The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He sat down in his chair behind the big oak desk, opened the bottom drawer, removed glass and bottle, and poured a hefty slug of bourbon. My God, there hadn't been any bourbon half an hour ago—not for twenty years! Grain had been far too precious, with seven billion mouths to feed, to go for spirits. There had been nothing but pseudobeer, or (for a doctor) absolute alcohol; that's what the bottle in his desk had been, half an hour ago.

  He drank off half the shot in a gulp, then paused. He looked over at the window. After a while he got up and stood in front of the window looking out over the roofs and trees. One hundred thousand souls.

  Evening was beginning to dim the quiet river, but the mountains stood immense and clear, remote, in the level sunlight of the heights.

  "To a better world!" Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.

  Chapter 6

  It may remain for us to learn . . . that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking; — that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past; — that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire; — and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.

  —Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East

  George Orr's apartment was on the top floor of an old frame house a few blocks up the hill on Corbett Avenue, a shabby part of town where most of the houses were getting on for a century, or well beyond it. He had three large rooms, a bathroom with a deep claw-foot tub, and a view between roofs to the river, up and down which passed ships, pleasure boats, logs, gulls, great turning flights of pigeons.

  He perfectly remembered his other flat, of course, the one-room 8-1/2 X 11 with the pullout stove and balloonbed and co-op bathroom down the linoleum hall, on the eighteenth floor of the Corbett Condominium tower, which had never been built.

  He got off the trolley at Whiteaker Street and walked up the hill, and up the broad, dark stairs; he let himself in, dropped his briefcase on the floor and his body on the bed, and let go. He was terrified, anguished, exhausted, bewildered. "I've got to do something, I've got to do something," he kept telling himself frantically, but he did not know what to do. He had never known what to do. He had always done what seemed to want doing, the next thing to be done, without asking questions, without forcing himself, without worrying about it. But that sureness of foot had deserted him when he began taking drugs, and by now he was quite astray. He must act, he had to act. He must refuse to let Haber use him any longer as a tool. He must take his destiny in his own hands.

  He spread out his hands and looked at them, then sank his face into them; it was wet with tears. Oh hell, hell, he thought bitterly, what kind of man am I? Tears in my beard? No wonder Haber uses me. How could he help it? I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.

  I must get away from Haber, he thought, trying to be firm and decisive, but even as he thought it he knew he wouldn't. Haber had him hooked, and with more than one hook.

  A dream configuration so unusual, indeed unique, Haber had said, was invaluable to research: Orr's contribution to human knowledge was going to prove immense. Orr believed that Haber meant this and knew what he was talking about. The scientific aspect of it all was in fact the only hopeful one, to his mind; it seemed to him that perhaps science might wring some good out of his peculiar and terrible gift, put it to some good ends, compensating a little for the enormous harm it had done.

  The murder of six billion nonexistent people.

  Orr's head ached fit to split. He ran cold water in the deep, cracked washbasin, and dunked his whole face in for half a minute at a time, coming up red, blind, and wet as a newborn baby.

  Haber had a moral line on him, then, but where he really had him caught was on the legal hook. If Orr quit Voluntary Therapy, he became liable to prosecution for obtaining drugs illegally and would be sent to jail or the nut hatch. No way out there. And if he didn't quit, but merely cut sessions and failed to cooperate, Haber had an effective instrument of coercion: the dream-suppressing drugs, which Orr could obtain only on his prescription. He was more uneasy than ever at the idea of dreaming spontaneously, without control, now. In the state he was in, and having been conditioned to dream effectively every time in the laboratory, he did not like to think what might happen if he dreamed effectively without the rational restraints imposed by hypnosis. It would be a nightmare, a worse nightmare than the one he had just had in Haber's office; of that he was sure, and he dared not let it happen. He must take the dream suppressants. That was the one thing he knew he must do, the thing that must be done. But he could do it only so long as Haber let him, and therefore he must cooperate with Haber. He was caught. Rat in a trap.

  Running a maze for the mad scientist, and no way out. No way, no way.

  Be he's not a mad scientist, Orr thought dully, he's a pretty sane one, or he was. It's the chance of power that my dreams give him that twists him around. He keeps acting a part, and this gives him such an awfully big part to play. So that now he's using even his science as a means, not an end. . . . But his ends are good, aren't they? He wants to improve life for humanity. Is that wrong?

  His head was aching again. He was underwater when the telephone rang. He hastily tried to rub his face and hair dry, and returned to the dark bedroom, groping. "Hello, Orr here."

  "This is Heather Lelache," said a soft, suspicious alto.

  An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind. "Hello," he said again.

  "Do you want to meet me some time to talk about this?"

