Under his leadership, indeed, more and more people declared themselves to be angels. The number of conversions in the first decades of the second century brought on a call for an Article 4 hearing on Religious Manipulation by a group who claimed that Patel Inbliss had formed and promulgated a religious cult which worshipped Terry as a god, thus threatening secular authority. The Central Council never actually called a committee to investigate the charge. The angels asserted that, though they venerated Kim Terry as a guide and teacher, they held him to be no more divine than the least of them. Are we not all angels? And Patel Inbliss argued cogently that the practice of Bliss in no way conflicted with polity and governance, but on the contrary supported it in every particular: for the laws and ways of the world were the laws and ways of Bliss. The Constitution of Discovery was holy writ. The life of the ship was bliss itself—the joyful mortal imitation of immortal reality. “Why would the followers of perfect law disobey it?” he asked. “Why would those who enjoy the angelic order seek disorder? Why would the inhabitants of heaven seek any other place or way to live?”
Angels were, in fact, extremely good citizens, active and cooperative in all civic duties, ready to fulfil communal obligations, diligent committee and Council members. In fact, more than half the Central Council at the time were angels. Not seraphim or archangels, as the very devout and those close to Patel Inbliss were nicknamed, but just everyday angels, enjoying the serenity and good fellowship of the Rejoicings, which were by now a familiar, accepted element of life for many people. The idea that the beliefs and practices of Bliss could in any way run counter to morality, that to be an angel was to be a rebel, was clearly ridiculous.
Patel Inbliss, now in his seventies, indomitably active, still occupied the Kim homespace.
Inside, Outside
“COULD IT BE THAT THERE are two kinds of people . . .” Luis said to Hsing. Then he paused for so long that she replied crisply, “Yes. Possibly even three. Daring thinkers have postulated as many as five.”
“No. Only two. People who can roll their tongue sideways into a tube and people who can’t.”
She stuck out her tongue at him. They had known since they were six that he could make his tongue into a tube and whistle through it, that she couldn’t, and that it was genetically determined.
“One kind,” he said, “has a need, a lack, they have to have a certain vitamin. The other kind doesn’t.”
“Well?”
“Vitamin Belief.”
She considered.
“Not genetic,” he said. “Cultural. Metaorganic. But as individually real and definite as a metabolic deficiency. People either need to believe or they don’t.”
She still pondered.
“The ones that do don’t believe that the others don’t. They don’t believe that there are people who don’t believe.”
“Hope?” she offered, tentative.
“Hope isn’t belief. Hope’s contingent upon reality, even when it’s not very realistic. Belief dismisses reality.”
“‘The name you can say isn’t the right name,’” said Hsing.
“The corridor you can walk in isn’t the right corridor,” said Luis.
“What’s the harm in believing?”
“It’s dangerous to confuse reality with unreality,” he said promptly. “To confuse desire with power, ego with cosmos. Extremely dangerous.”
“Oooh.” She made a face at his pomposity. After a while she said, “Is that what Terry’s mother meant—‘People need God like a three-year-old needs a chensa.’ What was a chensa, I wonder?”
“A weapon, maybe.”
“I used to go to Rejoicings sometimes with Rosa before she went seraph. I liked a lot of it, actually. The songs. And when they praise things, you know, just ordinary things, and say how everything you do is sacred. I don’t know, I liked it,” she said, a little defensive. He nodded. “But then they’d get into reading all the weird stuff out of the book, about what the ‘voyage’ really is, and what ‘discovery’ actually means, and I’d get claustro. Basically they were saying that there is nothing at all outside. The whole universe is inside. It was weird.”
“They’re right.”
“Oh?”
“For us—they’re right. There is nothing at all outside. Vacuum. Dust.”
“The stars—the galaxies!”
“Light-specks on a screen. We can’t reach them, we can’t get to them. Not us. Not in our lifetime. Our universe is this ship.”
It was an idea so familiar as to be banal and so strange it unnerved her. She pondered.
“And life here is perfect,” Luis said.
“It is?”
“Peace and plenty. Light and warmth. Safety and freedom.”
Well, of course, Hsing thought, and her face showed it.
Luis pressed on—“You did History. All that suffering. Did anybody in the subzero generations ever live as well as we live? Half as well? Most of them were afraid all the time. In pain. They were ignorant. They fought each other over money and religions. They died from diseases and wars and food shortage. It was all like Inner City 2000 or Jungle. It was hell. And this is heaven. Angel Terry was right.”
She was puzzled by his intensity. “So?”
“So did our ancestors arrange to send us from one hell to another hell, by way of heaven? Do you see potential danger in that arrangement?”
“Well,” Hsing said. She considered his metaphor. “Well, for the Sixes, maybe it’ll seem kind of unfair. It’s not going to make much difference to us. We’ll be too doddering to go eva at all, I suppose. Although I’d like to dodder out and see what it looks like. Even if it is hell.”
“That’s why you’re not an angel. You accept the fact that our life, our voyage, has a purpose outside itself. That we have a destination.”
“Do I? I don’t think so. I just sort of hope we do. It would be interesting to be somewhere else.”
