The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  "You're of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?" The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.

  "No. I don't know anything about them. I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of things. It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years. Don't you—don't you see what happened yesterday?"

  The opaque, dark eyes met his, straight on.

  "What happened yesterday, George?"

  No way. No way out.

  Haber was using sodium pentothal on him now, to lower his resistance to hypnotic procedures. He submitted to the shot, watching the needle slip with only a moment of pain into the vein of his arm. This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

  Haber went off somewhere to run something while the drug took effect; but he was back promptly in fifteen minutes, gusty, jovial, and indifferent. "All right! Let's get on with it, George!"

  Orr knew, with dreary clarity, what he would get on with today: the war. The papers were full of it, even Orr's news-resistant mind had been full of it, coming here. The growing war in the Near East. Haber would end it. And no doubt the killings in Africa. For Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity.

  The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr lay back on the couch and shut his eyes.

  The hand touched his throat, "You will enter the hypnotic state now, George," said Haber's deep voice. "You are. . . ." dark.

  In the dark.

  Not quite night yet: late twilight on the fields. Clumps of trees looked black and moist. The road he was walking on picked up the faint, last light from the sky; it ran long and straight, an old country highway, cracked blacktop. A goose was walking ahead of him, about fifteen feet in advance and visible only as a white, bobbing blur. Now and then it hissed a little.

  The stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it had already become larger and brighter. It's enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. The eyes swam. Small blue-green streaks zipped about it zigzagging Brownian round-ianroundian. A vast and creamy halo pulsated about big star and tiny zips, fainter, clearer, pulsing. Oh no no no! he said as the big star brightened hugendly BURST blinding. He fell to the ground, covering his head with his arms as the sky burst into streaks of bright death, but could not turn onto his face, must behold and witness. The ground swung up and down, great trembling wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth. "Let be, let be!" he screamed aloud with his face against the sky, and woke on the leather couch.

  He sat up, and put his face in his sweaty, shaking hands.

  Presently he felt Haber's hand heavy on his shoulder. "Bad time again? Damn, I thought I'd let you off easy. Told you to have a dream about peace."

  "I did."

  "But it was disturbing to you?"

  "I was watching a battle in space."

  "Watching it? From where?"

  "Earth." He recounted the dream briefly, omitting the goose. "I don't know whether they got one of ours or we got one of theirs."

  Haber laughed. "I wish we could see what goes on out there! We'd feel more involved. But of course those encounters take place at speeds and distances that human vision simply isn't equipped to keep up with. Your version's a lot more picturesque than the actuality, no doubt. Sounds like a good science-fiction movie from the seventies. Used to go to those when I was a kid. . . . But why do you think you dreamed up a battle scene when the suggestion was peace?"

  "Just peace? Dream about peace—that's all you said?"

  Haber did not answer at once. He occupied himself with the controls of the Augmentor.

  "O.K.," he said at last. "This once, experimentally, let's let you compare the suggestion with the dream.

  Perhaps we'll find out why it came out negative. I said—no, let's run the tape." He went over to a panel in the wall.

  "You tape the whole session?"

  "Sure. Standard psychiatric practice. Didn't you know?"

  How could I know if it's hidden, makes no noise signal, and you didn't tell me, Orr thought; but he said nothing. Maybe it was standard practice, maybe it was Haber's personal arrogance; but in either case he couldn't do much about it.

  "Here we are, it ought to be about here. The hypnotic state now, George. You are—Here! Don't go under, George!" The tape hissed. Orr shook his head and blinked. The last fragments of sentences had been Haber's voice on the tape, of course; and he was still full of the hypnosis-inducing drug.

  "I'll have to skip a bit. All right." Now it was his voice on the tape again, saying, "—peace. No more mass killing of humans by other humans. No fighting in Iran and Arabia and Israel. No more genocides in Africa. No stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons, ready to use against other nations. No more research on ways and means of killing people. A world at peace with itself. Peace as a universal life-style on Earth. You will dream of that world at peace with itself. Now you're going to sleep. When I say—"

  He stopped the tape abruptly, lest he put Orr to sleep with the key word.

  Orr rubbed his forehead. "Well," he said, "I followed instructions."

  "Hardly. To dream of a battle in cislunar space—" Haber stopped as abruptly as the tape.

  "Cislunar," Orr said, feeling a little sorry for Haber. "We weren't using that word, when I went to sleep.

  How are things in Isragypt?"

  The made-up word from the old reality had a curiously shocking effect, spoken in this reality: like surrealism, it seemed to make sense and didn't, or seemed not to make sense and did.

