You came to see that there was not plenty to eat. That there might not ever be plenty to eat. That (the beans did not flower, the rice did not come up out of the dirt, the genetic experiment did not succeed) there might not be enough to eat. In time. Time was not the same here.
Here, to every thing there was a season.
• • •
5-Nova Luis, a doctor, sat beside the body of 5-Chang Berto, a soil technician, who had died of blood poisoning from a blister on his heel. The doctor suddenly shouted at Berto’s tense-mates, “He neglected it! You neglected him! You could see that it was infected! How could you let this happen? Do you think we’re in a sterile environment? Don’t you listen? Can’t you understand that the dirt here is dangerous? Do you think I can work miracles?” Then he began to cry, and Berto’s tense-mates all stood there with their dead companion and the weeping doctor, dumb with fear and shame and sorrow.
Creatures. There were creatures everywhere. This world was made of creatures. The only things not alive were the rocks. Everything else was alive with creatures.
Plants covered the dirt, filled the waters, endless variety and number of plants (4-Liu Yao working in the makeshift plant test lab felt sometimes through the mist of exhaustion an incredulous delight, a sense of endless wealth, a desire to shout aloud — Look! Look at this! How extraordinary!) — and of animals, endless variety and number of animals (4-Steinman Jael, one of the first to sign up as an Outsider, had to go back permanently to the ship, driven into fits of shuddering and screaming by the continual sight and touch of the innumerable tiny crawling and flying creatures on the ground and in the air, and her uncontrollable fear of seeing them and being touched by them).
People were inclined at first to call the creatures cows, dogs, lions, remembering words from Earth books and holos. Those who read the manuals insisted that all the Shindychew creatures were much smaller than cows, dogs, lions, and were far more like what they called insects, arachnids, and worms on Dichew. “Nobody here has invented the backbone,” said young Garcia Anita, who was fascinated by the creatures, and studied the Earth Biology archives whenever her work as an electrical engineer left her time to do so. “At least nobody in this part of the world. But they certainly have invented wonderful shells.”
The creatures about a millimeter long with green wings that followed people about persistently and liked to walk on your skin, tickling slightly, got called dogs. They acted friendly, and dogs were supposed to be man’s best friend. Anita said they liked the salt in human sweat, and weren’t intelligent enough to be friendly, but people went on calling them dogs. Ach! what’s that on my neck? Oh, it’s just a dog.
The planet revolved around the star.
But at evening, the sun set. The same thing, but a different matter. With it as it set the sun took colors, colors of clouds moved through air by wind.
At daybreak the sun rose, bringing with it all the mutable, fierce, subtle colors of the world, restored, brought back to life, reborn.
Continuity here did not depend on human beings. Though they might depend on it. It was a different matter.
The ship had gone on. It was gone.
Outsiders who had changed their minds about living outside had mostly gone back up in the first few tendays. When the Plenary Council, now chaired by the Archangel 5-Ross Minh, announced that Discovery would leave orbit on Day 256, Year 164, a number of people in the Settlement asked to be taken back to the ship, unable to endure the finality of permanent exile, or the painful realities of life outside. About as many shipsiders asked to join the Settlement, unable to accept the futility of an endless pilgrimage, or the government of the archangels.
When the ship left, the nine hundred and four people on the planet had chosen to be there. To die there. Some of them had already died there.
They talked about it very little. There wasn’t a lot to say, and when you were tired all the time all you wanted was to eat and get into your bedbag and sleep. It had seemed like a big event, the ship going on, but it wasn’t. They couldn’t see it from the ground anyway. For days and days before the leaving date the radios and the hooknet carried a lot of talk about the journey into bliss, and exhortations telling the people on the ground that they were still all angels and were welcome back to joy. Then there was a flurry of personal messages, pleadings, blessings, goodbyes, and then the ship was gone.
For a long time Discovery kept sending news and messages to the Settlement, births, deaths, sermons, prayers, and reports of the unanimous joyfulness of the voyage. Personal messages went back to the ship from the Settlement, along with the same informational and scientific reports that were sent to Earth. Attempts at dialogue, at response, rarely successful, were mostly abandoned after a few years.