“But the angels believe there is nowhere else.”
“Then they’re in for a surprise when we reach Shindychew,” Hsing said. “But then, I expect we all are. . . . Listen, I have to do that chart for Canaval. I’ll see you in class.”
They were second-year college students, nineteen years old, when they had this conversation. They did not know that sophomores had always discussed belief and unbelief and the purpose of existence.
Words from Earth
MESSAGES HAD FOLLOWED, OR PRECEDED, them, of course, ever since Discovery left the planet Dichew, Earth. During the First Generation many personal messages were received. Descendants of Ross Betti: Everybody in Badgerwood is rooting for you! Such transmissions had become rarer as the years went on, and finally vanished. Occasionally there had been major interruptions in reception, once lasting for nearly a year; and as the distance grew, and for some reason particularly during the last five years, distortions and delays and partial losses were the norm. Still, Discovery had not been forgotten. Words came. Images arrived. Somebody, or some program, on the Planet of Origin kept sending out a steady trickle of news, information, updates on technology, a poem or a fiction, occasionally whole periodicals or volumes of political commentary, literature, philosophy, criticism, art, documentaries; only all the definitions had changed and you couldn’t be sure whether what you were watching or reading was invented or actual, because how could you possibly tell Earth reality from Earth fiction, and the science was just as bad, because they took discoveries for granted and forgot to define the terms they were using. Generations One and Two had spent a lot of time and passion and intelligence analysing and interpreting receptions from Dichew. There had been whole schools of opinion in Quads One and Four about the reports concerning apparent conflict between what were apparently philosophical-religious schools of thought, or possibly national or ethnic divisions, called (in Arabic) The True Followers and The Authentic Followers. Thousands or millions—the transmissions spoke of billions but this was certainly a distortion or error—at any rate a great number of
people on Dichew had killed one another, had been killed, because of this conflict of ideas or beliefs. On Discovery, there were violent arguments about what the ideas, the beliefs, the conflicts were. The arguments went on for decades, but nobody died because of them.
By the Third and Fourth Generations the general content of Earth transmissions had become so arcane that only devotees followed them closely; most people paid no attention to them at all. If something important had happened on Dichew somebody or other would notice, and in any case whatever was received went into the Archives. Or was supposed to be going into the Archives.
4-Canaval
WHEN SHE CAME TO COLLEGE Center to enroll for her first-year courses, Hsing found that the professor of Navigation, 4-Canaval Hiroshi, had requested that she be skipped over the first year of his course and put into the second. “What if I wasn’t intending to take Nav at all?” she demanded of the registrar, indignant at this high-handed order. But she was flattered; clearly Canaval had been watching the High School math and astro classes, and had his eye on her. She signed up for Nav 2.
Navigation was an honored profession but not a glamorous one, not like being an evaman or an innet entertainer. To many people the idea of navigation was a little threatening. They explained it by saying that in most jobs you could make a mistake and of course it would cause trouble (any event in a glass bowl is likely to affect everything in the glass bowl), but in jobs like atmosphere control and navigation, a mistake could hurt or even kill people—hurt or kill everybody.
All the systems were full of failsafes and backups and redundancies, but there was, notoriously, no way to failsafe navigation. The computers, of course, were infallible, but they had to be operated by humans; the course had to be continually adjusted; all the navigators could do was check and re-check their calculations and the computers’ calculations and operations, check and re-check input and feedback, check and correct for error, and keep on doing it, over and over and over. If the calculations and operations all agreed with each other, if it all checked out, then nothing happened. You just did it all over again forever.
Navigation was about as thrilling as running the bacteria counts, also an unpopular job. And the mathematical talent and training required to do it was formidable. Not many students took Nav for more than the required first year, and very few went on to specialise in it. 4-Canaval was looking for candidates, or victims, as some of his students said.
If the unpopularity of the subject rose from some deeper discomfort, some dread of what it dealt with—the voyage through space, the very movement of the shipworld, its course, its goal—nobody talked about it. But Hsing thought about it sometimes.
Canaval Hiroshi was in his forties, a short, straight-backed man with coarse, bushy black hair and a blunt face, like the pictures of Zen Masters, Hsing thought. He was related to Luis; they were half-cousins; at moments Hsing saw a resemblance. In class he was brusque, impatient, intolerant of error. Students complained: one insignificant mistake in a computer simulation and he tossed the whole thing out, hours of work—“worthless.” He was certainly both arrogant and obsessive, but Hsing defended him against charges of megalomania. “It’s not his ego,” she said. “I don’t think he has an ego. All he has is his work. And it does have to be right. Without error. I mean, if we get too close to a gravity sink, does it matter whether it’s by a parsec or by a kilometer?”
“All right, but a millimeter isn’t going to do any harm,” said Aki, who had just had a beautiful charting deleted as “worthless.”
