Ursula Le Guin: The Compass Rose

“Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how you got here.”

“Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you’re going—to have some place to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. It’s just that my back’s seized up, now.”

When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him, and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American continent,” he said. I can’t remember what else he said, but he made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection: he makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases him.

It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,” the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”

He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just with drugs. They save it mostly for the V.I.P.s. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my ‘foreign' contacts.’ ” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital.”

“Simon, were they… are they cruel, or just righteous?”

He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.

“Some of them…” he said at last, mumbling.

Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on society.

“Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

“Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand—“some of them, there were men like gold there—”

The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

“What have you been playing?” he asked.

“Forrest, Schubert.”

“With the quartet?”

“Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”

“Ah, poor Max.”

“It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”

I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counsellors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot to the touch when I kissed him goodbye. I went instead and got a black-market doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take after they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.

The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more to it that that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily, and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills, unlabelled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks.”

I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before, only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the Triple Power N-L-G-Zic and the Extra Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors recommend, which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your FMA-approved private-enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices established by the Pure Food and Drug Administration in order to inspire competitive research.

“Aspirin,” the doctor repeated. “The miracle ingredient more doctors recommend.” She cat-grinned again. I think she liked us because we were living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably worth more than the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled at my address, and to apply for Temporary Unemployment Compensation ration stamps for him. They only give them to you for two weeks and you have to come every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the signatures of two fed-meds, and I thought I’d rather put that off for a while. It took three hours to go through the lines and get the forms he would have to fill out, and to answer the crats’ questions about why he wasn’t there in person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it’s hard for them to prove that two people are married, if you move now and then, and your friends help out by sometimes registering one of you as living at their address; but they had all the back files on both of us and it was obvious that we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State really does make things awfully hard for itself. It must have been simpler to enforce the laws, back when marriage was legal and adultery was what got you into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I’ll bet people broke the law just as often then as they do now.