The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

It was a strange thing to say after half a year of silence between them, he knew that; still, he found her response even stranger. She looked amazed, dismayed. She covered her shock, began to speak, stopped, and finally, with what seemed suspicion, said, “Why me?”

  “Who else?”

  “What do you think I have to do with anything to do with them?”

  Circuitous! Luis thought. He said only, “Nothing. And that’s getting to be rare. This is important, and I need to talk it over with you. I want to know what you think about it. Your judgment. I’ve always thought best when I talked with you.”

  She did not loosen up at all. Tense, wary, she nodded grudgingly. She said, “Do you want tea?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll talk as fast as I can. Please interrupt if I’m not clear. Tell me if what I say is credible.”

  “I don’t find much incredible lately,” she said, dry, not looking at him. “Go ahead, then. I do have to be on the Bridge at ten-forty. I’m sorry.”

  “Half an hour will do.”

  In half that time he told her what he had to tell. He began with his realisation that the education committees and councils had been controlled for at least twenty years by a large, steady majority of angels. It was now impossible to find what curriculum the Zero Generation had originally planned for the Sixth. Those plans had evidently been deleted — possibly even from the Archives.

  Every time he considered that possibility it still shocked Luis, and he did not try to minimise his concern. Hsing continued to conceal any reaction she felt. He began to wonder if she already knew everything he was telling her. If so, she wasn’t admitting that either. He went on.

  The elementary and high school curriculum had been scarcely altered since Hsing’s and Luis’s schooldays. The most striking change was a decrease in information and discussion concerning both Dichew and Shindychew. Children now in school spent very little time learning about the planets of origin and destination. Language concerning them was vague, with a curiously remote tone. In two recent texts Luis had found the phrase, “the planetary hypothesis.”

  “But in 43.5 years we will arrive at one of these hypotheses,” Luis said. “What are we going to make of it?”

  Hsing looked stricken again — frightened. He didn’t know what to make of that, either. He went on.

  “I’ve been trying to understand the elements in angelic theory or belief that lead them to deny the importance — the fact — of our origin on one planet and our destination on another. Bliss is a coherent system of thought that makes almost perfect sense in itself and as a belief-system for people living as we live. In fact, that’s the problem. Bliss is a self-contained proposition, a closed system. It is a psychic adaptation to our life — ship life — an adaptation to a self-contained system, an unvarying artificial environment providing all necessities at all times. We of the middle generations have no goal except to stay alive and keep the ship running and on course, and to achieve it all we have to do is follow the rules — the Constitution. The Zeroes saw that as an important duty, a high obligation, because they saw it as an element of the whole voyage — the means glorified by the end. But for those who won’t see the end, there’s not much glory being the means. Self-preservation seems self-centered. The system’s not only closed, but stifling. That was Kim Terry’s vision — how to glorify the means, the voyage — how to make following the rules an end in itself. As he saw it, our true journey is not only to a material world outside in space, but also to a spiritual world of bliss — which we will attain, by living rightly here.”

  Hsing nodded.

  “Over the last decades Patel Inbliss has gradually changed the emphasis of this vision. Here is all. There’s nothing outside the ship — literally nothing, spiritually nothing. Origin and destination are now metaphors. They have no reality. Journey is the sole reality. The voyage is its own end.”

  She was still impassive, as if he was telling her nothing she didn’t know; but she was alert.

  “Patel isn’t a theorist. He’s an activist. Acting on his vision through his archangels and their disciples. I believe that in the last ten or fifteen years, angels have been making many of the decisions in Council, and most of the decisions about education.”

  Again she nodded, but warily.

  “The schools teach almost nothing about the original purpose of the interstellar voyage — to study and perhaps settle a planet. The texts and programs still have information about the cosmos — starcharts, stellar types, planet formation, all that stuff we had in Tenth — but I’ve been talking to teachers and they tell me they skip most of it. The children ‘aren’t interested,’ they ‘find these old material-science theories confusing.’ You realise that almost all school administrators and about 65 percent of the teachers — 90 percent in Quad One — are members of Bliss?”

