The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  PUTTING ON CLOTHES

  She looked forward to it forever and couldn’t sleep at all the night before, lying awake forever. But there was Father standing there suddenly, wearing his dress-up clothes, black long pants and his white silky kurta. “Wake up, sleepyhead, are you going to sleep through your Ceremony?” She leaped up from bed in terror, believing him, so that he said at once, seriously, “No, no, I was only joking. You have plenty of time. You don’t have to get dressed, yet!” She saw the joke, but she was too bewildered and excited to laugh. “Help me comb my hair!” she wailed, tugging her comb into a knot in the thick black tangles. He knelt to help her.

  By the time they got to the Temenos her excitement only made everything clearer than usual, bright, distinct. The huge room seemed even bigger than usual. Music was playing, cheery and dancy. Lots and lots of people were coming, naked children, each one with a parent in dress-up clothes, some of them with two parents, many with grandparents, a few with a little naked brother or sister or a big brother or sister in dress-up clothes. Luis’s father was there, but he was only wearing workshorts and an old singlet, and she was sorry for Luis. Her mother Jael came through the big crowd of people. Jael’s son Joel came with her from Quad Four, and both of them were wearing really, really dress-up clothes. Jael’s had red zigzags and sparkles painted on, and Joel’s shirt was purple with a gold zipper. They hugged and kissed, and Jael gave Father a package and said “For later,” and Hsing knew what was in it, but didn’t say anything. Father was hiding his package in one hand behind his back and she knew what was in it too.

  The music was turning into the song they had all been learning, all the seven-year-olds in all four schools in the whole world: “I’m growing up! I’m growing up!” The parents pushed the children forward or led the shy ones by the hand, whispering, “Sing! Sing!” And all the little naked children, singing, came together in the center of the high round room. “I’m growing up! What a happy happy day!” they sang, and the grown-ups began to sing with them, so it got huge and loud and deep and made tears start in her eyes. “What a happy happy day!”

  An old teacher talked a little while, and then a young teacher with a beautiful high clear voice said, “Now everyone sit down,” and everyone sat down on the deck. “I will read each child’s name. When I read your name, stand up. Your parent and relations will stand up too, and then you can go to them, and look at your clothes. But don’t put them on till everybody in the world has their new clothes! I’ll say when. So! Are you ready? So! 5-Adano Sita! Stand up and be clothed!”

  A little tiny girl jumped up in the circle of sitting children. She was red in the face and looked around in terror for her mother, who stood up laughing and waving a beautiful red shirt. Little Sita ran headlong for her, and everybody laughed and clapped. “5-Alzs-Matteu Frans! Stand up and be clothed!” And so it went, till the clear voice said, “5-Liu Hsing! Stand up and be clothed!” and she stood up, her eyes fixed on Father, who was easy to see because of Jael and Joel glittering beside him. She ran to him and took something silky, something wonderful, into her arms, and the people from Peony Compound and Lotus Compound clapped specially hard. She turned and stood pressed against Father’s legs, watching.

  “5-Nova Luis! Stand up and be clothed,” but he was up and over with his father almost before the words were said, so that people laughed again, and hardly had time to clap. Hsing tried to catch Luis’s eye but he wouldn’t look. He watched the rest of the Ceremony seriously, so she did too.

  “These are the fifty-four seven-year-old children of the Fifth Generation,” the teacher said when no more children were left in the center of the circle. “Let us welcome them to all the joys and responsibilities of growing up,” and everybody cheered and clapped while the naked children, hurrying and inept, struggling with unfamiliar holes, getting things upside down, fumbling with buttons, put on their new clothes, their first clothes, and stood up again, resplendent.

  Then all the teachers and grown-ups started singing “What a happy happy day” again and there was a lot more hugging and kissing. Hsing got enough of that pretty soon, but she noticed that Luis really liked it, and hugged back hard when grown-ups he hardly knew hugged him.

