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

white quartzites cut right across the quarter-palm straight-edge double line; and the rhomboid section of half-palm
     sandstones seemed to be an element in a long crescent of pale yellow.
    Both patterns were there; did one cancel the other,or was each part of the other? It was difficult to see them both at once, but not impossible.
    After a long time little Ga asked, “Did we do all that without even knowing we were doing it?”
    “I always looked at the colors of the rocks,” Un said in a low voice, looking down.
    “So did I,” Ko said. “And the grain and texture, too. I started that wiggly part in the Crystal Angles,” pointing at a very
     ancient and famous section of the terrace, designed by the great OholothL. “Last year, after the late flood, when we lost
     so many stones from the design, remember? I got a lot of amethysts from the Ubi Caves. I love purple!” His tone was defiant.
    Bu looked at a circle of small, smooth turquoises inlaid in a corner of a set of interlocked rectangles. “I like blue-green,”
     Bu said in a whisper. “I like blue-green. He likes purple. We see the colors of the stones. We make the pattern. We make the
     pattern beautifully.”
    “Should we tell the Professors, do you think?” little Ga asked, getting excited. “They might give us extra food.”
    Old Un opened all his eyes very wide. “Don’t breathe a word of this to the Professors! They don’t like patterns to change.
     You know that. It makes them nervous. They might get nervous and punish us.”
    “We are not afraid,” Bu said, in a whisper.
    “They wouldn’t understand,” Ko said. “They don’t look at colors. They don’t listen to us. And if they did, they’d know it
     was just nurs talking and didn’t mean anything. Wouldn’t they? But I’m going back to the Caves and get some more amethysts
     and finish that wiggly part,” pointing to the Crystal Angles, where repairs had scarcely begun. “They’ll never even see it.”
    Ga’s naughty little blit, Professor Endl’s son, was digging up pebbles from the Superior Triangle, and had to be spanked.
     “Oh,” Ga sighed, “he’s all oblblit! I just don’t know what to do with him.”
    “He’ll go to School next year,” Un said drily. “They’ll know what to do with him.”
    “But what will I do without him?” said Ga.
    The sun was well up in the sky now, and Professors could be seen looking out from their bedroom windows over the terraces.
     They would not like to see nurs loitering, and small blits were, of course, absolutely forbidden within the college walls.
     Bu and the others hastily returned to the nests and workhouses.
    Ko went to the Ubi Caves that same day, and Bu went along; they came back with sacks of fine amethysts, and worked for several
     days completing the wiggly part, which they called the Purple Waves, in the repair and maintenance of the Crystal Angles.
     Ko was happy in the work, and sang and joked, and at night he and Bu made love. But Bu remained preoccupied. She kept studying
     the patterns of color on the terraces, and finding more and more of them, and more and more meanings and ideas in them.
    “Are they all about nurs?” old Un asked. His arthritis kept him from the terraces, but Bu reported her findings to him every
     day.
    “No,” Bu said, “most of them are about obis and nurs both. And blits, too. But nurs made them. So they’re different. Obl patterns
     are never really about nurs. Only about obls and what obls think. But when you begin to read the colors they say the most
     interesting things!”
    Bu was so excited and persuasive that other nurs of Obling began studying the color patterns, learning how to read their meanings.
     The practice spread to other nests, and soon to other towns. Before long, nurs all up and down the river were discovering
     that their terraces, too, were full of wild designs in colored stones, and surprising messages concerning obls, nurs, and
     blits.
    Many nurs, however,