Inside a bubble where there is so much air and no more, so much water and no more, so much food and no more, so much energy and no more — in an aquarium, perfectly self-contained in its tiny balancing act: one catfish, two sticklebacks, three waterweeds, plenty of algae, three snails, maybe four, but no dragonfly larvae — inside a bubble, the population must be strictly controlled.
When Meiling dies she is replaced. But she is no more than replaced. Everybody can have a child. Some can’t or won’t or don’t have children and some children die young, and so most of those who want two children can have two children. Four thousand isn’t a great number. It is a carefully maintained number. Four thousand isn’t a great gene pool, but it is a carefully selected and managed one. The anthrogeneticists are just as watchful and dispassionate as Yao in the plant labs. But they do not experiment. Sometimes they can catch a fault at the source, but they have not the resources to meddle with twists and recombinations. All such massive, elaborate technologies, supported by the continuous exploitation of the resources of a planet, were left behind by the Zero Generation. The anthrogeneticists have good tools and know their job, and their job is maintenance. They maintain the quality, literally, of life.
Everyone who wants to can have a child. One child, two at most. A woman has her motherchild. A man has his fatherchild.
The arrangement is unfair to men, who have to persuade a woman to bear a child for them. The arrangement is unfair to women, who are expected to spend three-quarters of a year of their life bearing somebody else’s child. To women who want a child and cannot conceive or whose sexual life is with other women, so that they have to persuade both a man and a woman to get and give them a child, the arrangement is doubly unfair. The arrangement is, in fact, unfair. Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common. Love and friendship and conscience and kindness and obstinacy find ways to make the unfair arrangement work, though not without anxiety, not without anguish, and not always.
Marriage and linking are informal options, often chosen while the children are young, for many women find it hard to part with a fatherchild, and a homespace for four is luxuriously spacious.
Many women do not want to bear or bring up a child at all, many feel their fertility to be a privilege and obligation, and some pride themselves on it. Now and then there is a woman who boasts of the number of her fatherchildren, as of a basketball score.
4-Steinfeld Jael bore Hsing; she’s Hsing’s mother, but Hsing isn’t her child. Hsing is 4-Liu Yao’s child, his fatherdaughter. Jael’s child is Joel, her motherson, six years older than his halfsister Hsing, two years younger than his halfbrother 4-Adami Seth.
Everybody has a homespace. A single is one and one half rooms; a room is a space of 960 cubic feet. The commonest shape is 10’ x 12’ x 8’, but since the partitions are movable the proportions can be altered freely within the limits of the structural space. A double, like the 4-5 Lius’, is usually arranged as two little sleepcells and a large sharespace: two privacies and a commonality. When people link, and if they each have one or two children, their homespace may get quite large. The 3-4-5-Steinman-Adamis, Jael and Joel and 3-Adami Manhattan, to whom she has been linked for years, and his fatherson Seth, have 3,840 cubic feet of homespace. They live in Quad Four, where a lot of Nor-Ans live, Northamerican and European Ancestry people. With her usual flair for the dramatic, Jael has found an area in the outer arc where there’s room for ten-foot ceilings. “Like the sky!” she cries. She has painted the ceilings bright blue. “Feel the difference?” she says. “The sense of liberation — of freedom?” In fact, when she goes to stay with Jael on visits, Hsing finds the rooms rather disagreeable; they seem deep and cold, with all that waste space overhead. But Jael fills them with her warmth, her golden, inexhaustible voice, her bright clothing, her abundance of being.
When Hsing began menstruating and learning how to use prevention and brooding about sex, both Jael and Meiling told her that having a baby is a piece of luck. They were very different women, but they used the same word. “The best luck,” Meiling said. “So interesting! Nothing else uses all of you.” And Jael talked about how your relation to the baby in your womb and the newborn baby nursing was part of sex, an extension and completion of it that you were really lucky to know. Hsing listened with the modest, cynical reserve of the virgin. She’d make up her own mind about all that when the time came.
Many Chi-Ans had, more or less silently, disapproved of Yao’s asking a woman of another quadrant and a different ancestry to bear his child. Many people of Jael’s ancestry had asked her if she wanted an exotic experience or what. The fact was Jael and Yao had fallen desperately in love. They were old enough to realise that love was all they had in common. Jael had asked Yao if she could have his child. Moved to the heart, he had agreed. Hsing was born of an undying passion. Whenever Yao came to bring Hsing for a visit, Jael flung her arms about him crying “Oh Yao, it’s you!” with such utter, ravished joy and delight that only a man as thoroughly satisfied and self-satisfied as Adami Manhattan could have escaped agonies of jealousy. Manhattan was a huge, hairy man. Perhaps being fifteen years older, eight inches taller, and a great deal hairier than Yao helped him to be unjealous of him.
Grandparents provided another way to increase the size of a homespace. Sometimes relatives, halfsibs, their parents, their children grouped together in still larger spaces. Next down the corridor from the 4-5 Lius’ was the 3-4-5-Wangs’ — Lotus Compound — eleven contiguous homespaces, the partitions arranged so as to provide a central atrium, the scene of ceaseless noise and activity. Peony Compound, where Meiling had lived all her life, always had from eight to eighteen homespaces. None of the other ancestries lived in such large groupings.
