Ursula Le Guin: Five Ways to Forgiveness

Gubu danced about her on the pathway down, silent, tickling her legs with his tail. “Look out,” she scolded him, “I’m going to walk on you.” She was grateful to him, picked him up as soon as they were indoors. No dignified and joyous greeting from Tikuli, not this night, not ever. Roo-roo-roo, Gubu went under her ear, listen to me, I’m here, life goes on, where’s dinner?

The Chief got a touch of pneumonia after all, and she went into the village to call the clinic in Veo. They sent out a practitioner, who said he was doing fine, just keep him sitting up and coughing, the herbal teas were fine, just keep an eye on him, that’s right, and went away, thanks very much. So she spent her afternoons with him. The house without Tikuli seemed very drab, the late autumn days seemed very cold, and anyhow what else did she have to do? She liked the big, dark raft-house. She wasn’t going to clean house for the Chief or any man who didn’t do it for himself, but she poked about in it, in rooms Abberkam evidently hadn’t used or even looked at. She found one upstairs, with long low windows all along the west wall, that she liked. She swept it out and cleaned the windows with their small, greenish panes. When he was asleep she would go up to that room and sit on a ragged wool rug, its only furnishing. The fireplace had been sealed up with loose bricks, but heat came up it from the peat fire burning below, and with her back against the warm bricks and the sunlight slanting in, she was warm. She felt a peacefulness there that seemed to belong to the room, the shape of its air, the greenish, wavery glass of the windows. There she would sit in silence, unoccupied, content, as she had never sat in her own house.

The Chief was slow to get his strength back. Often he was sullen, dour, the uncouth man she had first thought him, sunk in a stupor of self-centered shame and rage. Other days he was ready to talk; even to listen, sometimes.

“I’ve been reading a book about the worlds of the Ekumen,” Yoss said, waiting for their bean-cakes to be ready to turn and fry on the other side. For the last several days she had made and eaten dinner with him in the late afternoon, washed up, and gone home before dark. “It’s very interesting. There isn’t any question that we’re descended from the people of Hain, all of us. Us and the Aliens too. Even our animals have the same ancestors.”

“So they say,” he grunted.

“It isn’t a matter of who says it,” she said. “Anybody who will look at the evidence sees it; it’s a genetic fact. That you don’t like it doesn’t alter it.”

“What is a ‘fact’ a million years old?” he said. “What has it to do with you, with me, with us? This is our world. We are ourselves. We have nothing to do with them.”

“We do now,” she said rather fliply, flipping the bean-cakes.

“Not if I had had my way,” he said.

She laughed. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” he said.

After they were eating, he in bed with his tray, she at a stool on the hearth, she went on, with a sense of teasing a bull, daring the avalanche to fall; for all he was still sick and weak, there was that menace in him, his size, not of body only. “Is that what it was all about, really?” she asked. “The World Party. Having the planet for ourselves, no Aliens? Just that?”

“Yes,” he said, the dark rumble.

“Why? The Ekumen has so much to share with us. They broke the Corporations’ hold over us. They’re on our side.”

“We were brought to this world as slaves,” he said, “but it is our world to find our own way in. Kamye came with us, the Herdsman, the Bondsman, Kamye of the Sword. This is his world. Our earth. No one can give it to us. We don’t need to share other peoples’ knowledge or follow their gods. This is where we live, this earth. This is where we die to rejoin the Lord.”

After a while she said, “I have a daughter, and a grandson and granddaughter. They left this world four years ago. They’re on a ship that is going to Hain. All these years I live till I die are like a few minutes, an hour to them. They’ll be there in eighty years—seventy-six years, now. On that other earth. They’ll live and die there. Not here.”

“Were you willing for them to go?”

“It was her choice.”

“Not yours.”

“I don’t live her life.”

“But you grieve,” he said.

The silence between them was heavy.

“It is wrong, wrong, wrong!” he said, his voice strong and loud. “We had our own destiny, our own way to the Lord, and they’ve taken it from us—we’re slaves again! The wise Aliens, the scientists with all their great knowledge and inventions, our ancestors, they say they are— ‘Do this!’ they say, and we do it. ‘Do that!’ and we do it. ‘Take your children on the wonderful ship and fly to our wonderful worlds!’ And the children are taken, and they’ll never come home. Never know their home. Never know who they are. Never know whose hands might have held them.”

He was orating; for all she knew it was a speech he had made once or a hundred times, ranting and magnificent; there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in her eyes also. She would not let him use her, play on her, have power over her.

“If I agreed with you,” she said, “still, still, why did you cheat, Abberkam? You lied to your own people, you stole!”

“Never,” he said. “Everything I did, always, every breath I took, was for the World Party. Yes, I spent money, all the money I could get, what was it for except the cause? Yes, I threatened the Envoy, I wanted to drive him and all the rest of them off this world! Yes, I lied to them, because they want to control us, to own us, and I will do anything to save my people from slavery—anything!”

He beat his great fists on the mound of his knees, and gasped for breath, sobbing.

“And there is nothing I can do, O Kamye!” he cried, and hid his face in his arms.

She sat silent, sick at heart.

After a long time he wiped his hands over his face, like a child, wiping the coarse, straggling hair back, rubbing his eyes and nose. He picked up the tray and set it on his knees, picked up the fork, cut a piece of bean-cake, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. If he can, I can, Yoss thought, and did the same. They finished their dinner. She got up and came to take his tray. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It was gone then,” he said very quietly. He looked up at her directly, seeing her, as she felt he seldom did.

She stood, not understanding, waiting.

“It was gone then. Years before. What I believed at Nadami. That all we needed was to drive them out and we would be free. We lost our way as the war went on and on. I knew it was a lie. What did it matter if I lied more?”

She understood only that he was deeply upset and probably somewhat mad, and that she had been wrong to goad him. They were both old, both defeated, they had both lost their child. Why did she want to hurt him? She put her hand on his hand for a moment, in silence, before she picked up his tray.

As she washed up the dishes in the scullery, he called her, “Come here, please!” He had never done so before, and she hurried into the room.

“Who were you?” he asked.

She stood staring.

“Before you came here,” he said impatiently.

“I went from the plantation to education school,” she said. “I lived in the city. I taught physics. I administered the teaching of science in the schools. I brought up my daughter.”

“What is your name?”

“Yoss. Seddewi Tribe, from Banni.”

He nodded, and after a moment more she went back to the scullery. He didn’t even know my name, she thought.

Every day she made him get up, walk a little, sit in a chair; he was obedient, but it tired him. The next afternoon she made him walk about a good while, and when he got back to bed he closed his eyes at once. She slipped up the rickety stairs to the west-window room and sat there a long time in perfect peace.