Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

Probably people on Earth already knew that.

The big, thick, tall plants, the trees, consisted largely of the very rare and precious substance wood, the material of certain instruments and ornaments ontheship. (One word: ontheship.) Wood objects had seldom been recycled, because they were irreplaceable; plastic copies were quite different in quality. Here plastic was rare and precious, but wood stood around all over the hills and valleys . With peculiar, ancient tools provided in the Landing Stock, fallen trees could be cut into pieces. (The meaning of the word chensa , spelled chainsaw in the manuals, was rediscovered.) All the pieces of tree were solid wood: an excellent material for building with, which could also be shaped into all kinds of useful devices. And wood could be set fire to, to create warmth.

This discovery of enormous importance, would it be news on Earth?

Fire. The stuff at the end of a welding torch. The active point in a bunsenburner.

Most people had never seen a fire burning. They gathered to it. Don’t touch! But the air was cold now, full of cloud and wind, full of weather. Fire-warmth felt good. Lung Jo, who had set up the Settlement’s first generator, gathered bits of tree and piled them inside his tense and set fire to them and invited his buddies to come get warm. Presently everybody poured out of the tense coughing and choking, which was fortunate, because the fire liked the tense as well as it liked the wood, and ate with its red and yellow tongues till nothing was left but a black stinking mess in the rain. A disaster. (Another disaster.) All the same, it was funny when they all rushed out weeping and coughing in a cloud of smoke.

Cloud. Smoke. Words full, crammed, jammed with meaning, with meanings. Life-and-death meanings, signifying life, signifying death. The poets had not been talking virtually, after all.

The 0-2 strain of oats came up out of the dirt, sprang up ( spring ), shot up, put out leaves and beautiful hanging grain-heads, was green, was yellow, was harvested. The seeds flowed between your fingers like polished beads, fell ( fall ) back into the heap of precious food.

Abruptly, the material received from the ship ceased to contain any personal messages or information, consisting of rebroadcasts of the three recorded talks given by Kim Terry, talks by Patel Inbliss, sermons by various archangels, and a recording of a male choir chanting, played over and over.

“Why am I Six Lo Meiling?”

When the child understood her mother’s explanation, she said, “But that was ontheship. We live here. Aren’t we all Zeroes?”

5-Lo Ana told this story in Meeting, and it went through the whole community causing pleasure, like the flight of one of the creatures with fluttering transparent wings edged with threads of gold, at which everybody looked up and stopped work and said, “Look!” Mariposas, somebody called them, and the pretty name stuck.

There had been a good deal of talk, during the cold weather when work wasn’t so continuous, about the names of things. About naming things. Such as the dogs. People agreed that naming should be done seriously. But it was no good looking in the records and finding that on Dichew there had been creatures that looked something like this brown creature here so we’ll call it beetle . It wasn’t beetle. It ought to have its own name. Tree-crawler, clickclicker, leaf-chewer. And what about us? Ana’s kid is right, you know? 4’s, 5’s, 6’s—what’s that got to do with us now, here? The angels can go on to 100…Lucky if they get to 10…What about Zerin’s baby? She isn’t 6-Lahiri Padma. She’s 1-Shindychew-Lahiri-Padma…Maybe she’s just Lahiri Padma. Why do we need to count the steps? We aren’t going anywhere. She’s here. She lives here. This is Padma’s world.

She found Luis in the patty-gardens behind the west compound. It was his day off from the hospital. A beautiful day of early summer. His hair shone in the sunlight. She located him by that silver nimbus.

He was sitting on the ground, on the dirt. On his day off he did a shift at the irrigation system of little ditches, dikes, and watergates, which required constant but unlaborious supervision and maintenance. Patty grew well only when watered but not overwatered. The tubers, baked whole or milled, had become a staple since Liu Yao’s success at breeding the edible strain. People who had trouble digesting native seeds and cereals thrived on patty.

Children of ten or eleven, old people, damaged people, mostly did irrigation shifts; it took no strength, just patience. Luis sat near the watergate that diverted the flow from West Creek into one or the other of the main channel systems. His legs, thin and brown, were stretched out and his crutch lay beside them. He leaned back on his arms, hands flat on the black dirt, face turned to the sun, eyes shut. He wore shorts and a loose, ragged shirt. He was both old and damaged.

Hsing came up beside him and said his name. He grunted but did not move or open his eyes. She squatted down by him. After a while his mouth looked so beautiful to her that she leaned over and kissed it.

He opened his eyes.

“You were asleep.”

“I was praying.”

“Praying!”

“Worshipping?”

“Worshipping what?”

“The sun?” he said, tentative.

“Don’t ask me!”

He looked at her, exactly the Luis look, tenderly inquisitive, noncommittal, unreserved; ever since they were five years old he had been looking at her that way. Looking into her.

“Who else would I ask?” he asked her.

“If it’s about praying and worshipping, not me.”

She made herself more comfortable, settling her rump on the berm of an irrigation channel, facing Luis. The sun was warm on her shoulders. She wore a hat Luisita had inexpertly woven of grain-straw.

“A tainted vocabulary,” he said.

“A suspect ideology,” she said.

And the words suddenly gave her pleasure, the big words— vocabulary! ideology! —Talk was all short, small, heavy words: food, roof, tool, get, make, save, live. The big words they never used any more, the long, airy words carried her mind up for a moment like a mariposa, fluttering aloft on the wind.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know.” He pondered. She watched him ponder. “When I smashed my knee, and had to lie around,” he said, “I decided there was no use living without delight.”

After a silence she said, in a dry tone, “Bliss?”

“No. Bliss is a form of VU. No, I mean delight. I never knew it on the ship. Only here. Now and then. Moments of unconditional existence. Delight.”

Hsing sighed.

“Hard earned,” she said.

“Oh yes.”

They sat in silence for some time. The south wind gusted, ceased, blew softly again. It smelled of wet earth and bean-flowers.

Luis said:

“Oh,” Hsing said.

Her breath caught in another, deeper sigh, a sob. Luis put his hand over hers.

“Alejo went fishing with the children, upstream,” she said.

He nodded.

“I worry so much,” she said. “I worry the delight away.”

He nodded again. Presently he said, “But I was thinking…when I was worshipping, or whatever, what I was thinking, was about the dirt.” He picked up a palmful of the crumbly, dark floodplain soil, and let it fall from his hand, watching it fall. “I was thinking that if I could, I’d get up and dance on it…Dance for me,” he said, “will you, Hsing?”