  Ed had given Luis black shorts and a blue silky shirt, in which he looked absolutely different and absolutely himself. Rosa had all white clothes because her mother was an angel. Father had given Hsing dark blue shorts and a white shirt, and Jael’s package was light blue pants and a blue shirt with white stars on it, to wear tomorrow. The cloth of the shorts rubbed her thighs when she moved and the shirt felt soft, soft on her shoulders and belly. She danced with joy, and Father took her hands and danced gravely with her. “So, my grown-up daughter!” he said, and his smile crowned the day.

  LUIS BEING DIFFERENT

  The penis-vulva difference was superficial. She had learned that word from Father not long ago, and found it useful. Luis wasn’t different only from her or only because of that superficial difference. He was different from everybody. Nobody said “ought to” the way Luis did. He wanted the truth. Not to lie. He wanted honor. That was the word. That was the difference. He had more honor than the others. Honor is hard and clear and Luis was hard and clear. And at the same time and in exactly the same way he was tender, he was soft. He got asthma and couldn’t breathe, he got big headaches that knocked him out for days, he was sick before exams and performances and ceremonies. He was like the knife that wounds, and like the wound. Everybody treated Luis with a difference, respectfully, liking him but not trying to get close to him. Only she knew that he was also the touch that heals the wound.

  V

  When they were ten and finally were allowed to enter what the teachers called Virtual Earth and the Chi-Ans called V-Dichew, Hsing was overwhelmed and disappointed. V-Dichew was exciting and tremendously complicated, yet thin. It was superficial. It was programs.

  There were infinite things in it, but one stupid real thing, her old toothbrush, had more being in it than all the swarming rush of objects and sensations in City or Jungle or Countryside. In Countryside, she was always aware that although there was nothing overhead but the blue air, and she was walking along on grass-stuff that carpeted the uneven deck for impossible distances rising up into impossible shapes (hills), and that the noises in her ears were air moving fast (wind) and a kind of high yit-yit sound sometimes (birds), and that those things on all fours way off on the winds, no, on the hills, were animals (cattle), all the same, all the time, she knew she was sitting in a chair in School Two V-Lab with some junk attached to her body, and her body refused to be fooled, insisting that no matter how strange and amazing and educational and important and historical V-Dichew was, it was a fake. Dreams could also be convincing, beautiful, frightening, important. But she didn’t want to live in dreams. She wanted to be awake in her body touching true cloth, true metal, true skin.

  THE POET

  When she was fourteen, Hsing wrote a poem for an English assignment. She wrote it in both the languages she knew. In English it went:

  In the Fifth Generation

  My grandfather’s grandfather walked under heaven.

  That was another world.

  When I am a grandmother, they say, I may walk under heaven

  On another world.

  But I am living my life now joyously in my world

  Here in the middle of heaven.

  She had been learning Chinese with her father since she was nine; they had read some of the classics together. He smiled when he read the Chinese poem, read the characters “under heaven” — “t’ien hsia.” She saw his smile and it made her happy, proud of her erudition and enormously proud that Yao had recognised it, that they shared this almost secret, almost private understanding.

  The teacher asked her to read her poem aloud in both languages at first-quarter Class Day for second-year high-schoolers. The next day the editor of Q-4, the most famous literary magazine in the world, called her up and asked if he could publish it.
Her teacher had sent it to him. He wanted her to read it for the audio. “It needs your voice,” he said. He was a big man with a beard, 4-Bass Abby, imperious and opinionated, a god. He was rude to everybody else but kind to her. When they made the recording and she fluffed it, he just said, “Back up and take it easy, poet,” and she did.

  Then it seemed for a while that everywhere she was she heard her own voice saying “When I am a grandmother, they say. . . .” on the speaker, and people she hardly knew at school said, “Hey I heard your poem, it was zazz.” All the angels liked it specially and told her so.

