The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  THE REGISTRY OF INTENT UPON ARRIVAL

  In the first quarter of Year 163, all people over sixteen were required to declare Intent Upon Arrival in an open registry on the innet. They could change their declaration any time, and it would not be binding upon them until a moment of ultimate decision, to be announced after investigations of the habitability of the planet were complete and had been fully tested.

  They were asked:

  If the planet proved habitable, would you be willing to be part of a team visiting the surface to gather information?

  Would you be willing to live on the planet while the ship remained in orbit?

  If the ship left, would you be willing to stay on the planet as colonists?

  They were asked to state their opinion:

  How long should the ship stay in orbit as a support to the people on the planet?

  And finally, if the planet was not accessible or not habitable, or if you chose to stay on the ship and not visit or colonise the planet:

  If and when the ship left, should it return to the planet of origin, or continue on into space?

  A return journey to Earth, according to Canaval and others, might take as little as seventy-five years if the whiplash effect of the gravity sink could be repeated. Some engineers were skeptical, but the navigators were confident that Discovery could return to Earth within a lifetime or two. This assertion met with little enthusiasm except among the navigators.

  The open registry of Intent Upon Arrival, accessible on the innet at all times, went through interesting fluctuations. At first the number of people willing to visit the planet or live on it while the ship stayed in orbit — Visitors, they were dubbed — was pretty large. Very few, however, said they would be willing to stay there when the ship left. These diehards got tagged Outsiders, and accepted the name.

  The largest figure by far was those who wished not to land on the planet at all, and to continue the voyage out as soon as possible. Over two thousand people registered immediately as Voyagers.

  This angelic vote was so strong that there was no real question of what the final decision would be. Discovery would not stay in orbit around its Destination, would not turn back to its Origin, but would go on to Eternity.

  Urgent arguments about exhaustibility of supplies, about wear and tear, about accident and entropy, swayed some Voyagers; but the majority continued steadfast in their intention to live in bliss and die to Bliss.

  As this became clear, the number of people who registered as willing to stay permanently on the planet began to grow, and kept growing. It was clear that the angelic majority, eager to continue its sacred journey, could not be kept tethered to the planet for very long. Few of the angels opted even to make an exploratory visit to the planet’s surface. Many, following the teachings of the archangels, tried to persuade their friends that leaving the ship was unthinkably dangerous — not a bodily risk, but a sin, a temptation to seek unneeded knowledge at the cost of the immortal soul.

  Gradually the choices narrowed, became absolute. Go out into the dark and be left there, or continue on the bright and endless voyage. The unknown, or the known. Risk, or safety. Exile, or home.

  Throughout the year, the number of those who shifted their registry from Visitor to Outsider grew to over a thousand.

  In the latter half of Year 163, the yellow star that was the primary of Shindychew’s system appeared to the eye at magnitude -2. Schoolchildren were taken onto the Bridge to see it in the “window.”

  The education curriculum had been radically revised. Though teachers who were angels were unenthusiastic or hostile to the new material, they were required to allow “lay teachers” to present information about what the Destination might be like. The VRs of Old Earth — Jungle, Inner City, and so on — had allegedly deteriorated, and had been destroyed; but many educational films were salvaged, and others were found in Storage awaiting use by potential settlers.

  Those who registered as Visitors or Outsiders formed learning groups, in which they studied and discussed these films and instructional books. Dictionaries were much called upon to settle misunderstandings and arguments over terms, though sometimes the arguments went on and on. Was a ravine a need for food, or a place where the floor went down into a hole? The dictionary offered gorge, gully, gulch, canyon, chasm, rift, abyss . . . . A low place in the floor, then. When you need food badly, that’s ravenous. But why would you need food badly?

  A PRAGMATIST

  “No. I don’t intend to leave the ship.”

  Luis stared at the Registry, where he had just discovered Tan Bingdi’s name on the list of Voyagers. He looked around at his friend, and at the screen again.

  “You don’t?”

  “I never did. Why?”

