It is often that a story comes to me as I read the work of others and imagine an ending coming to the piece that turns out to have not been the author’s direction. This story admittedly owes much to Le Guin’s Omelas in that manner, though I have strived to make it wholly my own in every way, as the reader will hopefully agree. Still, I am indebted to her for inspiration and dedicate this piece accordingly to Ursula K. Le Guin.

Somewhere, there is Learsi. It is a place of agreeable climate, perhaps rendered temperate by proximity to the sea. From early spring until the beginning of winter, the flatlands are green and the hills are purple; thereafter, a placid white subdues everything like a comfortable bed sheet for a few months before the snows leave. Rarely is a winter worse than mild. In this region, where grapes would concede to be cultivated if wine were known to its inhabitants, the community rests, nestled, as it may be, between ocean and mountains, between earth and sky. Does it sound too ideal? Yes, well, if all things are possible then even the most inconceivable things must be… somewhere.

The plain of Learsi has been inhabited since ancient times by a race that migrated in from the east. These men and women tend to have black or auburn hair, generally curly. The natural color of their eyes is a cloudy, almost supernatural gray. They are unusually fit, owing to their culture’s emphasis on physical education and their reliance upon traditional agriculture, which, suffice it to say, is naturally hard work. One would not wish to wage war upon the Learsites, but through history the sea and the mountains have kept most of their neighbors afar anyway.

The remarkable fortune this people had to settle the rich plain between the ocean and the hills is only half of the miracle of Learsi. The other half has its origin in their early philosopher, Harobed. It is unclear whether he was named harobed because it meant wise, or if harobed came to mean wise because of him. Either way, it was the social structure he advocated that led to the prosperity of Learsi. It was he who led to – dare I say such an impossible word? – happiness. It is difficult to believe, but all things have their place, somewhere.

Well, if you don’t believe it in the abstract, let’s look into the particular. As summer shines across the unnaturally green hay fields, the youths practice their physical disciplines outdoors. Their bronze bodies are long accustomed to working naked, or near-naked in the fields; the sun rarely burns anyone. They work and exercise frequently, but even the laziest of their peers are well-proportioned and generally sound, even without striving too hard for fitness. There is illness, but it is generally rare and minor among the youths. This may owe itself to the happy fact of their relative solitude from the rest of the world, where disease has taken much greater liberties. The boys and girls, this group mostly within an age range that has seen at least their fourteenth winter, attend physical practice together and school together. Many of them are clearly distracted, therefore, by their peers.

Nurah watches Haras with cautious dartings of her overcast-sky eyes. Haras is not aware. He is rather thick and shy. Nurah looks at his shoulders frequently; she knows the routines by heart as all the youths do. It’s all very automatic and unthinking. Haras does push-ups on his knuckles in the grass. His shoulders have fibrous ripples like celery stalks. She likes the thought of that texture.

Nurah is old enough to vote with the women, but Haras is still too young to receive women’s votes. She will definitely vote for him when he is a few years older.

Elsewhere, a gray cat purrs in an old woman’s lap. She is too old to vote, by nature’s ways. Instead, she is a sort of repository of knowledge for the younger folks who come to her to hear all sorts of stories that even their instructors do not know. Lines cleave her ancient face; her auburn hair, once prized, is losing its color. She smiles, because she loves the youths who will soon be coming to hear her tales. Her name might be Haduj. She is rather famous from accounts in which older men still speak of her youthful wonder.

In a study three streets away, Halel composes poetry. The language of Learsi, written in cursive logograms, lends itself to the most philosophical and elegant verses. The first principle of being Learsite is balance, however. There is no woman who does not respect Halel’s gifts with words as well as with muscle. Lines appear in his arms just from the light grip of his fingers upon his pen. Halel smiles. He just completed the bit that runs

The time of man is short and light;
a swing hangs empty from the tree of life…

Those will be the most remembered lines from the long story-poem he is compiling concerning a man who is fabled to have walked into the ocean to live among the mer-people who feed off krill and keep crustaceans as the Learsites keep cats, dogs, or crows. In the end, Halel supposes, the man from the fable finds himself confused by the ocean’s strange ways and returns to live in Learsi. Halel derives great pleasure from his imagination and the way he can sit and play with words like a child plays at making sand-figures. Like the man of the fable, he sojourns into unknown worlds, and from them returns, always, to Learsi.

In the amphitheatre by the sea, the council of thirty-three males meets that evening; Halel is among them. The air is salty; the loud ocean resembles Learsite eyes. There are three times eleven men – eleven each from the three schools of the Learsite education system: the school of the intelligent, the school of the strong, and the school of the talented. Balance between the three is encouraged for everyone, but the Learsites know more than anyone that each person has their own proclivities.

Among the males is the retired emperor, a man of speckled gray and deep-set eyes. His hair, including his wiry beard, resembles the pelt of a black and silver jaguar. From the days when he was the emperor, he has many stories to tell. Some of them have to do with a series of intrigues involving Haduj.  

The retired emperor takes the poet Halel aside.

“I wish to show you something that you, in your wisdom, may understand.”

“Can I know something an emperor does not?” Halel replies this way, knowing that the retired emperor was once the head of the school of the intelligent.

“Truly, before my day is done, I will see you head my old school, but that is neither here nor there… My hope is that a mind that is not my own may, by chance, hold things I have not thought of.”

“Certainly, emperor.”

Halel has never seen the former emperor’s eyes flash with the look that he sees in them now. He thinks he has seen it before on another brow, perhaps, once when the male council decided to euthanize a woman’s deformed child. It was a thing for which his people barely had a word.

As the council breaks up, and as meanwhile the women’s council breaks up on the other side of Learsi, Halel and the retired emperor begin to walk the streets toward the central tower.

“I’ve invited your old instructor too,” the retired emperor says off-hand. He means Haduj.

“Wonderful,” says Halel.

“Three minds will be even better.”

“Of course.”

Somewhere, an infant cries, a guitar player slowly composes a song, a couple women gossip about voting… Halel sees the moon and wonders what the mer-people use to tell the seasons, if not the moon. The patting sound of bare feet on cobblestone echoes back to Halel and the emperor from the walls of the households. Their own noise joins the noise of others in their ears. The emperor’s eyes are lowered. He doesn’t look around toward the invisible sounds as Halel instinctively does.

“You seem disturbed,” Halel finally says.

The emperor only looks at Halel.

By the market where baskets of fruit convene in the day, Haduj meets the two men. In the dark, Halel can briefly imagine that she is her former self, the Haduj of the emperor’s tales, of Halel’s schoolboy memories, and this makes him smile, but it only lasts until she speaks. The illusion is broken by a faint crackle in her voice.

“What have you to say?” she says to the emperor.

“Come and see,” he says back.

As the three Learsites enter the great gate of the central tower, the former emperor speaks again, as if to prepare them for what will be seen.

“Would you believe,” he says, “that happiness is limited, can be broken? Is there anyone where Harobed’s word can go that is wretched or tortured? There is a place, truly, in this city where a child suffers, and I have seen it. It falls to every emperor, when the next man supplants him, to see the abomination. Would you believe me?”

His guests are silent. The brass frame of the stairs, the turquoise steps are all muted by the gray of ensuing night as the three figures descend.

“I will die if I do not share this knowledge with others. Please,” he says, “forgive me this.”

Below the tower where the emperor reigns over Learsi, ignorant of the throne room’s very foundations, there is a door that mostly goes unnoticed by the Learsites. It is a plain, gray door with a small, reinforced slot, above which one word is painted in the blocky script of an older style of writing. Halel reads it, and mutters in awe and curiosity about what he sees.

“It says ‘Harobed’… backwards…”

The emperor only nods. That foreign something flashes again in his twilight-eyes as his hand rests on the handle, hesitating.

As above Nurah clandestinely makes love to her instructor in the vacant granary, and as pitiable Haras just as clandestinely watches from outside, the cloistered emperor opens the gray door and his two companions see the abomination. In the dark, it is a moment before they can clearly see the child. It’s curled up on the far side of the small, dusty chamber. Halel cannot judge its age or its gender. Maybe it’s twelve… could be less or more, but a safe bet, he reasons, is in the middle. It quickly looks to the intruders like a base animal regards a hunter, and its horrible eye shakes Halel’s bones. One of the child’s eyes is normal – gray, cloudy – but the left is disfigured, gruesomely – brown, dark, mottled… Curly black hair, not unlike his own, falls from the child’s crown to its shoulders – however oily, unlike the Learsites’. It is skinny, pale, devoid of muscle definition. It has never been out of its room, or at least, has not been for a considerable amount of time. It watches him. It won’t stop watching him so… so fearfully. That’s the foreign look he was trying to understand. The emperor leads Halel into the room; he reluctantly follows, and the child skitters like a spider across the floor to stay far away from him, no matter where he steps. The look of its face reminds Halel of the euthanized baby. He reasons that the abomination must be retarded as the infant was.