Obeying the mandates of the Constitution, the Settlers collected and organised the information they gathered concerning Shindychew and sent it to the planet of origin as often as the work of survival allowed them time to do so. A committee worked on keeping and transmitting methodical annals of the Settlement. People also sent observations and thoughts, images, poems.
You couldn’t help wondering if anyone would listen to them. But that was nothing new.
Transmissions intended for the ship continued to come in to the receivers in the Settlement, since the people on Dichew wouldn’t hear about the early arrival for years to come, and then their response would take years to arrive. The transmissions continued to be as confusing as ever, almost entirely irrelevant, and increasingly difficult to understand, due to changes in thought and vocabulary. What was a withheld E.O. and why had there been riots about it in Milak? What was faring technology? Why were they saying that it was essential to know about the 4:10 ratio in pankogenes?
The vocabulary problem was nothing new, either. All your life inside the ship you had known words that had no meaning at all. Words that signified nothing in the world. Words such as cloud, wind, rain, weather. Poets’ words, explained in notes at the foot of the page, or that found a brief visual equivalent in films, sometimes a brief sensory equivalent in VRs. Words whose reality was imaginary, or virtual.
But here, the word that had no meaning, the concept without content, was the word virtual. Here nothing was virtual.
Clouds came over from the west. West, another reality: direction: a crucially important reality in a world you could get lost in.
Rain fell out of a certain kind of cloud, and the rain wet you, you were wet, the wind blew and you were cold, and it went on and didn’t stop because it wasn’t a program, it was the weather. It went on being. But you didn’t, unless you acquired the sense to come in out of the rain.
Probably people on Earth already knew that.
The big, thick, tall plants, the trees, consisted largely of the very rare and precious substance wood, the material of certain instruments and ornaments ontheship. (One word: ontheship.) Wood objects had seldom been recycled, because they were irreplaceable; plastic copies were quite different in quality. Here plastic was rare and precious, but wood stood around all over the hills and valleys. With peculiar, ancient tools provided in the Landing Stock, fallen trees could be cut into pieces. (The meaning of the word chensa, spelled chainsaw in the manuals, was rediscovered.) All the pieces of tree were solid wood: an excellent material for building with, which could also be shaped into all kinds of useful devices. And wood could be set fire to, to create warmth.
This discovery of enormous importance, would it be news on Earth?
Fire. The stuff at the end of a welding torch. The active point in a bunsenburner.
Most people had never seen a fire burning. They gathered to it. Don’t touch! But the air was cold now, full of cloud and wind, full of weather. Fire-warmth felt good. Lung Jo, who had set up the Settlement’s first generator, gathered bits of tree and piled them inside his tense and set fire to them and invited his buddies to come get warm. Presently everybody poured out of the tense coughing and choking, which was fortunate, because the fire liked the tense as well as it lik
ed the wood, and ate with its red and yellow tongues till nothing was left but a black stinking mess in the rain. A disaster. (Another disaster.) All the same, it was funny when they all rushed out weeping and coughing in a cloud of smoke.
Cloud. Smoke. Words full, crammed, jammed with meaning, with meanings. Life-and-death meanings, signifying life, signifying death. The poets had not been talking virtually, after all.
I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .
What is the weather in a beard?
It’s windy there and rather weird . . .
The 0-2 strain of oats came up out of the dirt, sprang up (spring), shot up, put out leaves and beautiful hanging grain-heads, was green, was yellow, was harvested. The seeds flowed between your fingers like polished beads, fell (fall) back into the heap of precious food.
Abruptly, the material received from the ship ceased to contain any personal messages or information, consisting of rebroadcasts of the three recorded talks given by Kim Terry, talks by Patel Inbliss, sermons by various archangels, and a recording of a male choir chanting, played over and over.
“Why am I Six Lo Meiling?”
When the child understood her mother’s explanation, she said, “But that was ontheship. We live here. Aren’t we all Zeroes?”
