The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2

EDITORIAL REVIEW:

The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her lyrical writing, rich characters, and diverse worlds. The Wind's Twelve Quarters collects seventeen powerful stories, each with an introduction by the author, ranging from fantasy to intriguing scientific concepts, from medieval settings to the future.

Including an insightful foreword by Le Guin, describing her experience, her inspirations, and her approach to writing, this stunning collection explores human values, relationships, and survival, and showcases the myriad talents of one of the most provocative writers of our time.

Ursula Le Guin

The
Wind's Twelve Quarters

Volume
II

PANTHER
GRANADA PUBLISHING

London Toronto Sydney
New York

Published by Granada Publishing Limited in
Panther Books 1978

ISBN 0 586 04623 2

First published in Great Britain in one
volume under the title of
The Wind's Twelve
Quarters
by Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1976 Copyright ©
Ursula K. Le Guin 1975

Things
originally appeared under the title
The End
in
Orbit 6,
1970
A
Trip to the Head
originally
appeared in
Quark I,
1970
Vaster
than Empires and More Slow
originally
appeared in
New Dimensions 1,
1971
The
Stars Below
originally appeared in
Orbit 12,
1973
The Field of Vision
originally appeared in
Galaxy,
1973
Direction of the Road
originally appeared in
Orbit 14,
1974
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
originally appeared in
New Dimensions 3,
1973

The Day Before the
Revolution
originally appeared in
Galaxy,
1974

Granada Publishing Limited Frogmore, St
Albans, Herts AL2 2NF and

3 Upper James Street, London WiR 4BP

1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY
10020, USA

117 York Street, Sydney, NSW 2000,
Australia

100 Skyway Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M9W 3A6

Trio City, Coventry Street, Johannesburg
2001, South Africa

CML Centre, Queen & Wyndham Auckland 1,
New Zealand

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and
Fakenham

Contents

Things

A
Trip to the Head

Vaster
than Empires and More Slow

The
Stars Below

The
Field of Vision

Direction
of the Road

The
Ones who Walk Away from Omelas

The
Day Before the Revolution

THINGS

Damon
Knight,
editor
mirabilis,
first
published this story in a volume of
Orbit,
under the
title 'The End'. I don't now remember how we arrived at it, but I suspect he
thought that 'Things' sounded too much like something you see on the television
at one
A.M.,
with purple tentacles. But I have
gone back to it because — at least
after
reading the
psychomyth — it puts the right emphasis. Things you use; things you possess,
and are possessed by; things you build with — bricks, words. You build houses
with them, and towns, and causeways. But the buildings fall, the causeways
cannot go all the way. There is an abyss, a gap, a last step to be taken.

On
the shore of the sea he stood looking out over the long foam-lines far where
vague the Islands lifted or were guessed. There, he said to the sea, there lies
my kingdom. The sea said to him what the sea says to everybody. As evening
moved from behind his back across the water the foam-lines paled and the wind
fell, and very far in the west shone a star perhaps, perhaps a light, or his
desire for a light.

He
climbed the streets of his town again in late dusk. The shops and huts of his
neighbors were looking empty now, cleared out, cleaned up, packed away in
preparation for the end. Most of the people were up at the Weeping in
Heights-Hall or down with the Ragers in the fields. But Lif had not been able
to clear out and clean up; his wares and belongings were too heavy to throw
away, too hard to break, too dull to burn. Only centuries could waste them.
Wherever they were piled or dropped or thrown they formed what might have been,
or seemed to be, or yet might be, a city. So he had not tried to get rid of his
things. His yard was still stacked and piled with bricks, thousands and
thousands of bricks of his own making. The kiln stood cold but ready, the
barrels of clay and dry mortar and lime, the hods and barrows and trowels of
his trade, everything was there. One of the fellows from Scriveners Lane had
asked sneering, Going to build a brick wall and hide behind it when that old
end comes, man?

Another
neighbor on his way up to the Heights-Hall gazed a while at those stacks and
heaps and loads and mounds of well-shaped, well-baked bricks all a soft reddish
gold in the gold of the afternoon sun, and sighed at last with the weight of
them on his heart: Things, things! Free yourself of things, Lif, from the
weight that drags you down! Come with us, above the ending world!

Lif
had picked up a brick from the heap and put it in place on the stack and smiled
in embarrassment. When they were all past he had gone neither up to the Hall
nor out to help wreck the fields and kill the animals, but down to the beach,
the end of the ending world, beyond which lay only water. Now back in his
brickyard hut with the smell of salt in his clothes and his face hot with the
sea wind, he still felt neither the Ragers' laughing and wrecking despair nor
the soaring and weeping despair of the communicants of the Heights; he felt
empty; he felt hungry. He was a heavy little man and the sea wind at the
world's edge had blown at him all evening without moving him at all.

Hey
Lif! said the widow from Weavers Lane, which crossed his street a few houses
down, —I saw you coming up the street, and never another soul since sunset, and
getting dark, and quieter than ... She did not say what the town was quieter
than, but went on, Have you had your supper? I was about to take my roast out
of the oven, and the little one and I will never eat up all that meat before
the end comes, no doubt, and I hate to see good meat go to waste.

