Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

Maybe she could write love poems. There were an awful lot of love poems in the World Lit anthology. She had a feeling that you didn’t need to really be in love with a person to write a love poem. Maybe in fact if you were really seriously in love it would interfere with the poetry. A sort of yearning, undemanding adoration like she felt for Bass Abby, or for Rosa at school, maybe was a good place to start from. So she wrote quite a few love poems, but for one reason or another she was embarrassed about turning them in to her teacher, and only showed them to Luis. Luis had acted all along like he didn’t think she was a poet. She had to show him.

“I like this one,” he said. She peered to see which one.

She hadn’t thought much of the poem, it was so short, but now it seemed better than she’d thought.

“It’s about Yao, isn’t it?” Luis said.

“About my father? ” Hsing said, so shocked she felt her cheeks burning. “No! It’s a love poem!”

“Well, who do you actually love a lot besides your father?” Luis asked in his horrible matter-of-fact way.

“A whole lot of people! And love is—There are different kinds —”

“Are there?” He glanced up at her. He pondered. “I didn’t say it was a sex poem. I don’t think it is a sex poem.”

“Oh, you are so weird,” Hsing said, abruptly and deftly snatching her writer back and closing the folder labelled Original Poems by 5-Liu Hsing . “What makes you think you know anything about poetry anyhow?”

“I know about as much about it as you do,” said Luis with his pedantic fairness, “but I can’t do it at all. You can. Sometimes.”

“Nobody can write great poetry all the time!”

“Well,”—her heart always sank when he said “Well”—“maybe not literally all the time, but the good ones have an amazingly high average. Shakespeare, and Li Po, and Yeats, and 2-Eli—”

“What’s the use trying to be like them? ” she wailed.

“I didn’t mean you had to be like them,” he said after a slight pause and in a different tone. He had realised that he might have hurt her. That made him unhappy. When he was unhappy he became gentle. She knew exactly how he felt, and why, and what he’d do, and she also knew the fierce, regretful tenderness for him that swelled up inside her, a sore tenderness, like a bruise. She said, “Oh, I don’t care about all that anyway. Words are too sloppy, I like math. Let’s go meet Lena at the gym.”

As they jogged through the corridors it occurred to her that in fact the poem he had liked wasn’t about Rosa, as she had thought, or about her father, as he had thought, but was about him, Luis. But it was all stupid anyhow and didn’t matter. So she wasn’t Shakespeare. But she loved quadratic equations.

How sheltered they were, how protected! Safer than any guarded prince or pampered child of the rich had ever been; safer than any child had ever been on Earth.

No cold winds to shiver in or heavy heat to sweat in. No plagues or coughs or fevers or toothaches. No hunger. No wars. No weapons. No danger. No danger from anything in the world but the danger the world itself was in. But that was a constant, a condition of being, and therefore hard to think about, except sometimes in dream; the horrible images. The walls of the world deformed, bulging, shattering. The soundless explosion. A spray of bloody mist, a tiny smear of vapor in the starlight. They were all in danger all the time, surrounded by danger. That is the essence of safety, the heart of it: that the danger is outside.

They lived inside. Inside their world with its strong walls and strong laws, shaped and bulwarked to protect and surround them with strength. There they lived, and there was no threat unless they made it.

“People are a risky business,” Liu Yao said, smiling. “Plants mostly don’t go crazy.”

Yao’s profession was gardening. He worked in hydroponic engineering and maintenance and in plant-genetic quality and control. He was in the gardens every workday and many evenings. The 4-5-Liu homespace was full of pet plants—gourdvines in carboys of water, flowering shrubs in pots of dirt, epiphytes festooning the vents and light-fixtures. Many of them were experimentals, which usually died. Hsing believed that her father was sorry for these genetic errors, felt guilty about them, and brought them home to die in peace. Occasionally one of the experiments thrived under his patient attendance and went back to the plant labs in triumph, accompanied by Yao’s faint, deprecating smile.

4-Liu Yao was a short, slender, handsome man with a shock of black hair early going grey. He did not have the bearing of a handsome man. He was reserved, courteous, but shy. A good listener but a rare and low-voiced talker, when he was with more than one or two people he was almost entirely silent. With his mother 3-Liu Meiling or his friend 4-Wang Yuen or his daughter Hsing he would converse contentedly, unassertively. His passions were contained, restrained, powerful: the Chinese classics, his plants, his daughter. He thought a good deal and felt a good deal. He was mostly content to follow his thoughts and feelings alone, in silence, like a man going downstream in a small boat on a great river, sometimes steering, more often drifting. Of boats and rivers, of cliffs and currents, Yao knew only images in pictures, words in poems. Sometimes he dreamed that he was in a boat on a river, but the dreams were vague. He knew dirt, though, knew it exactly, bodily. Dirt was what he worked in. And water and air he knew, the humble, transparent things, on whose clarity, invisibility, life depended, the miracles. A bubble of air and water floated in the dry black vacuum, reflecting starlight. He lived inside it.

3-Liu Meiling lived in the group of homespaces called Peony Compound, a corridor away from her son’s homespace. She led an extremely active social life limited almost entirely to the Chinese-Ancestry population of Quadrant Two. Her profession was chemistry; she worked in the fabric labs; she had never liked the work. As soon as she decently could she went on halftime and then retired. Didn’t like any work, she said. Liked to look after babies in the babygarden, play games, gamble for flower-cookies, talk, laugh, gossip, find out what was happening next door. She took great pleasure in her son and granddaughter and ran in and out of their homespace constantly, bringing dumplings, rice cakes, gossip. “You should move to Peony!” she said frequently, but knew they wouldn’t, because Yao was unsociable, and that was fine, except she did hope that Hsing would stay with her own people when she decided to have a baby, which she also said frequently. “Hsing’s mother is a fine woman, I like Jael,” she told her son, “but I never will understand why you couldn’t have had a baby from one of the Wong girls and then her mama would be right here in Quadrant Two, that would have been so nice for all of us. But I know you have to do things your way. And I must say even if Hsing is only half Chinese Ancestry nobody would ever know it, and what a beauty she’s getting to be, so I suppose you did know what you were doing, if anyone ever does when it comes to falling in love or having a child, which I doubt. It’s basically luck, is all it is. Young 5-Li has an eye on her, did you notice yesterday? He’s twenty-three, a good solid boy. Here she is now! Hsing! How beautiful your hair is when it’s long! You should let it grow longer!” The kind, practical, undemanding babble of his mother’s talk was another stream on which Yao floated vaguely, peacefully, until all at once, in one moment, it was cut short. Silence. A bubble had burst. A bubble in an artery of the brain, the doctors said. For a few hours 3-Liu Meiling gazed in mute bewilderment at something no one else could see, and then died. She was only seventy. All life is in danger, from without, from within. People are a risky business.