  Haber walked up and down the long, handsome room. Once he passed his hand over his red-brown, curly beard. The gesture was a calculated one and familiar to Orr, but when he spoke Orr felt that he was seeking and choosing his words carefully, not trusting, for once, to his inexhaustible fund of improvisation. "It's curious that you used the Defense of Earth as a symbol or metaphor of peace, of the end of warfare. Yet it's not unfitting. Only very subtle. Dreams are endlessly subtle. Endlessly. For in fact it was that threat, that immediate peril of invasion by noncommunicating, reasonlessly hostile aliens, which forced us to stop fighting among ourselves, to turn our aggressive-defensive energies outward, to extend the territorial drive to include all humanity, to combine our weapons against a common foe. If the Aliens hadn't struck, who knows? We might, actually, still be fighting in the Near East."

  "Out of the frying pan into the fire," Orr said. "Don't you see, Dr. Haber, that that's all you'll ever get from me? Look, it's not that I want to block you, to frustrate your plans. Ending the war was a good idea, I agree with it totally. I even voted Isolationist last election because Harris promised to pull us out of the Near East. But I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?"

  Haber said nothing, and showed no reaction, so Orr went on.

  "Or maybe it's not just my unconscious, irrational mind, maybe it's my total self, my whole being, that just isn't right for the job. I'm too defeatist, or passive, as you said, maybe. I don't have enough desires.

  Maybe that has something to do with my having this—this capacity to dream effectively; but if it doesn't, there might be others
who can do it, people with minds more like your own, that you could work with better. You could test for it; I can't be the only one; maybe I just happened to become aware of it. But I don't want to do it. I want to get off the hook. I can't take it. I mean, look: all right, the war's been over in the Near East for six years, fine, but now there are the Aliens, up on the Moon. What if they land? What kind of monsters have you dredged up out of my unconscious mind, in the name of peace? I don't even know!"

  "Nobody knows what the Aliens look like, George," Haber said, in a reasonable, reassuring tone. "We all have our bad dreams about 'em, God knows! But as you said, it's been over six years now since their first landing on the Moon, and they still haven't made it to Earth. By now, our missile defense systems are completely efficient. There's no reason to think they'll break through now, if they haven't yet. The danger period was during those first few months, before the Defense was mobilized on an international cooperative basis."

  Orr sat a while, shoulders slumped. He wanted to yell at Haber, "Liar! Why do you lie to me?" But the impulse was not a deep one. It led nowhere. For all he knew, Haber was incapable of sincerity because he was lying to himself. He might be compartmenting his mind into two hermetic halves, in one of which he knew that Orr'sdreams changed reality, and employed them for that purpose; in the other of which he knew that he was using hypnotherapy and dream abreaction to treat a schizoid patient who believed that his dreams changed reality.

  That Haber could have thus got out of communication with himself was rather hard for Orr to conceive; his own mind was so resistant to such divisions that he was slow to recognize them in others. But he had learned that they existed. He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

  But that was in the old world, now. Not in the brave new one.

  "I am cracking," he said. "You must see that. You're a psychiatrist. Don't you see that I'm going to pieces? Aliens from outer space attacking Earth! Look: if you ask me to dream again, what will you get?

  Maybe a totally insane world, the product of an insane mind. Monsters, ghosts, witches, dragons, transformations—all the stuff we carry around in us, all the horrors of childhood, the night fears, the nightmares. How can you keep all that from getting loose? I can't stop it. I'm not in control!"

  "Don't worry about control! Freedom is what you're working toward," Haber said gustily. "Freedom!

  Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That's a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don't be afraid of your unconscious mind! It's not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality. The aim of psychotherapy is precisely this, to remove those groundless fears and nightmares, to bring up what's unconscious into the light of rational consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that there is nothing to fear."

  "But there is," Orr said very softly.

  Haber let him go at last. He came out into the spring twilight, and stood a minute on the steps of the Institute with his hands in his pockets, looking at the streetlights in the city below, so blurred by mist and dusk that they seemed to wink and move like the tiny, silvery shapes of tropical fish in a dark aquarium.

  A cable car was clanking up the steep hill toward its turnaround here at the top of Washington Park, in front of the Institute. He went out into the street and climbed aboard the car while it was turning. His walk was evasive and yet aimless. He moved like a sleepwalker, like one impelled.

  Chapter 7

  Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature. . . . Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe. . . . The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss . . . and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.

  —V. Hugo, Travailleurs de la Mer

  At 2:10 P.M. on March 30, Heather Lelache was seen leaving Dave's Fine Foods on Ankeny Street and proceeding southward on Fourth Avenue, carrying a large black handbag with brass catch, wearing a red vinyl rain-cloak. Look out for this woman. She is dangerous.