Well
thank you very much, says Lif, putting on his coat again; and they went down
Masons Lane to Weavers Lane through the dark and the wind sweeping up steep
streets from the sea. In the widow's lamplit house Lif played with her baby,
the last born in the town, a little fat boy just learning how to stand up. Lif
stood him up and he laughed and fell over, while the widow set out bread and
hot meat on the table of heavy woven cane. They sat to eat, even the baby, who
worked with four teeth at a hard hunk of bread. —How is it you're not up on the
Hill or in the fields? asked Lif, and the widow replied as if the answer
sufficed to her mind, Oh, I have the baby.

Lif
looked around the little house which her husband, who had been one of Lif's
bricklayers, had built. —This is good, he said. I haven't tasted meat since
last year some time.

I
know, I know! No houses being built any more.

Not
a one, he said. Not a wall nor a henhouse, not even repairs. But your weaving,
that's still wanted?

Yes;
some of them want new clothes right up to the end. This meat I bought from the
Ragers that slaughtered all my lord's flocks, and I paid with the money I got
for a piece of fine linen I wove for my lord's daughter's gown that she wants
to wear at the end! The widow gave a little derisive, sympathetic snort, and
went on: But now there's no flax, and scarcely any wool. No more to spin, no
more to weave. The fields burnt and the flocks dead.

Yes,
said Lif, eating the good roast meat. Bad times, he said, the worst times.

And
now, the widow went on, where's bread to come from, with the fields burnt? And
water, now they're poisoning the wells? I sound like the Weepers up there,
don't I? Help yourself, Lif. Spring lamb's the finest meat in the world, my man
always said, till autumn came and then he'd say roast pork's the finest meat in
the world. Come on now, give yourself a proper slice...

That
night in his hut in the brickyard Lif dreamed. Usually he slept as still as the
bricks themselves but this night he drifted and floated in dream all night to
the Islands, and when he woke they were no longer a wish or a guess: like a
star as daylight darkens they had become certain, he knew them. But what, in
his dream, had borne him over the water? He had not flown, he had not walked,
he had not gone underwater like the fish; yet he had come across the grey-green
plains and wind-moved hillocks of the sea to the Islands, he had heard voices
call, and seen the lights of towns.

He
set his mind to think how a man could ride on water. He thought of how grass
floats on streams, and saw how one might make a sort of mat of woven cane and
lie on it pushing with one's hands: but the great canebrakes were still
smoldering down by the stream, and the piles of withies at the basketmaker's
had all been burnt. On the Islands in his dream he had seen canes or grasses
half a hundred feet high, with brown stems thicker than his arms could reach
round, and a world of green leaves spread sunward from the thousand outreaching
twigs. On those stems a man might ride over the sea. But no such plants grew in
his country nor ever had; though in the Heights-Hall was a knife-handle made of
a dull brown stuff, said to come from a plant that grew in some other land,
called wood. But he could not ride across the bellowing sea on a knife-handle.

Greased
hides might float; but the tanners had been idle now for weeks, there were no
hides for sale. He might as well stop looking about for any help. He carried
his barrow and his largest hod down to the beach that white windy morning and
laid them in the still water of a lagoon. Indeed they floated, deep in the
water, but when he leaned even the weight of one hand on them they tipped,
filled, sank. They were too light, he thought.

He
went back up the cliff and through the streets, loaded the barrow with useless
well-made bricks, and wheeled a hard load down. As so few children had been
born these last years there was no young curiosity about to ask him what he was
doing, though a Rager or two, groggy from last night's wreckfest, glanced
sidelong at him from a dark doorway through the brightness of the air. All that
day he brought down bricks and the makings of mortar, and the next day, though
he had not had the dream again, he began to lay his bricks there on the blustering
beach of March with rain and sand handy in great quantities to set his cement.
He built a little brick dome, upside down, oval with pointed ends like a fish,
all of a single course of bricks laid spiral very cunningly. If a cupful or a
barrowful of air would float, would not a brick domeful? And it would be
strong. But when the mortar was set, and straining his broad back he overturned
the dome and pushed it into the cream of the breakers, it dug deeper and deeper
into the wet sand, burrowing down like a clam or a sand flea. The waves filled
it, and refilled it when he tipped it empty, and at last a green-shouldered
breaker caught it with its white dragging backpull, rolled it over, smashed it
back into its elemental bricks and sank them in the restless sodden sand. There
stood Lif wet to the neck and wiping salt spray out of his eyes. Nothing lay
westward on the sea but wavewrack and rainclouds. But they were there. He knew
them, with their great grasses ten times a man's height, their wild golden
fields raked by the sea wind, their white towns, their white-crowned hills
above the sea; and the voices of shepherds called on the hills.

I'm
a builder, not a floater, said Lif after he had considered his stupidity from
all sides. And he came doggedly out of the water and up the cliff-side path and
through the rainy streets to get another barrowload of bricks.

Free
for the first time in a week for his fool dream of floating, he noticed now
that Leather Street seemed deserted. The tannery was rubbishy and vacant. The
craftsmen's shops lay like a row of little black gaping mouths, and the
sleeping-room windows above them were blind. At the end of the lane an old
cobbler was burning, with a terrible stench, a small heap of new shoes never
worn. Beside him a donkey waited, saddled, flicking its ears at the stinking
smoke.