looking with all three of his eyes, Ko reads, "-'the nur places stones beautifully in uncontrollable loopingness . . . . foreshadowing the seen.'" Un suggests "The vision" but cannot figure out the last word. Bu is very excited, inferring that "the patterns of the colors . . . . aren't accidental. Not meaningless. All the time, we have been putting them here in patterns-not just ones the obls design and we execute, but other patterns-nur patterns-with new meanings." Amid the straight lines of the obls' designs they now see, "other designs, less complete, often merely sketched or hinted-circles, spirals, ovals, and complex curvilinear mazes and labyrinths of great and unpredictable beauty and significance. * * * Both patterns were there; did one cancel the other, or was each part of the other? It was difficult to see them both at once, but not impossible." Had the nurs done this all totally unconsciously "without even knowing we were doing it?" Un admits to having looked at colors, and so did Ko, plus "grain and texture." Un warns them to keep word of their works from the Professors: "They don't like patterns to change. . . . It makes them nervous"-and nervous Professors are dangerous to nurs (62-63).

Bu, however "was so excited and persuasive" about colors of stones "that other nurs of Obling began studying the color patterns, learning how to read their meanings." And the practice spreads. Soon, all sorts of nurs were finding "wild designs in colored stones, and surprising messages concerning obls, nurs, and blits" (64) Conservative nurs-"Many nurs," we're told-resist the trend. "If we start inventing new meanings, changing things, disturbing the patterns, where will it end?" It is unclear just how many of the nurs believe «Mr. Charlie treats us real good»-or, as we soon see, Ms. Charlie-but certainly not Bu; she "would hear none of that; she was full of her discovery.⁴² She no longer listened in silence. She spoke." Bu goes up to the Rectory Mosaic, wearing around her neck a turquoise that she calls her "selfstone." Up at the Mosaic, Bu crouches before the Rectoress and asks "Would the Lady Rectoress in her kindness answer a question I have?" The Lady Rectoress will not. Without a word to Bu, she turns to the nearest Professor and says, "This nur is insane; have it removed, please." We may assume Bu is removed. The next sentence tells us Bu was punished with ten days in jail, rape "by Students whenever they pleased, and then sent to the flagstone quarries for a hundred days." She returns to the nest after her sentence, pregnant from one of the rapes (proving, if we needed proof, that Nurobls and Obls are the same species). Her many friends and nestmates greet her, singing songs that they "had made out of the meanings of the colored patterns on the terraces." Ko comforts her that night, and tells her "that her blit would be his blit, and her nest his nest"-in an interesting variation on Ruth's promise to Naomi (Ruth 1.16-17). Bu does not give up her quest for the meaning of the stone (64-65).

Sneaking in through the kitchen, and with the help of serving-nurs, Bu gets to the private room of the Canon of Obling College, "a very old obl, renowned for his knowledge of metaphysical linguistics," and the sort of wise old man or animal that heroes often go to in penultimate actions in tales to get a secret meaning. Except we are in a satire here, more than a relatively innocent folktale, and the canon would have "reached for his gun" if he hadn't been so sleepy (65-66). Returning to more folkish motifs, Bu tells the Canon that nobody else has been able to answer the question she has for him: "Do you know if a blue-green stone in a pattern might be a word?" The Canon knows. It can not be a word nowadays because ". . . all verbal color-significance is long obsolete"; but once, long ago, "The hue of blue-green-such as in that stone you seem to be wearing as an ornament-might, in its adjectival form within a pattern, have indicated a quality of untrammeled volition. As a noun" it might have meant, "an absence of coercion; a lack of control; a condition of self-determination-" Rescuing the Canon from his syntax, Bu ask, "Freedom . . . . Does it mean freedom?" The Canon says it doesn't. "It did. But it does not. * * * Because the word is obsolete" (66)

Bu tells the Canon to look out the window at the terraces. "Look at the colors of the stones! Look at the patterns the nurs make, the designs we have made, the meanings we have written! Look for the freedom!" (67) Bu goes off, and, after a bit, the Canon looks out the window:

And with this question the story ends.

COMMENTS:

For the meaning of "this" at "The Rock's" end, I shall start with the revolutionary vision at the end of Jerry Farber's classic 1967 underground essay, "The Student As Nigger," which ends, "For students, as for black people, the hardest battle isn't with Mr. Charlie. It's with what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind" (100). Or, more positively, in Le Guin's formulation, ". . . revolution begins in the thinking mind" (TD 267; ch. 10). I.e., a necessary and, perhaps, nearly sufficient cause of revolution is getting oppressed people to think. Ordinarily, the colonized oppressed will greatly outnumber the oppressors, and the « grunts » in the armed forces will almost always come from the ranks of the oppressed (the children of the privileged will find better work, at least as officers over the grunts). The problem is how to get oppressed masses conscious enough to rebel before they have rebelled (see Orwell, 1984 61; I.7).

By the 1990s, one Leftist (anti)orthodoxy reformulated the problem in terms of who got to tell the stories crucial to peoples' cultures: who got to formulate what earlier in the century were called myths and ideologies, now themselves redescribed as "metanarratives" (Lyotard, Introd.). In "The Rock That Changed Things," the nurs are clearly the oppressed, literally spending their working lives telling the stories of the oppressors, the Professorial obls. When Bu comes to see their work with an "altered eye," and gets that vision generally accepted, the nurs see that they have been telling their own stories and that their stories include a word now obsolete but yet always (already) with us: "freedom." And when the word goes forth, the first steps toward freedom are taken. The rock that changed things is primarily the rock that gives the word, "freedom," but also, if far less so, the rock that goes through the window to start making the word into living revolution.

Like Selver in The Word for World Is Forest, Bu is one of Le Guin's answers to the difficult question of how you can get true anarchistic change: you get true change by getting from among the people themselves a "translator"; i.e., you need a person to tell the people what they already know, to bring over into consciousness and action what is already there in the Dreamtime, the collective unconscious, the prehistory of freedom, a potential within the Dao-however we formulate it.

Beyond this beginning of revolution, however, in "The Rock," "The rest is silence" (Hamlet 5.2.347). And this is well. In The Dispossessed, in the high-technology civilization of Urras, the bearer of change is Shevek, and he gives a pre-Revolutionary crowd the true message, "You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere"-followed by the clatter of helicopters and machine guns as the Ioti State moves to crush any movement Shevek might have helped to start (242; ch. 9).

We see no automatic weapons among the obls in "The Rock That Changed Things," so the revolution there may have a chance. But the towns of the obls are make-believe, and it may be more important what "The Rock" is doing for its readers' heads.

First, there is, for the synecdoche for the oppressors, Obling College, with Rectoress, Canon, Professors, Students-an armed and pipe-smoking faculty, and nurobl-raping Students. As one who did not invent the US system of higher education but partly sold out to it, I will resent the implications of Obling College, but I won't flat-out deny them. If one sees the Enlightenment and Modernism, Rationalism and rectilinear forms as major tools of the oppressors in our world, then universities and colleges are more part of the (Modern/Modernist) problem than part of the solution. If one sees the University as, ideally, a small-scale utopia, then it is important to remember Le Guin's statement in her own voice that "The purer, the more euclidean{sic} the reason that builds a utopia, the greater is its self-destructive capacity"-and, clearly, capacity for destruction of others.⁴³ Second, you have the idea in "The Rock" that what colleges and universities get inscribed and reinscribed-those rectilinear forms-have within them, if we can only see the "colors," other patterns, other messages. Insofar as the oppressed of the world inscribe the messages, there are also, again, if we see with more than one eye-other messages. "Both patterns" are there, and they do not necessarily cancel each other out. "It was difficult to see them both at once, but not impossible" (62-63). And, I believe the major message of "The Rock" is that we should try to see all the messages: the old, rectilinear, establishment messages and the more colorful, nonlinear messages of the oppressed.

Indeed, that may be the most important message of "The Rock That Changed Things." Whether or not this revolution is successful, the nurs have learned that they have been telling their own stories and that they have stories of their own to tell. Whether or not this revolution is successful, Bu and her nest-mates and work-friends had brought back into the world-time of their culture the word "freedom." In "The Rock," the nurs produce their color stories collectively and, initially, with only limited consciousness. They work out their stories immanently, working in the rock, feeling their way through, as opposed to the obl Professors, who have a (transcendent) design that they have the nurs execute for them. Except, as we have seen, some of the nurs-like Medieval craftsfolk, not ancient slaves-have worked quite consciously with color, and even with texture and grain. In any event, we see in the story is the enlightenment of Bu and the others so that they get a relatively transcendent vision of the color patterns they have made. In this story, enlightenment in the sense of seeing patterns is not a bad thing but a good thing, to be shared among different classes and extended beyond Euclidean ideas of regular shapes to Newtonian curves and colors-and, maybe, eventually, textures and grains: felt patterns. And, just maybe, enlightenment can continue on to Einstein, and a nur/obl alliance could produce dynamic patterns, in the four dimensions of everyday reality.⁴⁴ Looking at the story this way, "The Rock" has to do with canons: whose stories get told, what sort of stories get told, what approaches to the world are accepted as legitimate. And here Le Guin and "The Rock" (and many feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial critics) have an important point: Obl "Patterns aren't ever about nurs!" (62), and few US college courses are about patterns valued by figurative nurs: all those who traditionally do not become Professors. And that is much of the world, far too much to be denied and excluded from college and university curricula and the major narratives of Western culture.

* * * * * *

The stories of what may be called the Churten Effect Group (or Churten Group) are quite good and important for continuity and change in Le Guin. Le Guin in these stories remains consistent in her philosophical interests, her most profound feelings about what is, her valuing of community, and her distrust of more or less radical individualists and masculinist heroes.⁴⁵ "The Shobies' Story" and "Dancing to Ganam" are also serious investigations in prose fiction of the question of the social construction of reality, of the possibility that we construct the world with language.⁴⁶

From my point of view, a fairly Modernist, epistemological position, the practical (ethical, political) implications of a world of language is best presented by Jane Flax, who is skeptical of the extreme skepticism of "nothing exists outside of a text" (Flax 47) and suggests the more moderate idea that "Perhaps reality," however constituted "can have 'a' structure only from the falsely universalizing perspective of the dominant group. That is, only to the extent that one person or group can dominate the whole, will reality appeared to be governed by one set of rules or be constituted by one privileged set of social relations" (49). If Jean-François Lyotard is correct, that dominance in a world of words would come from illegitimately controlling the stories we tell, determining which metanarratives will be privileged and used to legitimate all other politically significant thought. For Lyotard, though, no discourse is really privileged. "Where, then, he asks, does legitimation reside in the postmodern era?" Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson give, out of Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, the brief and intelligible answer, "that in the postmodern era"-our times-"legitimation becomes plural, local, and immanent" (23). If all we have is words, what may constitute our truest social reality is the words of the stories we tell each other around the fire in the cave, or reconstructing the world while in a limbo after a Churten jump.

Allowing Le Guin her Hainish universe in the far future-Peter Brigg puts it in 5100 CE-we have with "The Shobies' Story" a very elegant example of a science fiction story using the principles of "one big lie" and the wonderful gadget. In this case the one big lie is Churten theory and an instantaneous trip from Ve Port on the planet Hain to M-60-340-nolo. The crew of the Shoby-hence, "the Shobies"-will turn on "the churten process" device, and (if it works as did in extensive testing) it will "effectuate their transilience to a solar system seventeen light-years from Ve Port without temporal interval" (FIS 89).⁴⁷ That's one major whopper of a lie, actually, and a pretty miraculous gadget: even as Shevek's theory allowed the ansible and instantaneous communication, so churten theory allows instantaneous travel by matter (except that "transilience," technically is not instantaneous travel). "There and Back Again," indeed, as the alternative title to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) has it, but not just to the rather uninteresting M-60-340-nolo. (If the Shoby "arrived as a neutron bomb or a black hole event," they would take out only bacteria and a rather ugly planet [FIS 91].) This trip, like that of the Hobbits or the men in the 1950 movie Destination: Moon, is both a literal trip and a thematically significant one.

The crew of the Shoby differ from the crew in Destination: Moon, or even the Bridge of any of the Enterprises in Star Trek.⁴⁸ The crew is a group of ten from the Ekumen planets of Hain, Gethen, Anarres, and Terra. The lingua franca adopted by the crew is Hainish, and so the Hainish woman on board has a meaningful name: Sweet Today ([75]-76). When they are operating the Shoby, Sweet Today is a central figure, the coordinator.⁴⁹ The "affective focus" of the crew, their metaphorical hearth, is the Gethenian pair Karth and Oreth, and their two children Asten (six Earth-years old) and Rig (four years). "Oreth, who was just coming out of female kemmer" could watch for a moment "Rig, whom she had fathered, dance with Asten, whom she had borne" (86)-an extraordinarily elegant illustration of the defamiliarization SF is supposed to get done: making strange overly familiar parental roles. Hain, the homeworld of humanity, then, supplies one center for the crew; Gethen, a very recent addition to the Ekumen, supplies another. The one member of the crew with a background to allow him some chance of understanding churten theory is, appropriately, the Cetian Gveter, from Anarres: the relevant intellectual of the crew. The remainder of the crew come from a world as marginal in its way as Gethen (distant, extremely cold) and Anarres (as desert mining colony for Urras, and a place to dump their anarchist revolutionaries); the remainder come from Terra, still recovering some 2000 years later from the ecological disasters Le Guin posits for us in her future history.⁵⁰ This last is an important point. "The Shobies' Story" places value upon risk-taking, gambling, even taking risks with children; still, Le Guin continues her warnings, consistently and repeatedly, against ecological risk-taking, when any generation (necessarily abstractly and unmindfully) gambles the future of all who might follow them.

One of the Terrans is Lidi, an expert in NAFAL (Nearly as Fast as Light) flight; she is an old woman who pointedly stays away from Terra. A pair are Tai and Betton. They had been living "in a reclamation commune on Terra," and Tai had "drawn the lot for Ekumenical service," and had requested ship duty; her eleven-year-old son Betton asked to come along "as family. She had agreed; but after training; when she volunteered for this test flight, she had tried to get Betton to withdraw  . . . . He had refused." The last crew member is Shan, about whom we get little background. He had trained with Tai and Betton, and he wants a relationship with both. This Terran triad is, in a sense, where the action is on the Shoby. Shan tells the others about "the tension between the mother and the son" so that it could be understood and "used effectively in group formation. . . . Shan offered him fatherly-brotherly warmth, but Betton accepted it sparingly, coolly, and sought no formal crew relation with him or anyone" (78). Tai will dance with Shan "but even then was shy, would not touch. She had been celibate since Betton's birth. She did not want Shan's patient, urgent desire, did not want to cope with it, with him" (85).

