These words are archaic, history-words, attached only to history-images: receptacles were filled with “dirty” “garbage” that was poured into vehicles which carried it to “trash dumps” to “throw away.” What does that mean? Where is “away”?
Roxana and Rosa
WHEN SHE WAS SIXTEEN HSING read the Diaries of 0-Fayez Roxana. That self-probing mind, forever questioning its own honesty, was attractive to the adolescent. Roxana was rather like Luis, Hsing thought, but a woman. Sometimes she needed to be with a woman’s mind, not a man’s, but Lena was obsessed with her basketball scores, and Rosa had gone totally angel, and Grandmother had died. Hsing read Roxana’s Diaries.
She realised for the first time that the people of the Zero Generation, the worldmakers, had believed that they were imposing an immense sacrifice on their descendants. What the Zeroes gave up, what they lost in leaving Earth—Roxana always used the English word—was compensated to them by their mission, their hope, and (as Roxana was well aware) by the tremendous power they had wielded in creating the very fabric of life for thousands of people for generations to come. “We are the gods of Discovery,” Roxana wrote. “May the true gods forgive us our arrogance!”
But when she speculated on the years to come, she did not write of her descendants as children of the gods, but as victims, seeing them with fear, guilt, and pity, helpless prisoners of their ancestor’s will and desire. “How will they forgive us?” she mourned. “We who took the world from them before they were ever born—we who took the seas, the mountains, the meadowlands, the cities, the sunlight from them, all their birthright? We have left them trapped in a cage, a tin can, a specimen box, to live and die like laboratory rats and never see the moon, never run across a field, never know what freedom is!”
I don’t know what cages or tin cans or specimen boxes are, Hsing thought with impatience, but whatever a laboratory rat is, I’m not. I’ve run across a v-field in Countryside. You don’t need fields and hills and all that stuff to be free! Freedom’s what your mind does, what your soul is. It has nothing to do with all that Dichew-stuff. Don’t worry, Grandmother! she said to the long-dead writer. It all worked out just fine. You made a wonderful world. You were a very wise, kind god.
When Roxana got depressed about her poor deprived descendants she also tended to go on and on about Shindychew, which she called the destination planet or just the Destination. Sometimes it cheered her up to imagine what it might be like, but mostly she worried about it. Would it be habitable? Would there be life on it? What kind of life? What would “the settlers” find, how would they cope with what they found, would they send the information back to Earth? That was so important to her. It was funny, poor Roxana worrying about what kind of signals her great-great-great-grandchildren would send “back” in two hundred years to a place they’d never been! But the bizarre idea was a great consolation to her. It was her justification for what they had done. It was the reason. Discovery would build a vast and delicate rainbow bridge across Space, and across it the true gods would walk: information, knowledge. The rational gods. That was Roxana’s recurring image, her solace.
Hsing found her god-imagery tiresome. People with a monotheist ancestry seemed unable to get over it. Roxana’s lower-case metaphorical deities were preferable to the capitalised Gods and Fathers in History and Lit, but she had very little patience with any of them.
Getting the Message
DISAPPOINTED WITH ROXANA, HSING QUARRELED with her friend.
“Rosie, I wish you’d talk about other stuff,” she said.
“I just want to share my happiness with you,” Rosa said in her Bliss voice, soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.
“We used to be happy together without dragging in Bliss.”
Rosa looked at her with a general lovingness that insulted Hsing obscurely but very deeply. We were friends, Rosie! she wanted to cry.
“Why do you think we’re here, Hsing?”
Mistrusting the question, she pondered a bit before she answered. “If you mean that literally, we’re here because the Zero Generation arranged that we should be here. If you mean it in some abstract sense, then I reject the question as loaded. To ask ‘why’ assumes purpose, a final cause. Zero Generation had a purpose: to send a ship to another planet. We’re carrying it out.”
“But where are we going?” Rosa asked with the intense sweetness, the sweet intensity, that made Hsing feel tight, sour, and defensive.
