Ursula Le Guin: The Eye of the Heron

Luz sighed again and looked out at the ragged, rain-dropping clouds. She had looked at all the pictures, and the words were not interesting.

She got up, and was just setting the book down on the table exactly where it had lain, when her father entered the room.

His step was energetic, his back straight, his eyes clear and stern. He smiled when he saw Luz. A little startled, guilty, she swept him a fancy curtsy, her skirts hiding the table and the book. “Senhor! A thousand greetings!”

“There’s my little beauty. Michael! Hot water and a towel!—I feel dirty all over.” He sat down in one of the carved wooden armchairs and stretched out his legs, though his back stayed as straight as ever.

“Where have you been getting dirty, Papa?”

“Among the vermin.”

“Shanty Town?”

“Three kinds of creature came from Earth to Victoria: Men, lice, and Shanty-Towners. If I could get rid of only one kind, it would be the last.” He smiled again, pleased by his joke, then looked up at his daughter and said, “One of them presumed to answer me. I think you knew him.”

“I knew him?”

“At school. Vermin shouldn’t be allowed into the school. I forget his name. Their names are all nonsense, Sticktight, Holdfast, Howd’youdo, what have you … . A little black-haired stick of a boy.”

“Lev?”

“That’s the one. A troublemaker.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said no to me.”

Falco’s man came hurrying in with a pottery basin and a jug of steaming water; a maid followed with towels. Falco scrubbed his face and hands, puffing and blowing and talking through the water and the towels. “He and some others just came back from an expedition up north, into the wilderness. He claims they found a fine town site. They want the whole lot to move there.”

“To leave Shanty Town? All of them?”

Falco snorted in assent, and stuck out his feet for Michael to take off his boots. “As if they’d last one winter without the City to look after them! Earth sent them here fifty years ago as unteachable imbeciles, which is what they are. It’s time they relearned their lesson.”

“But they can’t just go off into the wilderness,” said Luz, who had been listening to her thoughts as well as to her father’s words. “Who’d farm our fields?”

Her father ignored her question by repeating it, thus transforming a feminine expression of emotion into a masculine assessment of fact. “They can’t, of course, be allowed to start scattering like this. They provide necessary labor.”

“Why is it that Shanty-Towners do almost all the farming?”

“Because they’re good for nothing else. Get that slop out of the way, Michael.”

“Hardly any of our people know how to farm,” Luz observed. She was thinking. She had dark, strongly arched eyebrows, as her father did, and when she was thinking they lay in a straight line above her eyes. This straight line displeased her father. It did not suit the face of a pretty girl of twenty. It gave her a hard, unwomanly look. He had often told her this, but she had never broken the bad habit.

“My dear, we are City people, not peasants.”

“But who did the farming before the Shanty-Towners came? The Colony was sixty years old when they came.”

“The working people did the manual work, of course. But even our working people were never peasants. We are City people.”

“And we starved, didn’t we? There were the Famines.” Luz spoke dreamily, as if recalling an old history recitation, but her eyebrows were still down in that straight black line. “In the first ten years of the Colony, and other times … lots of people starved. They didn’t know how to cultivate bog-rice or raise sugar-root, until the Shanty-Towners came.”

Her father’s black brows were now a straight line too. He dismissed Michael, the maid, and the subject of conversation with one wave of the hand. “It’s a mistake,” he said in his dry voice, “to send peasants and women to school. The peasants become insolent, the women become boring.”

It would have made her cry, two or three years ago. She would have wilted, and crept off to her room to weep, and been miserable until her father said something kind to her. But these days he could not make her cry. She didn’t know why it was, and it seemed very strange to her. Certainly she feared and admired him as much as ever; but she always knew what he was going to say. It was never anything new. Nothing was ever new.

She turned and looked out through the thick, whorled glass again at Songe Bay, the farther curve of the shore veiled by unending rain. She stood straight, a vivid figure in the dull light, in her long red homespun skirt and ruffled shirt. She looked indifferent, and alone, standing there in the center of the high, long room; and she felt so. Also she felt her father’s gaze on her. And knew what he was going to say.

“It’s time you were married, Luz Marina.”

She waited for the next sentence.

“Since your mother died … .” And the sigh.

Enough, enough, enough!

She turned to face him. “I read that book,” she said.

“Book?”

“Doctor Martin must have left it. What does it mean, ‘penal colony’?”

“You had no business to touch that!”

He was surprised. That at least made things interesting.

“I thought it was a box of dried fruits,” she said, and laughed. “But what does it mean, ‘penal colony’? A colony of criminals, a prison?”

“That is nothing you need to know.”

“Our ancestors were sent here as prisoners, is that right? That’s what the Shanty-Towners in school said.” Falco’s face was getting white, but the danger exhilarated Luz; her mind raced, and she spoke her mind. “They said the First Generation were all criminals. The Earth Government used Victoria for a jail. The Shanty-Towners said they were sent because they believed in peace or something, but we were sent because we were all thieves and murderers. And most of them, the First Generation, were men, their women couldn’t come unless they were married to them, and that’s why there were so few women to start with. That always seemed stupid, not to send enough women for a colony. And it explains why the ships were made only to come, not to go back. And why the Earth people never come here. We’re locked out. It’s true, isn’t it? We call ourselves Victoria Colony. But we’re a jail.”

Falco had risen. He came forward; she stood still, poised on her feet. “No,” she said, lightly, as if indifferent. “No, don’t, Papa.”

Her voice stopped the man in his anger; he too stood still, and looked at her. For a moment he saw her. She saw in his eyes that he saw her, and that he was afraid. For a moment, only a moment.

He turned away. He went to the table and picked up the book Dr. Martin had left. “What does all that matter, Luz Marina?” he said at last.

“I’d like to know.”

“It was a hundred years ago. And Earth is lost. And we are what we are.”

She nodded. When he spoke that way, dry and quiet, she saw the strength she admired and loved in him.

“What angers me,” he said, but not with anger, “is that you listened to that talk from those vermin. They put everything backward. What do they know? You let them tell you that Luis Firmin Falco, my great-grandfather, the founder of our House, was a thief, a jailbird. What do they know about it! I know, and I can tell you, what our ancestors were. They were men. Men too strong for Earth. The Government on Earth sent them here because they were afraid of them. The best, the bravest, the strongest—all the thousands of little weak people on Earth were afraid of them, and trapped them, and sent them off in the one-way ships, so that they could do as they liked with Earth, you see. Well, when that was done, when the real men were gone, the Earth people were left so weak and womanish that they began to be afraid even of rabble like the Shanty-Towners. So they sent them here for us to keep in order. Which we have done. You see? That’s how it was.”