The story starts with the Shobies making their "first consensual decision," which is "to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing" ([75]). The "consensual decision" phrase indicates that this is serious social fiction, a point reinforced soon after with the definition of the Hainish term isyeye: "'making a beginning together,' or 'beginning to be together,' or, used technically, 'the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.'" The reference to negative ions foreshadows "The Shobies' Story" as hard science fiction at least so far as one needs to be sophisticated enough at physics or chemistry to know what an "ion" is and/or sophisticated enough of a reader of SF not to care: i.e., to know that you needn't know what an ion is to follow the story's first paragraph. The reference to negative ions doing "their thing" is a key to the tone of the story. The "thing" of negative ions for humans is mild euphoria, as when Ike Rose is "absolutely happy" in the Spes colony and notes that "The negative ions in the atmosphere would have something to do with that" (FIS 29). And "do their thing" is a highly anthropomorphic and fairly flippant way to talk about ions ([75]). This point is reinforced when we learn that Sweet Today, as a Hainish person, had "kinsfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines all over the Ekumen . . . " (76). Cosines? Indeed: "The Shobies' Story" is going to be hard SF and social fiction-and a story, to be enjoyed and taken seriously, not earnestly, as if it were our grim duty to be instructed. "The Shobies' Story" will have some jokes, and even a happy ending.

During their isyeye, the adult Shobies and Betton sit around a campfire and discuss churten theory: "They talked, as human beings do, about what they didn't know." And they talk imperfectly. These people are far more stable than the ten "nuts" on the Gum in "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"-with the craziness of the early NAFAL explorers specifically alluded to by Shan (81); indeed, they are more stable than the disgustingly competent heroes of Heinlein novels or even the officers aboard any of the Star Trekian Enterprises. Still, Gveter, communist-anarchist Anarresti "held tight to his knowledge, because he needed the advantage it gave him" (76), and, as we have seen, Tai doesn't want to be touched. It will even turn out that Tai is suspicious of men, and Karth of Terrans-and do-gooder Shan may be a control freak (95).

Sandwiched between these rounds of crew discourse, is a conversation by ansible with Cetian scientists, where, from one point of view, the Shobies get explained to them as much about the churten effect as they can understand, and, from another point of view-Shan's particularly-undergo a ritual like the ones used by Ekumen humans when they use lab animals (82).

In the first round of discourse, around the fire on the beach at Liden, the main topic is the churten effect. Sweet Today suggests their ship will travel "by ideas?"-and Gveter says "No, no, no, no," but isn't sure where to go from there. "It is not physical," he says, "it is not not physical, these are the categories our minds must discard" (78). Gveter, the student of temporal physics and old Lidi the navigator were convinced "that the engineers knew perfectly well what they were doing": there had been sixty-two successful "transiliences" (instantaneous trips). The problem was theirs: "the difficulty human minds had in grasping a genuinely new concept." Tai offers the analogy of blood circulation, which went on for a long time before William Harvey described it. She isn't totally satisfied with the analogy when Shan quotes "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know," and Tai replies with "Mysticism" using "the tone of voice of one warning a companion about dog-shit on the path" (79).⁵¹ Betton finally turns the conversation quite serious in asking what the dangers might be. Tai tells him that they do not know; Sweet Today says the obvious: worse goes to worst, and they might all die. The conversation moves on to Asten telling about the ritual animals with an earlier crew they were with. Sweet Today compliments her/him on telling good stories. Betton concludes "So we're sort of ritual humans," and then the others supply other possibilities. Tai: Volunteers; Lidi: Experimenters; Shan: Experiencers; Oreth: Explorers; Karth: Gamblers. Then Shan alludes to the "nuts" who supplied personnel for NAFAL ships early in the history of the League, and Oreth asks, "Are we stable" and says for himself: "I like instability. I like this job. I like the risk, taking the risk together. High stakes! That's the edge of it, the sweetness of it"; and Gveter, who has been fairly silent in through here, says, "Together" and adds "You aren't crazy. You are good. I love you. We are ammari," i.e., siblings (80-81).

Then comes the ansible talk with the experts about the churten. The Cetian scientists helpfully explain to them that "The churten, in lay terms, may be seen as displacing the virtual field in order to realize relational coherence in terms of the transiliential experientiality." Shan for one rejects at least one later bit of such jargon with the one-word typification, "Shit!"; the Narrator, however, is more generous, noting that the scientist "was trying to find the words, to accept the responsibility." The Shobies and we are told that there is "a possibility that the participation of high intelligence in the process might affect the displacement in one way or another. And that such displacement would reciprocally affect the participant." Trying to get the words right, the scientist eventually tries, "As the experimenter is an element of the experiment, so we assume that the transilient may be an element or agent of transilience," which is why they wanted to send a group and not just one or two: "The psychic interbalance of a bonded social group is a margin of strength against disintegration or incomprehensible experience, if any such occurs. Also the separate observations of the group members will mutually interverify." (It is the word "interverify" that is the immediate occasion for Shan's "Shit!" [83].) Again, there is wisdom among the pedantry here, and foreshadowing: what happens if the "interbalance" is weaker than it appears?⁵²

The other part of the discourse sandwich comes after this conversation with the scientists and just before the churten. There is an informal ritual celebration the night before, with everyone dressing up and having a fine meal and then sitting around "the big fireplace in the library" on the Shoby: it is a big and comfortable ship. Oreth lays a fire and later Karth lights it (artificial logs, real flames). "Everybody gathered round" and the youngest, Rig, says "Tell bedtime stories," which they do. When the kids go to bed, Betton passes by his mother, "for she did not like to be touched; but she put out her hand, drew the child to her, and kissed his cheek. He fled in joy." The section ends with Sweet Today saying "Stories" and adding "Ours begins tomorrow, eh?" (88).

The next day they churten, and all seems well with the process: there is no command chain with "hierarchic control" on the Shoby but rather a properly anarchistic "network of response" and feminist basing in "mutual empowerment, 'thick' description," and open-ended complexity. Sweet Today, intersees or subvises, "gestalting them, all ten at once" with the analogy Le Guin suggests of the violinist of a chamber group (88-89), plus, I will add for those who know The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), like Faxe "weaving" the Foretelling. They churten, and things are not well with the result.

Among the bridge crew, Oreth on the Artificial Intelligence says "There was no interval," and Gveter agrees. Karth says "Nothing happened," and Lidi says "We aren't anywhere." Tai and Shan say they're at M-60-340-nolo, but "All their words fell dead, had a false sound." And then the ansible doesn't work, and Lidi says, "We're going back now." Lidi wants to return by NAFAL flight for a little over seventeen years of Hainish time. The Narrator tells us briefly but very significantly that Lidi's "words, her tone, shook them, shook them apart" (89).

Then we get to hear what Gveter calls "Perception variation" among the Shobies. Shan sees an ugly planet, and Gveter's instruments indicate that it is a cold planet with a lot of bacteria. Oreth sees the planet; Asten does not. Tai thinks that they somehow must determine that they got to where they are "and then get here." Lidi, the oldest of the group, can see stars through the walls of the ship and takes herself off duty. Rig, the youngest says s/he "can see the stars too," that s/he "can see everything! And Asten can't" (91-93). Karth carries Rig off, and Oreth follows the rest of the family off the bridge and does and/or does not stay with the children (93, 94-95).

Rather than bring back only evidence Sweet Today labels, neutrally, "Anecdotal," Tai asks for "a consensus about going down onplanet." A rough agreement is reached to go-although nothing that sounds like consensus to my ear-and Betton asks to go with. Tai says no; Gveter says yes. Gveter is "honestly puzzled" by Tai's position. "I don't want the responsibility," Tai says. Even more puzzled, Gveter asks why it is particularly hers: "We all share it; Betton is crew." Shan wants to know why they "keep crossing . . . coming and going." Gveter's answer is "Confusion due to the churten experience," and that is part of it (94). From a godlike, readerly position, though-and located ourselves within Terran history and culture-Gveter's interpretation may seem to us to miss how the "crossing" preceded the churten experience and participates with it in a cycle. Tai, Betton, and Gveter are acting out a bit of Terran family dynamics, including what viewed positively is parental responsibility and viewed negatively is parental possessiveness.

From this point on in "The Shobies' Story" the center doesn't hold, and we get "a cessation of cause and effect." In the original opening of "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971), the Narrator directly addresses the audience, starting with "You're looking at a clock," and tries to give us some idea what NAFAL flight is like for the occasional mystic-"intuition of the eternal"-and more statistically normal people: "Oh God, here now One get me out of this[!]." Here, the Narrator sticks to third-person, tells us quite directly that it is difficult to narrate a switch from sequency to simultaneity and gives us a workable solution to the problem: "As the members of the crew network no longer perceived the network steadily and were unable to communicate their perceptions, an individual perception is the only clue to follow through the labyrinth of this dislocation." So she goes to the point of view of Gveter. Gveter talks with others about going down to the planet: "He perceived this discussion as perfectly rational," except it was "interrupted by outbursts of egoizing not characteristic of the crew," including the lines in response to Shan's "Somebody's got to stay in control here," Tai: "Not the men!" and Karth: "Not the Terrans" (95).

Gveter perceives himself going on the lander with Tai and Betton down to the planet, and then staying on board the lander as Tai and Betton go out to get samples. Betton walks easily on the planet, while Tai seems to "be sinking into the surface," until finally she "sank into the formless murk" (96-97). Except then Tai's voice comes on the ship's intercom, instructing Lander One and its crew to return to the Shoby (97). Etc.⁵³ In fact, etc. until it seems that chaos is come again and the Shoby's "systems died away into the real silence that was always there. But there was nothing there," or nothing except the threat of the Shobies' dying as they lose life-support (98).

And then one (of the Shobies?) cries out, "Listen!" and tells them, "We have always known this. This is where we have always been, will always be, at the hearth, at the center. There is nothing to be afraid of, after all" (99).

As in NAFAL flight, "Maya has fallen. All is here now one" (New Dimensions I 88). The threat to the Shobies is that which Tolfink of Carlisle resisted in carving his runes into the stone: dissolving entirely into one's surroundings, total loss in the Dao (DEW 29).⁵⁴ The Shobies, must die, or they must recreate the(ir) universe. They do not die but wind up at a "here, at the hearth," where Oreth "had laid the fire." Karth lights it, and Oreth and Karth say together, in Karhidish, "Praise also the light, and creation unfinished" (99). The one bit of ritual language Genly Ai learned from the Handdara in Karhide was "Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished" (LHD 246; ch. 18). Darkness, Absolute Dao, is the source of creation: the nonBeing out of which comes Being, the Void, the Potential; but light, also, is necessary. And at a time and place where Yin seems to have conquered Yang, where nonBeing has become a threat to human life-then it is a time for light and words. So these elohim, human gods, will recreate the world, not by hovering over the firmament and commanding light, but in the human fashion of sitting around a fire and finding "the thread," of the Way (and the narrative), creating the world, establishing a human cosmos through "Telling stories" (100-02).

In "silence, the silence that was always there," their voices raise some key points. First, the personal one: Betton quietly claims that "The boy and his mother . . . were the first human beings ever to set foot on that world." Then another voice out of the silence, Lidi expressing her fears that her navigation skills would be rendered obsolete by the churten, her fear she might be too old to learn the new technique. One of the Gethenians, I think, tells briefly of their sense of loss in NAFAL time-dilation. Then I think the other Gethenian-Garth?-talks of how they bet on the new technique, "Staking everything on it," and then, in a favorite Le Guinian paradoxical teaching, completing the sentence, "because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing's safe except what we put at risk" (103).

Frequently in Le Guin we have gotten the Romantic-Comic motif of a new and better world coalescing around a central couple (in my modification of Northrop Frye's formula). In "The Shobies' Story," we have that again, but with an important difference. In a voice that may be Gveter's we hear that "actual transilience of living, conscious beings . . . would be a great event in the mind of his people-for all people. A new understanding. A new partnership. A new way of being in the universe. . . . He wanted to be one of the crew that first formed that partnership" (103-104). Partnership is the term for "marriage" among Odonians and in this speech some primal couple is replaced by a crew, in the immediate context a discourse community telling their stories. But a community-a hearth-that includes pairs and families: the Gethenian family, with Sweet Today as honorary Grandmother (76), Tai and Betton, apparently without Shan. The ship's systems start up again, with the final voices speaking:

And here they notice the "warm fresh air and light inside the solid walls and hulls" (104). Nine had spoken; the tenth is Rig, asleep with thumb in mouth.⁵⁵ They are back at Ve Port, having been gone for forty-four minutes "into non-existence, into silence," but they are back now to tell their stories (105), the story Le Guin has put into a complex singular: "The Shobies' [plural possessive] Story."

* * *

"Dancing to Ganam" is a sequel to "The Shobies' Story," a gloss to "The Shobies' Story," and an extension of "The Shobies' Story's" thematic concerns.⁵⁶ "Dancing" is also a return by Le Guin, to such themes as music and myth, the archetypes of the Child and the Hero, the nature of reality.

The story is bracketed with a brief prolog and slightly longer epilog (neither labeled with those terms). What I am calling the epilog occurs after the action of the story, as part of the report of the point-of-view character in the story-or his responses at a debriefing or interrogation, or his testimony at some (formal?) inquiry.