  She was going to be a poet, of course. She would be really great, like 2-Eli Ali. Only instead of little short weird obscure poems like Eli’s, she would write a great narrative poem about — actually the problem was what should it be about. It could be a great historical epic about the Zero Generation. It would be called Genesis. For a week she was excited, thinking about it all the time. But to do it she’d really have to learn all the history that she was sort of gliding through in History, she’d have to read hundreds of books. And she’d have to really go into V-Dichew to feel what it had been like to live there. It would all take years before she could even start writing it.

  Maybe she could write love poems. There were an awful lot of love poems in the World Lit anthology. She had a feeling that you didn’t need to really be in love with a person to write a love poem. Maybe in fact if you were really seriously in love it would interfere with the poetry. A sort of yearning, undemanding adoration like she felt for Bass Abby, or for Rosa at school, maybe was a good place to start from. So she wrote quite a few love poems, but for one reason or another she was embarrassed about turning them in to her teacher, and only showed them to Luis. Luis had acted all along like he didn’t think she was a poet. She had to show him.

  “I like this one,” he said. She peered to see which one.

  What is the sadness in you

  that I see only in your smile?

  I wish I could hold your sadness

  in my arms like a sleeping child.

  She hadn’t thought much of the poem, it was so short, but now it seemed better than she’d thought.

  “It’s about Yao, isn’t it?” Luis said.

  “About my father?” Hsing said, so shocked she felt her cheeks burning. “No! It’s a love poem!”

  “Well, who do you actually love a lot besides your father?” Luis asked in his horrible matter-of-fact way.

  “A whole lot of people! And love is — There are different kinds — ”

  “Are there?” He glanced up at her. He pondered. “I didn’t say it was a sex poem. I don’t think it is a sex poem.”

  “Oh, you are so weird,” Hsing said, abruptly and deftly snatching her writer back and closing the folder labelled Original Poems by 5-Liu Hsing. “What makes you think you know anything about poetry anyhow?”

  “I know about as much about it as you do,” said Luis with his pedantic fairness, “but I can’t do it at all. You can. Sometimes.”

  “Nobody can write great poetry all the time!”

  “Well,” — her heart always sank when he said “Well” — “maybe not literally all the time, but the good ones have an amazingly high average. Shakespeare, and Li Po, and Yeats, and 2-Eli — “

  “What’s the use trying to be like them?” she wailed.

  “I didn’t mean you had to be like them,” he said after a slight pause and in a different tone. He had realised that he might have hurt her. That made him unhappy. When he was unhappy he became gentle. She knew exactly how he felt, and why, and what he’d do, and she also knew the fierce, regretful tenderness for him that swelled up inside her, a sore tenderness, like a bruise. She said, “Oh, I don’t care about all that anyway. Words are too sloppy, I like math. Let’s go meet Lena at the gym.”

  As they jogged through the corridors it occurred to her that in fact the poem he had liked wasn’t about Rosa, as she had thought, or about her father, as he had thought, but was about him, Luis. But it was all stupid anyhow and didn’t matter. So she wasn’t Shakespeare. But she loved quadratic equations.

  4-LIU YAO

  How sheltered they were, how protected! Safer than any guarded prince or pampered child of the rich had ever been; safer than any child had ever been on Earth.

  No cold winds to shiver in or heavy heat to sweat in. No plagues or coughs or fevers or toothaches. No hunger. No wars. No weapons. No danger. No danger from anything in the world but the danger the world itself was in. But that was a constant, a condition of being, and therefore hard to think about, except sometimes in dream; the horrible images. The walls of the world deformed, bulging, shattering. The soundless explosion. A spray of bloody mist, a tiny smear of vapor in the starlight. They were all in danger all the time, surrounded by danger. That is the essence of safety, the heart of it: that the danger is outside.

  They lived inside. Inside their world with its strong walls and strong laws, shaped and bulwarked to protect and surround them with strength. There they lived, and there was no threat unless they made it.

  “People are a risky business,” Liu Yao said, smiling. “Plants mostly don’t go crazy.”