“To the Destination. Shindychew. And you and I will be old grannies when we get there!”
“Why are we going there?”
“To get information and send it back,” Hsing said, having no answer ready except Roxana’s, and then hesitated. She realised that it was a fair question, and that she had never really asked or answered it. “And to live there,” she said. “To find out—about the universe. We are a—we are a voyage. Of discovery. The voyage of the Discovery.”
She discovered the meaning of the name of the world as she said it.
“To discover—?”
“Rosie, this leading-question bit belongs in babygarden. ‘And what do we call this nice curly letter?’ Come on. Talk to me, don’t manipulate me!”
“Don’t be afraid, angel,” Rosa said, smiling at Hsing’s anger. “Don’t be afraid of joy.”
“Don’t call me angel. I liked you when you were just you, Rosa.”
“I never had any idea who I was before I knew Bliss,” Rosa said, no longer smiling, and with such simplicity that Hsing felt both awed and ashamed.
But when she left Rosa, she was bereft. She had lost her friend for years, her beloved for a while. They wouldn’t link when they grew up, as she had dreamed. She was damned if she’d be an angel! But oh, Rosie, Rosie. She tried to write a poem. Only two lines came:
We will always meet and never meet again.
Our corridors lead us forever apart.
What Does Apart Mean in a Closed World?
IT WAS HSING’S FIRST REAL loss. Grandmother Meiling had been such a cheerful, kindly presence, her death had been so unexpected, so quietly abrupt, that Hsing had never been entirely aware that she was gone. It seemed as if she still lived down the corridor. To think of her was not to grieve, but to be comforted. But Rosa was lost.
Hsing brought all the vigor and passion of her youth to her first grief. She walked in shadow. Certain parts of her mind might have been darkened permanently. Her fierce resentment of the angels for taking Rosa from her led her to think that some of the older people of her ancestry were right: it was no use trying to understand other-ancestry people. They were different. They were best avoided. Keep to our own kind. Keep to the middle, keep to the way.
Even Yao, tired of fellow-workers in the plantlabs preaching Bliss, quoted Old Long-Ears—“They talk, they don’t know. They know, they don’t talk.”
Fools
“SO YOU KNOW?” LUIS SAID, when she repeated the line to him. “You Chi-Ans?”
“No. Nobody knows. I just don’t like preaching!”
“Lots of people do, though,” Luis said. “They like preaching and they like being preached to. All kinds of people.”
Not us, she thought, but didn’t say. After all, Luis wasn’t Chinese Ancestry.
“Just because you have a flat face,” he said, “you don’t have to make a wall out of it.”
“I don’t have a flat face. That’s racist.”
“Yes you do. The Great Wall of China. Come on out, Hsing. It’s me. Hybrid Luis.”
“You aren’t any more hybrid than I am.”
“Much more.”
“You don’t think Jael is Chinese!” she jeered.
“No, she’s pure Nor-An. But my birthmother’s half Euro and half Indo and my father’s one quarter each Southamerican and Afro and the other half Japanese, if I have it straight. Whatever it all means. What it means is I have no ancestry. Only ancestors. But you! You look like Yao and your grandmother, and you talk like them, and you learned Chinese from them, and yo
u grew up here in the heart of an ancestry, and you’re in process right now of doing the old Chi-An Exclusion Act. Your ancestry comes from the most racist people in history.”
“Not so! The Japanese—the Euros—the Northamericans—”
They argued amicably for a while on sketchy data, and agreed that probably everybody on Dichew had been racist, as well as sexist, classist, and obsessed with money, that incomprehensible but omnipresent element of all the histories. They got sidetracked into economics, which they had been trying to understand in history class. They talked about money for a while, very stupidly.
If everybody has access to the same food, clothing, furniture, tools, education, information, work, and authority, and hoarding is useless because you can have for the asking, and gambling is an idle sport because there’s nothing to lose, so that wealth and poverty have become mere metaphors—“rich in love,” “poor in spirit”—how is one to understand the importance of money?