The prolog is in three parts, starting with a dialog between the priest Aketa and his wife Ket, although both "priest" and "wife" need a good deal of explanation, especially since Ket has at least one other husband and is herself the more important priest (133). In the dialog, Aketa starts the story with the line, "Power is the great drumming," and adds "The thunder. The noise of the waterfall," which sounds nicely primitive and traditionally poetic until he identifies that waterfall as the one "that makes the electricity." He adds that such power-thunder-noise "fills you until there's no room for anything else." This is, of course, an important line for Le Guin: if her villains aren't hollow, like Haber in The Lathe of Heaven (e.g., 167; ch. 10), they are full of themselves like Davidson in The Word for World Is Forest-or full of themselves like such flawed men as the Master Windkey in Tehanu (ch. 10) or Jerry Debree in "Gorgonids" or the Professors in "The Rock that Changed Things." Ket, however, does not develop the line immediately (that will come in a moment and in the action of the story) but instead pours water upon the ground, followed by pollen meal, saying "Drink, traveler" and "Eat, traveler." If we tentatively picture these two as ancient Greeks (who know about electricity), we might think Ket welcoming or propitiating a ghost or sending water and food to one on the way to Hades. This first section of the prolog ends with Ket looking up at the volcano Iyananam, "the mountain of power" and speculating, "Maybe he only listened to the thunder, and couldn't hear anything else," and asks if Aketa thinks the unidentified "he" "knew what he was doing." Aketa replies that he thinks "he" did ([107]).

After a white space, the prolog continues with some background on churten technology and theory, featuring the admonitions of Cetian temporalists and Hainish psychologists that "You cannot say" a number of things about a churten event, including among the excluded words and concepts: went, happened, fact, experienced, and maybe arrival. Like old mystics or recent physicists, these future scientists present reality as "Not this . . . not that"-what's left over, possibly, after we stop thinking. They are pretty sure that "The reality point of 'arrival' for a churten crew" of intelligent sentients "is obtained by mutual perception-comparison and adjustment, so that for thinking beings construction of event is essential to effective transilience." This section ends with the experts listening to Commander Dalzul (from Terra, as we later learn) who has the idea that "The problem" the Shoby crew encountered was "interference"; therefore, "send one man alone." More specifically, send him (108).⁵⁷ In 1967, in City of Illusions, "Go alone" was good advice to the hero; in 1993, in "Dancing to Ganam," the volunteering for a solo job, and for heroism, is more problematic.

The last section of the prolog is a brief dialog between Tai and her son, Betton. Betton tells Tai she should go on the mission with Shan; Tai says that if Betton isn't invited on the churten mission, Tai is not going. Shan, though, is going, and the story proper starts with Shan: Shan getting into his black-and-silver Terran Ekumen uniform to meet Commander Dalzul-and then two long paragraphs of exposition on Commander Dalzul, a genuine, big-time hero.

Shan is our point-of-view character here, but rather like Ishmael in Herman Melville's Moby Dick: Dalzul will be the Ahab-like scene-stealer (competing with two characters we will meet later). So we learn little more about Shan and more about Dalzul, including that Dalzul is Terran-born (from "the barracks of Alberta") and goes back almost to the time of Terra's entrance into the Ekumen, a significant time back.⁵⁸ Dalzul has a degree in temporal physics from the University of A-Io on Urras (the school Shevek taught at), "trained with the Stabiles on Hain," and had returned to his homeworld as a Mobile, where "a troublesome religious movement escalated into the horrors of the Unist Revolution"-some totalizing system, monotheistic, and for some readers surely a glance at recent Right-wing religious movements in the US and elsewhere. That last point is hardly necessary, however; theocratic takeovers are a standard SF motif, one Le Guin used in "The Masters" (1963) and "The Stars Below" (1973). We learn that Dalzul brought things "under control within months" in ways that got him respect from those he helped, "and the worship of those he had worked against-for the Unist Fathers decided he was God." Acting with the "all the means the Ekumen most honored"-grace, wit, patience, "trickiness, and good humor"-Dalzul had at least "defused the worst resurgence of theocratic violence since the Time of Pollution."

Under the threat of renewed deification, Dalzul could no longer work on Terra and moves on to "obscure but significant tasks on obscure but significant planets," including Orint, the one planet from which the Ekumen had ever withdrawn, not long before whatever powers that were on the planet resorted to biological warfare and exterminated humanity on their world. Dalzul had not only foreseen the destruction "with terrible and compassionate accuracy" but had also managed to "set up the secret, last-minute rescue of a few thousand children whose parents were willing to let them go . . . ." Dalzul has again achieved major, unproblematic, unambiguous heroism. "Dalzul's children, these last of the Orintians were called," making Dalzul a combination of Janusz Korczak, "Father of the Orphans" (see Bernheim) and Oskar Schindler-plus any other of the righteous, nonmilitaristic, life-affirming heroes one wishes to mention. "Shan knew that heroes were phenomena of primitive cultures, but Terran culture is still primitive, it seems, "and Dalzul was his hero" (109). Indeed, Dalzul is strongly in contention for best of Heroes-if we need or want another hero at all.⁵⁹

This exposition on Dalzul very neatly replaces a scene we do not see: the first meeting between Dalzul and Shan. What we do see, very briefly, is Shan's return to his partner, Tai, and relaying the offer we already know she has rejected/will reject. "What kind of crew is that?" Tai asks-when all we know is that the proposed crew does not include (young) Betton; and she adds the intriguing rhetorical question, "Who asks parents to leave their kid?" Good question for those of us who found problems with taking children along on the Shoby trip. If Shan should go, so should Tai, and she wants to take her son. But she tells Shan to go without them: "Tai was on the hero's side," the Narrator tells us, and Shan goes, as is necessary if we want this story (109-10).

Instead of Tai, for Dalzul plus a partnered, heterosexual couple, the crew will be Dalzul, Shan, and a partnered couple who, initially are not identified by gender or sexuality: Riel and Forest, both Terrans for an all-Terran crew (unusual in the Ekumen). Riel and Forest know Shan from training on Ollul, and, like Shan, and modal Terrans generally, they are people of color: allowing for some figurative exaggeration, Forest's face is "an obsidian knife"-i.e., literally black, beautifully shiny, very sharp-and Riel's "round and shining as a copper sun" (110).⁶⁰ Dalzul is the oddball in terms of color-coding: "light hair, going grey . . . white-skinned"; the skin-color Shan sees as a "deformity or atavism," but a minor one.⁶¹ In his first meeting with the (potential) crew, Dalzul briefly relates the story of his first two solo churtens: no problems, "no perceptual dissonances at all." Promisingly, in a Le Guin story, he found the trips "magic," "natural. Where one is, one is." Dalzul asks for Shan's experience on the Shoby, and Shan relates that they "had some trouble deciding" just where they were. Dalzul thinks such confusion avoidable. Transilience, he thinks, "is a non-experience," wherein, "normally, nothing happens." He tells Shan "Extraneous events got mixed into it in the Shoby experiment-your interval was queered," in what may turn out to be a significant bit of word-choice. He thinks this time they could and should have "a non-experience," looks at Forest and Riel, laughs and says "You'll not-see what I don't mean" and gets to the really good part of his story (FIS 110).

Dalzul says he annoyed the churten group until Gvonesh-a character we will see in "Another Story"-allows Dalzul "to do a solo exploratory," coming to this decision, I assume, in consultation with her colleagues (111). Dalzul sets out to G-14-214-yomo, a k a Tadkla, called by the people Dalzul met on the planet-as Dalzul interprets what they say-Ganam. The Ekumen has a NAFAL mission on its way to Ganam, and Dalzul hopes the NAFAL mission will arrive "thirteen years from herenow" to find Ganam already a member of the Ekumen-and everything wonderfully transformed:

This little speech introduces Dalzul's audio-visual show of his solo to Ganam, so it is an important speech in a stressed location.

In Le Guin's canon, the Dao is and is "the beat that is the rhythm"; namable Dao is a timeless unity: in Western terms, eternal Being; in a very popular image, including with Le Guin, the eternal dance-hinted at with the printer's mark in Buffalo Gals (1987). Very explicitly in City of Illusions (1967) and The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Le Guin has it that one should get in contact with the Dao, touch immanent Reality, from time to time. Additionally, in the Hainish universe, we are children of one hearth, one household of humankind. However, and this is crucial, immanent Reality does not exhaust the human world, and where we live is less the Ultimate Dao of Nothingness or Namable Dao, but the world of Yin-Yang and the ten thousand created things. A bird in T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton tells us that "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," and Eliot liked the line enough to assign it also to Thomas à Becket in Murder in the Cathedral (1935).⁶² In The Lathe of Heaven, Le Guin says, ". . . the bird is mistaken," that it is "unreality" we cannot bear (171; ch. 11); still, I think she agrees with Eliot this far: we should not try to live in Ultimate Reality, however pictured, and lose our identities and the world: we should not lose ourselves in the light of Being and Truth as Meshe does in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) nor in the transcendent God of "Field of Vision" (1973), nor in Brahma in "Pathways of Desire" (1979)-nor in the "here now One" of NAFAL flight ("VEMS" 1971 [only]), nor in the churten. So Dalzul is right to remember with a very positive passion a churten experience that was, for him, a restoration of a lost unity, a restoration of "the primal moment." But only as a moment. It is troubling that he speaks of both changing things and escaping time, and a very bad sign that he wishes "To use eternity!" Le Guin makes clear in "The Shobies' Story" that she is well aware that "We all use each," however much "we have no right to do so" (FIS 82), and that is an ethical dilemma humans must feel our ways through; still, eternity is not there to be used, nor is "interval" to be controlled, nor time to be escaped.

There are also problems with wanting to unify quite so much the household of humankind. Again, Jane Flax reminds us that "Perhaps reality," however constituted "can have 'a' structure only from the falsely universalizing perspective" of some dominant group (49). White males, for example, White heterosexual and mildly heterosexist males for what will turn out to be an even more specific example.⁶³ False universalizing, trying to make us all one every which way, denies the reality of the Other, denies difference, denies the delight of diversity (see LHD 34-36; ch. 3).⁶⁴

And here we move on to Dalzul's story of First Contact with the Gaman, the people of Ganam, which he shows on a tape (with some sound).

The adventure starts out well, even if the magic did not work perfectly. Dalzul and ship did not materialize in the stratosphere but in the atmosphere, some 100 m. up and very close to a city. In Dalzul's theatrical figure of speech, he did not have much of a "chance to make an unobtrusive entrance on the scene" (FIS 113). There is soon an audience: magnificent barbarians from the City. So, Hero and competent man-and a well-trained Mobile of the Ekumen-Dalzul goes with his situation. He stresses his defenselessness by exiting his ship naked, with empty hands "held wide and open in the gesture of offering." He is met by a "stunning" woman, her hair "braided with gold into a coronet" (114), identified as Ket, the Anam, a word Dalzul will come to translate, "princess" (133). She goes through what seems to be a ceremony of greeting, or a ritual of some sort, ending with: "with a splendid conscious gesture," herself undressing and standing "naked before the naked man," and offering her hand, which Dalzul accepts (114).

Aside from its potential erotic appeal(s), Dalzul's tape and the adventure it records is very different from the Shobies' story because of its clarity and coherence. In Dalzul's interpretation, "'What the Shoby's crew discovered . . . is that individual experiences of transilience can be made coherent only by a concerted effort. An effort to synchronize-to entrain." The Shobies' "chaos experience," Dalzul thinks, "was an effect of the disparity of the Shoby crew." They were "ten people from four worlds-four different cultures"; Dalzul also counts "two very old women," which is overstating the ages, "and three young children," which lumps (honorary) Elder Sib Betton (FIS 88) with the two Gethenian children too casually: the Gethenian children are four and six E-years old, and Betton is eleven, big differences at those ages-which would help prove Dalzul's point; so this conflating of the children is a minor but potentially significant mistake; Dalzul may have blind spots about women and children (FIS 114-15)..

Dalzul would by-pass the problem the simplest way: "go alone." Forest brings up the obvious objection of the difficulty or impossibility of cross-checking on a single person, especially when, as Shan reminds them, the Shoby's instrument readings were no more coherent than the Shobies' perceptions (115). From Dalzul's point of view, that is the point:

Bright colors are good things, period and in Le Guin (e.g., "The Rock That Changed Things"), and so is clarity, e.g. Cetian or Anarresti clarity of thought in The Word for World Is Forest or The Dispossessed, or a clear view on the Ice in The Left Hand of Darkness. Still, such clarity is habitually contrasted in Le Guin's work to, or balanced by, the murk of forest, the rights of the darkness, the respectability of mud (EoH) or even of shit, "The color of the earth" (LoH 103; ch. 7). And, again, there is the point so elegantly summarized by Flax: if harmony = accuracy = Truth, it will probably be a «truth» determined by the person or caste or class with greatest power.

In Dalzul's theory, churtening by one person is safe, by ten people was an invitation to disaster; a churten by four is a "control" (118). What he does not add here is that he wanted to keep the emotional dynamics among the crew minimal: he wanted himself and a bonded heterosexual couple; when Tai declines, his second choice was a heterosexual male, Shan-who was more homosexual in his sexuality before his marriage than heterosexual, but Dalzul apparently doesn't know that-and the significantly named Riel ("real"?) and Forest (forest), bonded lesbians (126).

There is more to Dalzul's theory, a very beautiful more. The compatible group is to churten while entrained, and the entrainment is music: "All we need to get to Ganam is music. All there is, in the end, is music," which is an attractive theory to one who started her publishing career with "An die Musik" (1961); so they drink, as Shan's toast, "To music!" (FIS 117).

They keep isyeye-their crew-bonding time-but keep it to a minimum. During this time we overhear the first conversation among Shan, Forest, and Riel, without Dalzul. Forest notes the problem in accepting Dalzul's version of his trip "as objective fact." Shan notes that Dalzul's version and the "ship's tapes agree completely," but Forest points out that, if Dalzul's theory is correct, they would: ". . . he and the instruments were entrained." Shan has to agree, but he is reluctant, finding it "very difficult . . . to live without the notion that there is, somewhere, if one could just find it, a fact." Forest is consistent, "unrelenting," and insistent: "Only fiction . . . . Fact is one of our finest fictions." Shan doesn't push the point, but the story will return to it. What Shan does do is assert that "[M]usic comes first . . . . And dancing is people being music. I think what Dalzul sees is that . . . we can dance to Ganam." Riel likes the dancing idea, but picks up the implication of "the fiction theory." If all we have are fictions, the ship's tapes are also fictions. Dalzul is "a seasoned observer and a superb gestalter" (118), and Forest thinks Dalzul's version "looks and rings true." Still, you do not have to have just come off a reading of Jean-François Lyotard, or Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949, 1968) to recognize bits of a very old metanarrative in Dalzul's story or a displacement toward the secular of "The Meeting with the Goddess" or a fairly straight-forward version of the "mystical marriage" (Campbell 109 f.; ch. 2.2). Forest puts it, "There are elements of a rather familiar kind of fiction in his report . . . . The princess who has apparently been waiting for him, expecting him, and leads him naked to her palace, where after due ceremonies and amenities she has sex with him-and very good sex too-?" (119). Forest wonders "how the princess perceived these events" (119). Good question. Even if Truth exists, it may look different to a dragon and a man, as Ged points out to Arren (FS 153; ch. 10), and in a world where all may be fiction, the princess's version may be that nothing happened at all-and then tell you she is not a princess.