  Yao’s profession was gardening. He worked in hydroponic engineering and maintenance and in plant-genetic quality and control. He was in the gardens every workday and many evenings. The 4-5-Liu homespace was full of pet plants — gourdvines in carboys of water, flowering shrubs in pots of dirt, epiphytes festooning the vents and light-fixtures. Many of them were experimentals, which usually died. Hsing believed that her father was sorry for these genetic errors, felt guilty about them, and brought them home to die in peace. Occasionally one of the experiments thrived under his patient attendance and went back to the plant labs in triumph, accompanied by Yao’s faint, deprecating smile.

  4-Liu Yao was a short, slender, handsome man with a shock of black hair early going grey. He did not have the bearing of a handsome man. He was reserved, courteous, but shy. A good listener but a rare and low-voiced talker, when he was with more than one or two people he was almost entirely silent. With his mother 3-Liu Meiling or his friend 4-Wang Yuen or his daughter Hsing he would converse contentedly, unassertively. His passions were contained, restrained, powerful: the Chinese classics, his plants, his daughter. He thought a good deal and felt a good deal. He was mostly content to follow his thoughts and feelings alone, in silence, like a man going downstream in a small boat on a great river, sometimes steering, more often drifting. Of boats and rivers, of cliffs and currents, Yao knew only images in pictures, words in poems. Sometimes he dreamed that he was in a boat on a river, but the dreams were vague. He knew dirt, though, knew it exactly, bodily. Dirt was what he worked in. And water and air he knew, the humble, transparent things, on whose clarity, invisibility, life depended, the miracles. A bubble of air and water floated in the dry black vacuum, reflecting starlight. He lived inside it.

  3-Liu Meiling lived in the group of homespaces called Peony Compound, a corridor away from her son’s homespace. She led an extremely active social life limited almost entirely to the Chinese-Ancestry population of Quadrant Two. Her profession was chemistry; she worked in the fabric labs; she had never liked the work. As soon as she decently could she went on halftime and then retired. Didn’t like any work, she said. Liked to look after babies in the babygarden, play games, gamble for flower-cookies, talk, laugh, gossip, find out what was happening next door. She took great pleasure in her son and granddaughter and ran in and out of their homespace constantly, bringing dumplings, rice cakes, gossip. “You should move to Peony!” she said frequently, but knew they wouldn’t, because Yao was unsociable, and that was fine, except she did hope that Hsing would stay with her own people when she decided to have a baby, which she also said frequently. “Hsing’s mother is a fine woman, I like Jael,” she told her son, “but I never will understand why you couldn’t have had a baby from one of the Wong girls and then her mama would be right here in Quadrant Two, that would have be
en so nice for all of us. But I know you have to do things your way. And I must say even if Hsing is only half Chinese Ancestry nobody would ever know it, and what a beauty she’s getting to be, so I suppose you did know what you were doing, if anyone ever does when it comes to falling in love or having a child, which I doubt. It’s basically luck, is all it is. Young 5-Li has an eye on her, did you notice yesterday? He’s twenty-three, a good solid boy. Here she is now! Hsing! How beautiful your hair is when it’s long! You should let it grow longer!” The kind, practical, undemanding babble of his mother’s talk was another stream on which Yao floated vaguely, peacefully, until all at once, in one moment, it was cut short. Silence. A bubble had burst. A bubble in an artery of the brain, the doctors said. For a few hours 3-Liu Meiling gazed in mute bewilderment at something no one else could see, and then died. She was only seventy. All life is in danger, from without, from within. People are a risky business.

  THE FLOATING WORLD

  The brief funeral was held in Peony Compound; then the body of 3-Liu Meiling was taken by her son and granddaughter and the technician to the Life Center to be recycled, a chemical process of breakdown and re-use with which as a chemist she had been perfectly familiar. She would still be part of their world, not as a being but as an endless becoming. She would be part of the children Hsing would bear. They were all part of one another. All used and users, all eaters, all eaten.