“Really they were awful fools,” Hsing said, voicing the heresy all intelligent young people arrived at sooner or later.
“Then we are too,” Luis said, maybe believing it, maybe not.
“Oh Luis,” Hsing said with a long, deep sigh, looking up at the mural on the wall of the High School snackery, currently an abstract of soft curving pinks and golds, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Be an awful fool.”
She nodded.
4-Nova Ed
LUIS WASN’T TURNING OUT THE way his father intended. They both knew it. 4-Nova Ed was a kind man whose existence was centered in his genitals. Stimulation and relief was the pressing issue, but procreation was important to him too. He had wanted a son to carry his name and his genes into the future. He was glad to help make a child for any woman who asked him to, and did so three times; but he had looked long and carefully for the right woman to bear his fatherson. He studied every word of several compatibility charts and genetic mixmatches, though reading wasn’t his favorite occupation; and when he finally decided he’d found the one, he made sure she was willing to control the gender. “A daughter would be fine if I had two, but if it’s one it’s a son, right?”
“A son you want, a son you get,” said 4-Sandstrom Lakshmi, and bore him one. An active, athletic woman, she found the experience of pregnancy so uncomfortable and time-consuming that she never repeated it. “It was your big, brown, Goddam eyes, Ed,” she said. “Never again. Here you are. He’s all yours.” Every now and then Lakshmi turned up at the 4-5 Nova homespace, always bringing a toy appropriate to Luis’s age a year ago or five years from now. Usually she and Ed had what she called commemorative sex. After it she would say, “I wonder what the hell I thought I was doing. Never again! But I guess he’s OK, isn’t he?”
“The kid’s OK!” his father said, heartily and without conviction. “Your brains, my plumbing.”
She worked in Central Communications; Ed was a physical therapist, a good one, but as he said, his ideas were all in his hands. “It’s why I’m such a good lover,” he told his partners, and he was right. He was also a good parent for a baby. He knew how to hold the baby and handle him, and loved to do so. He lacked the fear of the infant, the squeamish dissociation which paralyses less manly men. The delicacy and vigor of the tiny body delighted him. He loved Luis as flesh of his flesh, wholeheartedly and happily, for the first couple of years, and less happily for the rest of his life. As the years went on the pure delight got covered over and buried under a lot of other stuff, a lot of hard feelings.
The child had a deep, silent will and temper. He would never give in and never take things easy. He had colic forever. Every tooth was a battle. He wheezed. He learned to talk before he could walk. By the time he was three he was saying things that left Ed staring. “Don’t talk so Goddam fancy!” he told the child. He was disappointed in his son and ashamed of his disappointment. He had wanted a companion, a double, a kid to teach racquetball to. Ed had been Quad Two racquetball champion six years running.
Luis dutifully learned to play racquetball, never very well, and tried to teach his father a word game called Grammary, which drove Ed nuts. He did outstandingly well at school, and Ed tried to be proud of him. Instead of running around with the kidherd, Luis always brought a Chi-An kid over, a girl, Liu Hsing, and they shut the room door and played for hours, silently. Ed checked, of course. They weren’t up to anything more than all herdkids got up to, but he was glad when they got to their Ceremony and started wearing clothes. In shorts and shirts they looked like little adults. In their nakedness they had been somehow slippery, elusive, mysterious.
As all the growing-up rules came into force, Luis obeyed them. He still preferred the girl Hsing over all the boys and they still saw each other all the time, but never alone together with the door shut. Which meant that when Ed was home he had to listen to them as they did their homework or talked. Talked, talked, shit, how they talked. Until the girl was twelve. Then her ancestry’s rule was that she could only meet a boy in public places and with other people around. Ed found this an excellent idea. He hoped Luis would take up with other girls, maybe get into some boy activities. Luis and Hsing did go around with a group of the Quad Two teens. But the two of them always ended up somewhere, talking.