After a white space, the crew sets off, with Shan confident that "with Dalzul there would be no chaos"-not with the Dalzul taken as a god by the Unists, received reverently by the Gaman: "Dalzul was charged, full of mana, a power to which others responded, by which they were entrained." Dalzul has "a brightness of being" (119) that makes him what Luz Falco calls her father in Eye of the Heron: "a king, a real one" (EH 73; ch. 5)-or the Prince of Kansas in City of Illusions (99; ch. 5) or a god like Rocannon (RW) or Selver (WWF) or Bob in "Pathways of Desire" (CR 189) or the god-like folk George Orr thinks we all, potentially, are (LoH 145; ch. 9). And Dalzul leads them in song to Ganam, where all four see sky of blue, grass of green and the approach of friendly natives (120). Shan finds this world, solidly real: "crude, magnificent, and human. It was stranger than anything Shan had known{,} and it was as if he had been away and come home again." Shan briefly weeps and thinks, "We are all one . . . . There is no distance, no time between us." The section ends with native people greeting them, and the final sentence-in Gaman?-"You have come home" (122).

After another white space, there is a quick summary of Shan's experiences the first few days. The summary can be quite quick since Shan follows the generally good advice Arthur C. Clarke offers people in very strange situations in Childhood's End (1953) and, more directly, in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): relax, experience, take it in; figure it out later. Shan enjoys himself, finding the experience a second childhood, with "no control," hence "no responsibility"; he "was part of the happening and watched it happen." And the happening he and his colleagues see is that the Gaman will "make Dalzul their king." What he and the rest believe (for now) is that the king has died without a successor, and Dalzul appears "out of the sky," and "vanishes and returns with three strange companions who can work various miracles; you make him king. What else can you do with him?" Forest, as well as the hilfer Riel are dubious about getting so involved in the native culture, but they have no better suggestions to make, and, if the kingship turns out to be as it appears, "more honorary than authoritative," then they thought going along better than resisting. Attempting to retain "perspective on Dalzul's situation," Riel and Forest move to a house "where they could be with common people and enjoy a freedom of movement Dalzul did not have" (122). On Ganam as with ritual kings on Terra, the "king-to-be . . . was expected to hang around the palace all day, observing taboos" (122-23), but often in the company of one Viaka. Shan sleeps at the palace, in a sort of liminal and movable position between Dalzul and the women: a Merlin, so to speak, to Arthur at Camelot and Morgan le Fay allied and in love with the Lady of the Lake. Or like Lyubov in The Word for World Is Forest, moving between the macho world of Davidson and the military and the more balanced world of Selver and the Athsheans. Or we can see Shan as similar to George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven, Child-like and moving between the world-changing (mad) scientist Dr. Haber and Orr's once and future partner, Heather Lelache.

In any event, Shan, though relatively peripheral to the action, is central in terms of point of view and as an envoy between a kind of dueling realities or, as Forest might still insist, competing fictions. Orr-like, Child-like, Shan goes with the flow, or follows the script, until we reach the turn in the story. The turn comes with some facts, or fictional elements, that do not fit in with the premise of Ganam as a world of magnificent barbarians awaiting a sky-god king. The first jarring bit of information comes when Shan gets to walk up the slope of Iyananam, the larger of the two volcanoes in the territory of the Gaman (123), and which the first section of the story identifies as "the mountain of power" ([107]). There is in the area "a little earth shrine," and Shan sees from the volcano other towns or cities and learns that ". . . only Ganam belonged to the Gaman; those cities were other cities" (124). The really jarring part comes in a beautiful area with a sacred waterfall Shan's hosts want him to see: "He was very much surprised to find that the sacred waterfall was employed to power a sacred dynamo." Shan feels less happy "to feel like a child," and comes to feel more like a "half-wit" trying to get his hosts to explain to him what they did with the electricity. He learns ". . . it comes out at the ishkanem when the basmmiak vada" (123). To clarify, they take him out onto an expertly made terrace and point downstream, where he sees something shining on the water and is told it is taboo, the first taboo he has personally run into (124).

The next jarring is far less spectacular than seeing a sacred hydroelectric generator; it involves a pruning knife Shan is using. It is not something Shan immediately thinks about, but the Narrator describes it as "a thin, slightly curved steel blade" with a handle (124-25). Steel? Bronze for ancient barbarians, magnificent or otherwise, as in King Dog's setting, which is explicitly labeled "a society in the Bronze Age" (13) and consistently depicted as such. Shortly after these experiences, Shan and Dalzul get together for a man-to-man talk, and Dalzul tells Shan that something is wrong.

In Dalzul's story, he has developed a rival, Aketa, with whom Princess Ket has gone to live, even though she still says that Dalzul will be what he translates as "king" (126). Dalzul is confused and seeks advice about women from Dalzul, as a partnered man. When Dalzul asks him if partnered people ever get to a place where the man knows who the woman is and (in Sigmund Freud's question) what she wants, Shan can only answer that he doesn't know and sensibly suggest that Dalzul ask Riel and Forest: "As women, maybe they'd have some insights?" It is here that Dalzul shows his sexism and heterosexism:

And here Dalzul tells Shan he would have preferred the "consonance" of an all-male crew but compromised to suit the old women of the Elders on Hain. Dalzul allows that Riel and Forest (though not "real women") have still "performed admirably. But I don't think they're equipped to tell me what's going on in the mind, or the hormones, of a very fully sexed woman such as the princess" (236-27). Here, Shan again feels the "beat" skip, and he should. Perfect consonance within a group can make their figurative music boring; Dalzul's attitude, though, could break their music: if Riel and Forest are not "real women," what are they? To paraphrase a Gethenian saying, you do not have to be lovers to work together-but you do have to see the people you work with as fellow human beings.

Dalzul's reading of the situation is that Ket has defected, causing a schism, "and if Aketa gains power, his supporters will wreak vengeance on Viaka and all his people. Blood sacrifice for offense to the true and sacred king's person.... Religion and politics! How could I of all men be so blind?" And Dalzul answers his own question by saying that he'd allowed his "longings" to persuade him that they had found a "primitive ideal" among people who have retained "everything we lost with our literacy, our industry, our science." Dalzul sees himself, and through him his companions, in the midst of "a factional and sexual competition among intelligent barbarians who keep their pruning hooks and their swords extremely sharp" (127).⁶⁶

The immediate problem for Shan is what to do faced with "Dalzul's unexpected male-heterosexual defensiveness" that prevent Dalzul from getting help and advice from Riel and Forest. Being a sensible person, Shan goes off to see Riel and Forest, thinking about the dynamo, other cities, and a pruning hook of steel: "How did the Gaman make their steel?" He comes upon Forest reading a native book-a book?-who greets him facetiously as "A visitor from another planet!" getting Shan to wonder just how long it had been since he had seen them, and feeling "a sudden tremor of unease, a missed beat so profound that he put his hands flat on the warm sandstone," as if there had been an earthquake (128).

Shan explains the situation from Dalzul's point of view, ending with "It's just the kind of sticky situation Dalzul was hoping to avoid," to which Forest adds, "And is matchless at resolving." Shan doesn't rise to that bait but says that Dalzul doesn't understand "what role the princess is playing." Forest and Riel then give another version of events. If by "princess" Dalzul means the daughter of a king, then Ket isn't one; there is no king; there has never been a king among the Gaman. Dalzul will be the divinely designated "one who will hold the scepter," but not a king. Forest asks for the name of the rival, and Shan tells them it is Aketa, and Forest looks at him very directly and tells him ". . . we are seriously out of sync," and suspects a chaos experience (129-30). Shan says it is nothing like what he experienced with the Shoby churten, but Forest suggests that they might be "reading the experience quite differently." Shan notes, correctly if "rather desperately," that "People always do, everywhere."⁶⁷ Then he sees-first «surrealistically» sees, sees as metamorphosing things-then really sees, the book: "In a strange writing. In a strange language. A book with covers of carved wood, hinged with gold." Forest tells him it is probably a sacred history of the cities under the volcano Iyananam. Shan knows the Gaman are preliterate. Forest and Riel tells them that many are illiterate, but some are literate, for example, Aketa, who gave them the book to read: Aketa who is teaching them, as part of his vocation as scholar-priest (130).

To Shan, it seems that men run the city; to Riel and Forest, the Gaman are "a non-gender-dominant society," without much sexual division of labor, a good deal of polyandry, and homosexual group marriage for women. "Aketa is one of Ket's husbands. His name means something like Ket's-kin-first-husband. Kin meaning they're in the same volcano lineage." His high rank may come from his marriage to Ket. If Forest and Riel are correct about the Gaman, Shan's impressions are "out of sync," and Dalzul's reading is seriously wrong. Shan says that Dalzul has to see the book (131). Riel says, "He has seen it," and explains the apparent paradox through an old Terran anthropologists' tale of taking a smart tribesman from a remote Arctic tribe to New York City, where the tribesman spent his time studying "the knobs on the bottom posts of staircases." In case this newel-post-knob analogy wasn't totally clear, Forest gets quite specific. The churten problem may not just be one of impressions but also of expectations.

As, for example, whatever the tribesman saw in the newel-post knobs. Riel then shifts her explanation to the linguistic: Say the word "I," and " . . . an infinite number of sentences could follow. But the next word begins to build the immutable syntax. . . . By the last word, there may be no choice at all. And also, you can only use words you know." Technically, in terms of generative grammar, you could probably extend any sentence, but the practical points are correct. As Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea had to learn, our choices create who we are and continually redefine the circumstances of our lives, limiting further choice.

Shan has some experience in this matter: the Shobies talked and "reconstructed the syntax of the experience. We told our story." Forest notes that the Shobies "tried very hard to tell it"-singular-"truly," and Shan asks if Dalzul is lying (132). They do not think Dalzul lies but ask if he is "telling the Ganam story or the Dalzul story" (the constant problem of the « participant-observer » generally, ethnographers most particularly). What they imply, is that Dalzul may be caught in a narrative: "The childlike, simple people acclaiming him king, the beautiful princess offering herself ..."-Shan interjects that "she did": so they saw on the tapes. Forest responds,

If you know the term "Year-King," you can guess, though, and that guess would be reinforced by the suggestion at the end of the page that part of the job of the priests is to "keep the city in spiritual balance," which means, "Sometimes, possibly, by blood sacrifice" (133).

For many readers, then, the syntax of the plot has already pretty well closed. Unless Le Guin gives us a surprise ending, or cheats, Dalzul has cast himself into the role of consort to the Earth-Mother, the consort whose major act in the story is to get killed. (And we already have strong hints on how Dalzul will be killed). Some of the questions remaining in the story for such readers regard character-Why does Dalzul do what he does? How do the others respond?-and theme: What should we make of this story? How does the plot relate to the churten experience and the structuring of reality? What does the plot tell us about Heroes?

The Narrator gets to work on these issues just before allowing Riel to throw out the crucial and only slightly misleading phrase, "blood sacrifice." Going into Shan's mind, the Narrator has him tell what he knows: that Forest and Riel are "sympathetic, intelligent, trying to be honest"; that "Dalzul is a great man, not a foolish egoist, not a liar." But Shan also knows "that when he was thirty, Dalzul was worshipped as God. No matter how he disavowed that worship, it must have changed him. Growing old, he would remember what it was to be a king ...." And he might translate "Todoghay, the one who holds the scepter" (133) to mean "king." Shan sighs and tells Riel and Forest he feels "like a fool," and Forest asks him, "Because you fell in love with Dalzul?" and says that she honors him for doing so. Still, Dalzul needs Shan's help. Shan concludes that there is a must here: initially he thinks they must tell their story together, but he changes the thought to "I must listen."

A beginning for building up a world, a real world, starting with what he sees as "recalcitrant" and "irreducible," including an Other "absolutely" a being in herself, for herself. All fiction, of course: Shan is a character in a highly improbable story. But while we are entrained into the world(s) of this story, caught up in its words and music, these are facts for Shan-out there, external facts-and, for a moment also, for us. This is one of the epiphanies in Le Guin, one of the moments a character achieves momentary wholeness and a momentary glimpse of the Other, wholly and clearly.⁶⁹ A moment when one can see with a kind of certainty: the "Sureness" for which language is "inadequate" when one has found "THE WAY" (ACH 485; "Some Generative Metaphors").

Starting from there, Shan understand that he has "been dreaming," a good dream, not the nightmare of the chaos experience on the Shoby-a good, Yinish, Le Guinian dream. But it is time for action, Tai is not there (who usually gets him moving), but Riel and Forest have figuratively shaken him awake, and Shan concludes he must do the same for Dalzul. If Dalzul will let him: "Apparently Forest and Riel don't exist for him as women; do I exist for him as a man?" In musical terms, Shan feels his job is to add "dissonance in the harmony, to syncopate the beat." In a different metaphor, he thinks his job "is to try to jolt him" (135).

To prepare for the dissonance-introduction and jolting, Shan, Riel, and Forest talk with Aketa about the scepter-bearer and the scepter and the power the scepter "Is connected with-symbolizes?" After a brief comic episode of Shan's "dancing a waterfall," miming "the little dynamo up on the volcano," and Aketa's responses, they conclude that the scepter is associated with electricity: "If you take the scepter[,] you're the Electricity Priest . . . ." Dalzul chose the scepter and, in some sense, was chosen by it. But to what end? Aketa's answer includes a word Shan tentatively interprets as "Dead, death?" (136-37).

