Ursula Le Guin - The Eye of the Heron

“Screw!” said Luz, and strode down the street, her long skirts whipping at her ankles. She had been too well brought up to know swearwords. She knew “Hell!” because her father said it, even in front of women, when he was annoyed. She never said “Hell!” —it was her father’s property. But Eva had told her, years ago, that “screw” was a very bad word, and so, when alone, she used it.

And there, materializing like a wotsit out of nothing, and like a wotsit humpbacked, beady-eyed, and vaguely feathery, there was her duenna, Cousin Lores, who she thought had given up and gone home half an hour ago. “Luz Marina! Luz Marina! Where were you? I waited and waited—I ran all the way to Casa Falco and back to the school—where were you? Why are you walking all by yourself? Slow down, Luz Marina, I’m dying, I’m dying.”

But Luz would not slow down for the poor squawking woman. She strode on, fighting tears that had come upon her unawares: tears of anger because she could never walk alone, never do anything by herself, never. Because the men ran everything. They had it all their way. And the older women were all on their side. So that a girl couldn’t walk in the streets of the City alone, because some drunken working man might insult her, and what if he did get put in jail or get his ears cut off for it afterward? A lot of good that would do. The girl’s reputation would be ruined. Because her reputation was what the men thought of her. The men thought everything, did everything, ran everything, made everything, made the laws, broke the laws, punished the lawbreakers; and there was no room left for the women, no City for the women. Nowhere, nowhere, but in their own rooms, alone.

Even a Shanty-Towner was freer than she was. Even Lev, who wouldn’t fight for a football, but who challenged the night as it came up over the edge of the world, and laughed at the laws. Even Southwind, who was so quiet and mild—Southwind could walk home with anyone she liked, hand in hand across the open fields in the wind of evening, running before the rain.

The rain drummed on the tile roof of the attic, where she had taken refuge that day three years ago when she got home at last, Cousin Lores puffing and squawking behind her all the way.

The rain drummed on the tile roof of the attic, where she had taken refuge today.

Three years, since that evening in the golden light. And nothing to show for it. Less now than there had been then. Three years ago she had still gone to school; she had believed that when school was over she would magically be free.

A prison. All Victoria was a prison, a jailhouse. And no way out. Nowhere else to go.

Only Lev had gone away, and found a new place somewhere far in the north, in the wilderness, a place to go … . And he had come back from it, and had stood up and said “No” to the Boss Falco.

But Lev was free, he had always been free. That was why there was no other time in her life, before or since, like the time when she had stood with him on the heights of her City in the golden light before the storm, and seen with him what freedom was. For one moment. A gust of the sea wind, a meeting of the eyes.

It was more than a year since she had even seen him. He was gone, back to Shanty Town, off to the new settlement, gone free, forgetting her. Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room.

The two human settlements on the planet Victoria were six kilometers apart. There were, so far as the inhabitants of Shantih Town and Victoria City knew, no others.

A good many people had work, hauling produce or drying fish, which took them from one settlement to the other frequently, but there were many more who lived in the City and never went to the Town, or who lived in one of the farm-villages near the Town and never from year’s end to year’s end went to the City.

As a small group, four men and a woman, came down the Town Road to the edge of the bluffs, several of them looked with lively curiosity and considerable awe at the City spread out beneath them on the hilly shore of Songe Bay; they stopped just under the Monument Tower—the ceramic shell of one of the ships that had brought the first settlers to Victoria—but did not spend much time looking up at it; it was a familiar sight, impressive by its size, but skeletal and rather pitiful set up there on the cliff-top, pointing bravely at the stars but serving merely as a guide to fishing boats out at sea. It was dead; the City was alive. “Look at that,” said Hari, the eldest of the group. “You couldn’t count all those houses if you sat here for an hour! Hundreds of them!”

“Just like a city on Earth,” another, a more frequent visitor, said with proprietary pride.

“My mother was born in Moskva, in Russia the Black,” a third man said. “She said the City would only be a little town, there on Earth.” But this was rather farfetched, to people whose lives had been spent between the wet fields and the huddled villages, in a close continuous bind of hard work and human companionship, outside which lay the immense, indifferent wilderness. “Surely,” one of them said with mild disbelief, “she meant a big town?” And they stood beneath the hollow shell of the space ship, looking at the bright rust color of the tiled and thatched roofs, and the smoking chimneys, and the geometrical lines of walls and streets, and not looking at the vast landscape of beaches and bay and ocean, empty valleys, empty hills, empty sky, that surrounded the City with a tremendous desolation.

Once they came down past the schoolhouse into the streets they could entirely forget the presence of the wilderness. They were surrounded on all sides by the works of mankind. The houses, mostly row-built, lined the way on both sides with high walls and little windows. The streets were narrow, and a foot deep in mud. In places walkways of planking were laid over the mud, but these were in bad repair, and slippery with rain. Few people passed, but an open door might give a glimpse into the swarming interior courtyard of a house, full of women, washing, children, smoke, and voices. Then again the cramped, sinister silence of the street.

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” sighed Hari.

They passed the factory where iron from the Government mines and foundry was made into tools, kitchenware, door latches, and so on. The doorway was wide open, and they stopped and peered into the sulfurous darkness lit with sparking fires and loud with banging and hammering, but a workman yelled at them to move on. So they went on down to Bay Street, and looking at the length and width and straightness of Bay Street, Hari said again, “Wonderful!” They followed Vera, who knew her way about the City, up Bay Street to the Capitol. At the sight of the Capitol, Hari had no words left, but merely stared.

It was the biggest building in the world—four times the height of any common house—and built of solid stone. Its high porch was supported by four columns, each a single huge ringtree trunk, grooved and whitewashed, the heavy capitals carved and gilt. The visitors felt small passing between these columns, small entering the portals that gaped so wide and tall. The entry hall, narrow but also very high, had plastered walls, and these had been decorated years ago with frescoes that stretched from floor to ceiling. At the sight of these the people from Shantih stopped again and gazed, silent; for they were pictures of the Earth.

There were still people in Shantih who remembered Earth and would tell about it, but the memories, fifty-five years old, were mostly of things seen by children. Few were left who had been adults at the time of the exile. Some had spent years of their lives in writing down the history of the People of the Peace and the sayings of its leaders and heroes, and descriptions of the Earth, and sketches of its remote, appalling history. Others had seldom spoken of the Earth; at most they had sung to their children born in exile, or to their children’s children, an old song with strange names and words in it, or told them tales about the children and the witch, the three bears, the king who rode on a tiger. The children listened round-eyed. “What is a bear? Does a king have stripes too?”