Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

fumo balls.

  Fumo is a word for concretions, usually whitish or yellowish, of ancient industrial origin, of nearly the same specific gravity as ice. There are fumo belts in certain parts of the oceans, and some beaches are almost entirely composed of small particles of fumo.

  Pandora Worrying About What She Is Doing:

  She Addresses the Reader with Agitation

  HAVE I BURNED all the libraries of Babel?

  Was it I that burned them?

  If they burn, it will be all of us that burned them. But now while I write this they aren’t burnt; the books are on the shelves and all the electronic brains are full of memories. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, and everything is in little bits.

  But, you know, even if we don’t burn it, we can’t take it with us. Many as we are, there’s still too much to carry. It is a dead weight. Even if we keep breeding ten babies every second to bear the load of Civilisation forward into the future, they can’t take it. They’re weak, they keep dying of hunger and tropical diseases and despair, puny little bastards. So I killed them all off. You may have noticed that the real difference between us and the Valley, the big difference, is quite a small thing really. There are not too many of them.

  Was it I that killed the babies?

  Listen, I tried to give them time, that’s all, honestly. I can’t give them history. I don’t know how. But I can give them time—that’s a native gift. All I did was open the box Prometheus left with me. I knew what would come out of it! I know about the Greeks bearing gifts! I know about war and plague and famine and holocaust, indeed I do. Am I not a daughter of the people who enslaved and extirpated the peoples of three continents? Am I not a sister of Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank? Am I not a citizen of the State that fought the first nuclear war? Have I not eaten, drunk, and breathed poison all my life, like the maggot that lives and breeds in shit? Do you take me for innocent, my fellow maggot, colluding Reader? I knew what was in that box my brother-in-law left here. But remember, I’m married to his brother Hindsight, and I have my own ideas about what’s in the bottom of the box, underneath the war, plague, famine, holocaust, and Fimbul Winter. Prometheus, Foresight, Fire-giver, the Great Civiliser, named it Hope. Indeed I hope he was right. But I won’t mind if the box is empty—if all there is in it is some room, some time. Time to look forward, surely; time to look back; and room, room enough to look around.

  Oh, to have room enough! A big room, that holds animals, birds, fish, bugs, trees, rocks, clouds, wind, thunder. A living room.

  Take your time, now.

  Well, now, where’s the fire? Officer, my wife is having a baby in the back seat! Now, now, none of that now. No hurry. Take your time. Here, take it please. I give it to you, it’s yours.

  TIME AND THE CITY

  The City

  The word kach, city, was not used of the communities of the Valley or its neighbors; small or large, they were all called choum, town.

  Stone Telling calls the Condor towns kach, translating their word; normally the word was used only in two compounds: tavkach, the City of Man, and yaivkach, the City of Mind. Both of these words need some explaining.

  YAIVKACH: THE CITY OF MIND.

  Some eleven thousand sites all over the planet were occupied by independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings—computers with mechanical extensions. This network of intercommunicating centers formed a single entity, the City of Mind.

  Yaivkach meant both the sites or centers and the whole network or entity. Most of the sites were small, less than an acre, but several huge desert Cities served as experimental stations and manufacturing centers or contained accelerators, launching pads, and so on. All City facilities were underground and domed, to obviate damage to or from the local environment. It appears that an ever-increasing number were located on other planets or bodies of the solar system, in satellites, or in probes voyaging in deep space.

  The business of the City of Mind was, apparently, the business of any species or individual: to go on existing.

  Its existence consisted essentially in information.

  Its observable activity was entirely related to the collection, storage, and collation of data, including the historical records of cybernetic and human populations back as far as material was available from documentary or archaeological evidence; description and history of all life forms on the planet, ancient and current; physical description of the material world on all levels from the subatomic through the chemical, geological, biological, atmospheric, astronomical, and cosmic, in the historical, current, and predictive modes; pure mathematics; mathematical description and prediction derived from data in statistical form; exploration and mapping of the interior of the planet, the depths and superfices of the continents and seas, other bodies in the solar system including the sun, and an expanding area of near interstellar space; research and development of technologies ancillary to the collection, storage, and interpretation of data; and the improvement and continuous enhancement of the facilities and capacities of the network as a whole—in other words, conscious, self-directed evolution.

  It appears that this evolution proceeded consistently in the direct linear mode.

  Evidently it was in the interest of the City to maintain and foster the diversity of forms and modes of existence which made up the substance of the information which informed their existence—I apologise for the tautology but find it inevitable under the circumstances. Everything was grist to the Mind’s mill; therefore they destroyed nothing. Neither did they foster anything. They seem not to have interfered in any way with any other species.

  Metals and other raw materials needed for their physical plants and technical experimentation were mined by their robot extensions in poisoned areas or on the Moon and other planets; this exploitation seems to have been as careful as it was efficient.

  The City had no relation to plant life at all, except as it was the subject of their observation, a source of data. Their relation to the animal world was similarly restricted. Their relation to the human species was similarly restricted, with one exception: communication, the two-way exchange of information.

