A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online

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     us about? Maybe EVA? And she got like fried, and went crazy, and she’s hiding now.”
    They weren’t stupid, Treese and Linda, not at all—no doubt IQs over 150 like everybody else—but they’d been born in the Colony.
     They’d never lived outside.
    Esther had. She remembered. The Roses had joined when she was seven. She remembered all sorts of stuff about the city where
     they had lived before they joined, Philadelphia; stuff like cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, and her best friend in the
     building, Saviora, who had ten million little tiny short braids each one tied with a red thread and a blue bead. Her best
     friend in the building and in the Building Mothers’ School and in the world. Until she had to go live in the United States
     and then Bakersfield and be decontaminated, decontaminated of everything, the germs and viruses and funguses, the roaches
     and the radiation and the rain, the red threads and the blue beads and the bright eyes. “Hey I’ll see for you, ole blindy-eyes,”
     Saviora had said when Esther had the first operation and it didn’t help. “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK,
     in arithmetic?”
    It was weird how she could remember that, nearly ten years ago. She could hear Saviora’s voice, the way she sang the word
     “arithmetic,” with a fall and rise in it so it sounded like something foreign, incomprehensible, marvelous, blue and red….
    “Arith-metic,” she said aloud, going down BB Corridor, but she could not say it right.
    All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman. But that didn’t explain how she got into 2-C, or the O.R., or onto
     the Plaza in Florida, where a girl called Oona Chang and her little brother claimed to have seen her last night just after
     sun-out.
    Oh, shit, I just wish I could see, Esther Rose thoughtas she walked across the Common, which to her was a blue-green blur. What’s the use? That woman could be walking in front
     of me right now and I wouldn’t even know it, I’d think it was just somebody that belonged. Anyhow how could there be a stowaway?
     After a year and a half in space? Where’s she been till now? And there hasn’t been any accident. It’s just kids. Playing ghosts,
     trying to scare each other and getting scared. Getting scared of those old history vids, those black faces, grinning with
     famine, when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat.
    “The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters,” Esther Rose said aloud. She had pored over the Monuments of Western Art file in
     the library because even though she couldn’t see the world, or even Spes, she could see pictures if they were close enough.
     Engravings were the best, they didn’t go all to blobs of color when she enlarged them on the screen, but kept making sense,
     the strong black lines, the shadows and highlights that built up the forms. Goya, it was. The bat things coming out of the
     man’s head while he slept at a table full of books, and down below were the words that meant “The Sleep of Reason engenders
     monsters” in English, the only language she would ever know. Roaches, rain, Spanish, all washed away. Of course Spanish was
     in the AI. Everything was. You could learn Spanish if you wanted to. But what use could it possibly be, when the AI could
     translate it into English faster than you could read or think? What use would there be knowing some language that nobody spoke
     but you?
    When she got home she was going to ask Susan about going to live in the A-Ed dorm in Boulder. She would do it. Today. When
     she got home. She had to get out. The dorm couldn’t be worse than home. Their incredible family, Daddy and Mommy and Bubby
     and Sis, like something from the nineteens! The womb within the womb! And here’s Uterine Rose, Space Heroine, groping home
     across the plastic grass…. She got there and hissed the door open and, seeing her motherworking on her little kitchen computer, faced her