  “So many?”

  “At least that many. My impression is that some angels conceal their beliefs, deliberately, to keep their dominance from becoming too plain.”

  Hsing looked uneasy, disgusted, but said nothing.

  “Meanwhile in the archangelic teachings, ‘outside’ is equated with danger, physical and spiritual — sin, evil — and with death. Nothing else. There is nothing good outside the ship. Inside is positive, outside negative. Pure dualism. — Not many young angels are going into dermatology these days, but there are some older ones who do eva. As soon as they’re through the airlocks, they undergo a ritual of purification. Did you know that?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s called decontamination. An old material-science-theory word with a new meaning. The soul is contaminated by the silent black outside. . . . Well, that aside. Angels are eager to follow the rules, because our life lived well leads us directly to eternal happiness. They are eager for us all to follow the rules. We live in the Vehicle of Bliss. We can’t miss bliss. Unless we break the one new rule. The big one: The ship can’t stop.”

  He stopped. Hsing looked angry, as she always did when she was worried, troubled, or scared.

  His gradual discovery of the change in the angelic teachings and the extent of angelic control over various councils had alarmed but not frightened him. He had seen it as a problem, a serious problem, that must be addressed. The way to solve it was to bring it out into the open, forcing the angels to explain their policies and making the non-angels aware that Patel Inbliss was trying to change the rules, and exerting clandestine power to do so. When they saw that, they’d react against it. There need be no crisis.

  “We’ve got 43.5 years,” he said. “Plenty of time to talk it over. It’s a matter of getting things back in proportion. The more radical angels will have to agree that we do have a destination, that people are going to do eva there, and that they’ll need to be trained to do eva, not to look on it as a sin.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Hsing said. The tight, stricken look had come over her again. She jumped up and walked across the room — a neat, severe room, not like the messy nest she used to live in — and stood with her back to him.

  “Well, yes,” Luis said, unsure what she meant, but encouraged at her saying anything at all. “We all need training. We’ll be in our sixties at Arrival. If the planet’s habitable, we’ve got to get used to the idea of at least some of us living there — staying there. While maybe some of us turn around and head back to Dichew. . . . The angels never mention that, by the way. Inbliss seems to think only in a straight line extending to infinity. The flaw in his reasoning is that he assumes a material vehicle is capable of an eternal journey. Entropy does not seem to be part of Bliss.”

  “Yes,” Hsing said.

  “That’s all,” he said after a minute. He was puzzled and worried by her non-response. He waited a little and said, “I think this must be talked about. So I came to you. To talk about it. And you might want to talk about it to non-angelic people in Management and on the Bridge. They need to be concerned about this revision of our mission.” He paused. “Maybe they already are.”r />
  “Yes,” she said again. She had not turned around.

  Luis had very little anger in his temperament and was not given to fits of pique, but he felt let down flat. As he looked at Hsing’s back, her pink cheongsam, her short-legs-no-butt (so she had described her Chi-An figure), her black hair falling bright and straight and cut off sharp at the shoulder, he also felt pain. A hard, deep, sore pain at the heart.

  “There was a flaw in my reasoning too,” he said. He stood up.

  She turned around. She still looked worried beyond anything he had expected. It had taken him a long time to realise how powerful angelic thinking had become, and he had dumped all his discoveries on her at once — yet none of it had seemed to surprise her. So why this reaction? And why wouldn’t she talk about it?

  “What flaw?” she asked, but still distrustful, holding back.

  “Nothing. I miss talking with you.”

  “I know. The work in Nav, it seems like it never lets up.”

  She was looking at him but not looking at him. He couldn’t stand it.

  “So. That’s it. Just sharing my worries, as we say in Peace Session. Thanks for the time.”

  He was in the doorway when she said, “Luis.”