In fact by the fifth generation many people had lost any sense of what ancestry was, found it irrelevant, and disapproved of people who based their identity or their community on it. In Council, disapproval was frequently expressed of Chinese-Ancestry clannishness, referred to by its critics as “Quad Two separatism” or more darkly as “racism,” and by those who practiced it as “keeping to our ways.” The Chi-Ans protested the new Schools Administration policy of shifting teachers around from quad to quad, so that children would be taught by people from other ancestries, other communities; but they were outvoted in Council.
THE BUBBLE
Dangers, risks. In the glass bubble, the fragile world, the danger of schism, of conspiracy, the danger of aberrant behavior, madness, the violence of madness. No decision of any consequence at all was to be made by a single person acting without counsel. Nobody ever, since the beginning, had been allowed alone at any of the systems controls. Always a backup, a watcher. Yet there had been incidents. None had yet wreaked permanent damage.
But what of the merely normal, usual behavior of human beings? What is aberrant? Who’s sane?
Read the histories, say the teachers. History tells us who we are, how we have behaved, therefore how we will behave.
Does it? The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder — that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us? History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
The foam of the salt ocean has tossed up a bubble. It floats free.
To learn who we are, look not at history but at the arts, the record of our best, our genius. The elderly, sorrowful, Dutch faces gaze out of the darkness of a lost century. The mother’s beautiful grave head is bowed above the dead son who lies across her lap. The old mad king cries over his murdered daughter, “Never, never, never, never, never!” With infinite gentleness the Compassionate One murmurs, “It does not last, it cannot satisfy, it has no being.” “Sleep, sleep,” say the cradle songs, and “Set me free” cry the yearning slave-songs. T
he symphonies rise, a glory out of darkness. And the poets, the crazy poets cry out, “A terrible beauty is born.” But they’re all crazy. They’re all old and mad. All their beauty is terrible. Don’t read the poets. They don’t last, they can’t satisfy, they have no being. They wrote about another world, the dirt world. That too, too solid world which the Zeroes made naught of.
Ti Chiu, Dichew, the dirt-ball. Earth. The “garbage” world. The “trash” planet.
These words are archaic, history-words, attached only to history-images: receptacles were filled with “dirty” “garbage” that was poured into vehicles which carried it to “trash dumps” to “throw away.” What does that mean? Where is “away”?
ROXANA AND ROSA
When she was sixteen Hsing read the Diaries of 0-Fayez Roxana. That self-probing mind, forever questioning its own honesty, was attractive to the adolescent. Roxana was rather like Luis, Hsing thought, but a woman. Sometimes she needed to be with a woman’s mind, not a man’s, but Lena was obsessed with her basketball scores, and Rosa had gone totally angel, and Grandmother had died. Hsing read Roxana’s Diaries.
She realised for the first time that the people of the Zero Generation, the worldmakers, had believed that they were imposing an immense sacrifice on their descendants. What the Zeroes gave up, what they lost in leaving Earth — Roxana always used the English word — was compensated to them by their mission, their hope, and (as Roxana was well aware) by the tremendous power they had wielded in creating the very fabric of life for thousands of people for generations to come. “We are the gods of Discovery,” Roxana wrote. “May the true gods forgive us our arrogance!”
But when she speculated on the years to come, she did not write of her descendants as children of the gods, but as victims, seeing them with fear, guilt, and pity, helpless prisoners of their ancestor’s will and desire. “How will they forgive us?” she mourned. “We who took the world from them before they were ever born — we who took the seas, the mountains, the meadowlands, the cities, the sunlight from them, all their birthright? We have left them trapped in a cage, a tin can, a specimen box, to live and die like laboratory rats and never see the moon, never run across a field, never know what freedom is!”
I don’t know what cages or tin cans or specimen boxes are, Hsing thought with impatience, but whatever a laboratory rat is, I’m not. I’ve run across a v-field in Countryside. You don’t need fields and hills and all that stuff to be free! Freedom’s what your mind does, what your soul is. It has nothing to do with all that Dichew-stuff. Don’t worry, Grandmother! she said to the long-dead writer. It all worked out just fine. You made a wonderful world. You were a very wise, kind god.
When Roxana got depressed about her poor deprived descendants she also tended to go on and on about Shindychew, which she called the destination planet or just the Destination. Sometimes it cheered her up to imagine what it might be like, but mostly she worried about it. Would it be habitable? Would there be life on it? What kind of life? What would “the settlers” find, how would they cope with what they found, would they send the information back to Earth? That was so important to her. It was funny, poor Roxana worrying about what kind of signals her great-great-great-grandchildren would send “back” in two hundred years to a place they’d never been! But the bizarre idea was a great consolation to her. It was her justification for what they had done. It was the reason. Discovery would build a vast and delicate rainbow bridge across Space, and across it the true gods would walk: information, knowledge. The rational gods. That was Roxana’s recurring image, her solace.
