Ursula Le Guin: Unlocking The Air

Avelin sat on the lab stool, his head bowed. When Fabbre was done, he nodded. After a while, he said, "But I have to ask you if it’s realistic to separate the circumstances, as you put it, from the work."

"About as realistic as separating the body from the mind," Fabbre said. He stretched again and reseated himself at the computer. "I want to get this series in," he said, and his hands went to the keyboard and his gaze to the notes he was copying. After five or six minutes, he started the printer and spoke without turning. "You’re serious, Givan? You think it’s coming apart?"

"Yes. I think the experiment is over." The printer scraped and screeched, and they raised their voices to be heard.

"Here, you mean."

"Here and everywhere. They know it, down at Roukh Square. Go down there. You’ll see. There could be such jubilation only at the death of a tyrant or the failure of a great hope."

"Or both."

"Or both," Avelin agreed. The paper jammed in the printer, and Fabbre opened the machine to free it. His hand was shaking. Avelin, spruce and cool, hands behind his back, strolled over, looked, reached in, disengaged the corner that was jamming the feed.

"Soon," he said, "we’ll have an IBM. A Mactoshin. Our hearts’ desire."

"Macintosh," Fabbre said.

"Everything can be done in two seconds." Fabbre restarted the printer and looked around. "Listen, the principles— Avelin’s eyes shone strangely, as if full of tears; he shook his head.

"So much depends on the circumstances," he said.

It locks and unlocks a door, the door to apartment 2-1 of the building at 43 Pradinestrade in the Old North Quarter of the city of Krasnoy. The apartment is enviable, having a kitchen with saucepans, dislicloths, spoons and all that is necessary, and two bedrooms, one of which is now used as a sitting room, with chairs, books, papers and all that is necessary, as well as a view from the window between other buildings of a short section of the Molsen River. The river at this moment is lead-colored and the trees above it are bare and black. The apartment is unlighted and empty. When they left, Bruna Fabbre locked the door and dropped the key, which is on a steel ring along with the key to her desk at the lyceum and the key to her sister Bendika’s apartment in the Trasfiuve, into her small imitation leather handbag, which is getting shabby at the corners, and snapped the handbag shut. Bruna’s daughter Stefana has a copy of the key in her jeans pocket, tied on a bit of braided cord along with the key to the closet in her room in dormitory G of the University of Krasnoy, where she is a graduate student in the department of Orsinian and Slavic Literature, working for a degree in the field of early romantic poetry. She never locks the closet. The two women walk down Pradinestrade three blocks and wait a few minutes at the corner for the number 18 bus, which runs on Bulvard Settentre from North Krasnoy to the center of the city.

Pressed in the crowded interior of the handbag and the tight warmth of the jeans pocket, the key and its copy are inert, silent, forgotten. All a key can do is lock and unlock its door; that’s all the function it has, all the meaning; it has a responsibility but no rights. It can lock or unlock. It can be found or thrown away.

Once upon a time, in 1830, in 1848, in 1866, in 1918, in 1947, in 1956, stones flew. Stones flew through the air like pigeons, and hearts, too; hearts had wings. Those were the years when the stones flew, the hearts took wing, the young voices sang. The soldiers raised their muskets to the ready, the soldiers aimed their rifles, the soldiers poised their machine guns. They were young, the soldiers. They fired. The stones lay down, the pigeons fell. There’s a kind of red stone called pigeon blood, a ruby. The red stones of Roukh Square were never rubies; slosh a bucket of water over them or let the rain fall and they’re gray again, lead-gray, common stones. Only now and then, in certain years, they have flown, and turned to rubies.

Nothing to do with fairy tales and not romantic; certainly realistic; though, in a way, in principle, in fact, it is highly idealistic. A city bus, crowded with people, in a city street in central Europe on a November afternoon and it’s stalled. What else? Oh, dear. Oh, damn. But no, it hasn’t stalled; the engine, for a wonder, hasn’t broken down; it’s just that it can’t go any farther. Why not? Because there’s a bus stopped in front of it, and another one stopped in front of that one at the cross street, and it looks like everything has stopped. Nobody on this bus has heard the word gridlock, the name of an exotic disease of the mysterious West. There aren’t enough private cars in Krasnoy to bring about a gridlock even if they knew what it was. There are cars, and a lot of wheezing, idealistic buses, but all there is enough of to stop the flow of traffic in Krasnoy is people. It is a kind of equation, proved by experiments conducted over many years, perhaps not in a wholly scientific or objective spirit but nonetheless presenting a well-documented result confirmed by repetition: There are not enough people in this city to stop a tank. Even in much larger cities, it has been authoritatively demonstrated as recently as last spring that there are not enough people to stop a tank But there are enough people in this city to stop a bus, and they are doing so. Not by throwing themselves in front of it, waving banners or singing songs about Liberty’s eternal day, but merely by being of the g in the street, getting in the way bus, on the supposition that the bus driver has not been trained in either homicide or suicide, and on the same supposition-upon which all cities stand or fall-that they are also getting in the way of all the other buses and all the cars and in one another’s way, too, so that nobody is going much of anywhere, in a physical sense.

"We’re going to have to walk from here," Stefana said, and her mother clutched her imitation-leather handbag

"Oh, but we can’t, Fana. Look at that crowd! What are they—Are they—"

"It’s Thursday, ma’am," said a large, red-faced, smiling man just behind them in the aisle. Everybody was getting off the bus, pushing and talking.

"Yesterday, I got four blocks closer than this," a woman said crossly. And the red-faced man said, "Ah, but this is Thursday."

"Fifteen thousand last time," said somebody. And somebody else said, "Fifty, fifty thousand today!"

"We can never get near the Square. I don’t think we should try," Bruna told her daughter as they squeezed into the crowd outside the bus door.

"You stay with me, don’t let go and don’t worry," said the student of Early Romantic Poetry, a tall, resolute young woman, and she took her mother’s hand in a firm grasp. "It doesn’t really matter where we get, but it would be fun if you could see the Square. Let’s try. Let’s go round behind the post office."

Everybody was trying to go in the same direction. Stefana and Bruna got across one street by dodging and stopping and pushing gently, then turning against the flow, they trotted down a nearly empty alley, cut across the cobbled court in back of the Central Post Office and rejoined an even thicker crowd moving slowly down a wide street and out from between the buildings. "There, there’s the palace, see!" said Stefana, who could see it, being taller. "This is as far as we’ll get except by osmosis." They practiced osmosis, which necessitated letting go of each other’s hands and made Bruna unhappy.

"This is far enough, this is fine here," Bruna kept saying. "I can see everything. There’s the roof of the palace. Nothing’s going to happen, is it? I mean, will anybody speak?" It was not what she meant, but she did not want to shame her daughter with her fear, her daughter who had not been alive when the stones turned to rubies. And she spoke quietly because although there were so many people pressed and pressing into Roukh Square, they were not noisy. They talked to one another in ordinary, quiet voices. Only now and then, somebody down nearer the palace shouted out a name, and then many other voices would repeat it with a roll and crash like a wave breaking. Then they would be quiet again, murmuring vastly, like the sea between big waves.