  He stopped, but didn’t turn.

  “I want to talk more about all this maybe with you later.”

  “Sure. Don’t let it worry you.”

  “I have to talk to Hiroshi about it.”

  “Sure,” he said again, and went out into the corridor.

  He wanted to go somewhere else, not corridor 4-4, not any corridor, not any room, not any place he knew. But there was no place he didn’t know. No place in the world.

  “I want to go out,” he said to himself. “Outside.”

  Silent, black, outside.

  ON THE BRIDGE

  “Tell your friend not to panic,” Hiroshi said. “The angels aren’t in control. Not as long as we are.”

  He turned back to his work.

  “Hiroshi.”

  He did not answer.

  She stood a while near his seat at the navigators’ station. Her gaze was on Discovery’s one “window”: a meter-square screen on which data from the epidermal sensors was represented in visible light. Blackness. Bright dots, dim dots, haze: the local starfield and, in the left lower corner, a bit of the remote central galactic disk.

  Children in the third year of school are brought to see the “window.”

  Or they used to be.

  “Is that actually what’s ahead of us?” she had asked Teo not long ago, and he had said, smiling, “No. Some of it’s behind us. It’s a movie I made. It’s where we’d be if we were on schedule. In case somebody noticed.”

  She stared at it now and remembered Luis’s phrase, VU. Virtual Unreality.

  Without looking at Hiroshi she began to speak.

  “Luis thinks the angels are taking control. You think you’re in control. I think the angels are controlling you. You don’t dare tell people that we’re decades ahead of schedule, because you think that if the archangels knew, they’d take over and change course so as to miss the planet. But if you go on hiding the truth, you’re guaranteeing that they’ll take over when we reach the planet. What are you planning to say? Here we are! Surprise! All the angels will have to say is, These people are crazy, they made a navigation error and then tried to cover it up. We aren’t at Shindychew — it’s forty years too soon — this is some other solar system. So they take over the Bridge and we go on. And on. To nowhere.”

  A long time passed, so that she thought he had not listened, had not heard her at all.

  “Patel’s people are extremely numerous,” he said. His voice was low. “As your friend has been discovering. . . . It was not an easy decision, Hsing. We have no strength except in the accomplished fact. Actuality against wishful thinking. We arrive, we come into orbit, and we can say: There’s the planet. It’s real. Our job is to land people on it. But if we tell people now . . . four years or forty, it doesn’t matter. Patel’s people will discredit us, replace us, change course, and . . . as you say . . . go on to nowhere. To ‘bliss.’ ”

  “How can you expect anybody to believe you, to support you, if you’ve lied to them right up to the last moment? Ordinary people. Not angels. What justifies you in not telling them the truth?”

  He shook his head. “You underestimate Patel,” he said. “We cannot throw away our one advantage.”

  “I think you underestimate the people who would support you. Underestimate them to the point of contempt.”

  “We must keep personalities out of this matter,” he said with sudden harshness.

  She stared at him. “Personalities?”

  THE PLENARY COUNCIL

  “Thank you, Chairwoman. My name is Nova Luis. I request the Council discuss formation of an ad hoc Committee on Religious Manipulation, to investigate the educational curriculum, the contents and availability of certain materials in the Records and Archives, and the composition of the fourteen committees and deliberative bodies listed on the screen.”

  4-Ferris Kim was on his feet at once: “A Committee on Religious Manipulation can be convened, according to the Constitution, only to investigate ‘an election or the deliberation of a legislative body.’ School curriculum, the materials kept in Records and Archives, and the committees and councils listed cannot be defined as legislative bodies and thus are exempt from examination.”

  “The Constitutional Committee will decide that point,” said Uma, chairing the meeting. Ferris sat down looking satisfied.

  Luis stood up again. “Since the religion in question is the creed of Bliss, may I suggest that the Chair consider the Constitutional Committee as possibly biased, since five of the six members profess the creed of Bliss.”