Shan has Dalzul over for dinner and serious conversation, and gets Dalzul's story (continued). In Dalzul's version, Ket is a virgin saving herself for the sacred marriage of the king and earth: "So that in a sense she is the Earth. As, in a sense, I am Space, the sky. Coming alone to this world, a conjunction. A mystic union: fire and air with soil and water. The old mythologies enacted again in living flesh." Except the Terrans "aren't behaving in a properly sacred manner." Dalzul thinks the Gaman primitive and therefore rigid; and from there he reasons that the Terrans are disrupting Gaman society and that he, Dalzul, is responsible. Shan tries to get the matter in perspective, pointing out to Dalzul that the people of this world are responsible for their world, "And they don't seem all that primitive," pointing out the steel, electricity, literacy, and social flexibility and stability. And then goes on to give Forest and Riel's reading of their situation. Dalzul hears little of this (rejecting what doesn't fit with his story) and then exits: "He stood up and patted the air on the back, saying, 'Good night, Forest; good night, Riel,' before he patted Shan on the back and said, 'Good night and thanks, Shan!" (138-39). Shan returns to Riel and Forest to review the problem. Shan thinks Dalzul delusional, and from the point of view of the story, which is Shan's, Dalzul is delusional. Still, within the story, Shan must wonder if perhaps he is the one with the delusions, "But you and Riel and I," he tells Forest, "we seem to be in the same general reality-fiction-are we?" Forest says "Increasingly so" (139).

All three go to see Dalzul, but Dalzul sees only Shan. Dalzul agrees they must leave, but only after the coronation. He sees an obligation: "If I run out on them, Aketa's faction will have their swords out-" Riel interrupts, loudly, "Aketa doesn't have a sword . . . . These people don't have swords, they don't make them!" Dalzul talks through her words (141). Shan thinks they should knock Dalzul on the head and get him offplanet: "He could destroy Ganam instead of saving it-" and Riel interrupts him with "Is Ganam a world? Is Dalzul a God?" And then an important speech:

Putting "a peaceable arm around Riel's shoulders," Forest reiterates the message: Aketa won't slaughter Viaka and the palace household, and Forest cannot "see these people letting us mess up anything in a big way. They're in control." So they should go through with the ceremony. "It probably isn't a big deal except in Dalzul's mind." When it is over, they can ask him to go home, and he'll take them: "'He'll do it. He's-' she paused. He's fatherly,' she said, without sarcasm," ending the section (142). The ultimate father-figure in a way, Dalzul is best-of-breed as traditional (heterosexual, unpartnered, Judeo-Christian-Rationalist Western) Hero, who comes to a decorous end.

The Ceremony of the Scepter as the Narrator describes it, and Riel interprets, is very impressive. Ket is accompanied by Aketa and Ketketa, her two husbands, with a big turnout of priests. Dalzul is dressed in his black and silver uniform, and Ket walks to him, kneels down on both knees, and says to him a sentence Riel translates, "Dalzul, you chose." She goes back to her husbands (143); everybody walks onto the volcano, "all in one huge pulse. Entrained." They get to "an altar or low pedestal" placed in "the shine and glitter of the water," and on the pedestal "a wand, not gold, unornamented, of dark wood or tarnished metal" (144). It's metal. Dalzul is told to take off his shoes, which he does, walks to the pedestal "and around it, so that he faced the procession and the watching people. He smiled, and put out his hand, and seized the scepter." For those who want things spelled out, there is Shan's testimony in what I've called the epilog: Dalzul was electrocuted. "They thought he had chosen that death. He chose it when he chose to have sex with Ket, with the Earth Priestess, with the Earth. They thought he knew . . . . If you lie with the Earth, you die by the Lightning. Men come a long way to Ganam for that death." Shan says that the Terrans had not understood, but he doesn't know if their lack of perception had to do with "the churten effect, with perceptual dissonance, with chaos." They had come "to see differently, but which of us knew the truth? He knew he had to be a god again"; and there the story ends (145).

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Discussion:

At the end of "The Shobies' Story," the nine crew members still awake agree on a narrative and so recreate the(ir) universe and get home. It is a comic ending: not a new and better world coalescing around a central couple, but a lost universe reforming around a central group, in a kind of allegory of the establishment of human society around the fire in a cave. "Dancing to Ganam" comes to a more abrupt and tragic ending.

I have of "Dancing" three related question: (1) Finally, whose story is this? (2) How does this story come down on the possibility "that there is, somewhere, if one could just find it, a fact"? (3) How does "Dancing" fit into Le Guin's canon?

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However much Captain Ahab steals the show in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), the opening and closing belong to Ishmael, the Narrator. The close of "Dancing" is Shan's testimony about Dalzul's death, including the assertions that the Gaman "thought he had chosen that death" and that Shan is sure that Dalzul "had to be a god again" (145). So Shan and Dalzul share the close between them, with some reference to the Gaman, and with Shan as Narrator, Shan having escaped to tell the story. The opening is the Gaman view, or at least that of Aketa and Ket, in a scene that occurs, I think, simultaneously with Shan's testimony. As the Ekumenical authorities close the case, as I picture these scenes, the Gaman are completing their ritual.⁷⁰ Ket wonders if Dalzul "only listened to the thunder"-the power-"and couldn't hear anything else"; Aketa says he thinks Dalzul "knew what he was doing" ([107]). The opening, then, is shared by the Gaman and Dalzul. I think, then, that the story is about Dalzul, from multiple points of view, Terran and Gaman, female and male.

If Dalzul knew what he was doing, then one interpretation of what he was doing was choosing to become a year-king, one of the "Kings Killed at the End of a Fixed Term" described by James Frazer (319 f.; ch. 24.3), combined with the consort of the Earth, in the godly manner of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis (Frazer 376 f.; chs. 29-43, esp. 378-80). This is not exactly what the Gaman think Dalzul is doing, but it is close enough. What is insane in Dalzul's behavior is his starting to conspire, wheel, and deal in the manner of a real, political king, or in the manner of a Mobile of the Ekumen to Terra, when he really was taken for God and really, in terms of Ekumenical history, achieved his greatest political success, going on to become, on Terra and on Orint, a true hero (FIS 109). In that case, his insanity is trying to recreate in detail his greatest role. He is also a little scary from the point of view of Shan, Riel, and Forest, in talking to people who are not there and (on another occasion) ignoring people who are-at least in Shan's version.

If Dalzul did not choose his script, then he was insanely acting like a political king going to his coronation and finding himself an electrocuted temporary lover of the Earth embodied in Ket as Anam.

Alternatively, Dalzul went to the Ceremony of the Scepter, was crowned king, and did what was necessary to get back the princess Ket and put down the rebellion of Aketa. If we have nothing else but fictions, that happy ending (for Dalzul) is a possibility-if we had heard the story from Dalzul's point of view. We did not, however, and I believe most readers take it that within the fiction of "Dancing to Ganam" it is a fact that Dalzul is electrocuted. So Ket and Aketa imply in the opening; so Shan testifies or reports (without ever mentioning Dalzul by name) at the end of the story. So the Narrator strongly hints by standard protocols of dropping hints in SF stories and in mysteries. We can say, then, "that there is, somewhere . . . a fact," if only in a fictional world. Further, we can say that for Shan there are facts: the sensations in the market place, where Shan sees the world of the Gaman, hears the vendor's call, and most especially sees the "short old woman going about her business" as an Other, absolute in herself (134). Or we can say with Forest that there is "Only fiction," including the facts Shan makes up for himself (118); we can add to this the idea, also from Forest, that "the churten problem centers not on impressions only, but expectations" (132)-including, perhaps, the expectations of those who know the term "Year-King" and SF reading protocols. And we should add even to that Riel's insistence that the Gaman: "have their own story, and they're telling it!" (141). In that case, in the land of the Gaman, Gaman consensus determines reality: they expect Dalzul to be electrocuted; hence Dalzul is electrocuted (insofar as "is" is a meaningful word).

I choose to take the modernist position (and the very early modernist one of Koheleth in Ecclesiastes) and believe that somewhere some facts may exist, but they are very difficult to find and will look different from different point of view. And I think I can get Le Guin on my side here as much as she is on the side of Riel and Forest.

I have compared Shan's liminality-his acting as a kind of envoy between two realties-to that of Lyubov in The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), both early works but both relevant. On the one hand, both works stress the importance of the dream, always a kind of fiction. For the Athsheans in Word for World, dream-time is as real as world-time. And, in a sense, all of The Lathe of Heaven, except for a flashback, is set in worlds dreamed by George Orr: Orr's fictions. Still, though, within those worlds and applicable, I think, to our world-singular-we have statements that go very differently. Most succinct is Selver's assertion, "What is, is." If something has been brought from the dream-time into the world-time, it is in the world; to believe otherwise "is insanity" (168; ch. 8). Selver's people have learned mass murder; in the story, that is a fact. In the story, Selver and his people have won a terrible victory, and Don Davidson has lost and is isolated on an island. To say that this is only one version and to insist on giving Davidson's equal weight is to undermine Word for World as an attack on US military action in Indochina and render Le Guin politically and artistically irresponsible.

Within one world that George Orr has dreamed up, within the fiction of Lathe, Heather Lelache thinks about her responsibility in suggesting a dream to George Orr. "A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it. But she was caught in a role and couldn't back out of it now." Lelache suggests that Orr "dream the Aliens aren't out there on the Moon any longer"-with bad (if darkly comic) results (106-07; ch. 7). Le Guin is well aware of the idea of getting caught up in roles-fictions, narratives-and nevertheless her Narrator rings a lot of large chimes here in having Lelache able to resist the yearning to play God because Lelache feels herself part of a larger whole, a whole that has real, extra-fictional existence. In Lathe, the most basic whole is the Dao. Similarly, at the turning point of Lathe George Orr experiences "a sense of well-being . . . a certainty that things were all right, and that he was in the middle of things. Self is universe. He would not be allowed to be isolated, to be stranded. . . . This feeling did not come to him as blissful or mystical, but simply as normal" (139; ch. 9). Dalzul is not a god, able to save or destroy the Gaman (141) even if in Dalzul's mind he is, not because the Gaman outvote him but because there just aren't such gods in the world of this story.

In "Pathways of Desire" (1979), Le Guin was willing to play again with the idea that worlds can be dreamed up and are being dreamed up; but even in "Pathways" relatively old people are able to escape the dream-having no assigned roles except being old-and begin to create a culture. And the two central lovers can determine that even if the world we experience is all illusion, Maya, that we should stay in it and do the best we can in what reality we have. If nothing else, death in "Pathways" seems really real, and it is also the one certainty allowed in the Handdara in The Left Hand of Darkness (71; ch. 5). Genly Ai makes his report as if it were a story, for the Terran view is "that Truth is a matter of the imagination" and "Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are" (1), but pearls are quite real enough for all esthetic matters, and, in Left Hand, we cannot deny Estraven's death. The same is the case for Dalzul. Starting with this one apparent fact-Dalzul ends up the story dead (so says Hideo in "Another Story" [FIS 177])-we can read back and privilege the perceptions of the Gaman and the growing awareness of Riel, Forest, and Shan. They are right; the Hero Dalzul is wrong and flawed and/or suicidal: a worthy tragic hero, in a universe where we can do without heroes. Additionally, we can privilege the Narrator's hints at facts within the story: the dynamo, the steel pruning hook, the book. What is, is: Brahman, Dao, Yin-Yang, the Other, a tune on the streets, a tool, a woman passing by-perhaps most if not all of the ten thousand created things of the only world most of us have.

"Dancing to Ganam" indeed uses poststructuralist ideas becoming mainstream in the 1990s, but I do not think it was a major break with Le Guin's earlier work. In some ways, the postmodern avant-garde was catching up with Le Guin and some very old ideas of Eastern thought, the Perennial Philosophy, and a very widespread tradition of down-to-earth mysticism.

* * *

"A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" straddles the time of "The Shobies' Story" and "Dancing to Ganam" (Brigg 19; Le Guin, "Open Letter"). It is a first-person narrative and a report: Tiokunan'n Hideo, a "Farmholder of the Second Sedoretu of Udan," on the planet O submits a report to the Ekumenical Stabiles on Hain and to the Anarresti scientist Gvonesh, working on the Churten Field at the Laboratories at Ve Port. It being a tradition of some standing, he makes his report as if he told a story (LHD 1), and it is a sentimental love story. Le Guin describes "Another Story" as one of her "very few experiments with time travel," and notes that it "explores the possibility of two stories about the same person in the same time being completely different and completely true" (FIS 9). Since the privileged version comes to a happy ending, I will call "The Fisherman" a "Replay" story, following Carol D. Stevens's suggestion (from the title of Ken Grimwood's novel Replay [1986]).⁷¹

In the first-play version and the replay, Hideo is born on the planet O to the First Sedoretu of Udan, and what that means is complicated. O is a world with "a low, stable human population" of long-standing, "an ancient climax technology," a social basis of dispersed villages and associated farms (very rich farms) rather than cities and states-and few problems.⁷² In short, human culture on O is close to Le Guin's idea of eutopia from at least her description of Karhide's hearths in "Is Gender Necessary?" in 1976 (LoN [1979]: 164-165) and the "Redux" version in 1989 (DEW 10-12), through "A Non-Euclidean View . . ." in 1982 (DEW 88-96). We should not think of O's society, however, as simple; we humans tend to like complexity in life, and the ki'O add a lot of complexity to their lives with their marriage arrangements (see FIS Introd. 9). Unlike the Christian vision of eternal life after the resurrection "There is no end to the making of marriages on O" (152).⁷³ The ki'O are born into one of two moieties, Morning and Evening, with one's mother determining which moiety one is born into. Sex between members of the same moiety is incest and punished only socially but severely. A basic marriage group, a sedoretu, is a heterosexual couple of Morning and Evening, and a heterosexual couple of Evening and Morning (each designated Morning or Evening according to the moiety of the woman in the pair): four people, who also form two homosexual pairings (male-male, called Night; female-female, called Day [reversing the usual Terran associations]). Each member of the group is expected to have sex with the two people of the opposite moiety and strictly forbidden to have sex with the person of the same moiety (FIS 151).

