The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He knew the quotation. Hsing and her father Yao had both studied with 3-Tan, who as well as being the Librarian was a scholar of the Chinese classics, and all three were fans of Old Long-Ears. Growing up in Quad Two, Luis had heard the book quoted till he read a translation of it in self-defense. Recently he had re-read it, trying to figure out how much of it made sense to him. Liu Yao had copied the whole thing out in the ancient Chinese characters. It had taken over a year. “Just practicing calligraphy,” he said. Watching the complex, mysterious figures flow from Yao’s brush, Luis had been moved more strongly than he ever had been moved by the seemingly comprehensible translated words. As if not to understand was to understand.

  Circulation

  PAPER, MADE FROM RICE STRAW, was rare stuff. Little writing was done by hand. Yao had got permission to use several meters of paper for his copying, but he could not keep it out of circulation for long. He gave pieces of the scroll to Chi-An friends. They would put them up on the wall for a while, then recycle them. No inessential artifact could survive more than a few years. Clothes, artworks, paper copies of texts, toys, all were given back to the cycle, sometimes with a ceremony of grief. A funeral for the beloved doll. The portrait of Grandfather might be copied into the electronic memory bank when the original was recycled. Arts were practical or ephemeral or immaterial—a wedding shirt, bodypaint, a song, a story in an all-net magazine. The cycle was inexorable. The people of Discovery were their own raw material. They had everything they needed, they had nothing they could keep. The only poverty such a world could suffer would follow from the loss or waste of energy/matter tied up in useless objects or ejected into space.

  Or, in the very long run, from entropy.

  Once upon a time a dermatologist doing eva to repair a slight encounter-graze on the underhull had tossed his alloy gun to his companion a few meters away, who missed the catch. The film-story of the Lost Gun was a dramatic moment in second-grade Ecology. Oh! the children cried in horror as the tool, gently revolving, drifted among the stars, farther and farther away. There—look—it’s going to away! It’s going to away forever!

  The light of the stars moved the world. Hydrogen acceptors fed the tiny fusion reactors that powered the electrical and mechanical systems and the Fresno accelerators that sped Discovery on its way. The little world was affected from outside only by dust and photons. It accepted nothing from outside but atoms of hydrogen.

  Within itself it was entirely self-sustaining, self-renewing. Every cell shed by human skin, every speck of dust worn from a fabric or a bearing, every molecule of vapor from leaf or lung, was drawn into the filters and the reconverters, saved, recombined, re-used, reconfigured, reborn. The system was in equilibrium. There were reserves for emergencies, never yet called upon, and the store of Unreplaceable Supplies Tan had mentioned, some of them raw materials, others hi-tech items which the ship lacked the means to duplicate: a surprisingly small amount, stored in two cargobays. The effect of the second law of thermodynamics operating in this almost-closed system had been reduced to almost-nil.

  Everything had been thought about, seen to, provided for. All the necessities of life. Why am I here? Why am I? A purpose for living: a reason. That, too, the Zeroes had tried to provide.

  For all the middle generations of the two-century voyage, their reason for being was to be alive and well, to keep the ship in good running order, and to furnish it with another generation, so that it could accomplish its mission, their mission, the purpose to which they were all essential. A purpose which had meant so much to the Zeroes, the earthborn. Discovery. Exploration of the universe. Scientific information. Knowledge.

  An irrelevant knowledge, useless, meaningless to people living and dying in the closed, complete world of the ship.

  What did they need to know that they didn’t know?

  They knew that life was inside: light, warmth, breath, companionship. They knew that outside was nothing. The void. Death. Death silent, immediate, absolute.

  Syndromes

  “INFECTIOUS DISEASES” WERE SOMETHING YOU read about or saw hideous pictures of in history films. In every generation there were a few cancers, a few systemic disorders; kids broke their arms, athletes overdid it; hearts and other organs went wrong or wore out; cells followed their programs, aged, died; people aged, died. A major responsibility of doctors was seeing that death did not come too hard.