“A millimeter now, a parsec in ten years,” Hsing said priggishly. She saw Aki roll his eyes. She didn’t care. Nobody else seemed to understand the excitement of doing what Canaval did, the thrill of getting it right—not nearly right, but exactly right. Perfection. It was beautiful, the work. It was abstract, yet human, even humble, because what you wanted didn’t matter. And you couldn’t rush it; you had to get all the small things right, take care of all the details, in order to get to the great thing. There was a way to follow. It took constant, ceaseless, alert attention to that way to stay on it. It was not a matter of following your wish or your will, but of following what was. Being aware, all the time, being centered. Celestial Navigation: heaven-sailing. Out there was infinity. Through it there was one way.
And if knowing this went to your head, you always got reminded, immediately and inarguably, that you were completely dependent on the computers.
In third-year Nav, Canaval always gave a problem: The computers are down for five seconds. Using the coordinates and settings given, plot course for the next five seconds without using the computers.—Students either gave it up within hours, or worked days at it and then gave it up as a waste of time. Hsing did not hand the problem back in. At the end of term, Canaval asked her for it. “I thought I’d play around with it in vacation,” she said.
“Why?”
“I like the computations. And I want to know how long it’ll take me.”
“How long so far?”
“Forty-four hours.”
He nodded so slightly that perhaps he didn’t nod, and turned away. He was incapable of showing approval.
He did, however, have a capacity for pleasure, and laughed when he found things funny, usually quite simple things, silly mistakes, foolish mishaps. His laughter was a loud, childish ha! ha! ha! After he laughed he always said, smiling broadly, “Stupid! Stupid!”
“He really is a Zen Master,” she told Luis in the snackery. “I mean really. He sits zazen. He gets up at four to sit. Three hours. I wish I could do that. But I’d have to go to bed at twenty, I’d never get any studying done.” Observing a lack of response in Luis, she said, “And how is your v-corpse?”
“Reduced to a virtual skeleton,” Luis said, still looking a bit absent.
College students chose a professional course in third year. Hsing was in Nav, Luis in Med. They no longer had any classes together, but they met daily in the snackery, the gyms, or the library. They no longer visited each other’s room.
Sex in the Glass Bowl
LOVERS DO NOT RUN AWAY (where is away?). Lovers’ meetings are public matters. Your procreative capacity is a matter of intense and immediate social interest and concern. Contraception is guaranteed by an injection every twenty-five days, for girls from the onset of menstruation, for boys at a time determined by medical staff. Failure to come to the Clinic for your conshot at the due date and hour is followed by immediate public inquiry: Clinic staff people come to your class, your gym, your section, corridor, homespace, announcing your name and your delinquency loud and clear.
People are permitted to go without conshots on the following conditions or undertakings: sterilization, or completion of menopause; a pledge either of chastity or of strict homosexuality; or an intention to conceive, formally declared by both the man and the woman. A woman who violates her undertaking to be chaste or conceives a child with anyone but the declared partner can get a morning-after shot, but both she and her sexual partner must then go back to conshots for two years. Unauthorised conceptions are aborted. The inexorable social and genetic reasons for all this are made clear during your education. But all the reasons in the world wouldn’t work if you could keep your sexual life private. You can’t.
Your corridor knows, your family knows, your section, your ancestry, your whole quadrant knows who you are and where you are and what you do and who you do it with, and they all talk. Shame and honor are powerful social engines. If enforced by total publicity and attached to rational need, rather than to hierarchic fantasies and the will to dominate, shame and honor can keep a society running steadily for a long time.
A teenager may move out of the parent’s homespace and find a single on another corridor, in another section, even change quadrants; but everybody in that new corridor, section, quad will know who goes in and out your door. They will be observant, and interested, and vigilant, and curious, and mostly well-disposed, and always hoping for a scandal, and they will talk.
The Warn, or Warren, was the first place many young people moved to when they left parentspace. It was a set of corridors in Quad Four, close to the College; all the spaces were singles; due to the shape of the housing of the main accelerator, walls in the Warn weren’t all at right angles, and some of the spaces were substandard size. The students moved partitions around and created a maze of cubicles and sharespaces. The Warn was noisy and disorganised and smelled of dirty clothes. Sleep there was occasional, sex was casual. But everybody turned up on time at Clinic for their conshot.
Luis lived near the Warn in a triple with two other medical students, Tan Bingdi and Ortiz Einstein. Hsing was still in the Quad Two homespace with Yao. She had a twenty-minute walk to and from college daily.
After the usual adolescent period of experimenting around, when she entered college Hsing had pledged chastity. She said she didn’t want conshots controlling her body’s cycles, and didn’t want emotion controlling her mind; not till she was through college.
Luis continued to get his conshot every twenty-five days, did not pledge, but did not go to bed with any of his friends. He never had. His only sexual experiences had been the general promiscuities of teenparties.
They knew all this about each other because it was public knowledge. When they were together they didn’t talk about these matters. Their silences were as deeply and comfortably mutual as their conversations.
Their friendship was of course equally public. Their friends speculated freely about why Hsing and Luis didn’t have sex and whether and when they’d get around to it.
Beneath their friendship was something that was not public, and was not friendship: a pledge made without words, but with the body; a non-action with profound results. They were each other’s privacy. They had found where away was. The key to it was silence.
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