Hideo's father, Dohedri, is a ki'O Morning man, and "rooted to his knees in the dirt of Udan Farmhold"; adding beautifully to the "thick description," "thick planning"-social complexity-of the neighborhood, Hideo's father somehow got involved with a very important person of no moiety: Isako, a Mobile of the Ekumen, a Terran with an ethnic background Le Guin's readers will recognize as Japanese (150). Le Guin's readers will also recognize the Terra alluded to briefly: a planet where human fertility was so decreased that "they have to think about marrying for children" (151), where Isako sustained "damage from her childhood, from the poison in the Terran biosphere"-a potential threat to her (173). With much ado, Isako is adopted into the Evening (155), and Dohedri and Isako marry as the Evening couple. Isako (Evening) also marries Tubdu, "the Morning wife" (forming the female homosexual "Day" pair); and Tubdu marries Kap, the Evening husband, who is also married to Dohedri (for the male homosexual "Night" pair). Tubdu and Kap have two children, Isidri, who is highly relevant to the rest of the story, and Suudi, who is irrelevant. Isako and Dohedri have two children, Hideo (the protagonist-narrator) and his younger sister Koneko. Under the ki'O incest taboo, Hideo and Isidri may have sex and reproduce; Hideo and Keneko may not (151-53).

Hideo, his sister Keneko, and "germane" Isidri have a happy childhood, much of it spent fishing. Hideo likes to "stand heroic on a slippery boulder in midstream, the long spear poised to strike," in a pose that probably is no longer part of the fantasy life of the kids of California and the Pacific Northwest, but once was. With the exception of the Colorado River tribes, "every group" of Indians "in California whose territory contained sufficient bodies of water" used the harpoon to fish (Kroeber, Handbook 815; ch. 54). Hideo is good at hero-style fishing; Isidri does better slipping into the water and catching fish and even eels barehanded: "You just sort of move with the water and get transparent," she tells him (FIS 153).

All together, a good childhood: sort of ideal village life, but without raids by Vikings or Cossacks, without the manorial system, without plagues, Church, lord, or synagog-and with advanced, responsible science and appropriate technology. Also with a religion very like philosophical Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism ("godless, argumentative, and mystical," stressing the name of the world [174-75, 177]), and with no television but a strong tradition of story-telling.⁷⁴ As a child, Hideo's favorite story is his mother's story from her homeworld, "The Fisherman of the Inland Sea" (148 f.).

A poor but beautiful young fisherman, Urashima, Isako's story goes, is beloved and desired by the daughter of the sea king. She "begged him to come to her palace under the sea," but he refuses: "My children wait for me at home," he says, with no mention of a wife. Then Urashima gives in and spends "a night of love in her green palace." She tells him that if he leaves he leaves forever; he says he'll return. He leaves, and the sea king's daughter gives him a box with instructions not to open it. Urashima accepts the box and the command and returns to his village, except he knows no one there and his name is recognized only in terms of a story of "a fisherman named Urashima [who] was lost at sea" long ago, and none of that family has lived in the village for a century. "So Urashima went back down to the shore; and there he opened the box . . . ." A bit of white smoke comes out of the box. "In that moment Urashima's black hair turned white, and he grew old, old, old; and he lay down on the sand and died." There is evidence for the story, too: in the Annals of the Emperors, one Urashima of the Yosa district, "went away in the year 477, and came back to his village in the year 825, but soon departed again," and there are rumors of a box kept in a shrine (FIS 149). The story, of course, is like Isako's life, as a Mobile of the Ekumen: leaving home never to return, or, if she did, to return to a world that had changed in the many years she had been away because of the time-dilation of Nearly as Fast as Light travel, as is especially clear to readers familiar with read Le Guin's 1964 story, "Semley's Necklace." The question of "Another Story" is in what ways "The Fisherman" will become Hideo's story.

Not particularly with Hideo's first goings away. He goes off to school and loves it, but comes home for the long holidays and "dropped school like a book bag and became pure farm boy overnight," doing good country things, including "falling in and out of love with lovely boys and girls of the Morning" (156-57), including Sota, a Morning boy (168). As he grows older, though, Hideo takes care to avoid falling in love and even pulls away from Sota. He sits by the local river, the Oro, thinking deep thoughts and comes to a resolution: he's going to leave home. Looking back, Hideo as Narrator sees his younger self "luxuriate in sorrow . . . for this ancient home that I was going to leave and lose forever, to sail away from on the dark river of time. For I knew, from my eighteenth birthday on, that I would leave Udan, leave O, and go out to the other worlds. It was my ambition. It was my destiny" (158). Coming to this decision, Hideo sees himself, at least figuratively if not also literally, "standing again, poised on the slick boulder amidst the roaring water, spear raised, the hero!" willing to toss away the "long, slow, deep, rich life of Udan" (160)-to sacrifice.

The major tossing involves two women in his life: his mother and Isidri. Instead of just telling Isako he was going to Hain, his immediate plan, Hideo tells her he is going to Hain "and that from Hain I wanted to go on farther and forever." The older Hideo, maybe retaining a bit of his youthful luxuriating in misery, exclaims, "How cruel we are to our parents!" and goes on to condemn his own participation in "the impenetrable self-centeredness of youth." Hideo notes how that self-centeredness "mistakes itself for honesty," giving his mother instead of "some modest hope" she might see him in ten years, "the desolation of believing that when I left she would never see me again." Hideo says, "I prided myself on my truthfulness. And all the time, though I didn't know it . . . it was not the truth at all. The truth is rarely so simple, though not many truths are as complicated as mine turned out to be" (FIS 159-60).⁷⁵ He tells her he wants to be a Mobile of the Ekumen.

Having left her people herself to become a Mobile, Isako takes Hideo's "brutality without the least complaint" (160). Isidri, surprisingly, turns out to be another matter. She encounters Hideo in a boathouse and tells him she has been avoiding him, because she loves him: "If you'd felt anything like that for me, you'd have known I did. But it wasn't both of us. So there was no good in it" (161). So she says good-bye and for about an hour Hideo looks "at the world I had thrown away," sitting, thinking in the dark in the boathouse. "When at last I moved, I turned on a light, and began to try to defend my purpose, my planned future, from the terrible plain reality." By dinner time, Hideo "was in control" of himself again: "master of my destiny," sure of his decision (162).

He goes to Hain, a four-year trip (O time) by NAFAL, and begins his training.

The message is dated "nine days later than the date of reception" and contains words in Hideo's native language. Hideo cannot help them with this "creased message" or "ghost message," and the best guess of the Receivers is that there may have been "a double field-interference" phenomenon (164).

The next significant event occurs when Hideo is in his final year of training in temporal physics and considering going to the Cetian Worlds for advanced work, after his "promised visit home." Then they receive the first news "from Anarres of a new theory of transilience," the possibility of a "Churten technology" that would allow instantaneous transportation of matter. Hideo says, possibly with a pun he does not intend, "I was crazy to work on it." And then, just before he "was about to go promise . . . soul and body to the School if they would let" him do work on churten theory, they come and ask him. "Judiciously and graciously," Hideo consents and gets the chance to work with Gvonesh at Ve Port.

Hideo has now spent ten of his years on Hain and Ve and is thirty-one; returning to O, he will have been away for eighteen years. So Hideo goes home (166): "Eighteen years had made no difference at all to the hills beside the wide Saduun . . . . Everything was the same, itself. Timeless, Udan in its dream of work stood over the river that ran timeless in its dream of movement." People, though, change. Hideo's parents are older, and his mother is not well: the results of her youth in the degraded environment on Terra, plus, we later learn, sorrow for the absence of her son. Hideo's sister Koneko is also older; once four years his junior, she is now four years older. "The Second Sedoretu" of Udan "had been married for eleven years: Koneko and Isidri, sister germanes, were the partners of the Day. Koneko's husband was my old friend Sota . . . . Isidri's husband, a man nearly twenty years older than herself, named Hedran had been a traveling scholar of the Discussions. . . . He and Isidri had no children" (168). Hedran, then, was one of the "Scholars, wandering Discussers, itinerant artists" and others on O who "seldom want to fit themselves into the massive permanence of a farmhold sedoretu" and often do not marry (152). Hideo thinks Hedran may have a more passionate relationship with Sota than with Isidri, but he respects Isidri's respect for Hedran and her acceptance of his "intellectual and spiritual guidance"-although Hideo finds Hedran's teaching "a bit dry and disputatious" (174). Hedran is a strong candidate to become a comic-romance alazon: here, the inconvenient fifth who can be a left-over after the pairings up. He is older than the others in the Sedoretu, not in an impassioned love with Isidri, associated with "dry" teaching, symbolically dry in his sterility. Isidri, to the contrary, is "the hydrologist for the village and the oenologist for the farm"-working with water and wine-living a life that is "thick-planned, very rich in necessary work and wide relationships." Employing still more water imagery (the favorite Daoist element, Takver's element in The Dispossessed [1974]), Hideo says "She swam in life as she had swum in the river, like a fish, at home" (173-74).⁷⁶

Hideo does not feel at home at Udan. He and his mother may be attached by "a very fine, thin cord, like the umbilical cord, that can stretch light-years without any difficulty" (173), but it is not enough to snap him back. What might be is Isidri, and in a long, dark, night of the soul he decides to ask Isidri, to help him. "So, holding fast to that, I could at last stop the terrible sobbing and lie spent" until daybreak. Except he doesn't go to see Isidri. What he does do is recognize that he needs help and go "to the shrine in the Old School" and offers worship and comes to a true recognition "that Cetian physics and religion" really "are aspects of one knowledge" and came to wonder "if all physics and religion are aspects of one knowledge" (175-76), which is the case with Terran physics in our time, and Terran mysticism if Fritjof Capra is right in The Tao of Physics; but none of this resolves Hideo's immediate problem.

Which is the point: Hideo returns to work at Ran'n and gets by. Gvonesh churtens from one place to another around Ve Port, then farther. Then nonhuman animal tests and robot tests. Then the Shoby and their barely avoiding "a death by unreality," using "entrainment" to rescue "themselves from a kind of chaos of dissolution"; and "Experiments with high-intelligence life-forms came to a halt" (176). Gvonesh feels that "The rhythm is wrong," getting Hideo to think about something his mother had said to him at Udan about there being something wrong to have events without intervals: "Where is the dancing?" she had asked, "Where is the way?" and doubted the research teams, would "be able to control it" (170). But Hideo won't follow the "dancing" thought because he doesn't want to think about Udan. When he does, he feels "the knowledge of being no one, no where, and a shaking like a frightened animal" (177). He goes on to remember that his religion assured him he "was part of the Way," and the physics "absorbed . . . [his] despair in work." And then Dalzul arrives, and there are the two journeys from Ve to Ganam (called Tadkla here, its name on the maps of the Hainish Expansion). And then, obviously, another problem of some sort (177), though going one person at a time seems to work; and Hideo gets an idea.

He tells us that the lab groups "had taken to calling the non-interval in time/real interval in space a 'skip.' It sounded light, trivial. Scientists like to trivialize."⁷⁷ Hideo suggests his skipping to Ve Port and back to Ran'n. He notes that he had said he would visit Udan "this winter" and adds, with significant repetition and, perhaps, variation, "Scientists like to trivialize"-i.e., he suggests that a visit to Udan would be no big deal (177). Despite a "wrinkle" in the field Gvonesh points out to him he tries the test, and it works; and he is on Ve, with "no desire to return to O" (178).⁷⁸ Gvonesh thinks there is still a wrinkle or fold in the field they have named for Hideo: "the Tiokunan'n Field"; she finds it "unaesthetical."

In physics terms, we will have to take Gvonesh's word that the wrinkle is esthetically inappropriate; in literary terms she makes it very apt. Shortly after noting the wrinkle in the field, she asks "You got no sex, Hideo?" meaning primarily no sex life. Then she adds, before apologizing, "You got some kind of wrinkle in your life, hah" and suggests/asks, "Maybe is time you go back to O?" (179). She can send him back, and does, via churten: "A shimmer, a shivering of everything-a missed beat-skipped-" and Hideo is in darkness, in what turns out to be a biology lab on O, "in some building of the Center at Ran'n" (179-80). Eighteen years earlier, "the night after . . . [he] had left" for Hain by NAFAL ship (182).

"O is a good world to time-travel in. Things don't change." In fact there is no problem at all with Hideo's return to Udan, except that he was now thirty-one, not twenty-one (182-83). So at thirty-one, Hideo goes to see Isidri, and they marry, and time passes like a river, bringing Hideo to the present and end of his report, if not quite the end of the story: "I have lived now for eighteen years as a farmholder of Udan Farm of Derdan'nad Village . . . on Oket, on O. I am fifty years old. I am the Morning husband of the Second Sedoretu of Udan; my wife is Isidri; my Night marriage is to Sota of Drehe, whose Evening wife is my sister Koneko . . . . But none of this is of much interest to the Stabiles of the Ekumen" (185). Of interest to readers in the rest of the story is, first, what the current Hideo when newly returned to O is to do about Hideo's commitment to be on Hain; second, what will happen when the current point-of-view Hideo reaches the moment in which the initial Hideo churtened back into time-and, third, what to make of Hideo's story.

The first issue is handled very directly by Isako, who is quite healthy when Hideo returns and remains that way. However strange the situation-or perhaps especially when things get very strange-a promise is a promise, and Isako feels a "strong sense of duty" and "obligation to the Ekumen": she insists that Hideo "Apologize for not coming to study, as you said you would. And explain it to the Director, the Anarresti woman. Maybe she would understand." Gvonesh's understanding is unlikely since she will not learn of the churten for another three years; additionally, Hideo may be on Hain: time-travel quickly creates paradoxes. As many readers will have guessed, Hideo sends a message by ansible (for "a staggering sum in cash" [and nine days after returning?]), and Hideo assumes "that this was the 'creased message' or 'ghost' they asked . . . [him] to interpret" his first year on Hain (FIS 186-87).

The second issue is resolved when the time comes (again) when Hideo-1 returned to Udan to find Isidri married to Hedran, his mother sick-and so forth. About that time Hedran comes again to the village and Isidri suggests "inviting him to stay at Udan." Hideo successfully opposes the suggestion, "saying that though he was a brilliant teacher there was something I disliked about him" (190). So "the instant of transilience" passes, leaving intact Hideo-2's marriage, family, and new life at Udan (189).