  The angels spared them even that responsibility, being strong on “positive dying,” which made of death a devout communal exercise, leading the dying person into trance induced by hypnosis, chanting, music, and other techniques; the death itself was greeted by ecstatic rejoicing.

  Many doctors dealt almost entirely with gestation, birth, and death: “easy out, easy in.” Diseases were words in textbooks.

  But there were syndromes.

  In the First and Second Generations many men in their thirties and forties had suffered rashes, lethargy, joint pains, nausea, weakness, inability to concentrate. The syndrome was tagged SD, somatic depression. The doctors judged it to be psychogenic.

  It was in response to the SD syndrome that certain areas of professional work had been gender-restricted. A measure was put up for discussion and vote: men were to do all structural maintenance and dermatology. The last—repair and upkeep of the skin of the world where it interfaced with space—was the only job that required doing eva: going outside the world.

  There were loud protests. The “division of labor,” perhaps the oldest and deepest-founded of all the institutions of power-imbalance—was that irrational, fanciful set of prescriptions and proscriptions to be reinstituted here, where sanity and balance must, at the cost of life itself, be preserved?

  Discussions in Council and quad meetings went on for a long time. The argument for gender-restriction was that men, unable to bear and nourish children, needed a compensatory responsibility to valorise their greater muscular strength as well as their hormone-related aggressivity and need for display.

  A great many men and women found this argument insupportable in every sense of the word. A slightly larger number found it convincing. The citizens voted to restrict all evas to men.

  After a generation had passed, the arrangement was seldom questioned. Its popular justification was that since men were biologically more expendable than women they should do the dangerous work. In fact no one had ever been killed doing eva, or even taken a dangerous dose of radiation; but the sense of danger glamorised the rule. Active, athletic boys volunteered for dermatology in numbers far larger than were needed, and so served on a reserve rota with regular training evas. Evamen had a distinctive way of dressing: brown canvas shorts, a carefully embroidered sleeve-patch of stars on black.

  The outbreak of SD had leveled off eventually to a low endemic level, a drop that some said was connected to the eva restrictions and some said was not.

  The Thirds had dealt with a high incidence of spontaneous abortions and stillbirths, never explained, and fortunately lasting only a few years. The episode had caused an increase in late pregnancies and two-child families until the optimum replacement ratio was recovered.

  In the Fourth and Fifth generations a perhaps related, even more debilitating set of symptoms appeared, diagnosed but as yet unexplained, tagged TSS, tactile sensitivity syndrome. The symptoms were random pains and extreme neural sensitivity. TSS sufferers avoided crowds, could not eat in the refectories, complained that everything they touched hurt; they used dark glasses and earplugs and covered their hands and feet with things called sox. As no explanation or cure had been found, myths of prevention sprang up and folk remedies flourished. Quad Two had a low incidence of TSS, and so the Chi-An food style—rice, soy, ginger, garlic—was imitated. A reclusive life seemed to ease the symptoms, so some people with TSS tried to keep their children out of kidherd and school. But here the law intervened. No parental decision was permitted to impair the welfare of the child and of the community as determined by the Constitution and the judgment of th
e Council on Education. The children went to school and suffered no visible ill effects. Dark glasses, earplugs, and sox were a brief fad among high-schoolers, but the disorder affected few people under twenty. The angels asserted that no practitoner of Bliss suffered from TSS, and that to escape it, all you had to do was learn to rejoice.

  Ancestors of the Angels

  0-KIM JAN HAD BEEN THE youngest of the Zeroes, ten days old at Embarkation.

  0-Kim Jan was a power in the Council for many years. Her genius was for organisation, order, a firm, impartial administration. The Chi-Ans called her Lady Confucius.

  She had a late-born son, 1-Kim Terry. Her son led an obscure life, interrupted by bouts of somatic depression, as a programmer for the primary schools innet, until 0-Kim died in the year 79. She was the last of the Zeroes, the earthborn. Her death was felt as momentous.