5-Lo Ana told this story in Meeting, and it went through the whole community causing pleasure, like the flight of one of the creatures with fluttering transparent wings edged with threads of gold, at which everybody looked up and stopped work and said, “Look!” Mariposas, somebody called them, and the pretty name stuck.
There had been a good deal of talk, during the cold weather when work wasn’t so continuous, about the names of things. About naming things. Such as the dogs. People agreed that naming should be done seriously. But it was no good looking in the records and finding that on Dichew there had been creatures that looked something like this brown creature here so we’ll call it beetle. It wasn’t beetle. It ought to have its own name. Tree-crawler, clickclicker, leaf-chewer. And what about us? Ana’s kid is right, you know? 4’s, 5’s, 6’s — what’s that got to do with us now, here? The angels can go on to 100. . . . Lucky if they get to 10. . . . What about Zerin’s baby? She isn’t 6-Lahiri Padma. She’s 1-Shindychew-Lahiri-Padma. . . . Maybe she’s just Lahiri Padma. Why do we need to count the steps? We aren’t going anywhere. She’s here. She lives here. This is Padma’s world.
She found Luis in the patty-gardens behind the west compound. It was his day off from the hospital. A beautiful day of early summer. His hair shone in the sunlight. She located him by that silver nimbus.
He was sitting on the ground, on the dirt. On his day off he did a shift at the irrigation system of little ditches, dikes, and watergates, which required constant but unlaborious supervision and maintenance. Patty grew well only when watered but not overwatered. The tubers, baked whole or milled, had become a staple since Liu Yao’s success at breeding the edible strain. People who had trouble digesting native seeds and cereals thrived on patty.
Children of ten or eleven, old people, damaged people, mostly did irrigation shifts; it took no strength, just patience. Luis sat near the watergate that diverted the flow from West Creek into one or the other of the main channel systems. His legs, thin and brown, were stretched out and his crutch lay beside them. He leaned back on his arms, hands flat on the black dirt, face turned to the sun, eyes shut. He wore shorts and a loose, ragged shirt. He was both old and damaged.
Hsing came up beside him and said his name. He grunted but did not move or open his eyes. She squatted down by him. After a while his mouth looked so beautiful to her that she leaned over and kissed it.
He opened his eyes.
“You were asleep.”
“I was praying.”
“Praying!”
“Worshipping?”
“Worshipping what?”
“The sun?” he said, tentative.
“Don’t ask me!”
He looked at her, exactly the Luis look, tenderly inquisitive, noncommittal, unreserved; ever since they were five years old he had been looking at her that way. Looking into her.
“Who else would I ask?” he asked her.
“If it’s about praying and worshipping, not me.”
She made herself more comfortable, settling her rump on the berm of an irrigation channel, facing Luis. The sun was warm on her shoulders. She wore a hat Luisita had inexpertly woven of grain-straw.
“A tainted vocabulary,” he said.
“A suspect ideology,” she said.
And the words suddenly gave her pleasure, the big words — vocabulary! ideology! — Talk was all short, small, heavy words: food, roof, tool, get, make, save, live. The big words they never used any more, the long, airy words carried her mind up for a moment like a mariposa, fluttering aloft on the wind.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know.” He pondered. She watched him ponder. “When I smashed my knee, and had to lie around,” he said, “I decided there was no use living without delight.”
After a silence she said, in a dry tone, “Bliss?”
“No. Bliss is a form of VU. No, I mean delight. I never knew it on the ship. Only here. Now and then. Moments of unconditional existence. Delight.”
Hsing sighed.
“Hard earned,” she said.
“Oh yes.”
They sat in silence for some time. The south wind gusted, ceased, blew softly again. It smelled of wet earth and bean-flowers.
Luis said:
“ ‘When I am a grandmother, they say, I may walk under heaven, On another world.’ ”
“Oh,” Hsing said.
Her breath caught in another, deeper sigh, a sob. Luis put his hand over hers.
“Alejo went fishing with the children, upstream,” she said.
He nodded.
“I worry so much,” she said. “I worry the delight away.”
