Ursula K. LeGuin - Day Before The Revolution.pdf

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The DayBefore The Revolution
URSULA LE GUIN
"The DayBefore 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 thebooming, 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
noddedabove 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
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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,.thoughtof him, as
"Taviri"? How long since she had said his name?
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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 atall, 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, washingher 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
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her appetite back sincethe ;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 inRiver 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 allthe 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 byherself . 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
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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
sucha defeat for the Movement, after your partner's death,
peoplehad used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to
do? Bravery, courage-what was courage? She had never '°'
figuredit out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on;
otherssaid. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real:
choice, ever? r
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 onthe .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 invoiceprint, 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 theNorthCoast . 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 hisletters, 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,.exceptthis 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
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