“When I was sixteen, I’d slept with three girls,” Ed said. “And a couple of guys.” It didn’t come out the way he meant. He meant to confide in Luis, to encourage him, but it sounded like a boast or a reproach.
“I don’t want to have sex yet,” the boy said, sounding stuffy. Ed couldn’t blame him.
“It’s not really a big deal,” Ed said.
“It is for you,” Luis said. “So I guess it is for me.”
“No, what I mean—” But Ed could not say what he meant. “It’s not just fun,” he said lamely.
A pause.
“Beats jerking off,” Ed said.
Luis nodded, evidently in full agreement.
A pause.
“I just want to figure out how to, maybe, you know, how to find my own way, in all that,” the boy said, not as fast with the words as usual.
“That’s OK,” the father said, and they parted with mutual relief. The boy might be slow, Ed thought, but at least he’d grown up in a homespace with plenty of healthy, open, happy sex as an example.
On Nature
IT WAS INTERESTING TO KNOW that Ed had slept with men; it must have been youthful experiment, for he’d never to Luis’s knowledge brought a man home. But he brought women home. Probably every woman of his own generation, Luis thought, and now he was bringing home some of the older Fives. Luis knew the sound of his orgasms by heart—a harsh, increasing hah! hah! HAH!—and had heard every conceivable form of ecstatic female shriek, wail, howl, grunt, gasp, and bellow. The most notable bellower was 4-Yep Sosi, a physical therapist from Quad Three. She had been coming over every now and then ever since Luis could remember. She always brought star-cookies for Luis, even now. Sosi started out going aah, like a lot of them, but her aahs got louder and louder and more and more continuous, rising to a relentless, mindless ululation, so piercing that once Granny 2-Wong down the corridor thought it was an alarm siren and roused up everybody in the Wong compound. It didn’t embarrass Ed at all. Nothing did. “It’s perfectly natural,” he said.
It was a favorite phrase of his. Anything to do with the body was “perfectly natural.” Anything to do with the mind wasn’t.
So, what was “nature”?
As far as Luis could think it through, and he thought about it a good deal his last year in high school, Ed was quite correct. In this world—on this ship, he corrected himself, for he was trying to train his mind in certain habits—on this ship, “nature” was the human body. And to some extent the plants, soils, and water in hydroponics; and the bacterial population. Those only to some extent, because they were so closely controlled by the techs, even more closely controlled than human bodies were.
“Nature,” on the original planet, had meant wha
t was not controlled by human beings. “Nature” was what was substantially previous to control, the raw material for control, or what had escaped from control. Thus the areas of Dichew where few people lived, quadrants that were undesirably dry or cold or steep, had been called “nature,” “wilderness,” or “nature preserves.” In these areas lived the animals, which were also called “natural” or “wild.” And all the “animal” functions of the human body were therefore “natural”—eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, sex, reflex, sleep, shouting, and going off like a siren when somebody licked your clitoris.
Control over these functions wasn’t called unnatural, however, except possibly by Ed. It was called civilisation. Control started affecting the natural body as soon as it was born. And it really began to click in, Luis saw, at seven when you put on clothes and undertook to be a citizen instead of one of the kidherd, the wild bunch, the naked little savages.
Wonderful words!—wild—savage—civilisation—citizen—
No matter how you civilised it, the body remained somewhat wild, or savage, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions, or die. It could never be fully tamed, fully controlled. Even plants, Luis learned from listening to Hsing’s father, however manipulated to serve their symbiotic functions, were not totally predictable or obedient; and the bacteria populations came up constantly with “wild” breeds, possibly dangerous mutations. The only things that could be perfectly controlled were inanimate, the matter of the world, the elements and compounds, solid, liquid, or gas, and the artifacts made from them.
What about the controller, the civiliser itself, the mind? Was it civilised? Did it control itself?
There seemed to be no reason why it should not; yet its failures to do so constituted most of what was taught as History. But that was inevitable, Luis thought, because on Dichew “Nature” had been so huge and so strong. Nothing there was really, absolutely under control, except v-stuff.
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