  It wasn't that she cared one way or the other about seeing that poor damned psycho, but shit, she hated to look foolish in front of waiters. Holding a table for half an hour right in the middle of the lunchtime crowd—"I'm waiting for somebody."—"I'm sorry, I'm waiting for somebody."—and so nobody comes and nobody comes, and so finally she had to order and shove the stuff down in a big rush, and so now she'd have heartburn. On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.

  She turned left on Morrison, and then suddenly stopped. What was she doing over here? This wasn't the way to Forman, Esserbeck, and Rutti. Hastily she returned north several blocks, crossed Ankeny, came to Burnside, and stopped again. What the hell was she doing?

  Going to the converted parking structure at 209 S.W. Burnside. What converted parking structure? Her office was in the Pendleton Building, Portland's first post-Crash office building, on Morrison. Fifteen stories, neo-Inca decor. What converted parking structure, who the hell worked in a converted parking structure?

  She went on down Burnside and looked. Sure enough, there it was. There were Condemned signs all over it.

  Her office was up there on the third level.

  As she stood down on the sidewalk staring up at the disused building with its queer, slightly skewed floors and narrow window slits, she felt very strange indeed. What had happened last Friday at that psychiatric session?

  She had to see that little bastard again. Mr. Either Orr. So he stood her up for lunch, so what, she still had some questions to ask him. She strode south, click clack, pincers snapping, to the Pendleton Building, and called him from her office. First at Bradford Industries (no, Mr. Orr didn't come in today, no, he hasn't called in), then at his residence (ring. ring. ring.).

  She should call Dr. Haber again, maybe. But he was such a big shot, running the Palace of Dreams up there in the park. And anyhow what was she thinking of: Haber wasn't supposed to know she had any connection with Orr. Liar builds pitfall, falls in it. Spider stuck in own web.

  That night Orr did not answer his telephone at seven, nine, or eleven. He was not at work Tuesday morning, nor at two o'clock Tuesday afternoon. At four-thirty Tuesday afternoon Heather Lelache left the offices of Forman, Esserbeck, and Rutti, and took the trolley out to Whiteaker Street, walked up the hill to Corbett Avenue, found the house, rang the bell: one of six infinitely thumbed bell pushes in a grubby little row on the peeling frame of the cut-glass-paneled door of a house that had been somebody's pride and joy in 1905 or 1892, and that had come on hard times since but was proceeding toward ruin with composure and a certain dirty magnificence. No answer when she rang Orr's bell. She rang M. Ahrens Manager. Twice. Manager came, was uncooperative at first. But one thing the Black Widow was good at was the intimidation of lesser insects. Manager took her upstairs and tried Orr's door. It open
ed. He hadn't locked it.

  She stepped back. All at once she thought there might be death inside. And it was not her place.

  Manager, unconcerned with private property, barged on in, and she followed, reluctant.

  The big, old, bare rooms were shadowy and unoccupied. It seemed silly to have thought of death. Orr did not own much; there was no bachelor slop and disarray, no bachelor prim tidiness either. There was little impress of his personality on the rooms, yet she saw him living there, a quiet man living quietly. There was a glass of water on the table in the bedroom, with a spray of white heather in it. The water had evaporated down about a quarter inch.

  "I dono where he's gone to," Manager said crossly, and looked at her for help. "You think he hanaccident? Something?" Manager wore the fringed buckskin coat, the Cody mane, the Aquarius emblem necklace of his youth: he apparently had not changed his clothes for thirty years. He had an accusing Dylan whine. He even smelled of marijuana. Old hippies never die.

  Heather looked at him kindly, for his smell reminded her of her mother. She said, "Maybe he went to the place he has over on the Coast. The thing is, he's not well, you know, he's on Government Therapy. He'll get in trouble if he stays away. Do you know where that cabin is, or if he has a phone there?"

  "I dono."

  "Can I use your phone?"

  "Use his," said Manager, shrugging.

  She called up a friend in Oregon State Parks and got him to look up the thirty-four Siuslaw National Forest cabins which had been lotteried off and give her their location. Manager hung around to listen in, and when she was done said, "Friends in high places, huh?"

  "It helps," the Black Widow answered, sibilant.

  "Hope you dig George up. I like that cat. He borrows my Pharm Card," Manager said and all at once gave a great snort of laughter which was gone at once. Heather left him leaning morose against the peeling frame of the front door, he and the old house lending each other mutual support.