URSULA K. LE GUIN

(1929- )

Like Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin is celebrated as a writer of fantasy and science fiction; yet she writes what might be called mainstream literature as well—-fiction, poetry, criticism. The author of fifteen novels, three books of poetry, seven books for children, two books of criticism, and five short story collections, Le Guin is a brilliant stylist for whom the imagination is transcendent. As the protagonist of "Texts," the elliptical story included here, believes, "texts"—messages to be decoded—confront us on all sides, if only we could read them: "Words were everywhere."

"Texts" is taken from Le Guin's most recent story collection, Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (1991), a group of linked and interrelated stories set in a seaside town on the Oregon coast. The stories are "realistic"—though, as in all of Le Guin's work, they turn upon mystery and ambiguity.

Born in Berkeley, California, daughter of writer Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, Ursula K. Le Guin studied at Radcliffe and Columbia, married the historian Charles A. Le Guin in 1953, and began publishing in the 1960s. She now lives in Oregon. Her work has been plentiful, and much acclaimed; the titles for which she is best known are the novels The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and Always Coming Home (1985), but she is the author of outstanding collections of stories in the fantasy mode: The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), Orsinian Tales (1976), The Compass Rose (1982), and Buffalo Gals (1987).

Such categories as "realism"—"fantasy"—"science fiction"— "mainstream" are revealed as hopelessly inadequate when we try to characterize writers of Ursula K. Le Guin's gifts.

Texts

Messages came, Johanna thought, usually years too late, or years before one could crack their code or had even learned the language they were in. Yet they came increasingly often and were so urgent, so compelling in their demand that she read them, that she do something, as to force her at last to take refuge from them. She rented, for the month of January, a little house with no telephone in a seaside town that had no mail delivery. She had stayed there several times in summer; winter, as she had hoped, was even quieter than summer. A whole day would go by without her hearing or speaking a word. She did not buy the paper or turn on the television, and the one morning she thought she ought to find some news on the radio she got a program in Finnish from Astoria. But the messages still came. Words were everywhere.

Literate clothing was no real problem. She remembered the first print dress she had ever seen, years ago, a genuine print dress with typography involved in the design—green on white, suitcases and hibiscus and the names Riviera and Capri and Paris occurring rather blobbily from shoulder-seam to hem, sometimes right side up, sometimes upside down. Then it had been, as the saleswoman said, very unusual. Now it was hard to find a T-shirt that did not urge political action, or quote lengthily from a dead physicist, or at least mention the town it was for sale in. All this she had coped with, she had even worn. But too many things were becoming legible.

She had noticed in earlier years that the lines of foam left by waves on the sand after stormy weather lay sometimes in curves that looked like handwriting, cursive lines broken by spaces, as if in words; but it was not until she had been alone for over a fortnight and had walked many times down to Wreck Point and back that she found she could read the writing. It was a mild day, nearly windless, so that she did not have to march briskly but could mosey along between the foam-lines and the water's edge where the sand reflected the sky. Every now and then a quiet winter breaker driving up and up the beach would drive her and a few gulls ahead of it onto the drier sand; then as the wave receded she and the

gulls would follow it back. There was not another soul on the long beach. The sand lay as firm and even as a pad of pale brown paper, and on it a recent wave at its high mark had left a complicated series of curves and bits of foam. The ribbons and loops and lengths of white looked so much like handwriting in chalk that she stopped, the way she would stop, half willingly, to read what people scratched in the sand in summer. Usually it was "Jason + Karen" or paired initials in a heart; once, mysteriously and memorably, three initials and the dates 1973-1984, the only such inscription that spoke of a promise not made but broken. Whatever those eleven years had been, the length of a marriage? a child's life? they were gone, and the letters and numbers also were gone when she came back by where they had been, with the tide rising. She had wondered then if the person who wrote them had written them to be erased. But these foam words lying on the brown sand now had been written by the erasing sea itself. If she could read them they might tell her a wisdom a good deal deeper and bitterer than she could possibly swallow. Do I want to know what the sea writes? she thought, but at the same time she was already reading the foam, which though in vaguely cuneiform blobs rather than letters of any alphabet was perfectly legible as she walked along beside it. "Yes," it read, "esse hes hetu tokye to' ossusess ekyes. Seham hute' u." (When she wrote it down later she used the apostrophe to represent a kind of stop or click like the last sound in "Yep!") As she read it over, backing up some yards to do so, it continued to say the same thing, so she walked up and down it several times and memorised it. Presently, as bubbles burst and the blobs began to shrink, it changed here and there to read, "Yes, e hes etu kye to' ossusess kye. ham te u." She felt that this was not significant change but mere loss, and kept the original text in mind. The water of the foam sank into the sand and the bubbles dried away till the marks and lines lessened into a faint lacework of dots and scraps, half legible. It looked enough like delicate bits of fancywork that she wondered if one could also read lace or crochet.

When she got home she wrote down the foam words so that she would not have to keep repeating them to remember them, and then she looked at the machine-made Quaker lace tablecloth on the little round dining table. It was not hard to read but was, as one might expect, rather dull. She made out the first line inside

the border as "pith wot pith wot pith wot" interminably, with a "dub" every thirty stitches where the border pattern interrupted. But the lace collar she had picked up at a second-hand clothes store in Portland was a different matter entirely. It was handmade, hand written. The script was small and very even. Like the Spencerian hand she had been taught fifty years ago in the first grade, it was ornate but surprisingly easy to read. "My soul must go," was the border, repeated many times, "my soul must go, my soul must go," and the fragile webs leading inward read, "sister, sister, sister, light the light." And she did not know what she was to do, or how she was to do it.