Free The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

Stanley Park, the two of them. There were still some big trees there, enormous trees from before the pollution. Firs, Pao said. Douglas firs, and spruce, they were called. Once the mountains had been black with them. "Black with them!" she said in her husky, unmodulated voice, and Sutty saw the great black forests, the heavy, glossy black hair.
    "You grew up here?" she asked, for they had everything to learn about each other, and Pao said, "Yes I did, and now I want to get out!"
    "Where to?"
    "Hain, Ve, Chiffewar, Werel, Yeowe-Werel, Gethen, Urras-Anarres, O!"
    "O, O, O!" Sutty crowed, laughing and half crying to hear her own litany, her secret mantra shouted out loud. "I do too! I will, I will, I'm going!"
    "Are you in training?"
    "Third year."
    "I just started."
    "Catch up!" Sutty said.
    And Pao almost did so. She got through three years of work in two. Sutty graduated after the first of those years and stayed on the second as a graduate associate, teaching deep grammar and Hainish to beginning students. When she went to the Ekumenical School in Valparaiso, she and Pao would be apart only eight months; and she would fly back up to Vancouver for the December holiday, so they'd only actually be separated for four months and then four months again, and then together, together all the way through the Ekumenical School, and all the rest of their lives, all over the Known Worlds. "We'll be making love on a world nobody even knows the name of now, a thousand years from now!" Pao said, and laughed her lovely chortling laugh that started down inside her belly, in what she called her tan-tien-tummy, and ended up rocking her to and fro. She loved to laugh, she loved to tell jokes and be told them. Sometimes she laughed out loud in her sleep. Sutty would feel and hear the soft laughter in the darkness, and in the morning Pao would explain that her dreams had been so funny, and laugh again trying to tell the funny dreams.
    They lived in the flat they'd found and moved into two weeks after freedom, the dear grubby basement flat on Souché Street, Sushi Street because there were three Japanese restaurants on it. They had two rooms: one with wall-to-wall futons, one with the stove, the sink, and the upright piano with four dead keys that came with the flat because it was too far gone to repair and too expensive to move. Pao played crashing waltzes with holes in them while Sutty cooked bhaigan tamatar. Sutty recited the poems of Esnanaridaratha of Darranda and filched almonds while Pao fried rice. A mouse gave birth to infant mice in the storage cabinet. Long discussions about what to do about the infant mice ensued. Ethnic slurs were exchanged: the ruthlessness of the Chinese, who treated animals as insentient, the wickedness of the Hindus, who fed sacred cows and let children starve. "I will not live with mice!" Pao shouted. "I will not live with a murderer!" Sutty shouted back. The infant mice became adolescents and began making forays. Sutty bought a secondhand box trap. They baited it with tofu. They caught the mice one by one and released them in New Stanley Park. The mother mouse was the last to be caught, and when they released her they sang:
God will bless thee, loving mother

Of thy faithful husband's child,

Cling to him and know no other,

Living pure and undefiled.
    Pao knew a lot of Unist hymns, and had one for most occasions.
    Sutty got the flu. Flu was a frightening thing, so many strains of it were fatal. She remembered vividly her terror, standing in the crowded streetcar while the headache got worse and worse, and when she got home and couldn't focus her eyes on Pao's face. Pao cared for her night and day and when the fever went down made her drink Chinese medicinal teas that tasted like piss and mildew. She was weak for days and days, lying there on the futons staring at the dingy ceiling, weak and stupid, peaceful, coming back to life.
    But in that epidemic little Aunty found her way back to the village. The first time