What Hideo's experience means in terms of time-travel, I don't understand. Hideo's explanation involves the "fact" that the ansible field for his message from O to Ve "was meeting a resonance resistance caused by the ten-year anomaly in the churten field, which did fold the message back into itself, crumple it up, inverting and erasing." It follows then, Hideo writes, that "At that point, within the implication of the Tiokunan'n Double Field, my existence on O as I sent the message was simultaneous with my existence on Hain when the message was received. There was an I who sent and an I who received. Yet, for so long as the encapsulated field anomaly existed, the simultaneity was literally a point, an instant, a crossing without further implication in either the ansible or the churten field" (187-88).

Hideo tries to clarify this in terms of an image of a river curving back on itself in its flood plain into an "S" and then breaking through the "double banks of the S and runs straight, leaving a whole reach of the water aside as a curving lake, cut off from the current, unconnected": his life on Hain and Ve as a churten researcher. He thinks, though, "a truer image is the whirlpools of the current itself, occurring and recurring, the same? or not the same?" (188), and the two images together, I think, are central to the meaning of the story. And to the meaning of A Fisherman of the Inland Sea as a volume ending with "Another Story"-and to the place of Fisherman in Le Guin's canon.

That "reach of water . . . cut off" is Hideo's time "outside the world" in terms of Always Coming Home and Buffalo Gals, as a "historian," in the term of "A Man of the People." His time as a research scientist is a project that was necessary for him, perhaps, but time away from his real "life's work": "vineyards, drainage, the care of yamas, the care and education of children, the Discussions, and trying to learn how to catch fish" not with a manly heroic spear, but with bare and empty hands (188). "True journey is return," indeed, but also Dorothy of Kansas's recognition, even after Oz: "There's no place like home." Corny, but a point Le Guin insists upon, so long as home is a true home (otherwise the moral is to Walk Away from Omelas-or just get out). "[T]he whirlpools of the current itself" refers to the quantum field where particles go in and out of existence, and to the same field seen as the Dao-or Brahman or ch'i (Capra 197-201; ch. 14); it makes little sense to get pedantic about nomenclature for the ineffable. As Ogion explains to Ged, to avoid becoming "a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream," one "must be the steam itself, all of it . . ." (WE 128; ch. 7). As Ged explains to Arren, "Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death ..." (FS 165; ch. 11), and each human life-"That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity"-is a momentary wave on the sea of being (FS 122; ch. 8).

In Fisherman, as in much of Le Guin's earlier and most recent work, selfhood is best achieved in immanent relationship with the world and with others, primarily a primary, central, really significant other. In "Another Story," Isidri is that center, but only as the center of a web of relationships with other people, "yamas," and a world held together with highly symbolic water. Hideo's true heroism, his holding fast, is letting go of his project of churten science and returning to his beloved. He is not caught in Urashima's story or Semley's or even his mother's but is able, as if by magic, to change the story and come to a comic-romance ending.

*

Hideo's rejection of traditional, macho heroism, gives a nice shape to Fisherman.⁷⁹ The first story of the volume, "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" shows the development of Mrs. Jerry Debree to Annie Laurie Debree. She begins as an appendage to Jerry; at the end, "She was the heroine." That is "heroine," arguably a feminine form of the hero, and a heroine with the name of a stereotypical ballad heroine: Annie Laurie. Still, that's progress for Ms. Debree, who becomes a heroine who can look out for herself and cut a sharp business deal, and not a bad place to start a volume. "Newton's Sleep" suggests that a transcendent project like the Spes Colony has its limitations and shows the recapture of the colony by Earth and earth: the world and dirt and life. Thinking about the story, it is a strange comedy of reintegrating Spes with the planet; feeling with Isaac Rose, we experience Ike as the Hero as exile, engineer, and rationalist: "a true believer" in reason "who can't see how and why the true belief isn't working," even, for his creator, "a tragic character, an admirable overreacher" (FIS Introd. 11)-or not so admirable but still tragic.⁸⁰ If we learn a kind of "double vision" from "Newton's Sleep," we should experience the story through thinking and feeling, as comedy and tragedy. "The Ascent of the North Face" is a delightful send-up of the Hero as explorer/adventurer, Conqueror of Everest, K2, the Pole, a house at the nonexistent address (in Portland, OR) of 2647 Lovejoy Street. "The Rock That Changed Things" shows us a Hera, I think, although I won't push the point. Bu did not have to be female; what she had to be was a nur: one of the oppressed of the Earth (or wherever), functioning as a midwife of the revolution-or, in Athshean terms, functioning as a god like Selver, helping her people to translate the word "freedom" and tell their own stories. "The Kerastion" shows the Hero as Artist, and, as we have seen, quite exactly balances the claims of the heroic artist to express himself and try to hold onto his art, and the claims of the community and the Earth-Mother as Kali: destroying and producing, taking into herself and recycling all that is, that lives, that is beautiful.

The three churten stories show a successful group project (similar to "Sur") in "The Shobies' Story," and the Hero as Hero in "Dancing to Ganam." Dalzul is a good hero as heroes go-a savior-but also "a hi-tech, hubristic hero" (FIS Introd. 9), who turns out to be a heterosexist and a bit of a sexist. He also usefully repeats the lesson of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the very old one that the truly transcendent project of a Hero is to become a god. That is overreaching! If we see him consciously choosing a role as a dying god in a universe without resurrection, then, I think, we can find him a still potentially dangerous but "admirable overreacher" (9). What keeps him from being truly dangerous in the world of "Dancing" is, first, that quite unlike Captain Ahab's authority in Moby Dick, Commander Dalzul has nothing like near total, despotic command on a ship; the Stabiles on Hain won't grant such power, nor will the members of the crew. Second, he is kept in line by a universe that is, massively is, and planets and cultures that are much smaller but still much, much too big for one man to push around. Another Story" gives us the scientist as Hero, returning to a theme of "Newton's Sleep." Here, though, the scientist does not need to have his world recaptured; he is recaptured by the story he says he feels "far down deeper inside me than my bones" (177). When the churten experience puts him into contact with what is, Hideo's entire being goes back to Udan. He renounces his project, sacrifice, the symbolic spear of the hero, a life of never having "an intense relationship" being "married to a damned theory," "No room for love, no time"-rather like Shevek in despair, actually (TD ch. 6)-and he follows home that "very fine, thin cord" that leads back to Mother in many senses: to his wife, family, and life (FIS 171, 175).

In this chorus of the Coyote's song the finest heroism is renunciation of heroism and returning to the world.

*

Tiokunan'n Hideo and "Another Story" generally are similar to Shevek and The Dispossessed: both works are structured with dual time-tracks in a significant variation on the rhetorical device of chiasmus-crossover, as symbolized by the Greek letter Chi: X (Bittner, Approaches 130). Both feature temporal physics and physicists; both deal with issues of transcendent projects and immanent life of domesticity; both stress the importance of pain for human development; both contain significant sexual politics; both deal with continuity and change.⁸¹

Implicit in my analysis of Le Guin has been a perception of a good deal of continuity in her work, and such a view, as one view, is appropriate. As Shevek says at Vea's party in the central chapter of The Dispossessed (178-80; ch. 7), things do endure, at least for a while: there is time's circle as well as arrow. Alternatively stated, Haber tells Orr in The Lathe of Heaven, "Life-evolution-. . . existence itself-is essentially change," and Orr doesn't disagree but says, "That is one aspect of it . . . . The other is stillness" (135; ch. 9).

In The Dispossessed, the emphasis is on change, uncertainty, and the unreliability of the everyday world: the dance over the abyss, "on the brink of the world" (DEW 48). Shevek returning home feels something like an earthquake and feels that "Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable." In such a world "The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind." That bit of reliability is imaged in Shevek and his partner Takver taking hands as "they came together and stood holding each other on the unreliable earth" (TD 252; ch. 10). Central to Shevek's story and his life are his relationships, primarily his love for Takver. Still, Shevek is a change-bringer; his work is important. "Another Story" makes a similar point; the change, the difference from The Dispossessed, is the increased stress on relationships. In The Dispossessed there is a dynamic balancing of the value of Shevek's temporal physics (his theory makes possible the League and the Ekumen) and Shevek's homelife. In the world Hideo makes in his return to Udan, there is no reference in the literature to a "Tiokunan'n Hideo doing [churten] research. . . . Nobody worked on a theory of a stabilized double field"-Hideo's theory. The cost of Udan is the Tiokunan'n Field (FIS 188-89)-the loss of Hideo's chance to be a Shevek-like, worlds-changing hero-and it is a cost Hideo cheerfully pays and hardly reckons. And we should agree: the galaxy is too big to be changed significantly by any person, or even all of Ekumenical humanity.

On the other hand, the differences with working women, especially older women, is very important for the sexual politics of "Another Story" versus The Dispossessed, as is the treatment of homosexuality.

In The Dispossessed, Shevek's mother Rulag is cold and distant, denying Shevek touch; it is Shevek's father who nurtured him. Rulag summarizes, "He was supportive, he was parental, as I am not. The work comes first, with me. It has always come first" (97-101; ch. 4). In "A Fisherman," Hideo's father is pretty much absent from Hideo's story; his mother, Isako, the Mobile who went native (FIS 150), has been as much of a mover and Shaker as Rulag, and she is a keen intellectual (169-70), and she is very much a nurturing parent in a story that puts strong value upon nurture. In The Dispossessed, there is Odo as a looming presence, but still "an alien: an exile" on Anarres (TD 82; ch. 4), and Shevek was trained in his field by women: Mitis and Gvarab 60; ch. 4). The Narrator of The Dispossessed tells us that "There are people of inherent authority; some emperors actually have new clothes," and Mitis is one of them (45; ch. 2); and old Gvarab's lecture group on Frequency and Cycle introduces Shevek to "a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing" (87; ch. 4); Gvarab has been the unrecognized Odo of physics (130; ch. 6). But Mitis and Gvarab are minor characters in a long novel; their parallel in "Another Story" is Gvonesh, Director of the Churten Field Laboratories at Ve Port, introduced in the salutation to Hideo's report, and a major character. Gvonesh is all director, her job, her function; her sex life is a mystery to her co-workers, and so was "the rest of her existence" outside of their work (178). But Gvonesh is, if not often nurturing, very concerned with Hideo, and overall a very positive character: asking Hideo the right questions, nudging him home.

On Anarres in The Dispossessed, "No law, . . . no punishment, no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman . . . ," and a partnership (marriage) is a partnership, "whether homosexual or heterosexual" (TD 198; ch. 8). Summarizing other arguments, and overstating the case, Sarah Lefanu has said tolerance and valuing diversity may be the theory on Anarres, but what we see is different (141); and she has a valid point. We see no lesbian relations in The Dispossessed, and Takver and Shevek's friend Bedap is the one major male character we might describe as homosexual in primary orientation (139; ch. 6). Bedap re-enters Shevek's life at close to Shevek's low point, and they discuss "whether or not they should pair for a while"-and Bedap helps save Shevek from despair (139; ch. 6). Still, it is Takver and a heterosexual, monogamous marriage and family that really saves Shevek, a relationship Bedap touches but is definitely outside of. Bedap ends up almost forty and asking himself, "What have I done? . . . Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people's lives because I don't have one. I never took the time. And the time's going to run out on me, all at once, and I will never have had ... that." What Bedap meant by "'that' he could not have said . . . ; yet he felt that he understood . . . that all his hope was in . . . understanding . . . that if he would be saved," as Rilke would put it, "he must change his life" (TD 297-98; ch. 12).⁸² This passage might mean that Bedap should find a nice young man and settle down and help raise children, but it probably does not: we see in The Dispossessed no homosexual domestic life: no options for gays and lesbians balancing political doing with immanent being. The Dispossessed suggests here that the life of social activism without family life is inadequate, and can be read that to get a real family part of what Bedap must change in his life is his sexual orientation.

Thus The Dispossessed in 1974, and still a light-year or two ahead of the United States in the 1990s. There is a definite change between The Dispossessed and "Another Story," where the sexual politics privilege bisexuality but are still more open, more inclusive. The central relationship is very much between Hideo and Isidri. When Isidri tells Hideo "There was a reason . . . that you came back-here," Hideo replies quite directly, "You." Still, she adds correctly, "And Sota, and Koneko, and the farmhold" (FIS 189) Especially relevant here, Sota: Hideo's relationship with Sota is secondary to that with Isidri, but it is there, socially supported, and important. And with other, positive people in the story, the homosexual marriages are equal or primary: Dohedri and Kap (male-male), Tubdu and Isako (female-female), with Uncle Tobo, Kap's younger brother, thrown in for Tubdu as "a bonus" (155). And "many people never marry," sometimes attaching "themselves to a brother or sister's marriage as aunt or uncle," sometimes not (152); so, apparently, even a relatively single life is provided for, and need not be lonely, or lead to evil. So long as it is conducted, mindfully and responsibly, in the world.

1 See Le Guin's "Solitude" (1994) for the possibility of good living with only moderate conscious commitments and relatively tenuous human connections.  Cf. and contrast "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," here LoN (1979): 116.

2 See Le Guin's 1982 essay "A Non-Euclidian View of California . . ." (DEW 80-100), esp. 87.

3 See the discussion above on Social Constructionism; see Le Guin's "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" (1979) esp. DEW 27.

4 "Annie Laurie" is an old folksong (in English, from Scotland), whose lyrics I checked on World Wide Web from The Florida Star (Jerund@aol.com), and whose provenance is given as recorded by William Douglas in 1685 (according to jfeiszli@silver.sdsmt.edu).  The folksong heroine exists primarily as Bonnie Annie Laurie for the (male) singer to adore.

5 Cf. the routine by Monty Python where the members of an Australian university philosophy department (except the new hire) are all hard-drinkers named Bruce.

6 See also, for contrast and comparison, "Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men" (Rugoff 71-74), whose female (?) narrator tells how the first man got from God greater strength than the first woman, but how the woman followed the advice of the devil and got back control (Rugoff 74).

7 For the log-entry joke, cf. opening narrative in "The Matter of Seggri."  See Also Le Guin's more earnest discussion of heroic explorers of the Antarctic in "Heroes" (DEW 171-75).

8 Alternatively, one could picture the metabolic keys of Terran digestive enzymes not fitting the locks of New Zion's proteins (carbohydrates, etc.).  Either way the point is excellent (and often ignored in SF): Terrans would have trouble eating native food on even Earth-like planets. 

