Урсула Ле Гуин - Dangerous People

to use the writers there, [15] To do research on the computers. and today she had been at the Oak workshops talking with people there about using one of the presses and arranging for the paper, for she wanted to hand-set the piece as a book. By the time the Water was danced [16] In early or mid-August. she would be setting type, but that pleasure would come in its own time. First she must have the text right. That was her concern now. She was thinking about an obscure passage, where the author had missed or miscopied several words through absent-mindedness, or had failed to express the thought in words appropriate to it. She knew how the text might be emended, but not whether she should emend it. Perhaps the obscurity just at this crucial point of the treatise, on which much of the argument hinged, [17] The noun or verb hinge, íya, is never used lightly; it always hints at further meaning or implication. was deliberate. To offer clarity and withdraw it without warning did not seem characteristic of the author, but it was a complex mind that had thought these thoughts, and the subject, after all, was control. So the obscurity might be intentional; or accidental; or non-existent except to Shamsha failing to understand. She was certain only that she must be careful about changing a text which perhaps understood her better than she understood it. So she thought while she carefully rinsed the chopper and the counter, gathered up the bits of stem and wilted leaf, and put them into the compost pail.

All the same, even if the author was deliberately indulging in a compressed allusive mode, the sentence that most troubled her still troubled her. Was it a clear strand across a gap, or a break in the skein, or a knot, a tangle? “Shattering pressure may induce scattering to find what is traduced.” The chime of shatter and scatter , induce and traduce , were much gaudier than this author’s usual plain style. Perhaps they signified a sleepy moment, copying out late at night, the mind not in control of the hand, picking up rhymes not reasons. The cracked wheat was done; she stirred it up and left the pot half-open on the stove to cool. Turning back to the counter, thinking of that word traduce , she saw the plant of chicory, today’s flower now withered shut and tomorrow’s buds on the stem mere knots, their promise lost. She felt a little annoyance at Hwette’s childishness in forcing her to decide what to do with this small, ungainly, and inappropriate gift. Was she to put it in water root and all? or to dry the one gangling root to roast for chicory tea? To chop the whole thing up for a bitter note in the salad was the only thing that made any sense at all. But the color of the closed flower, the blue-violet color it would be if it were open, was clear in her mind, and in that color the daughter’s gift of that flower to the mother spoke itself, and she understood.

Shamsha stood looking at the chicory plant, her arms apart and still, and then went hurrying down the hall to Hwette’s room, saying her daughter’s name. But nobody was in the room, or any of the rooms, except in the front room where her son-in-law was still stretched out in the windowseat, looking soft and moist and breathing in through his nose and out through his lips so that he made a little noise, like a distant engine with a bad valve, puh… puh… puh…. Often at night, too, Tai snored in reverse that way. Shamsha’s room was next to his and Fefinum’s, and once she heard the sound when seeking sleep there was no use trying to think of anything else.

She hurried noisily through the room now, hoping to disturb him, and out onto the balcony. The air that had come hot all day from the east was beginning to come cooler from the south, though still not very cool. Shamsha sat down in a legless wicker chair behind the wooden goats and vines and looked through them over the common place and across the Valley to the hills south of Odoun. [18] The town of Chúmo is in these hills. She stretched out her legs and stared at the blue-violet hills. Several times she spoke aloud, saying “How—” or “No,” or made a small, wordless sound, in the busy distress of her thinking.

Her son-in-law, Hwette’s husband [19] Souv giyouda, daughter’s husband, so called having formally married Hwette at the Wedding ceremonies of the World Dance. Kamedan, came up the outside stairs onto the balcony. He said in his low, gentle voice, “So you’re here, amabí.” [20] Han es im, the usual Kesh hello; amabí, dear grandmother. She looked at him from clear across the Valley. At last she started a little and said, “Kamedan! Have you seen Hwette?”

“Not since this morning. I’ve been at the looms,” he said. He stood there, hesitant. Kamedan was a tall, well-made man with dark skin, long hair, and clear eyes. He was strong and beautiful in limb and feature. His mother-in-law looked at him now admiringly and with rancor. She thought: He doesn’t know. He won’t know till she tells him. She told me first, as she ought. Hwette always does right, always does as she ought to do.—The thought was complacent and yet heavy, as if it held other thoughts folded inside it. She put it away from her. She said, “She was here, and then I lost her.”

Kamedan said, “I think she was going to the heyimas [21] The physical site of the spiritual center of one’s Earth House (maternal clan—in the case of Shamsha and her daughters the Obsidian). The five heyimas of the Five Houses were one arm of the double spiral formed by all Kesh towns; the other arm consisted of the dwelling houses. this afternoon with Fefinum, to Clown practice.” [22] The Obsidian House provided the ritual Clowns for several of the great dances. Fefinum and Hwette have joined the Blood Clown Society to learn and perform Clown roles in the women’s dances of the Blood Lodge.

“Oh yes, that’s right,” Shamsha said, getting up. She found it hard to get up gracefully from a legless chair, but Kamedan’s beauty made her wish to be graceful in his eyes. “All the same, she was here for a minute,” she said, and so saying thought about the chicory plant. She did not want anybody else seeing it lying wilting on the counter. She went in to the kitchen. Tai was there, still moist and creased, but awake, standing up, and breathing through his nose. She did not see the chicory plant. He had spread out a litter of vegetables and implements all over the counter, being as unable to work in an orderly place as Shamsha was unable to work in a disorderly one.

Kamedan had followed her, and now the children came running in, Fefinum’s eight-year-old daughter Bolekash and Hwette’s little boy Torip. Torip fastened his arms around his grandmother as high up as he could reach, which was just below the hips, and said earnestly, “Ama! Ama, I’m very hungry , I need to eat!” Kamedan poured them and himself cups of lemonade from the jug in the coolroom, and Shamsha fetched down a great bowl of apricots, the last picking of their five trees [23] The Kesh idea of property was complicated. Only sacred things were held entirely in common; only one’s own body was considered entirely one’s inalienable property. Everything else fell between those extremes. They used the possessive pronouns, but their meaning is often very shadowy, and is a kind of shorthand. Speaking carefully, one would not say “my family” “my house,” or “our trees,” but “the people I am related to,” “the house I am living in,” “the trees my family looks after.” The produce of farming and hunting was always shared to a degree determined by complicated traditions and rules. The farm holdings of a Kesh family were usually scattered here and there in a patchwork, cultivated partly by the individual owners and partly as a cooperative enterprise; work and produce were shared according to rule and custom. Shamsha’s family may have had various apricot trees in other orchards. in Dry Creek orchard, and the children filled their hands and mouths. Pottering at the counter, Tai asked, “Shall I get dinner early?”

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