Introduction of an Anarchist
Here is a girl of eleven or so, tall for her age and thin, with a cloud of dark hair and a bearing that, even in the gangling uncertainty of pre-adolescence, is self assured, steady, supple with the freedom of someone who has never known a locked door.
She is dressed simply, so simply as to call attention to herself in a place where not everyone is an Odonian. The hat she wears threatens to slip off her as she looks up, up, up at the Mansion.
She claps a hand to the hat, to save it, and turns slowly, slowly, looking at the grounds with interest and a certain quiet worry in her fine dark eyes. The building is so tall, so ostentatious, made so much of wood - of wood! The extravagance! - instead of stone. The only thing like it she knows of are pictures from her classes and references in the writings Odo left, and the descriptions that Shevek gives, sometimes, in bursts of words. The grounds are not very familiar either.
In very hopeful Pravic - after all, she could be wrong - she says, “Sadik. Which is the way to a commons? I’m turned ‘round.”
Sadik, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel “The Dispossessed”.
She is dressed simply, so simply as to call attention to herself in a place where not everyone is an Odonian. The hat she wears threatens to slip off her as she looks up, up, up at the Mansion.
She claps a hand to the hat, to save it, and turns slowly, slowly, looking at the grounds with interest and a certain quiet worry in her fine dark eyes. The building is so tall, so ostentatious, made so much of wood - of wood! The extravagance! - instead of stone. The only thing like it she knows of are pictures from her classes and references in the writings Odo left, and the descriptions that Shevek gives, sometimes, in bursts of words. The grounds are not very familiar either.
In very hopeful Pravic - after all, she could be wrong - she says, “Sadik. Which is the way to a commons? I’m turned ‘round.”
Sadik, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel “The Dispossessed”.