Ursula K. LeGuin - Day Before the Revolution.pdf - Ursula K. LeGuin - margozap

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URSULA LE GUIN

The Day Before the Revolution

"The Day Before the Revolution" won the Nebula Award for the best

science-fiction short story of 1974. Ursula's The Dispossessed won the Nebula

Award and the Hugo Award for the best novel of 1974. The Le Guin award-winning

spree began with her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the

Nebula and Hugo awards and to my mind did more to exploit the potential of the

science-fiction novel than anything published to that time; and it continued

with her Hugo novella of 1971, "The Word for World Is Forest," her Hugo short

story of 1973, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and the 1973 National Book

Award in children's literature for her novel The Farthest Shore. Ursula comes

naturally to writing and science: her mother was an author, her father an

anthropologist; her husband is a Portland State College professor of French

history, and she herself, besides her family of three children, possesses an

advanced degree in French and Italian Renaissance literature. The story that

follows is cut from the same fictional tapestry as The Dispossessed.

The speaker's voice was loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone street, and the

people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobblestones, that great voice

booming over them. Taviri was somewhere on the other side of the hall. She had

to get to him. She wormed and pushed her way among the dark-clothed, close

packed people. She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the

booming, and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see

Taviri, she was too short. A broad black vested belly and chest loomed up

blocking her way. She must get through to Taviri. Sweating, she jabbed

fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stones, he did not move at all,

but the huge lungs let out right over her head a prodigious noise, a bellow.

She cowered. Then she understood that the bellow had not been at her. Others

were shouting. The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or

shadows. Thrilled, she joined the shouting-"Yes! Yes! "-and shoving on, came

out easily into the open expanse of the Regimental Drill Field in Parheo.

Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the

tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what

they were called. The flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that

always blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they

whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. Taviri stood among the

tall weeds in his good suit, the dark gray one that made him look like a

professor or a playact or, harshly elegant.

He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying some-:: thing to her.

The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached out to catch hold of his

hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could not stop. "Oh, Taviri," she said,

"it's just on there!". The queer sweet smell of the white weeds was heavy as

she went` on. There were thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes.' pits.

She feared to fall . . . she stopped.

Sun, bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless.

She had forgotten to pull the blind last night. She turned her back. on the

sun, but the right side wasn't comfortable. No use. Day.

She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over the edge of the bed,; and sat

hunched in her nightdress looking down at her feet.

The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, we almost square where they

touched each other, and bulged out' above in corns; the nails were discolored

and shapeless. Between the knoblike ankle bones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The

brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin

was the color of mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad,

depressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the' words, and they all fit, like

hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself and find

it hideous, what a job! But" then, when she hadn't been hideous, had she sat

around and-, stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body's not an:

object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it's just you,

yourself. Only when it's no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry

about it- Is it in good shape? Will it do?: Will it last?

"Who cares?" said Laia fiercely, and stood up.

It made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her hand to the bed

table, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought` of reaching out to

Taviri, in the dream.

What had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if she had even

touched his hand. She frowned, trying to force' memory. It had been so long

since she had dreamed about Taviri; and now not even to remember what he had

said!

It was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her nightdress, frowning,

one hand on the bed table. How long was it since she had thought of him-let

alone dreamed of him-even,. thought of him, as "Taviri"? How long since she

had said his name?

Asieo said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before I met Asieo.

Asieo's theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about him, talked about him

too much no doubt, maundered, dragged him in. But as "Asieo," the last name,

the public man. The private man was gone, utterly gone. There were so few left

who had even known him. They had all used to be in jail. One laughed about it

on those days, all the friends in all the jails. But they weren't even there,

these days. They were in the prison cemeteries. Or in the common graves.

"Oh, oh my dear," Laia said out loud, and she sank down onto the bed again

because she could not stand up under the remembrance of those first weeks in

the Fort, in the cell, those first weeks of the nine years in the Fort in

Drio, in the cell, those first weeks after they told her that Asieo had been

killed in the fighting in Capitol Square and had been buried with the Fourteen

Hundred in the lime-ditches behind Oring Gate. In the cell. Her hands fell

into the old position on her lap, the left clenched and locked inside the grip

of the right, the right thumb working back and forth a little pressing and

rubbing on the knuckle of the left first finger. Hours, days, nights. She had

thought of them all, each one, each one of the fourteen hundred, how they lay,

how the quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning

dark. Who touched him? How did the slender bones of the hand lie now? Hours,

years.

