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

machines. Other days she felt human enough to get bored and be glad when Noah came to the Health Center to see her. “Hey,”
     he said, “did you hear about the Hag? All kinds of people over in Urban have seen her. It started with this baby getting excited,
     and then its mother saw her, and then a whole bunch of people did. She’s supposed to be real small and old and she’s sort
     of Asian, you know, with those eyes like Yukio and Fred have, but she’s all bent over and her legs are weird. And she goes
     around picking up stuff off the deck, like it was litter, only nothing’s there, and she puts it in this bag she has. And when
     they walk towards her she just goes out of sight. And she has this real gut mouth without any teeth in it.”
    “Is the burned woman still around?”
    “Well, some women in Florida were having some committee meeting and all of a sudden there were these other people sitting
     at the table and they were black. And they all looked at them and they just like went out of sight.”
    “Wow,” Esther said.
    “Dad got himself on this Emergency Committee with mostly psychologists, and they have it all worked out about mass hallucination
     and environmental deprivation and like that. He’ll tell you all about it.”
    “Yeah, he will.”
    “Hey Es.”
    “Hey No.”
    “Are they, I mean. Is it. Do they.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “First they take out the old ones. Then they put in the new ones. Then they do the wiring.”
    “Wow.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you really have to like, go and choose… ”
    “No. The meds pick out whatever’s most compatible genetically. They got some nice Jewish eyes for me.”
    “Honest?”
    “I was kidding. Maybe.”
    “It’ll be great if you can see really well,” Noah said, and she heard in his voice for the first time the huskiness like a
     double-reed instrument, oboe or bassoon, the first breaking.
    “Hey, have you got your
Satyagraha
tape, I want to hear that,” she said. They shared a passion for twentieth-century opera.
    “It has no intellectual complexity,” Noah said in Ike’s intonation. “I find an absence of thought.”
    “Yeah,” said Esther, “and it’s all in Sanskrit.”
    Noah put on the last act. They listened to the tenor singing ascending scales in Sanskrit. Esther closed her eyes. The high,
     pure voice went up and up, like mountain peaks above the mists.
    “We can be optimistic,” the doctor said.
    “What do you mean?” Susan said.
    “They can’t guarantee, Sue,” Ike said.
    “Why not? This was presented as a routine procedure!”
    “In an ordinary case—”
    “Are there ordinary cases?”
    “Yes,” the doctor said. “And this one is extraordinary. The operation was absolutely trouble free. So was the IS prep. However,
     her current reaction raises the possibility—a low probability but a possibility—of partial or total rejection.”
    “Blindness.”
    “Sue, you know that even if she rejects these implants, they can try again.”
    “Electronic implants might in fact be the better course. They’ll preserve optical function and give spatial orientation. And
     there are sonar headbands for periods of visual nonfunction.”
    “So we can be optimistic,” Susan said.
    “Guardedly,” said the doctor.
    “I let you do this,” Susan said. “I let you do this, and I could have stopped you.” She turned away from him and went down
     the corridor.
    He was due at the Bays, overdue in fact, but he walked across Urban to the farther elevator bank instead of dropping straight
     down from the Health Center. He needed a moment to be alone and think. This whole thing about Esther’s operation was hard
     to handle, on top of the mass hysteria phenomena, and now if Susan was going to let him down … He kept feeling a driving,
     aching need to be alone. Not to sit with Esther, not to talk to doctors, not to reason with Susan, not to go to committee
     meetings, not to listen to hysterics reporting their