  Ferris was up again: “Creed? Religion? What kind of misunderstanding is this? There are no creeds or cults in our world. Such words merely echo ancient history, divisive errors which we have long since left behind on our way.” His deep voice grew mellow, gentle. “Do you call the air a ‘creed,’ Doctor, because you breathe it? Do you call life a ‘religion,’ because you live it? Bliss is the ground and goal of our existence. Some of us rejoice in that knowledge; for others that joy lies in the future. But there are no religions here, no warring creeds. We are all united in the fellowship of Discovery.”

  “And the goal appointed in our Constitution for Discovery and those who travel in it is to travel through a portion of space to a certain planet, to study that planet, to colonise it if possible, and to send or bring back information about it to our world of origin, Dichew, Earth. We are all united in the resolve to accomplish that goal. Do you agree, Councillor Ferris?”

  “Surely the Plenary Council is not the place to quibble over linguistic and intellectual theories?” Ferris said with mild deprecation, turning to the Chair.

  “An allegation of religious manipulation is more than a quibble, Councillor,” Uma said. “I will discuss this matter with my advisory council. It will be on the agenda of the next meeting.”

  THE SOUP THICKENS

  “Well,” Bingdi said, “we have certainly put the turd in the soupbowl.”

  They were running the track. Bingdi had done twenty laps. Luis had done five. He was slowing down and breathing hard. “Soup of bliss,” he panted.

  Bingdi slowed down. Luis gasped and stopped. He stood awhile and wheezed. “Damn,” he said.

  They walked to the bench for their towels.

  “What did Hsing say when you talked to her?”

  “Nothing.”

  After a while Bingdi said, “You know, that bunch on the Bridge and Uma’s advisory council, they’re as tight as the archangels. They talk to each other and nobody else. They’re a faction, as much as the archangels.”

  Luis nodded. “Well, so, we’re the third faction,” he said. “The turd faction. The soup thickens. Ancient history repeats itself.”

  THE GREAT REJOICING OF YEAR 161, DAY 88

  Two days
after the Plenary Council announced the formation of a Committee on Religious Manipulation to investigate ideological bias in educational curricula and the suppression and destruction of information in the Records and Archives, Patel Inbliss called for a Great Rejoicing.

  The Temenos was packed. Everybody said, “It must have been like this when 0-Kim died.”

  The old man stood up at the lectern. His face, dark, unwrinkled, the bones showing through the fragile skin, loomed on every screen in every homespace. He raised his arms in blessing.

  The great crowd sighed, a sound like wind in a forest, but they did not know that; they had never heard the sound of wind in a forest; they had never heard any sigh, any voice but their own and the voices of machines.

  He talked for nearly an hour. At first he spoke of the importance of learning and following the laws of life laid down in the Constitution and taught in the schools. He asserted with passion that only scrupulous observance of these rules could assure justice, peace, and happiness to all. He talked about cleanliness, about recycling, about parenthood, about athletics, about teachers and teaching, about specialized studies, about the importance of unglamorous professions such as labwork, soilwork, infant care. Speaking of the happiness to be found in what he called “the modest life,” he looked younger; his dark eyes shone. “Bliss is to be found everywhere,” he said.

  That became his theme: the ship called “discovery,” the ship of life, that travels across the void of death: the vehicle of bliss.

  Within the ship, rules and laws and ways are provided by which each mortal being may, by learning to live in mortal harmony and happiness, learn also the way to the True Destination.

  “There is no death,” the old man said, and again that sigh ran through the forest of lives crowded in the round hall. “Death is nothing. Death is null, death is void. Life is all. Mortal life voyages onward, ever onward, straight and true on its course to everlasting life, and light, and joy. Our origin was in darkness, in pain, in suffering. On that black ground of evil, in that terrible place, our ancestors in their wisdom saw where true life, true freedom was. And they sent us, their children, forth, free of darkness, earth, gravity, negativity, to travel forever into the light.”