  Her funeral was attended by a very great crowd, far too many even for the Temenos to hold. The ceremony was broadcast on the allnet. Almost every person in the world watched it and so saw the inception of a new religion.

  Church and State

  THE CONSTITUTION WAS EXPLICIT IN decreeing the absolute separation of creed from polity. Article 4 specifically named the monotheisms that figured so large in history, including the religion that had controlled the dominant governments at the time the voyage of Discovery was planned. Any attempt “to influence an election or the deliberation of a legislative body by overt or covert invocation of the principles or tenets of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, or any other religious creed or institution,” if confirmed by an ad hoc committee on Religious Manipulation, could be punished by public reprimand, loss of office, or permanent disqualification from any position of responsibility.

  In the early decades there had been many challenges to Article 4. Though the planners had consciously tried to select Discovery’s crew for what they saw as scientific impartiality of mind, the monotheist tendency to limit understanding to a single mode was already deeply embedded in much of their science. They had expected that in a deliberately, widely heterogeneous population the practice of tolerance would be not so much a virtue as a necessity. Still, in the Zero Generation, after several years of space travel people who had never given religion much thought, or who had thought of it as inimical, often took to identifying themselves as Mormon, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu. They had found that religious affiliations and practices gave them needed support and comfort in their sudden, utter, irrevocable exile from everyone on Earth and from the Earth itself.

  Faithful atheists were incensed by this outbreak of piety. Actual memories of the horrors of the Fundamentalist Purification and historical evidence of endless genocides in the name of God cast their shadows across the mildest forms of public worship. Eclecticism waved its ineffectual hands. Accusations were hurled, challenges made. Ad hoc Committees on Religious Manipulation were convened and reconvened.

  But the generations after the Zeroes had no experience of exile; they lived where they were born, where their parents had been born. And miscegenation made ancestral pieties irrelevant. It was difficult for a Jewish Presbyterian Parsee to choose which of his Puritanisms to obey. It was not difficult to forgo the incompatible righteousnesses of a Sunni-Mormon-Brahmin inheritance.

  When 0-Kim died, Article 4 had not been invoked for years. There were religious practices, but no religious institutions. Practice was private or familial. People sat vipassana or zazen, prayed for guidance or in praise. A family celebrated the birth of Jesus or the kindness of Ganesh or the memory of the Passover on more or less appropriate days of the monthless year. Of all ceremonies, funerals, which were always public, were the most likely to bring the trappings as well as the essentials of religion into play. Beautiful old words in beautiful old languages were spoken, and rites of mourning and consolation were observed.

  The Funeral and the Birth of Bliss

  0-KIM HAD BEEN A MILITANT atheist. She had said, “People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.” Her funeral was scrupulously free of references to the supernatural or quotations from holy books. People spoke briefly—some not briefly enough—about her effect on their life and everyone’s life, about her charisma, her incorruptibility, her powerful, parental, practical care for the future generations. And they spoke with emotion of this death of the “Last of the Earthborn.” Children of children watching this ceremony, they said, would be alive when the Mission that the Founders sent forth came at last to its fulfilment—when the Destination was reached. Kim Jan’s spirit would be with them then.

  Finally, as was customary, the child of the deceased rose to say the last words.

  1-Kim Terry came up on the podium in front of the people and the innet camcorders beside the bier where his mother’s body lay draped in white. There was great intensity and purposefulness in his movements. To people who knew him, he looked changed—assured, calm. He was not tearful or shaky-voiced. He looked out over the crowd that filled the whole floor of the Temenos. “He shone,” several people said later.