  “You aren’t an angel,” Luis said at last, stupidly.

  “Of course not. I’m a pragmatist.”

  “But you’ve worked so hard to keep the . . . the way out open . . .”

  “Of course.” After a minute he explained: “I don’t like quarrels, divisions, enforced choices. They spoil the quality of life.”

  “You aren’t curious?”

  “No. If I want to know what living on a planet surface is like, I can watch the training videos and holos. And read all the books in the Library about Old Earth. But why do I want to know what living on a planet is like? I live here. And I like it. I like what I know and I know what I like.”

  Luis continued to look appalled.

  “You have a sense of duty,” Bingdi told him affectionately. “Ancestral duty — go find a new world . . . Scientific duty — go find new knowledge. . . . If a door opens, you feel it’s your duty to go through it. If a door opens, I unquestioningly close it. If life is good, I don’t seek to change it. Life is good, Luis.” He spoke, as always, with little rests between the sentences. “I will miss you and a lot of other people. I’ll get bored with the angels. You won’t be bored, down on that dirtball. But I have no sense of duty and I rather enjoy being bored. I want to live my life in peace, doing no harm and receiving no harm. And, judging by the films and books, I think this may be the best place, in all the universe, to live such a life.”

  “It’s a matter of control, finally, isn’t it,” Luis said.

  Bingdi nodded. “We need to be in control. The angels and I. You don’t.”

  “We aren’t in control. None of us. Ever.”

  “I know. But we’ve got a good imitation of it, here. VR’s enough for me.”

  A DEATH, YEAR 163, DAY 202

  After recurrent episodes of illness, Navigator Canaval Hiroshi died of heart failure. His wife Liu Hsing with their infant son, and many friends, all the staff of Navigation, and most of the Plenary Council, attended the funeral service. His colleague 4-Patel Ramdas spoke of his brilliance in his profession, and wept as he finished speaking. 5-Chatterji Uma spoke of how he laughed at silly jokes, and told one he had laughed at; she said how happy he had been to have a son, though he had known him so briefly. One of his students spoke last, in the place of the child, calling him a hard master but a great man. Hsing then went with the technicians, accompanying his body to the Life Center for recycling. She had not spoken at the service. The technicians left her alone for a moment, and she laid her hand very gently on Hiroshi’s cheek, feeling the death-cold. She whispered only, “Goodbye.”

  DESTINATION

  In the year 164, Day 82, Discovery entered orbit around the planet Shindychew, Hsin Ti Chiu, or New Earth.

  As the ship made its first forty orbits, probes sent down to the surface of the planet provided vast amounts of information, much of which was unintelligible or barely intelligible to those receiving it on the ship.

  They were soon able to state with certainty, however, that people would be able to do eva on the surface without respirators or suits. There was a growing body of evidence that the planet might be accessible to long-range inhabitation. That people could live there.

  In the year 164, Day 93, the first ship-to-grou
nd vehicle made a successful landing in the area designated Subquadrant Eight of the planetary surface.

  AFTER THIS THERE ARE NO MORE HEADINGS, FOR THE WORLD IS CHANGED, NAMES CHANGE, TIME IS NOT MEASURED AS IT WAS, AND THE WIND BLOWS EVERYTHING AWAY.

  To leave the ship: to go through the airlock into the lander, that was a comprehensible thing — terrifying, fiercely exciting, absolute, an act of transgression, of defiance, of affirmation. The last act.

  To leave the lander: to go down those five steps onto the surface of the planet, that was to leave comprehension behind, to lose understanding: to go mad. To be translated into a language where no word — ground, air — transgress, affirm — act, do — made sense. A world without words. Without meaning. A universe undefined.

  Immediately perceiving the wall, the blessed needed only wall, the side of the lander, she backed up against it and at once turned to hide her face against it so that she could see it, the wall, curving metal, firm, limiting, see it and not see the other, the no walls, the vast.

  She held her baby close against her, his face to her breast.