Hsing found her god-imagery tiresome. People with a monotheist ancestry seemed unable to get over it. Roxana’s lower-case metaphorical deities were preferable to the capitalised Gods and Fathers in History and Lit, but she had very little patience with any of them.
GETTING THE MESSAGE
Disappointed with Roxana, Hsing quarreled with her friend.
“Rosie, I wish you’d talk about other stuff,” she said.
“I just want to share my happiness with you,” Rosa said in her Bliss voice, soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.
“We used to be happy together without dragging in Bliss.”
Rosa looked at her with a general lovingness that insulted Hsing obscurely but very deeply. We were friends, Rosie! she wanted to cry.
“Why do you think we’re here, Hsing?”
Mistrusting the question, she pondered a bit before she answered. “If you mean that literally, we’re here because the Zero Generation arranged that we should be here. If you mean it in some abstract sense, then I reject the question as loaded. To ask ‘why’ assumes purpose, a final cause. Zero Generation had a purpose: to send a ship to another planet. We’re carrying it out.”
“But where are we going?” Rosa asked with the intense sweetness, the sweet intensity, that made Hsing feel tight, sour, and defensive.
“To the Destination. Shindychew. And you and I will be old grannies when we get there!”
“Why are we going there?”
“To get information and send it back,” Hsing said, having no answer ready except Roxana’s, and then hesitated. She realised that it was a fair question, and that she had never really asked or answered it. “And to live there,” she said. “To find out — about the universe. We are a — we are a voyage. Of discovery. The voyage of the Discovery.”
She discovered the meaning of the name of the world as she said it.
“To discover — ?”
“Rosie, this leading-question bit belongs in babygarden. ‘And what do we call this nice curly letter?’ Come on. Talk to me, don’t manipulate me!”
“Don’t be afraid, angel,” Rosa said, smiling at Hsing’s anger. “Don’t be afraid of joy.”
“Don’t call me angel. I liked you when you were just you, Rosa.”
“I never had any idea who I was before I knew Bliss,” Rosa said, no longer smiling, and with such simplicity that Hsing felt both awed and ashamed.
But when she left Rosa, she was bereft. She had lost her friend for years, her beloved for a while. They wouldn’t link when they grew up, as she had dreamed. She was damned if she’d be an angel! But oh, Rosie, Rosie. She tried to write a poem. Only two lines came:
We will always meet and never meet again.Our corridors lead us forever apart.
WHAT DOES APART MEAN IN A CLOSED WORLD?
It was Hsing’s first real loss. Grandmother Meiling had been such a cheerful, kindly presence, her death had been so unexpected, so quietly abrupt, that Hsing had never been entirely aware that she was gone. It seemed as if she still lived down the corridor. To think of her was not to grieve, but to be comforted. But Rosa was lost.
Hsing brought all the vigor and passion of her youth to her first grief. She walked in shadow. Certain parts of her mind might have been darkened permanently. Her fierce resentment of the angels for taking Rosa from her led her to think that some of the older people of her ancestry were right: it was no use trying to understand other-ancestry people. They were different. They were best avoided. Keep to our own kind. Keep to the middle, keep to the way.
Even Yao, tired of fellow-workers in the plantlabs preaching Bliss, quoted Old Long-Ears — “They talk, they don’t know. They know, they don’t talk.”
FOOLS
“So you know?” Luis said, when she repeated the line to him. “You Chi-Ans?”
“No. Nobody knows. I just don’t like preaching!”
“Lots of people do, though,” Luis said. “They like preaching and they like being preached to. All kinds of people.”
Not us, she thought, but didn’t say. After all, Luis wasn’t Chinese Ancestry.
“Just because you have a flat face,” he said, “you don’t have to make a wall out of it.”
“I don’t have a flat face. That’s racist.”
“Yes you do. The Great Wall of China. Come on out, Hsing. It’s me. Hybrid Luis.”
“You aren’t any more hybrid than
I am.”
“Much more.”
“You don’t think Jael is Chinese!” she jeered.
“No, she’s pure Nor-An. But my birthmother’s half Euro and half Indo and my father’s one quarter each Southamerican and Afro and the other half Japanese, if I have it straight. Whatever it all means. What it means is I have no ancestry. Only ancestors. But you! You look like Yao and your grandmother, and you talk like them, and you learned Chinese from them, and you grew up here in the heart of an ancestry, and you’re in process right now of doing the old Chi-An Exclusion Act. Your ancestry comes from the most racist people in history.”
“Not so! The Japanese — the Euros — the Northamericans — ”
They argued amicably for a while on sketchy data, and agreed that probably everybody on Dichew had been racist, as well as sexist, classist, and obsessed with money, that incomprehensible but omnipresent element of all the histories. They got sidetracked into economics, which they had been trying to understand in history class. They talked about money for a while, very stupidly.
If everybody has access to the same food, clothing, furniture, tools, education, information, work, and authority, and hoarding is useless because you can have for the asking, and gambling is an idle sport because there’s nothing to lose, so that wealth and poverty have become mere metaphors — “rich in love,” “poor in spirit” — how is one to understand the importance of money?
“Really they were awful fools,” Hsing said, voicing the heresy all intelligent young people arrived at sooner or later.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories Page 28