"Taviri, I have never forgotten you!" she whispered, and the stupidity of it

brought her back to morning-light and the rumpled bed. Of course she hadn't

forgotten him. These things go without saying between husband and wife. There

were her ugly old feet flat on the floor again, just as before. She had got

nowhere at all, she had gone in a circle. She stood up with a grunt of effort

and disapproval, and went to the closet for her dressing gown.

The young people went about the halls of the House in becoming immodesty, but

she was too old for that. She didn't want to spoil some young man's breakfast

with the sight of her. Besides, they had grown up in the principle of freedom

of dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn't. All she had done was invent

it. It's not the same.

Like speaking of Asieo as "my husband." They winced. The word she should use

as a good Odonian, of course, was "partner. " But why the hell did she have to

be a good Odonian?

She shuffled down the hall to the bathrooms. Mairo was there, washing her

hair in a lavatory. Laia looked at the long, sleek, wet hank with admiration.

She got out of the House so seldom now that she didn't know when she had last

seen a respectably shaven scalp, but still the sight of a full head of hair

gave her pleasure, vigorous pleasure. How many times had she been jeered at,

Longhair, Longhair, had her hair pulled by policemen or young y toughs, had

her hair shaved off down to the scalp by a grinning soldier at each new

prison? And then had grown it all over again, through the fuzz, to the frizz,

to the curls, to the mane . . . In the old days. For God's love, couldn't she

think of anything today but the old days?

Dressed, her bed made, she went down to commons. It was a good breakfast, but

she had never got her appetite back since the ;j damned stroke. She drank two

cups of herb tea, but couldn't finish the piece of fruit she had taken. How

she had craved fruit as a child, badly enough to steal it; and in the Forth

for God's love stop it! She smiled and replied to the greetings and friendly

.j inquiries of the other breakfasters and big Aevi who was serving the

counter this morning. It was he who had tempted her with the peach, "Look at

this, I've been saving it for you," and how' could she refuse? Anyway she had

always loved fruit, and never got enough; once when she was six or seven she

had stolen a j piece off a vendor's cart in River Street. But it was hard to

eat when everyone was talking so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real

news. She was inclined to discount it at first, being j wary of enthusiasms,

but after she had read the article in the paper, and read between the lines of

it, she thought, with a strange kind of certainty, deep but cold, Why, this is

it; it has come. And in Thu, not here. Thu will break before this country

does; the Revolution will first prevail there. As if that mattered! There will

be no more nations. And yet it did matter somehow, it made her a little cold

and sad-envious, in fact. Of all the infinite stupidities. She did not join

the talk much, and soon got up to go back to her room feeling sorry for

herself. She could not share their excitement. She was out of it, really out

of it. It's not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously

climbing the 7 stairs, to accept being out of it when you've been in it, in

the center of it, for fifty years. Oh for God's love. Whining!

She got the stairs and the self-pity behind her, entering her

room. It was a good room, and it was good to be by herself. It was a great

relief. Even if it wasn't strictly fair. Some of the kids in the attics were

living five to a room no bigger than this. There were always more people

wanting to live in an Odonian House than could be properly accommodated. She

had this big room all to herself only because she was an old woman who had had

a stroke. And maybe because she was Odo. If she hadn't been Odo, but merely

the old woman with a stroke, would she have had it? Very Rely. After all who

the hell wanted to room with a drooling old woman? But it was hard to be sure.

Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out

everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in

one generation; only Time works the great changes. Meanwhile this was a nice,

large, sunny room, proper for a drooling old woman who had started a world

revolution.

Her secretary would be coming in an hour to help her dispatch the day's work.

She shuffled over to the desk, a beautiful, big piece, a present from the Nio

Cabinetmakers' Syndicate because somebody had heard her remark once that the

only piece of furniture she had ever really longed for was a desk with drawers

and enough room on top . . . damn, the top was practically covered with papers

with notes clipped to them, mostly in Noi's small clear handwriting:

Urgent.-Northern Provinces.-Consult w/R.T.?