  People were there with her, beside her, clinging to the wall, but she was only vaguely aware of them, even though they were all huddled close together they all seemed apart and distant. She heard people gasping, vomiting. She was dizzy and sick. She could not breathe. The ventilation was failing, the fans were far too strong. Turn down the fans! A spotlight shone down on her, she could feel the heat of it on her head and neck, see the glare of it in the skin of the wall when she opened her eyes.

  The skin of the wall, the ship’s epidermis. She was doing eva. That was all. She always wanted to be an evaman when she was little. She was doing eva. When it was done she could go back into the world. She tried to hold on to the skin of the world but it was smooth ceramic and would not let her hold it. Cold mother, hard mother, dead mother.

  She opened her eyes again and looked down past Alejo’s silky black head at her feet and saw her feet standing in dirt. She moved, then, to get out of the dirt, because you shouldn’t walk in dirt. Father had told her when she was very young, no, it’s not good to walk in the dirt gardens, the plants need all the room, and your feet might hurt the little plants. So she moved away from the wall to move out of the dirt garden. But there was only dirt garden, dirt, plants, everywhere, wherever she put her feet. Her feet hurt the plants and the dirt hurt the soles of her feet. She looked despairingly for a walkway, a corridor, a ceiling, walls, looked away from the wall and saw a great whirl of green and blue spin round a center of intolerable light. Blinded and unbalanced she fell to her knees and hid her face beside the baby’s face. She wept in shame.

  Wind, air moving fast, hard, endlessly blowing, making you cold, so you shivered, shuddered, like having a fever, the wind stopping and starting, restless, stupid, unpredictable, unreasonable, maddening, hateful, a torment. Turn it off, make it stop!

  Wind, air moving softly, moving slender grasses in waves over the hills, carrying odors from a long way off, so you lifted your head and sniffed, breathed it in, the strange, sweet, bitter smell of the world.

  The sound of wind in a forest.

  Wind that moved colors in the air.

  People who had never been of much account became prominent, respected, constantly in demand. 4-Nova Ed was good with the tenses. He was the first to figure out how to deploy them properly. Miraculously the shambles of plasticloth and cords rose and became walls, walls to shut out the wind — became rooms, rooms to enclose you in the marvelous familiarity of surfaces close by, a ceiling close overhead, a floor smooth underfoot, quiet air, an even, unblinding light. It made all the difference, it made life livable, to have a tense, to have a homespace, to know you could go in, be in, be inside.

  “It’s ‘tent,’ ” Ed said, but people had heard the more familiar word and went on calling them tense, tenses.

  A fifteen-year-old girl, Lee Meili, remembered from an ancient movie what foot coverings were called. People had tried syndrome-sox, those that had them, but they were thin and wore out at once. She hunted through the Stockpile, the immense and growing labyrinth of stores that the landers kept bringing down from the ship, till she found crates labelled shoes. The shoes hurt the delicate-skinned feet of people who had gone barefoot on carpet all their lives, but they hurt less than the floor here did. The ground. The stones. The rocks.

  But 4-Patel Ramdas, whose skills had put Discovery into orbit and guided the first lander from ship to surface, stood with a reading lamp in one hand, its cord and plug in the other, staring at the dark wrinkled wall-like surface of a huge plant, the tree under which he had set up his tense. He was looking for an electrical outlet. His gaze was vague and sad. Presently he straightened up; his expression became scornful. He walked back to the Stockpile with the lamp.

  5-Lung Tirza’s three-month-old baby lay in the starlight while Tirza worked on construction. When she came to feed him she shrieked, “He’s blind!” The pupils of his eyes were tiny dots. He was red with fever. His face and scalp blistered. He had convulsions, went into coma. He died that night. They had to recycle him in the dirt. Tirza lay on the place in the dirt where the baby was lying inside it, underneath her. She moaned with her mouth against the dirt. Moaning aloud, she raised her face with brown wet dirt all over it, a terrible face made of dirt.

  Not star: sun. Starlight we know: safe, kind, distant. Sun is a star too close. This one.