9 See also CR 163 for the pattern of Genya's surviving a month without metas.

10 I'll mention more.  Please note: In most cases, Le Guin undoubtedly knows the works I mention.  In some cases she may not; in some cases, the works I mention by others may be irrelevant for her writing her works.  I mention them as context for reading, for readers' work in constructing the meaning of the texts.  In old technical terms, I'm not doing a source study but looking at sources, analogs, homologs, and cognates; in old-fashioned pedagogical terms, I'm looking for comparisons and contrasts.

11 See above, this chapter, my headnote from Blake.  For the triple "Holy," see Isaiah 6.3, quoted in Revelation 4.8.

12 See below on Dalzul and a human individual's inability to destroy the world.

13 See also my discussion of "Field of Vision" (1973): where Percy Bysshe Shelley replaces Blake as the inspiring Critical Romantic, but the same point is made about the importance of seeing not God or anything else Beyond, but the mundane world (WTQ 222 f.)

14 Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" line 179; § 10 (Norton Anthology 217).

15 For Commander Dalzul see FIS [107]-45, esp. 109, for Dalzul as hero; and see below in this chapter. For Le Guin on heroes and their problems-often for other people-see DEW, esp. the essays on literature: "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," "Heroes," "Conflict," "World-Making" for Conquistadores{sic}).

16 Cf. and definitely contrast the Passover narrated in Exodus 7.16-12.13.

17 Note for the name David Henry Maston that Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), a call for a simple life of relative self-sufficiency (except, if the rumor in academic folklore is true, Thoreau had his mother do his laundry while he stayed at Walden Pond).

18 See in TD Shevek's chiding a fellow physicist for talking about "the politics of reality"—i.e., a power struggle—and elaborating on the phrase by saying "The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world."  Shevek can't see "'laws' to protect wealth" and the "'forces' of guns and bombs" as having the same reality as "the law of entropy and the force of gravity" (TD 164; ch. 7).

19 For Holdfast as the mythical, not just folklore, father-tyrant and "monster of the status quo," who keeps the past, and, centrally, keeps, see Campbell 337 (2.3.3) & passim (see Campbell's Index).

20 A World Wide Web, search for "L5," yielded substantial files for "The Foundation Society" and HAL5, the very real Huntsville{,} Alabama{,} L5 Society.  At least as of this writing, "A Tour of the Colony" can be downloaded from

www.nas.nasa.gov/NAS/SpaceSettlement/75SummerStudychpt5.html#HAB

—where ".gov" indicates a governmental location on the net, and NASA is the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  See also Gary Westfahl's Islands in the Sky, a book originating in a desire to use SF space station to infer practical lessons for the design of Space Station Freedom (11-12).

21 In this ploy, Ike is like the Managers and Planners in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (a safe haven rather like Spes Colony): "Of course our children know about the outside world!", a doubter is told at Walden Two.  "We simply make sure they know the whole truth!  Nothing more is needed" (Walden Two 206; ch. 24).

22 See below on figurative umbilical cord in "Another Story" (FIS 173).

23 Cf. and contrast the two nasty little boys who throw stones at Tenar and Therru (Tehanu 122; "Finding Words," ch. 9).

24 So long as we exclude anything supernatural, we might accept the "a" as a feminizing ending in "Saviora" and read Saviora as female Savior for Esther.  (See though "Pathways of Desire," CR 183).

25 See Le Guin's Introd., FIS 10.  The injunction, "You shall remember" is a motif in Hebrew Scriptures, which is bad insofar as memory is necessary for revenge, but good in other contexts.

26 For apparitions on a space craft, cf. and contrast the visions from a mystic world-ocean in S. Lem's Solaris and the more cybernetically generated images in Gawron 's Dream of glass.

27 In addition to the Blake poetry I quote below in this chapter, see for ghosts Le Guin's CI (1967), WWF (1972), "Solitude," "The Matter of Seggri" (1994).

28 For the Blake quotations, see Le Guin's Introd., FIS 10.

29 Note also Euclid: see Le Guin's essay, "A Non-Euclidean View of California . . . " (esp. DEW 86-88).

30 See "A Non-Euclidean View," DEW 86-89.

31 Isaac Rose's father is not present or alluded to in the story.  For Isaac as son of Sarah, see Genesis 18.9-15, 21.1-7.

32 Mitchell's poetic rendition differs significantly from other translations I have consulted, and I do not suggest it or Tao te Ching ch. 24 as a source for Le Guin's "Kerastion": "a workshop story" (FIS 10) produced at about the same time as Mitchell's work.  Note also Wilhelm/Ostwald trans. of Tao te Ching 52 on "the Mother of the World" and how (the?) one way to avoid danger is to be one who "returns to the mother" (p. 50).

33 For life as a wave on a pool, see Meerloo 248.

34 See Shakespeare's Tempest 4.1.148-58 for a poetic version of art and all things coming to an end; see Le Guin, "Legends" 8, for the same idea in prose, viewed with disapproval.

35 For more somber examples, see DEW 25-27: the song of Aneirin, the perhaps lone survivor of a battle remembered only in his song, for the voices of survivors of Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz—bearing witness.

36 Students of Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind might also see Bu (and the other nurs) as distant relatives of Le Guin's ethnographers.  If making mosaics is very far from literal "bricolage," it still can be related, in "The Rock," to "intellectual bricolage"; see Lévi-Strauss 16-18, Heilman xvii-xix.  See also Le Guin on "The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction," DEW 165-70.

37 For meat as food of the slave-owners, cf. "A Man of the People" (FWF 132).

38 We can be sure only of the rape of females in "The Rock."  In the USA of the 1990s, rape and the threat of rape function for social control primarily to limit the behavior of women.  Note, though, the systematic use of rape of women to terrorize populations generally in the wars in the Balkans at the time of "The Rock's" composition, and prison rape as a threat functioning to limit the behavior of American male activists in the 1960s and early 1970s.  As prison populations increase in the USA, prison rape and the threat of prison rape become more obvious as a control on the behaviors of boys and young men, esp. young African Americans.  The prison rape threat for males was used explicitly in the "Scared Straight" programs in the 1970s into the 1980s.

39 Arnold, Essays in Criticism, Functions of Criticism at the Present Time; I quote ODQ 19.12.

40 Thought is the second ultimate Cartesian category (DoP "Attributes").

41 Nurs have three eyes (FIS 62), but in some stories—including that of Flicker of the Serpentine (ACH 283)—so do humans, with the third eye able to glimpse some of the things in heaven and earth that are missed in the philosophies of people who use only two eyes: e.g., with Shiva the third eye is "the eye of insight beyond duality" (Buitenen 8.931).   See Le Guin's poem "Siva and Kama" (Hard Words 18).

42 "Mr. Charlie" is the folklore White-Guy-in-Charge (see Farber 100 & passim).

43 Quoting "A Non-Euclidean View of California" (here DEW 87).

44 Anything that is in the everyday world, has length, width, breadth, and duration: extension in time.  That far, the 4-dimensional universe is just commonsensical.

45 See in DEW, "Heroes," "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address," "Conflict," and "A Non-Euclidean View of California . . . ," esp. 88-89.

46 Going beyond words, though, figuratively beneath them, we may also have the deeper reality of the Dao or Being or whatever Ineffable it is that mystics contact when they leave behind the chatter of social life and our incessant interior monologs.  (In "Some Generative Metaphors" in ACH (483-85) Le Guin has an entry for "Language as " for each of her seven entries [all preceded by "THE"]: WAR/control, LORD/power, ANIMAL/relationship, MACHINE/communication, DANCE/connection, HOUSE/ self-domestication, "THE WAY"/inadequate.)

47 For "transilience," see TD 69; ch. 3.

48 Including the original TV Star Trek episode, "Is There No Truth in Beauty," with its motif of navigating back to known space and its augmented and diversified crew.  Comparing and contrasting "Shobies' Story" with "Is there No Truth" might be a useful exercise in differentiating liberal Modernism (Star Trek) from a more postmodern, feminist perspective.

49 For "coordinator," see "Vaster than Empires" (WTQ 170); for "Weaver" in a Foretelling group among the Handdarata, see LHD, ch. 4.

50 Le Guin may be mildly pessimistic on the recovery time for Terra, but probably not, given the degree of ecological disaster and the consequent social disintegration she has implied or shown from "Nine Lives" in 1969 through LoH (1971), WWF (1972), TD (1974), "New Atlantis" (1975), ACH (1985), to "Dancing" (1993).  The logic for such future disasters is worked out brilliantly in Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952, 1953), and it is reiterated in Korten's 1996 "The Limits of the Earth" article, tracing the environmental implications of the assumption at the Bretton Woods meeting in 1944 that economic growth "will not be constrained by the inherent limits of a finite planet" (15).

51 Shan translates Blaise Pascal, Pensées § iv.277; cf. TD 108; ch. 5.  Pensées also quoted in "VEMS."  My source here is ODQ 374.4 (and 374.1).

52 See below, this chapter, "Dancing to Ganam" for Shan's learning the importance of interverification (however much the jargon remains ugly and suspect).

53 For straight-line exposition, see Shan's summary in "Dancing to Ganam" (FIS 115-16).

54 One could see the metaphoric danger as falling into eternity, as Meshe did in LHD (ch. 12), and/or, far more innocently, the "old mad woman" who has fallen into the mere now in Le Guin's 1988 poem "Tenses": "Terrible the cage of the present tense * * * without foresight or memory" (Wild Oats 81).  See also Ramchandra's finishing "PoD" bound tighter to the karmic wheel (203), more firmly enmeshed in the world by his desire for Tamara.

55 For 9 / 10, see Le Guin's "Nine Lives" and the Foretelling in LHD, esp. 65-68 (ch. 4).

56 In his "Hainish Chronology," "Dancing" is put by Peter Brigg in 5120, twenty years after "Shobies' Story" in 5100 CE (Brigg 18).  However, Betton is still living with Tai (and Shan) and is called "boy" on the second page of the story (FIS 108); and Shan's relationship with Dalzul and his brief reference to his relationship with his partner Tai (126) is more consistent with a relatively young man, recently married than a man in his 40s, who has been a husband for a good while.

57 For a significant allusion to Dalzul among the Cetians and Hainish, see "Another Story," FIS 177.

58 Brigg puts the Formation of the Ekumen in 4623, which makes Dalzul 497 Earth-years old, which, with time-dilation, is plausible.

59 In George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the literal theme song is Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)."

60 Among current human beings, Black people are not often black but some variation on brown or brown-black.  My selection of "Black," "White," etc. is intentional: I use these terms precisely because they are obviously "counterfactual" if taken literally.

61 Cf. Lyubov's finding the Hainishman Lepennon's white skin "a defect" to his "Earth-formed aesthetic taste" in WWF (68; ch. 3).

62 Near the end of Section 1 of Burnt Norton for the bird, in "Four Quartets" (Burnt Norton written 1935, publ. 1939).

63 I believe Adrienne Rich invented and/or popularized the term "heterosexist."

64 See also any US strip mall; making our Earth "one place" has some bad implications. 

65 Cf. Capra on the quantum field; see, Tao of Physics ch. 13, "The Dynamic Universe" and ch. 14, "Emptiness and Form."

66 Dalzul may see himself as Davidic king, working a slight variation on getting opponents to "beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks" (Micah 4.3 [also Isaiah 2.4]).

67 Note old Wold's observation in PE (1966), "All men were alien to one another at times, not only aliens" (37; ch. 4).

68 The William James line is quoted in Le Guin's "The Field of Vision" (WTQ 231).

69 Or one sees the Other and then contacts Dao; the language of cause and effects does not apply well to mystic experiences.

70 From a godlike, readerly point of view — as I read — one can say that two events at serious astronomical distances are simultaneous; within the world of any fiction set in a relativistic universe, simultaneity is a problematic concept.

71 The theme is older.  It was central to a one-act playlet at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) "Stunt Show" event, homecoming, 1960, called, if my memory is correct, "Some Sweet, Secret Place," i.e., a place where people might get second chances.  Entering the 1980s and 1990s, correlating with an aging Baby Boom population, the theme became quite popular.<

72 Cf. "the deep richness of the land" vs. "the show-wealth of the city" in Le Guin's fantasy "Olders" (1995), coll. UA (172).

73 Jesus answers a trick question on a multiply-married widow's marital status after the resurrection of the dead with ". . . in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven" (Matthew 22.30) — presumably celibate.  Also Mark 12.25 and Luke 20.34-35.

74 "The name of our world," O, "is the first word of its first prayer" (175).  Cf. Om: "a mystical Indian symbol upon which devout Hindus of all schools meditate" (Encyclopedia of Religion 545).  See Le Guin on her stealing "an idea from China and . . . a god from India," in "World Making" (1981 [DEW 48]).

75 On the self-centered young, note "young Thurro" and "his bridegroom's self-absorption" in CI (1967 [28; ch. 2]) and, from a parental point of view, Serenity's treatment of her mother in Le Guin's "Solitude."  Cf. and contrast Rakam on her "beautiful voice speaking the beautiful truth" in "A Woman's Liberation" (FWF 179; § 3).

76 For Takver and water, see esp. her line while pregnant, "I am a fish . . . a fish in water.  I am inside the baby inside me" (TD 191; ch. 8).  See also Yarrow in WE — true name Kest (= "minnow" in Old Speech): 158, 169; chs. 9 & 10.

77 E.g., "trivializing the origin of the world by calling it the Big Bang, as if the Universe were a firecracker" (Jastrow 114).  Alternatively, given the importance of being earnest in our time, one could find the flippancies of scientists endearing.

78 "A Wrinkle in Time" might be another appropriate alternative title for "Another Story," except it was used as a novel title by Madeline L'Engle in 1963.

79 The idea of a taxonomy of Heroes that I use below goes back to (at least) Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), but beyond the idea that such classifications might be useful, I tend to disagree with Carlyle.

80 I allude to Horace Walpole's comment in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (1742), "The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those who feel."  Alternatively: "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel" — letter to the Duchess of Upper Ossory, 16 Aug. 1776 (ODQ 558.27).

81 For pain in The Dispossessed, see esp. the discussion at the party just before Shevek leaves for Abbenay, where Shevek says that "Suffering is a misunderstanding" and "Suffering is the condition on which we live" (TD 48-50; ch. 2).  For pain in "Another Story," see esp. 162, 175.

82 "The poet [Rainer Maria] Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him.  'You must change your life,' he said" (Le Guin, LoN [1979]: 77-78).