“And what will be done, if they don’t happen to agree?”
“Move on to step four. Civil disobedience.”
“What’s that?”
“A refusal to obey any orders or laws, no matter what, issued by the authority being challenged. We set up our own, parallel, independent authority, and follow our own course.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” he said smiling. “It worked, you know, over and over again, on Earth. Against all kinds of threats and imprisonments, tortures, attacks. You can read about it, you should read Mirovskaya’s History—”
“I can’t read books,” the girl said with her disdainful air. “I tried one once.—If it worked so well, why did you get sent away from Earth?”
“There weren’t enough of us. The governments were too big and too powerful. But they wouldn’t have sent us off into exile, would they, if they hadn’t been afraid of us?”
“That’s what my father says about his ancestors,” Luz remarked. Her eyebrows were drawn down level above her eyes, dark pondering eyes. Lev watched her, stilled for a moment by her stillness, caught by her strangeness. For despite his insistence that she was one of them, she was not; she was not like Southwind, not like Vera, not like any woman he knew. She was different, alien to him. Like the gray heron of the Meeting Pool, there was a silence in her, a silence that drew him, drew him aside, toward a different center.
He was so caught, so held in watching her, that though Southwind said something he did not hear it, and when Luz herself spoke again he was startled, and for a moment the familiar room of Southwind’s house seemed strange, an alien place.
“I wish we could forget about all that,” she said. “Earth—it’s a hundred years ago, a different world, a different sun, what does it matter to us here? We’re here, now. Why can’t we do things our way? I’m not from Earth. You’re not from Earth. This is our world … . It ought to have its own name. ‘Victoria,’ that’s stupid, it’s an Earth word. We ought to give it its own name.”
“What name?”
“One that doesn’t mean anything. Ooboo, or Baba. Or call it Mud. It’s all mud—if Earth’s called ‘earth’ why can’t this one be called ‘mud’?” She sounded angry, as she often did, but when Lev laughed she laughed too. Southwind only smiled, but said in her soft voice, “Yes, that’s right. And then we could make a world of our own, instead of always imitating what they did on Earth. If there wasn’t any violence there wouldn’t have to be any nonviolence … .”
“Start with mud and build a world,” said Lev. “But don’t you see, that’s what we’re doing?”
“Making mudpies,” said Luz.
“Building a new world.”
“Out of bits of the old one.”
“If people forget what happened in the past, they have to do it all over again, they never get on into the future. That’s why they kept fighting wars, on Earth. They forgot what the last one was like. We are starting fresh. Because we remember the old mistakes, and won’t make them.”
“Sometimes it seems to me,” said Andre, who was sitting on the hearth mending a sandal for Southwind—his side-trade was cobbling—“if you don’t mind my saying so, Luz, that in the City they remember all the old mistakes so they can make them all over again.”
“I don’t know,” she said with indifference. She stood up, and went to the window. It was closed, for the rain had not stopped and the weather was colder, with a wind from the east. The small fire in the hearth kept the room warm and bright. Luz stood with her back to that snugness, looking out through the tiny, cloudy panes of the window at the dark fields and the windy clouds.
On the morning after she came to Shantih, after talking with Lev and the others, she had written a letter to her father. A short letter, though it had taken her all morning to write it. She had shown it first to Southwind, then to Lev. When he looked at her now, the straight strong figure outlined black against the light, he saw again the writing of her letter, straight black stiff strokes. She had written:
Honored Sir!
I have left our House. I will stay in Shanty Town because I do not approve of Your plans. I decided to leave and I decided to stay. No body is holding me prisoner or hostage. These people are my Hosts. If you mis treat them I am not on Your side. I had to make this choice. You have made a mistake about H. Macmilan. Senhora Adelson had nothing to do with my coming here. It was my Choice.
Your respectful Daughter
No word of affection; no plea for forgiveness.
And no answer. The letter had been taken by a runner at once, young Welcome; he had shoved it under the door of Casa Falco and trotted right on. As soon as he got safe back to Shantih, Luz had begun to wait for her father’s response, to dread it but also, visibly, to expect it. That was two full days ago. No answer had come; no attack or assault at night; nothing. They all discussed what change in Falco’s plans Luz’s defection might have caused, but they did not discuss it in front of her, unless she brought it up.
She said now, “I don’t understand your ideas, really. All the steps, all the rules, all the talk.”
“They are our weapons,” Lev replied.
“But why fight?”
“There’s no other choice.”
“Yes, there is. To go.”
“Go?”
“Yes! Go north, to the valley you found. Just go. Leave. It’s what I did,” she added, looking imperiously at him when he did not answer at once. “I left.”
“And they’ll come after you,” he said gently.
She shrugged. “They haven’t. They don’t care.”
Southwind made a little noise of warning, protest, sympathy; it really said all that needed saying, but Lev translated it—“But they do, and they will, Luz. Your father—”
“If he comes after me, I’ll run farther. I’ll go on.”
“Where?”
She turned away again and said nothing. They all thought of the same thing: of the wilderness. It was as if the wilderness came into the cabin, as if the walls fell down, leaving no shelter. Lev had been there, Andre had been there, months of the endless, voiceless solitude; it was in their souls now and they could never wholly leave it. Southwind had not been in the wilderness, but her love lay buried in it. Even Luz who had never seen or known it, the child of those who for a hundred years had built up their walls against it and denied it, knew it and feared it, knew it was foolishness to talk of leaving the Colony, alone. Lev watched her in silence. He pitied her, sharp pity, as for a hurt, stubborn child who refuses comfort, holds aloof, will not weep. But she was not a child. It was a woman he saw standing there, a woman standing alone in a place without help or shelter, a woman in the wilderness; and pity was lost in admiration and in fear. He was afraid of her. There was a strength in her that was not drawn from love or trust or community, did not rise from any source that should give strength, any source he recognized. He feared that strength, and craved it. These three days he had been with her, he had thought of her constantly, had seen everything in terms of her: as if all their struggle made sense only if she could be made to understand it, as if her choice outweighed their plans and the ideals they lived by.—She was pitiable, admirable, precious as any human soul was precious, but she must not take over his mind. She must be one of them, acting with him, supporting him, not filling and confusing his thoughts like this. Later, there would be time to think about her and understand her, when the confrontation was over, when they had won through to peace. Later, there would be all the time in the world.
“We can’t go north now,” he said patiently, a little coldly. “If a group left now, it would weaken the unity of those who must stay behind. And the City would track settlers down. We have to establish our freedom to go—here, now. Then we will go.”