  My name is Star, Hsing said in her mind. Star, not Sun.

  She made herself look out of her tense in darkcycle to see the safe, kind, distant stars who had given her her name. Shining stars, bing hsing. Tiny bright dots. Many, many, many. Not one. But each . . . Her thoughts would not hold. She was so tired. The immensity of the sky, the uncountability of the stars. She crawled back into inside. Inside the tense, inside the bagbed beside Luis. He lay in the moveless sleep of exhaustion. She listened automatically to his breathing for a moment; soft, unlabored. She drew Alejo into her arms, against her breasts. She thought of Tirza’s baby inside the dirt. Inside the dirtball.

  She thought of Alejo running across the grass the way he had today, running in the sunlight, shouting for the joy of running. She had hurried to call him back into the shade. But he loved the warmth of sunlight.

  Luis had left his asthma on the ship, he said, but his migraines were bad sometimes. Many people had headaches, sinus pain. Possibly it was caused by particles in the air, particles of dirt, plants’ pollens, substances and secretions of the planet, its outbreath. He lay in his tense in the long heat of the day, in the long ebb of the pain, thinking about the secrets of the planet, imagining the planet breathing out and himself breathing in that outbreath, like a lover, like breathing in Hsing’s breath. Taking it in, drinking it in. Becoming it.

  Up here on the hillside, looking down on the river but not close to it, had seemed a good place for the settlement, a safe distance, so that children would not be falling into the huge, fiercely rushing, deep mass of water. Ramdas measured the distance and said it was 1.7 kilos. People who carried water discovered a different definition of distance: 1.7 kilos was a long distance to carry water. Water had to be carried. There were no pipes in the ground, no faucets in the rocks. And when there were no pipes and faucets you discovered that water was necessary, constantly, imperatively necessary. Was wonderful, worshipful, a blessing, a bliss the angels had never dreamed of. You discovered thirst. To drink when you were thirsty! And to wash — to be clean! To be as you’d always been, not grainy-skinned and gritty and sticky with smears of dirt, but clean!

  Hsing walked back from the fields with her father. Yao walked a little stooped. His hands were blackened, cracked, ingrained with dirt. She remembered how when he worked in the dirt gardens of the ship that fine soft dirt had clung to his fingers, lined his knuckles and fingernails, just while he was working; then he washed his hands and they were clean.

  To be able to wash when you were dirty, to have enough to drink all the time, what a wond
erful thing. At Meeting they voted to move the tenses closer to the river, farther from the Stockpile. Water was more important than things. The children must learn to be careful.

  Everybody must learn to be careful, everywhere, all the time.

  Strain the water, boil the water. What a bother. But the doctors with their cultures were unyielding. Some of the native bacteria flourished in media made with human secretions. Infection was possible.

  Dig latrines, dig cesspools, what hard work, what a bother. But the doctors with their manuals were unyielding. The manual on cesspools and septic tanks (printed in English in New Delhi two centuries ago) was hard to understand, full of words that had to be figured out by context: drainage, gravel, bedrock, seep.

  A bother, being careful, taking care, taking trouble, following the rules. Never! Always! Remember! Don’t! Don’t forget! Or else!

  Or else what?

  You died anyway. This world hated you. It hated foreign bodies.

  Three babies now, an adolescent, two adults. All under the dirt in that place, close to the little first death, Tirza’s baby, their guide to the underground. To the inside.

  There was plenty to eat. When you looked at the food section of the Stockpile, the huge walls and corridors of crates, it seemed it must be all the food a thousand people could eat forever, and the angels’ generosity in letting them have it all seemed overwhelming. Then you saw the way the land went on and on, past the Stockpile, past the new sheds, and the sky went on and on over them; and when you looked back the pile of crates looked very small.

  You listened to Liu Yao saying in meeting, “We must continue to test the native plants for edibility,” and Chowdry Arvind saying, “We should be making gardens now, while the time of the revolu — of the year is the most advantageous time — the growing season.”