  "Yes. Certaintly."

  "Well. I don't want you thinking that there's any case to be made using that machine thing, the Augmentor. That seems to be perfectly in line. It's had extensive laboratory trial, and he's had all the proper checks and gone through the proper channels, and now it's registered with HEW.

  He's a real pro, of course. I didn't realize who he was when you first talked to me. A man doesn't get to that sort of position unless he's awfully good."

  "What position?"

  "Well. The directorship of a Government-sponsored research institute!"

  He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory "well." She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void.

  She had courage, great courage.

  "Oh, yes, I see," he said vaguely. Dr. Haber had got his directorship the day after Orr had got his cabin.

  The cabin dream had been during the one all-night session they had had; they never tried another.

  Hypnotic suggestion of dream content was insufficient to a night's dreaming, and at 3 A.M. Haber had at last given up and, hooking Orr to the Augmentor, had fed him deep-sleep patterns the rest of the night, so that they could both relax. But the next afternoon they had had a session, and the dream Orr had dreamed during it had been so long, so confused and complicated, that he had never been altogether sure of what he had changed, what good works Haber had been accomplishing that time. He had gone to sleep in the old office and had wakened in the O.O.I, office: Haber had got himself a promotion. But there had been more to it than that—the weather was a little less rainy, it seemed, since that dream; perhaps other things had changed. He was not sure. He had protested against doing so much effective dreaming in so short a time. Haber had at once agreed not to push him so fast, and had let him go without a session for five days. Haber was, after all, a benevolent man. And besides, he didn't want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

  The goose. Preci
sely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid stupid goose. He had lost a bit of what Miss Lelache was saying. "I'm sorry," he said, "I missed something. I'm kind of thick-headed just now, I think."

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes, fine. Just sort of tired."

  "You had an upsetting dream, about the Plague, didn't you. You looked awful after it. Do these sessions leave you this way every time?"

  "No, not always. This was a bad one. I guess you could see that. Were you arranging for us to meet?"

  "Yes. Monday for lunch, I said. You work downtown, don't you, at Bradford Industries?"

  To his mild wonder he realized that he did. The great water projects of Bonneville-Umatilla did not exist, to bring water to the giant cities of John Day and French Glen, which did not exist. There were no big cities in Oregon, except Portland. He was not a draftsman for the District, but for a private tools firm downtown; he worked in the Stark Street office. Of course. "Yes," he said. "I'm off from one to two. We could meet at Dave's, on Ankeny."

  "One to two is fine. So's Dave's. I'll see you there Monday."

  "Wait," he said. "Listen. Will you—would you mind telling me what Dr. Haber said, I mean, what he told me to dream when I was hypnotized? You heard all that, didn't you?"

  "Yes, but I couldn't do that, I'd be interfering in his treatment. If he wanted you to know he'd tell you. It would be unethical, I can't."

  "I guess that's right."

  "Yes. I'm sorry. Monday, then?"

  "Goodby," he said, suddenly overwhelmed with depression and foreboding, and put the receiver back without hearing her say goodby. She couldn't help him. She was courageous and strong, but not that strong. Perhaps she had seen or sensed the change, but she had put it away from her, refused it. Why not? It was a heavy load to bear, that double memory, and she had no reason to undertake it, no motive for believing even for a moment a driveling psycho who claimed that his dreams came true.

  Tomorrow was Saturday. A long session with Haber, four o'clock until six or longer. No way out.

  It was time to eat, but Orr wasn't hungry. He had not turned on the lights in his high, twilit bedroom, or in the living room which he had never got around to furnishing in the three years he'd lived here. He wandered in there now. The windows looked out on lights and the river, the air smelled of dust and early spring. There was a woodframe fireplace, an old upright piano with eight ivories missing, a pile of carpeting mill ends by the hearth, and a decrepit Japanese bamboo table ten inches high. Darkness lay softly on the bare pine floor, unpolished, unswept.

  George Orr lay down in that mild darkness, full length, face down, the small of the dusty wooden floor in his nostrils, the hardness of it upholding his body. He lay still, not asleep; somewhere else than sleep, farther on, father out, a place where there are no dreams. It was not the first time he had been there.

  When he got up, it was to take a chlorpromazine tablet and go to bed. Haber had tried him with phenothiazines this week; they seemed to work well, to let him enter the d-state at need but to weaken the intensity of the dreams so that they never rose to the effective level. That was fine, but Haber said that the effect would lessen, just as with all the other drugs, until there was no effect at all. Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.

  This night, at least, he slept deep, and if he dreamed the dreams were fleeting, without weight. He didn't wake until nearly noon on Saturday. He went to his refrigerator and look in it; he stood contemplating it a while. There was more food in it than he had ever seen in a private refrigerator in his life. In his other life.