He nodded again. Presently he said, “But I was thinking . . . when I was worshipping, or whatever, what I was thinking, was about the dirt.” He picked up a palmful of the crumbly, dark floodplain soil, and let it fall from his hand, watching it fall. “I was thinking that if I could, I’d get up and dance on it. . . . Dance for me,” he said, “will you, Hsing?”
She sat a moment, then stood up — it was a hard push up off the low berm, her own knees were not so good these days — and stood still.
“I feel stupid,” she said.
She raised her arms up and outward, like wings, and looked down at her feet on the dirt. She pushed off her sandals, pushed them aside, and was barefoot. She stepped to the left, to the right, forward, back. She danced up to him holding her hands forward, palms down. He took them, and she pulled him up. He laughed; she did not quite smile. Swaying, she lifted her bare feet from the dirt and set them down again while he stood still, holding her hands. They danced together that way.
HarperCollins e-book extras:
On Despising Genres
Basically my attitude is that genre is A) an unpronounceable French word; B) a very useful descriptive tool; and C) a pernicious instrument of prejudice.
Division of fiction into genres is like all classification, useful — useful to readers who like fiction of a certain kind or about certain subjects and want to know where to find it in a bookstore or library; and useful to critics and students and Common Readers who have realized that not all fictions are written in the same way with the same aesthetic equipment.
Genre has no use at all as a value category and should never be used as such.
But the concept or category of genre is used to evaluate fiction unread. To sort out the real books — that is, realistic fiction — from the “subliterature” — that is, everything else — every other kind of fiction written in this century. Everything but realism, including the very oldest and most widespread forms of story such as fantasy, gets shoved into a ghetto.
I mostly live in ghettos. My fiction-ghettos are kiddilit, YA, regional, historical, SF, fantasy. I write rea
lism too, but that’s not a ghetto, that’s Lit City. Where the real people live. At least it was until a bunch of subversive South Americans came along and made this barrio called Magic Realism, which kind of shook up the vanilla suburbs and in fact may have actually breached some ghetto walls. But magic realism gets shelved with realism. Why?
Genre categories are confirmed and perpetuated by the shelving practices of bookstores. Here in Portland, our Powell’s Books subcategorizes right down to Sea Stories — Napoleonic Era. Our Multnomah County Library is less detailed and invidious in gentrification-by-shelving. It sets apart only four genres from fiction as a whole: mystery, SF, Western, and YA. In “New Books” there are several genre shelves such as Suspense and Romance, but if thrillers and romances outlive the New Book category they get shelved in Fiction. The science fiction section includes fantasies and horror novels, neither of which belong there; the attitude apparently is, “This is irresponsibly imaginative so it’s SF.”
Not only is this practice incredibly invidious, randomly including some genres with the Real Books and excluding others, but it’s also shamelessly inconsistent: the librarians admit that they use personal evaluation of the quality of the book in deciding where to shelve it. Tolkien is famous, so Tolkien gets shelved with Realism. But almost no SF gets de-ghettoized this way, because few librarians read enough SF or fantasy or know enough about it to pick out the books of “genuine literary value” from the commercial schlock.
Commercial schlock is not limited to genre fiction — and so fiction of absolutely no literary merit at all, commercial junk realism, gets shelved with Austen and Bront韡nd Woolf, while SF and fantasy of real merit and real interest gets treated as junk by definition. No wonder writers like Kurt Vonnegut deny strenuously that their SF is SF — no wonder fantasists try to crawl under the magic realism label. They want respect.
Segregated shelving helps addicts find their fix. But couldn’t its convenience to readers in libraries be replaced by really good lists for addicts? Lists describe and make accessible without evaluating. Our library here in Portland — Multnomah County Library — has a wonderful “readers’ advisory binder” at the desk at the Central Library branch, listing all the popular genres and others I never would have thought of, such as baseball novels. Thrillers are divided into Spy, Legal, Techno, and Apocalyptic. Romance has seven subcategories: Family Saga, Gothic, Historical, Light, Period, Suspense, and Regency. I looked in vain for Bodice-Rippers. My two favorite subgenres were Novels About Older Women and Younger Men, and Seriously Humorous Mysteries.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories Page 37