  WUDUN: THE EXCHANGES.

  Computer terminals, each linked to nearby ground or satellite Cities and hence to the entire vast network, were located in human communities worldwide. Any settled group of fifty or more people qualified for an Exchange, which was installed at the request of the human community by City robots, and maintained by both robot and human inspection and repair.

  The Valley could have had eight or nine Exchanges, but settled for one, installed at Wakwaha. The Kesh word for Exchange was wudun.

  Information went both ways through the Exchanges; the nature and quantity of the information was up to the human end of the partnership. The City did not issue unrequested information; it sometimes requested, never demanded, information.

  The Wakwaha Exchange was programmed for routine issue of weather forecasts, warnings of natural disasters, train schedules, and some types of agricultural advice. Medical information, technical instructions, or any other news or material requested by an individual was furnished, using the universal language of the City, tok, which I have capitalised throughout this book to distinguish it from Kesh or other human words.

  If no information was requested, none was issued. Whatever data were properly requested were issued, whether a recipe for yogurt or an update on the incredibly sophisticated and destructive weaponry developed by the City of Mind as part of its pursuit of research as a cognitive end in itself. The City offered its data absolutely freely to human use, without restriction, as a function of its perfect nonmanipulative objectivity Its infrequent requests for information from the human community were usually for data in such fields as current styles in the arts of life, examples of pottery, poetry, kinship systems, politics, and other such matters which robot and satellite observers found difficult to obtain without interference in the behavior of the subjects observed, or not easil
y amenable to quantification.

  In settled human groups with well-established cultural interchange patterns such as the people of the Na Valley, instruction in computer use was part of ordinary education; in the Valley this principally involved learning TOK. A convenient side-effect of this was the use of TOK—which could be spoken as well as typed into the Exchange terminals—as a worldwide lingua franca for traders and travellers and people wishing to communicate with people of another language directly or through the Exchanges. In the Valley, in fact, this use of TOK rather overshadowed its original purpose. But anybody who was interested in working with the terminal could augment their training at will. The City would provide training on any level, from simple gameplaying to the heights of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, for anyone desiring to master some part of the infinite complexities of information retrieval. The Memory of the City of Mind was incalculably vast. Endless knowledge was there, if one could get at it; for the goal of the Mind was to become a total mental model or replica of the Universe.

  As with the Universe, however, the problem of intelligibility remained.

  People whose gifts so disposed them might make communication with the City of Mind their life’s pursuit; they lived in Wakwaha and worked at the Exchange at scheduled times. Others knew and cared nothing about the Exchange or the City. To most people, the Exchange was a useful and necessary link to such necessary and undesirable elements of existence as earthquakes, fires, foreigners, and freight schedules; while the City of Mind was one of the innumerable kinds of being in the world, all of them interconnected, like a forest, or an anthill, or the stars.

  If the people of the Valley took the City of Mind for granted as a “natural thing,” as we would say, the City itself seemed to recognise its ancient origins in human artifacts by the TOK word for the human species and its members, which translates as “makers.” And the City’s maintenance of the Exchanges for human use seems to show that it recognised humankind as related to itself by the capacity for mentation, language, and mathematics: a primitive ancestor, or divergent and retarded kindred, left far behind in the March of Mind. There would of course be no ethical or emotional color in such an assumption of evolutionary superiority. The assumption would be strictly rational, in an entity that was strictly rational, as well as being several lightyears larger than the solar system, and immortal.

  Thoughtful and educated people in the Valley recognised the incalculable treasures put at their disposal by the City of Mind; but they were not disposed to regard human existence either as information or as communication, nor intelligent mortality as a means to the ends of immortal intelligence. In their view, the two species had diverged to the extent that competition between them was nonexistent, cooperation limited, and the question of superiority and inferiority bootless.

  “The City’s freedom is our freedom reversed,” said the Archivist of Wakwaha, discussing these matters. “The City keeps. H keeps the dead. When we need what’s dead, we go to the Memory. The dead is bodiless, occupying no space or time. In the Libraries we keep heavy, time-consuming, roomy things. When they die we take them out. If the City wants them it takes them in. It always takes them. It’s an excellent arrangement.”

  TAVKACH: THE CITY OF MAN.

  This word may be translated as civilisation, or as history.

  The historical period, the era of human existence that followed the Neolithic era for some thousands of years in various parts of the earth, and from which prehistory and “primitive cultures” are specifically excluded, appears to be what is referred to by the Kesh phrases “the time outside,” “when they lived outside the world,” and “the City of Man.”

  It is very difficult to be sure of these meanings when dealing with a language and way of thought in which no distinction is made between human and natural history or between objective and subjective fact and perception, in which neither chronological nor causal sequence is considered an adequate reflection of reality, and in which time and space are so muddled together that one is never sure whether they are talking about an era or an area.