  “The last of those whose body was born of Earth is gone,” he said in a clear, strong voice, which reminded many of his mother, a fine speaker in Council. “She has gone to the glory of which her body was the bright shadow. We here, now, travel away from the body into the realm of the soul. We are free. We are utterly free of darkness, of sin, of Earth. Through the corridors of the future I bring the message to you. I am the messenger, the angel. And you, you are angels. You are the chosen. God has called you, called you by name. You are the blessed. You are divine beings, sacred souls, who have been called to live in bliss. All that remains to us to do is to know who we are, that we are the inhabitants of heaven. That we are the blessed, the heavenborn, chosen for the eternal voyage. That we are, each one of us, sacred, born to live in bliss and die to greater bliss.” He raised his arms in a great, dignified gesture of blessing over the startled, silent multitude.

  He spoke on for another twenty minutes.

  “Unhinged with grief,” some people said as they left the Temenos or turned off the set; cynics responded, “Maybe with relief?” But many people discussed the ideas and images Kim Terry had put into their minds, feeling that he had given them something they had craved without knowing it, or felt without being able to say it.

  Becoming Angels

  THE FUNERAL HAD BEEN EPOCHAL. Now that no living person in the world remembered the planet of origin, was there any reason to think anyone there remembered them? Of course they sent out radio messages concerning the progress of the Discovery regularly, as specified in the Constitution, but was anybody listening?

  “Orphans of the Void,” a mawkish song with a good tune, sung by the Fourth Quad group Nubetels, became a rage overnight. And people talked about 1-Kim Terry’s speech.

  They went by his homespace to talk to him, some concerned, some curious. They were received by a couple named 2-Patel Jimmy and 2-Lung Yuko, his next-door neighbors. Terry is resting, they said, but he’ll talk this evening. Did you feel the wonderful feelings while he was speaking in the Temenos? they asked. Did you see how different, how changed he is? We’ve watched him change, they said, watched him become wise, radiant, eloquent. Come hear him. He’ll speak this evening.

  For a while it was a kind of fad to go hear Terry speak about Bliss. There were jokes about it. Atheists railed about cult hysteria and hypocritical egotrippers. Then some people forgot about it, and others kept going to the Kim homespace cycle after cycle, year after year, for the evening meetings with Terry, Jimmy, and Yuko. People held meetings in their own homespaces, with little feasts, songs, meditations, devotions. They called these meetings angelic rejoicings, and called themselves friends in bliss, or angels.

  When these followers of Kim Terry began to preface their kin-name with Angel as a kind of title, there was a good deal of disapproval and discussion in the councils. The angels agreed that such group identification was potentially divisive. Terry himself told his followers not to
go against the will of the majority: “For, whether or not we know it, are we not all angels?”

  Yuko, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s little son Inbliss lived with Terry in the homespace he had shared with his mother. They led the nightly meetings. Kim Terry himself become increasingly reclusive. In the early years he now and then spoke to meetings held in the Quad One Circus or the Temenos, but as the years went by he appeared less and less often in public, speaking to his followers only over the innet. To those who went to the meetings at his homespace he might appear briefly, blessing and encouraging them; but his followers believed that his bodily presence was unimportant compared to his angelic presence, which was continual. Bodily matters darkened bliss, obscuring the soul’s needs. “The corridors I walk are not these corridors,” Terry said.

  His death in the year 123 brought on a deep hysteria of mourning combined with festivity, for his followers, embracing his doctrine of Actuality as explained by his energetic interpreter, 3-Patel Inbliss, celebrated his apparent death as a rebirth into the Real World, to which the shipworld was merely the means of access, the “vehicle of bliss.”

  Patel Inbliss lived on alone in the Kim homespace after Terry’s and his parents’ death, holding meetings there, speaking at home Rejoicings, talking on the innet, working on and circulating the collection of sayings and meditations called The Angel to the Angels. Patel Inbliss was a man of great intelligence, ambition, and devotion, with a genius for organisation. Under his guidance the Rejoicings had become less disorderly and ecstatic, indeed were now quite sedate. He discouraged the wearing of special clothing—undyed shorts and kurtas for men, white clothing and headscarves for women—which many angels had adopted. To dress differently was divisive, he said. Are we not all angels?