the island of the immortals
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Ursula K. Le Guin is one ofthe best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Dark-ness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one ofthe enduring classics ofthe genre—even ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF and future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of high fantasy writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her an-other Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Begin-ning Place, The Eye of the Heron, The Tombs of Atuan, Searoad, and the controversial multimedia novel Always Coming Home. She has had seven collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Com-pass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and most recently Unlocking the Air. Last year she published Steering the Craft, a slim book on the craft of writing fiction. Her stories have appeared in our Second, Fifth, Eighth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.
In the quiet little story that follows, as sharply exquisitely, and perfectly drawn as a miniature on tortoiseshell, she shows us that everything has a price...and that the more valuable the object of desire is, the higher that price is likely to be. . . .
* * * *
S omebody asked me if I’d heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I go there, I asked about them. The travel agent rather reluctantly showed me a place called the Island of the Immortals on her map. “You don’t want to go there,” she said.
“I don’t?”
“Well, it’s dangerous,” she said, looking at me as if she thought I was not the danger-loving type, in which she was entirely correct. She was a rather unpolished local agent, not an employee of the Interplanary Service. Yendi is not a popular destination. In many ways it’s so like our own plane that it seems hardly worth the trouble of visiting. There are differences, but they’re subtle.
“Why is it called the Island of the Immortals?”
“Because some of the people there are immortal.”
“They don’t die?” I asked, never quite sure of the accuracy of my translatomat.
“They don’t die,” she said indifferently. “Now, the Prinjo Archipelago is a lovely place for a restful fortnight.” Her pencil moved southward across the map of the Great Sea of Yendi. My gaze remained on the large, lonely Island of the Immor-tals. I pointed to it.
“Is there a hotel—there?”
“There are no tourist facilities. Just cabins for the diamond hunters.”
“There are diamond mines?”
“Probably,” she said. She had become dismissive.
“What makes it dangerous?”
“The flies.”
“Biting flies? Do they carry disease?”
“No.” She was downright sullen by now.
“I’d like to try it for a few days,” I said, as winningly as I could. “Just to find out if I’m brave. If I get scared, I’ll come right back. Give me an open flight back.” “No airport.”
“Ah,” said I, more winningly than ever. “So how would I get there?”
“Ship,” she said, unwon. “Once a week.”
Nothing rouses an attitude like an attitude. “Fine!” I said.
At least, I thought as I left the travel agency, it won’t be anything like Laputa. I had read Gulliver’s Travels as a child, in a slightly abridged and probably greatly expurgated version. My memory of it was like all my childhood memories, im-mediate, broken, vivid—bits of bright particularity in a vast drift of oblivion. I remembered that Laputa floated in the air, so you had to use an airship to get to it. And really I remembered little else, except that the Laputans were immortal, and that I had liked it the least of Gulliver’s four Travels, deciding it was for grown-ups, a damning quality at the time. Did the Laputans have spots, moles, something like that, which distinguished them? And were they scholars? But they grew senile, and lived on and on in incontinent idiocy—or did I imagine that? There was something nasty about them, something like that, something for grown-ups.
But I was on Yendi, where Swift’s works are not in the library. I could not look it up. Instead, since I had a whole day before the ship sailed, I went to the library and looked up the Island of the Immortals.
The Central Library of Undund is a noble old building full of modern conven-iences, including book- translatomats. I asked a librarian for assistance and he brought me Postwand’s Explorations, written about a hundred and sixty years earlier, from which I copied what follows. At the time Postwand wrote, the port city where I was staying, An Ria, had not been founded; the great wave of settlers from the east had not begun; the peoples of the coast were scattered tribes of shepherds and farmers. Postwand took a rather patronizing but intelligent interest in their stories.
“Among the legends of the peoples of the West Coast,” he writes, “one con-cerned a large island two or three days west from Undund Bay, where live the people who never die. All whom I asked about it were familiar with the reputation of the Island of the Immortals, and some even told me that members of their tribe had
visited the place. Impressed with the unanimity of this tale, I determined to test its veracity. When at length Vong had finished making repairs to my boat, I sailed out of the Bay and due west over the Great Sea. A following wind favored my expedition.
“About noon on the fifth day, I raised the island. Low-lying, it appeared to be at least fifty miles long from north to south.
“In the region in which I first brought the boat close to the land, the shores were entirely salt marsh. It being low tide, and the weather unbearably sultry, the putrid smell of the mud kept us well away, until at length sighting sand beaches I sailed into a shallow bay and soon saw the roofs of a small town at the mouth of a creek. We tied up at a crude and decrepit jetty and with indescribable emo-tion, on my part at least, set foot on this isle reputed to hold the secret of ETER-NAL LIFE.”
I think I shall abbreviate Postwand; he’s long-winded, and besides, he’s always sneering at Vong, who seems to do most of the work and have none of the in-describable emotions. So he and Vong trudged around the town, finding it all very shabby and nothing out of the way, except that there were dreadful swarms of flies. Everyone went about in gauze clothing from head to toe, and all the doors and windows had screens. Postwand assumed the flies would bite savagely, but found they didn’t; they were annoying, he says, but one scarcely felt their bites, which didn’t swell up or itch. He wondered if they carried some disease. He asked the islanders, who disclaimed all knowledge of disease, saying nobody ever got sick except mainlanders.
At this, Postwand got excited, naturally, and asked them if they ever died. “Of course,” they said.
He does not say what else they said, but one gathers they treated him as yet another idiot from the mainland asking stupid questions. He becomes quite testy, and makes comments on their backwardness, bad manners, and execrable cookery. After a disagreeable night in a hut of some kind, he explored inland for several miles, on foot since there was no other way to get about. In a tiny village near a marsh he saw a sight that was, in his words, “proof positive that the islanders’ claim of being free from disease was mere boastfulness, or something yet more sinister: for a more dreadful example of the ravages of udreba I have never seen, even in the wilds of Rotogo. The sex of the poor victim was indistinguishable; of the legs, nothing remained but stumps; the whole body was as if it had been melted in fire; only the hair, which was quite white, grew luxuriantly, long, tangled, and filthy—a crowning horror to this sad spectacle.”
I looked up udreba. It’s a disease the Yendians dread as we dread leprosy, which it resembles, though it is far more immediately dangerous; a single contact with saliva or any exudation can cause infection. There is no vaccine and no cure. Postwand was horrified to see children playing close by the udreb. He apparently lectured a woman of the village on hygiene, at which she took offense and lectured him back, telling him not to stare at