Her own handwriting had never been the same since Asieo's death. It was odd,

when you thought about it. After all, within five years after his death she

had written the whole Analogy. And there were those letters, which the tall

guard with the watery grey eyes, what was his name, never mind, had smuggled

out of the Fort for her for two years. The Prison Letters they called them

now, there were a dozen different editions of them. All that stuff, the

letters which people kept telling her were so full of "spiritual

strength"-which probably meant she had been lying herself blue in the face

when she wrote them, trying to keep her spirits up-and the Analogy which was

certainly the solidest intellectual work she had ever done, all of that had

been written in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, after Asieo's death. One had to

do something, and in the Fort they let one have paper and pens . . . But it

had all been written in the hasty, scribbling hand which she had never felt

was hers, not her own like the round, black scrollings of the manuscript of

Society Without Govern

ment, forty-five years old. Taviri had taken not only her body's and her

heart's desire to the quicklime with him, but even her good clear handwriting.

But he had left her the revolution.

How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after

such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner's death,

people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to

do? Bravery, courage-what was courage? She had never '°'

figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on;

others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real:

choice, ever?

To die was merely to go on in another direction.

If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant

when she wrote, "True journey is return,", but it had never been more than an

intuition, and she was farther than ever now from bring able to rationalise

it. She bent down,: too suddenly, so that she grunted a little at the creak in

her bones, and began to root in a bottom drawer of the desk. Her hand came to

an age-softened folder and drew it out, recognizing it by touch= before sight

confirmed: the manuscript of Syndical Organization in Revolutionary

Transition. He had printed the title on the . folder and written his name

under it, Taviri Odo Asieo, IX 741. There was an elegant handwriting, every

letter well-formed, bold, and fluent. But he had preferred to use a voice

printer. The manuscript was all in voiceprint, and high quality too,

hesitancies adjusted and idiosyncrasies of speech normalized. You couldn't see

there how he had said "o" deep in his throat as they did on the North Coast.

There was nothing of him there but his, mind. She had nothing of him at all

except his name written on. the folder. She hadn't kept his letters, it was

sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn't

think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years,. except

this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck: with that . . . .

Dualizing again. "She" and "it. " Age and illness made one dualist, made one

escapist; the mind insisted, It's not me, it's not me. But it was. Maybe the

mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied

them the chance, _ without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her

7v game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.

First self-pity, then self-praise, and here she still sat, for -1

God's love, holding Asieo's name in her hand, why? Didn't she know his name

without looking it up? What was wrong with her? She raised the folder to her

lips and kissed the handwritten name firmly and squarely, replaced the folder

in the back of the bottom drawer, shut the drawer, and straightened up in the

chair. Her right hand tingled. She scratched it, and then shook it in the air,

spitefully. It had never quite got over the stroke. Neither had her right leg,

or right eye, or the right corner of her mouth. They were sluggish, inept,

they tingled. They made her feel like a robot with a short circuit.

And. time was getting on, Noi would be coming, what had she been doing ever

since breakfast?

She got up so hastily that she lurched, and grabbed at the chair back to make

sure she did not fall. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked in

the big mirror there. Her grey knot was loose and droopy, she hadn't done it

up well before breakfast. She struggled with it awhile. It was hard to keep

her arms up in the air. Amai, running in to piss, stopped and said, "Let me do

it!" and knotted it up tight and neat in no time, with her round, strong,

pretty fingers, smiling and silent. Amai was twenty, less than a third of

Laia's age. Her parents had both been members of the Movement, one killed in

the insurrection of '60, the other still recruiting in the South Provinces.

Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter

of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you

cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this

is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.

Laia Osaieo Odo's right eye wept several little tears as she stood between the

lavatories and the latrines having her hair done up by the daughter she had

not borne; but her left eye, the strong one, did not weep, nor did it know

what the right eye did.

She thanked Amai and hurried back to her room. She had noticed, in the mirror,

a stain on her collar. Peach juice, probably. Damned old dribbler. She didn't

want Noi to come in and find her with drool on the collar.

As the clean shirt went on over her head, she thought, What's so special about

Noi?

She fastened the collar-frogs with her left hand, slowly.

Noi was thirty or so, a slight, muscular fellow with a soft voice and alert

dark eyes. That's what was special about Noi. It was

that simple. Good old sex. She had never been drawn to a fair man or a fat

one, or the tall fellows with big biceps, never, not even when she was

fourteen and fell in love with every passing fart. Dark, spare, and fiery,

that was the recipe. Taviri, of course. This boy wasn't a patch on Taviri for

brains, nor even for looks, but there it was: She didn't want him to see her

with dribble on her collar and her hair coming undone.

Her thin, grey hair.

Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway-my God, she hadn't even shut the

door while changing her shirt!-She looked at him and saw herself. The old

woman.

You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week's

shirt and last night's braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your

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