  My impression, however, is that this period in which we live, our civilisation, Civilisation as we know it, appeared in Valley thought as a remote region, set apart from the community and continuity of human/animal/earthly existence—a sort of peninsula sticking out from the mainland, very thickly built upon, very heavily populated, very obscure, and very far away

  The boundaries of this era-area, the City of Man, were not dates. Linear chronology was left to the Memory of the City of Mind. Indeed, the City of Mind, the computer network, including the Exchanges, was referred to as being “outside the world”—existing in the same time-region or mode as the City of Man, civilisation. The relation between the City and the Valley is not clear. How does one move from “inside” the world to “outside” it, and back?

  They were aware of this discontinuity, this gap or lack of connection, perceiving it as necessary and significant.

  Indeed, though I am not sure of this, they may have perceived it as the most important thing—to them—about civilisation, about history in our terms: that gap, that leap, break, flip, that reversal from in to out, from out to in. That is the hinge.

  Several efforts to effect that reversal or make that leap follow. When f asked the Archivist of the Library of Wakwaha for a piece that told about the City of Man, she gave me the story called “A Hole in the Air”; and the Speaker of the Obsidian in Chumo told me “Big Man and Little Man” as a “story about the outside time and the inside time.” Then come the results of several efforts to get at what we would call a history of the Valley. I can’t call them fruitless, although it was rather as if one went for grapes and returned with grapefruit. These are the tales about beginnings, and the section called “Time in the Valley.”

  A Hole In The Air

  There was a man a while ago who found a hole in the air, up near Pass Valley in the Range of Light. He built a pole house around the hole to keep it from getting blown away or moved around by the wind. Then he said heya and walked into it.

  He came out through the hole to the outside world. At first he didn’t know where he was. It seemed like the same place; the rocks and peaks were the same ones he knew around Pass Valley. But the air smelled different and was a different color, and as he looked he saw the trees weren’t the same trees, and the pole house he’d built wasn’t there. He built another one, and then he set off walking downhill, south westwards, towards the Inland Sea coast. The first thing he saw, he didn’t see: the water there. It was a great valley of land without water, covered with walls, roofs, roads, walls, roofs, roads, walls, roofs, roads, as far as he could see.

  Where Pass River Canyon turns south he followed it, and came across a big road, and the first thing that happened to him was he was killed. A four-wheeled motor hit him at great speed and went over him and went on.

  He was partly outside the world and still partly inside it, so that he died but could get up again; nine times he would be able to die, they say. He got up from being dead, and another motor hit him and ran its wheels over him. He died and got up and another motor hit him. Before he could get off that road he got killed three times.

  The road was coated with rotten blood and grease and flesh and fur and feathers. It stank. There were buzzards in the lodgepole pines along the roadside waiting for the motors to stop going by so they could eat what got killed. But the motors never stopped going up and down, up and down, whizzing with a loud noise up and down.

  There were some houses among the pines back from that road, and the man from Pass River went to one of them. He went very cautiously. He was afraid of what he might see in the house. Nobody was moving in the yard. He came up, slow and quiet, and looked in the window. He saw what he had been afraid to see: people in the house looking at him over their backbones, between their shoulderblades.

  He stayed still, not knowing what else to do, and after a while he saw that they were looking through him. They c
ouldn’t see anything that was even partly inside the world.

  It seemed that sometimes one of them caught a glimpse of him from the corner of the eye, and didn’t know what it was, and looked away again.

  He thought that if he was careful there was no need for fear, and after a while he came into the house. The backward-head people were sitting down at a high table to eat. He watched them eating, and got to feeling very hungry. He went into their kitchen to take some food. The kitchen was full of boxes and the boxes were full of boxes. Finally he found some food. He tasted it and spat it out: it was poisoned. He tried something else, and something else: it was all poisoned. The backward-head people were eating the poisoned food out of basins of pure copper, eating and talking, all sitting at the table with their heads facing away from it. He went out into the yard and found apple trees bearing fruit, but when he bit into an apple it tasted like brass, like bluestone. The skin was poisoned.

  He came back inside and listened to the backward-head people talking. It sounded to him like they were saying, “Kill people! Kill people!” (dushe ushud, dushe ushud). That was the sound of their words. After eating, the men backward-heads went outdoors, smoking tobacco and carrying guns. The women backward-heads went to the kitchen and smoked cannabis. The man from Pass River followed the men. He thought they might do some hunting, since they had been saying, “Kill,” and he could get some fresh food. But there were hardly any people except the backward-heads in those hills. If there were any, they hid, or had already gone inside the world. The only people he saw were the plants, some flies, and one buzzard. The backward-head men saw the buzzard circling too, and shot at her. They missed, and went on, smoking tobacco. The air now was getting full of smoke all around them. The Pass River man got worried, thinking these men must be making a war. He didn’t want to get mixed up in that, so he left them and went away, going downhill, at a distance from the big road he had been killed on. The farther he went the thicker the smoke got. He thought there must be a forest fire.