  The one lived among seven billion others, where the food, such as it was, was never enough. Where an egg was the luxury of the month —"Today we ovulate!" his halfwife had used to say when she bought their egg ration. . . . Curious, in this life they hadn't had a trial marriage, he and Donna. There was no such thing, legally speaking, in the post-Plague years. There was full marriage only. In Utah, since the birth rate was still lower than the death rate, they were even trying to reinstitute polygamous marriage, for religious and patriotic reasons. But he and Donna hadn't had any kind of marriage this time, they had just lived together. But still it hadn't lasted. His attention returned to the food in the refrigerator.

  He was not the thin, sharp-boned man he had been in the world of the seven billion; he was quite solid, in fact. But he ate a starving man's meal, an enormous meal— hard-boiled eggs, buttered toast, anchovies, jerky, celery, cheese, walnuts, a piece of cold halibut spread with mayonnaise, lettuce, pickled beets, chocolate cookies—anything he found on his shelves. After this orgy he felt physically a great deal better. He thought of something, as he drank some genuine nonersatz coffee, that actually made him grin.

  He thought: In that life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century. But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream. I was in Haber's office, all right, and I dreamed; but it didn't change anything. It's been this way all along, and I merely had a bad dream about the Plague Years. There's nothing wrong with me; I don't need therapy.

  He had never looked at it this way before, and it amused him enough that he grinned, but not particularly happily.

  He knew he would dream again.

  It was already past two. He washed up, found his raincoat (real cotton, a luxury in the other life), and set off on foot to the Institute, a couple of miles' walk, up past the Medical School and then farther up, into Washington Park. He could have got there by the trolleys, of course, but they were sporadic and roundabout, and anyhow there was no rush. It was pleasant, passing through the warm March rain, the unbustling streets; the trees were leafing out, the chestnuts ready to light their candles.

  The Crash, the carcinomic plague which had reduced human population by five billion in five years, and another billion in the next ten, had shaken the civilizations of the world to their roots and yet left them, in the end, intact. If had not changed anything radically: only quantitatively.

  The air was still profoundly and irremediably polluted: that pollution predated the Crash by decades, indeed was its direct cause. It didn't harm anybody much now, except the newborn. The Plague, in its leukemoid variety, still selectively, thoughtfully as it were, picked off one out of four babies born and killed it within six months. Those who survived were virtually cancer-resistant. But there are other griefs.

  No factories spewed smoke, down by the river. No cars ran fouling the air with exhaust; what few there were, were steamers or battery-powered.

  There were no songbirds any more, either.

  The effects of the Plague were visible in everything, it was itself still endemic, and yet it hadn't prevented war from breaking out. In fact the fighting in the Near East was more savage than it had been in the more crowded world. The U.S. was heavily committed to the Israeli-Egyptian side in weapons, munitions, planes, and "military advisers" by the regiment. China was in equally deep on the Iraq-Iran side, though she hadn't yet sent in Chinese soldiers, only Tibetans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, and Mongolians.

  Russia and India were holding uneasily aloof; but now that Afghanistan and Brazil were going in with the Iranians, Pakistan might jump in on the Isragypt side. India would then panic and line up with China, which might scare the USSR enough to push her in on the U.S. side. This gave a line-up of twelve Nuclear Powers in all, six to a side. So went the speculations. Meanwhile Jerusalem was rubble, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq the civilian population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out of the burrows blinded by napalm.

  They were still massacring whites in Johannesburg, Orr noticed on a headline at a corner newspaper stand. Years now since the Uprising, and there were still whites to massacre in South Africa! People are tough. . . .

  The rain fell warm, polluted, gentle on
his bare head as he climbed the gray hills of Portland.

  In the office with the great corner window that looked out into the rain, he said, "Please, stop using my dreams to improve things, Dr. Haber. It won't work. It's wrong. I want to be cured."

  "That's the one essential prerequisite to your cure, George! Wanting it."

  "You're not answering me."

  But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to stop, had to say Here I stay!

  No being, only layers.

  "You're using my effective dreams to change the world. You won't admit to me that you're doing it. Why not?"

  "George, you must realize that you ask questions which from your point of view may seem reasonable, but which from my point of view are literally unanswerable. We don't see reality the same way."

  "Near enough the same to be able to talk."

  "Yes. Fortunately. But not always to be able to ask and answer. Not yet."

  "I can answer your questions, and I do. . . . But anyway: look. You can't go on changing things, trying to run things."

  "You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"

  "No!"

  "What is his purpose, then?"

  "I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

  There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial, reassuring, or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt.