The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  "Don't sit up, the Augmentor hookup's still on you. What did you dream?"

  Orr spoke huskily and slowly, not fully awakened. "The ... an Alien was here. In here. In the office. It came out of the nose of one of their hopping ships. In the window. You and it were talking together."

  "But that's not a dream! That happened! Goddamn, we'll have to do this over again. That might have been an atomic blast a few minutes ago, we've got to get into another continuum, we may all be dead of radiation exposure already—"

  "Oh, not this time," Orr said, sitting up and combing off electrodes as if they were dead lice. "Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber."

  Haber stared at him.

  "I suppose your Augmentor increased the.immediacy of it for you," Orr said, still with extraordinary calmness. He appeared to ponder for a little. "Listen, couldn't you call Washington?"

  "What for?"

  "Well, a famous scientist right here in the middle of it all might get listened to. They'll be looking for explanations. Is there somebody in the government you know, that you might call? Maybe the HEW Minister? You could tell him that the whole thing's a misunderstanding, the Aliens aren't invading or attacking. They simply didn't realize until they landed that humans depend on verbal communication. They didn't even know we thought we were at war with them. ... If you could tell somebody who can get the President's ear. The sooner Washington can call off the military, the fewer people will be killed here. It's only civilians getting killed. The Aliens aren't hurting the soldiers, they aren't even armed, and I have the impression that they're indestructible, in those suits. But if somebody doesn't stop the Air Force, they'll blow up the whole city. Give it a try, Dr. Haber. They might listen to you."

  Haber felt that Orr was right. There was no reason to it, it was the logic of insanity, but there it was: his chance. Orr spoke with the incontrovertible conviction of dream, in which there is no free will: do this, you must do it, it is to be done.

  Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool?

  This went through his mind, not for the first time, but even as he thought it he was going over to the desk, to the telephone. He sat down and dialed direct-distance to the HEW offices in Washington. The call, handled through the Federal Telephone switchboards in Utah, went straight through.

  While he was waiting to be put through to the Minister of Health, Education, and Welfare, whom he knew fairly well, he said to Orr, "Why didn't you put us over in another continuum where this mess simply never happened? It would be a lot easier. And nobody would be dead. Why didn't you simply get rid of the Aliens?"

  "I don't choose," Orr said. "Don't you see that yet? I follow."

  "You follow my hypnotic suggestions, yes, but never fully, never directly and simply—"

  "I didn't mean those," Orr said, but Rantow's personal secretary was now on the line. While Haber was talking Orr slipped away, downstairs, no doubt, to see about the woman. That was all right. As he talked to the secretary and then to the Minister himself, Haber began to feel convinced that things were going to be all right now, that the Aliens were in fact totally unaggressive, and that he would be able to make Rantow believe this, and, through Rantow, the President and his Generals. Orr was no longer necessary.

  Haber saw what must be done, and would lead his country out of the mess.

  Chapter 9

  Those who dream of feasting wake to lamendation.

  —Chuang Tse: II

  It was the third week in April. Orr had made a date, last week, to meet Heather Lelache at Dave's for lunch on Thursday, but as soon as he started out from his office he knew it wouldn't work.

  There were by now so many different memories, so many skeins of life experience, jostling in his head, that he scarcely tried to remember anything. He took it as it came. He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.

  His office was on the third floor of the Civil Planning Bureau; his position was more impressive than any he had had before: he was in charge of the SouthEast Suburban Parks section of the City Planning Commission. He did not like the job and never had.

  He had always managed to remain some kind of draftsman, up until the dream last Monday that had, in juggling the Federal and State Governments around to suit some plan of Haber's, so thoroughly rearranged the whole social system that he had ended up as a City bureaucrat. He had never held a job, in any of his lives, which was quite up his alley; what he knew he was best at was design, the realization of proper and fitting shape and form for things, and this talent had not been in demand in any of his various existences. But this job, which he had (now) held and disliked for five years, was way out of line.

  That worried him.

  Until this week there had been an essential continuity, a coherence, among all the existences resultant from his dreams. He had always been some kind of draftsman, had always lived on Corbett Avenue.

  Even in the life that had ended on the concrete steps of a burnt-out house in a dying city in a ruined world, even in that life, up until there were no more jobs and no more homes, those continuities had held.

  And throughout all the subsequent dreams or lives, many more important things had also remained constant. He had improved the local climate a little, but not much, and the Greenhouse Effect remained, a permanent legacy of the middle of the last century. Geography remained perfectly steady: the continents were where they were. So did national boundaries, and human nature, and so forth. If Haber had suggested that he dream up a nobler race of men, he had failed to do so.

  But Haber was learning how to run his dreams better. These last two sessions had changed things quite radically. He still had his flat on Corbett Avenue, the same three rooms, faintly scented with the manager's marijuana; but he worked as a bureaucrat in a huge building downtown, and downtown was changed out of all recognition. It was almost as impressive and skyscraping as it had been when there had been no population crash, and it was much more durable and handsome. Things were being managed very differently, now.

  Curiously enough, Albert M. Merdle was still President of the United States. He, like the shapes of continents, appeared to be unchangeable. But the United States was not the power it had been, nor was any single country.

  Portland was now the home of the World Planning Center, the chief agency of the supranational Federation of Peoples. Portland was, as the souvenir post cards said, the Capital of the Planet. Its population was two million. The whole downtown area was full of giant WPC buildings, none more than twelve years old, all carefully planned, surrounded by green parks and tree-lined malls. Thousands of people, most of them Fed-peep or WPC employees, fitted those malls; parties of tourists from Ulan Bator and Santiago de Chile filed past, heads tilted back, listening to their ear-button guides. It was a lively and imposing spectacle—the great, handsome buildings, the tended lawns, the well-dressed crowds. It looked, to George Orr, quite futuristic.

  He could not find Dave's, of course. He couldn't even find Ankeny Street. He remembered it so vividly from so many other existences that he refused to accept, until he got there, the assurances of his present memory, which simply lacked any Ankeny Street at all. Where it should have been, the Research and Development Coordination Building shot cloudward from among its lawns and rhododendrons. He did not even bother to look for the Pendleton Building; Morrison Street was still there, a broad mall newly planted down the center with orange trees, but there were no neo-Inca style buildings along it, and never had been.

  He could not recall the name of Heather's firm exactly; was it Potman, Esserbeck, and Rutti, or was it Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti? He found a telephone booth and looked for the firm. Nothing of the kind was listed, but there was a P. Esserbeck, attorney. He called there and inquired, but no Miss Lelache worked t
here. At last he got up his courage and looked for her name. There was no Lelache in the book.

  She might still be, but bear a different name, he thought. Her mother might have dropped the husband's name after he went off to Africa. Or she might have retained her own married name after she was widowed. But he had not the least idea what her husband's name had been. She might never have borne it; many women no longer changed their names at marriage, holding the custom a relic of feminine serfdom. But what was the good of such speculations? It might very well be that there was no Heather Lelache: that—this time—she had never been born.

  After facing this, Orr faced another possibility. If she walked by right now looking for me, he thought, would I recognize her?

  She was brown. A clear, dark, amber brown, like Baltic amber, or a cup of strong Ceylon tea. But no brown people went by. No black people, no white, no yellow, no red.

  They came from every part of the earth to work at the World Planning Center or to look at it, from Thailand, Argentina, Ghana, China, Ireland, Tasmania, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Honduras, Lichtenstein. But they all wore the same clothes, trousers, tunic, raincape; and underneath the clothes they were all the same color. They were gray.

  Dr. Haber had been delighted when that happened. It had been last Saturday, their first session in a week. He had stared at himself in the washroom mirror for five minutes, chuckling and admiring; he had stared at Orr the same way. "That time you did it the economical way for once, George! By God, I believe your brain's beginning to cooperate with me! You know what I suggested you dream—eh?"

  For, these days, Haber did talk freely and fully to Orr about what he was doing and hoped to do with Orr's dreams. Not that it helped much.

  Orr had looked down at his own pale-gray hands, with their short gray nails. "I suppose that you suggested that there be no more color problems. No question of race."

  "Precisely. And of course I was envisaging a political and ethical solution. Instead of which, your primary thinking processes took the usual short cut, which usually turns out to be a short circuit, but this time they went to the root. Made the change biological and absolute. There never has been a racial problem! You and I are the only two men on earth, George, who know that there ever was a racial problem! Can you conceive of that? Nobody was ever outcaste in India—nobody was ever lynched in Alabama—nobody was massacred in Johannesburg! War's a problem we've outgrown and race is a problem we never even had! Nobody in the entire history of the human race has suffered for the color of his skin. You're learning, George! You'll be the greatest benefactor humanity has ever had in spite of yourself. All the time and energy humans have wasted on trying to find religious solutions to suffering, then you come along and make Buddha and Jesus and the rest of them look like the fakirs they were.

  They tried to run away from evil, but we, we're uprooting it—getting rid of it, piece by piece!"

  Haber's paeans of triumph made Orr uneasy, and he didn't listen to them; instead, he had searched his memory and had found in it no address that had been delivered on a battlefield in Gettysburg, nor any man known to history named Martin Luther King. But such matters seemed a small price to pay for the complete retroactive abolition of racial prejudice, and he had said nothing.

  But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze vase—no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no!

  That's why she's not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.

  He had, though. He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood.

  And Dr. Haber: he had been born. Nothing could prevent him. He only got bigger at every reincarnation.

  During that terrifying day's journey from the cabin to embattled Portland, when they were bumping over a country road in the wheezing Hertz Steamer, Heather had told him that she had tried to suggest that he dream an improved Haber, as they had agreed. And since then Haber had at least been candid with Orr about his manipulations. Though candid was not the right word; Haber was much too complex a person for candor. Layer after layer might peel off the onion and yet nothing be revealed but more onion.

  That peeling off of one layer was the only real change in him, and it might not be due to an effective dream, but only to changed circumstances. He was so sure of himself now that he had no need to try to hide his purposes, or deceive Orr; he could simply coerce him. Orr had less chance than ever of getting away from him. Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment was now known as Personal Welfare Control, but it had the same legal teeth in it, and no lawyer would dream of bringing a patient's complaint against William Haber. He was an important man, an extremely important man. He was the Director of HURAD, the vital center of the World Planning Center, the place where the great decisions were made. He had always wanted power to do good. Now he had it.

  In this light, he had remained completely true to the man Orr had first met, jovial and remote, in the dingy office in Willamette East Tower under the mural photograph of Mount Hood. He had not changed; he had simply grown.

  The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more. As there was no visible limit to the power Haber wielded through Orr's dreams, so there was no end to his determination to improve the world.

  A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on Morrison Mall, and apologized tonelessly from its raised left elbow. The Aliens had soon learned not to point at people, finding it dismayed them. Orr looked up, startled; he had almost forgotten about the Aliens, ever since the crisis on April Fools' Day.

  In the present state of affairs—or continuum, as Haber persisted in calling it—he now recalled, the Alien landing had been less of a disaster for Oregon, NASA, and the Air Force. Instead of inventing their translator-computers hastily under a rain of bombs and napalm, they had brought them with them from the Moon, and had flown about before they landed, broadcasting their peaceful intention, apologizing for the War in Space, which had all been a mistake, and asking for instructions. There had been alarm, of course, but no panic. It had been almost touching to hear the toneless voices, on every band of the radio and every TV channel, repeating that the destruction of the Moondome and the Russian orbiting station had been unintended results of their ignorant efforts to make contact, that they had understood the missiles of the Space Fleet of Earth to be our own ignorant efforts to make contact, that they were very sorry and, now that they had finally mastered human channels of communication, such as speech, they wished to try to make amends. The WPC, established in Portland since the end of the Plague Years, had coped with them, and had kept the populace and the Generals calm. This had, Orr now realized when he thought about it, not happened on the first of April a couple of weeks ago, but last year in February—fourteen months ago. The Aliens had been permitted to land; satisfactory relations with them had been established; and they had at last been allowed to leave their carefully guarded landing site near

  Steens Mountain in the Oregon desert and mix with men. A few of them now shared the rebuilt Moondome peacefully with Fed-peep scientists, and a couple of thousand of them were down on Earth.

  That was all of them that existed or, at least, all of them that had come; very few such details were released to the general public. Natives of a methane-atmosphere planet of the star Aldebaran, they had to wear their outlandish turtle-like suits perpetually on Earth or the Moon, but they
didn't seem to mind.

  What they actually looked like, inside the turtle suits, was not clear in Orr's mind. They couldn't come out, and they didn't draw pictures. Indeed, their communication with human beings, limited to speech emission from the left elbow and some kind of auditory receiver, was limited; he was not even sure that they could see, that they had any sense organ for the visible spectrum. There were vast areas over which no communication was possible: the dolphin problem, only enormously more difficult. However, their unaggressiveness having been accepted by the WPC, and the modesty of their numbers and their aims being apparent, they had been received with a certain eagerness into Terran society. It was pleasant to have somebody different to look at. They seemed to intend to stay, if allowed; some of them had already settled down to running small businesses, for they seemed to be good at salesmanship and organization, as well as space flight, their superior knowledge of which they had at once shared with Terran scientists.

  They had not yet made clear what they hoped for in return, why they had come to Earth. They seemed simply to like it here. As they went on behaving as industrious, peaceable, and law-abiding citizens of Earth, rumors of "Alien takeovers" and "nonhuman infiltration" had become the property of paranoid politicians of dying Nationalist splinter groups and those persons who had conversations with the real Flying Saucer People.

  The only thing left of that terrible first of April, in fact, seemed to be the return of Mount Hood to active-volcano status. No bomb had hit it, for no bombs had fallen, this time. It had simply waked up. A long, gray-brown plume of smoke drifted northward from it now. Zigzag and Rhododendron had gone the way of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A fumarole had opened up recently near the tiny, old crater in Mount Tabor Park, well within the city limits. People in the Mount Tabor area were moving out to the thriving new suburbs of West Eastmont, Chestnut Hills Estates, and Sunny Slopes Subdivision. They could live with Mount Hood fuming softly on the horizon, but an eruption just up the street was too much.