As the disquiet that was raised in Halel’s heart by seeing the child begins slowly to feel like an accustomed sensation, he begins to notice the room itself. It is almost cubic, largely featureless. A pile of fecal material is decomposing in one corner, the sight of which places the smell that is at least as repulsive as the child itself. On one wall there is a red and white disc holding a symbol for the sun. It is the only decoration in the room. The room also lacks windows. There is only the slot in the door to permit the entrance of fresh air.

“What do we do with it?” the emperor asks. Halel notices that Haduj has not been able to get past the entryway; she stands frozen, silhouetted against the filtered-down light of the moon.

“We kill it,” Halel says.

“We cannot,” says the cloistered emperor. “There is only one thing I know about it, and that is if we try to alleviate its sorrows, our own will be multiplied, and if we try to euthanize it, we too will perish from the world.”

“Then we must leave it here,” the woman finally speaks, her voice older than ever.

“And go on knowing what is here?” Halel returns.

“Damned are you forever for showing us this!” Haduj bursts.

The emperor watches the child a moment, only coldness in his eyes. “I was damned the moment I saw it.”

“We must kill it,” Halel mutters, angry.

“And we will die with it, Halel.” The utterance comes from the cloistered, old, silver-speckled emperor like a tired sigh.

“Then still! Let it be so!”

Halel runs from the basement like a child from the monsters that assail him in the shadows of dreams. He has no room left in him for courage or the strength that his Learsi upbringing instilled in him through so many harsh labors. His footsteps echo among the buildings. A woman, whose baby has finally begun to sleep, lies awake and hears them.

~

Alone, the girl saw mostly clouds. She was still aware of where she was, but no longer aware enough to care that her own shit piled up in the corner with every passing day that she was left with only intermittent scraps of bread that tasted like chemicals. She remembered her folks, occasionally: her parents and the ghetto of Strasburg. It had been months since that train had taken them, and since the armed men had set them all apart from each other. She rubbed her legs with her cold, wet palms. Everything smelled like urine; there was no longer any getting around it. She tried to fool herself that the touch of her own hands on her thighs was that of someone else, someone kind – someone who was not there. Anyone but who was there. Anyone real. The only ornament she could fixate on was the insistent, red swastika, placed there, it seemed, just so she could never forget, even for a moment, what reality was. But she tried hard. There was Learsi. There was something foreign, forgettable, called happiness that the imaginary sunshine and companionship somehow, in nearly neglectable ways, suggested. Her eye, that could no longer see the swastika, could see that place during the more merciful hours where the pain could be looked past. She wished they would take the syringe, try to dye the color of the other eye too… She was sure they would, in fact – it was only the wait that killed her. The brown eye, the one that God had given her, could only see the shit, the gray, the swastika…but the botched, cloudy, Aryan eye the Nazis had made as the syringe bled sky-blue dye into her eye’s lens – that could see anything. Anything anywhere. And somewhere, she supposed, maybe there was another world.

When the two men came in the door, and the old, fat woman hung back, she was not sure what eye was doing the seeing. They were horrified by her; she could tell, whether with one eye or the other. She was fourteen, but she perceived rightly that the starvation had made her look twelve again. The smell of the shit made the three visitors grasp at their noses. The thin man was horrified when he noticed the corner. She saw, not without a measure of comfort – the hope of kinship, perhaps – that the three all had the same, horrible eyes as her right eye, the one ruined by the Nazi scientists. It took her a while to discern that these three were from her dear Learsi; they looked so different there, in the real, gray light. When the one who ran first returned alone with the bread knife, she did not object or struggle, but she could tell this was what perhaps broke the man’s heart the most. At once, both the girl and the man, and Germany as well as Learsi, vanished like the dreams which they were.

~
Bret T. Norwood