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 u