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

nurs were; and Bu spoke to several of her nestmates and work-friends while they fed and cleaned
     the blits and ate their hurried breakfast of cold fried lichen. “Come up onto theterraces, now, before the obls are up,” Bu said. “I want to show you something.”
    Bu had many friends, and eight or nine nurs followed her up onto the terraces, some of them bringing their nursing or toddling
     blits along. “What’s Bu got in her head this time!” they said to each other, laughing.
    “Now look,” Bu said when they were all on the part of the inner terrace that Dean Festl had designed. “Look at the patterns.
     And look at the
colors
of the rocks.”
    “Colors don’t mean anything,” said one nur, and another, “Colors aren’t part of the patterns, Bu.”
    “But what if they were?” said Bu. “Just look.”
    The nurs, being used to silence and obedience, looked.
    “Well,” said one of them after a while. “Isn’t that amazing!”
    “Look at that!” said Bu’s best friend, Ko. “That spiral of blue-green running all over the Dean’s Design! And there’s five
     red hematites around a yellow sandstone—like a flower.”
    “This whole section in brown basalt—it cuts across the—the real pattern, doesn’t it?” said little Ga.
    “It makes another pattern. A different pattern,” Bu said. “Maybe it makes an immanent pattern of ineffable significance.”
    “Oh, come off it, Bu,” said Ko. “You a Professor or something?”
    The others laughed, but Bu was too excited to see that she was funny. “No,” she said earnestly, “but look—that blue-green
     rock, there, the last one in the spiral.”
    “Serpentinite,” said Ko.
    “Yes, I know. But if the Dean’s Design means something—He said that that part means ‘I place stones beautifully’—Well, could
     the blue-green rock be a different word? With a different meaning?”
    “What meaning?”
    “I don’t know. I thought you might know.” Bu looked hopefully at Un, an elderly nur who, though he had been lamed in a rockslide
     in his youth, was so good at fine pattern-maintenance that the obls had let himlive. Un stared at the blue-green stone, and at the curve of blue-green stones, and at last said slowly, “It might say, “The
     nur places stones.’”
    “What nur?” Ko asked.
    “Bu,” little Ga said. “She did place the stone.”
    Bu and Un both opened their eyes wide, to signify No.
    “Patterns aren’t ever about nurs!” said Ko.
    “Maybe patterns made of colors are,” said Bu, getting excited and blinking very fast.
    “The nur,’” said Ko, following the blue-green curve with all three eyes, “—’the nur places stones beautifully in uncontrollable
     loopingness.’ My goodness! What’s that all about?” He read on along the curve—” ‘in uncontrollable loopingness fore,’ what’s
     that? Oh, ‘foreshadowing the seen.’ ”
    “ ‘The vision,’” Un suggested. “‘The vision of … ‘I don’t know the last word.”
    “Are you seeing all that in the colors of the rocks?” asked Ga, amazed.
    “In the patterns of the colors,” Bu replied. “They aren’t accidental. Not meaningless. All the time, we have been putting
     them here in patterns—not just ones the obis design and we execute, but other patterns—nur patterns—with new meanings. Look—look
     at them!”
    Since they were used to silence and obedience, they all stood and looked at the patterns on the inner terraces of the College
     of Obling. They saw how the arrangement by shape and size of the pebbles and larger stones made regular squares, oblongs,
     triangles, dodecahedrons, zigzags, and rectilinear designs of great and orderly beauty and significance. And they saw how
     the arrangement of the stones by color had created other designs, less complete, often merely sketched or hinted—circles,
     spirals, ovals, and complex curvilinear mazes and labyrinths of great and unpredictable beauty and significance. So a long
     loop of