The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Then we are too,” Luis said, maybe believing it, maybe not.

  “Oh Luis,” Hsing said with a long, deep sigh, looking up at the mural on the wall of the High School snackery, currently an abstract of soft curving pinks and golds, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Be an awful fool.”

  She nodded.

  4-NOVA ED

  Luis wasn’t turning out the way his father intended. They both knew it. 4-Nova Ed was a kind man whose existence was centered in his genitals. Stimulation and relief was the pressing issue, but procreation was important to him too. He had wanted a son to carry his name and his genes into the future. He was glad to help make a child for any woman who asked him to, and did so three times; but he had looked long and carefully for the right woman to bear his fatherson. He studied every word of several compatibility charts and genetic mixmatches, though reading wasn’t his favorite occupation; and when he finally decided he’d found the one, he made sure she was willing to control the gender. “A daughter would be fine if I had two, but if it’s one it’s a son, right?”

  “A son you want, a son you get,” said 4-Sandstrom Lakshmi, and bore him one. An active, athletic woman, she found the experience of pregnancy so uncomfortable and time-consuming that she never repeated it. “It was your big, brown, Goddam eyes, Ed,” she said. “Never again. Here you are. He’s all yours.” Every now and then Lakshmi turned up at the 4-5 Nova homespace, always bringing a toy appropriate to Luis’s age a year ago or five years from now. Usually she and Ed had what she called commemorative sex. After it she would say, “I wonder what the hell I thought I was doing. Never again! But I guess he’s OK, isn’t he?”

  “The kid’s OK!” his father said, heartily and without conviction. “Your brains, my plumbing.”

  She worked in Central Communications; Ed was a physical therapist, a good one, but as he said, his ideas were all in his hands. “It’s why I’m such a good lover,” he told his partners, and he was right. He was also a good parent for a baby. He knew how to hold the baby and handle him, and loved to do so. He lacked the fear of the infant, the squeamish dissociation which paralyses less manly men. The delicacy and vigor of the tiny body delighted him. He loved Luis as flesh of his flesh, wholeheartedly and happily, for the first couple of years, and less happily for the rest of his life. As the years went on the pure delight got covered over and buried under a lot of other stuff, a lot of hard feelings.

  The child had a deep, silent will and temper. He would never give in and never take things easy. He had colic forever. Every tooth was a battle. He wheezed. He learned to talk before he could walk. By the time he was three he was saying things that left Ed staring. “Don’t talk so Goddam fancy!” he told the child. He was disappointed in his son and ashamed of his disappointment. He had wanted a companion, a double, a kid to teach racquetball to. Ed had been Quad Two racquetball champion six years running.

  Luis dutifully learned to play racquetball, never very well, and tried to teach his father a word game called Grammary, which drove Ed nuts. He did outstandingly well at school, and Ed tried to be proud of him. Instead of running around with the kidherd, Luis always brought a Chi-An kid over, a girl, Liu Hsing, and they shut the room door and played for hours, silently. Ed checked, of course. They weren’t up to anything more than all herdkids got up to, but he was glad when they got to their Ceremony and started wearing clothes. In shorts and shirts they looked like little adults. In their nakedness they had been somehow slippery, elusive, mysterious.

  As all the growing-up rules came into force, Luis obeyed them. He still preferred the girl Hsing over all the boys and they still saw each other all the time, but never alone together with the door shut. Which meant that when Ed was home he had to listen to them as they did their homework or talked. Talked, talked, shit, how they talked. Until the girl was twelve. Then her ancestry’s rule was that she could only meet a boy in public places and with other people around. Ed found this an excellent idea. He hoped Luis would take up with other girls, maybe get into some boy activities. Luis and Hsing did go around with a group of the Quad Two teens. But the two of them always ended up somewhere, talking.

  “When I was sixteen, I’d slept with three girls,” Ed said. “And a couple of guys.” It didn’t come out the way he meant. He meant to confide in Luis, to encourage him, but it sounded like a boast or a reproach.

  “I don’t want to have sex yet,” the boy said, sounding stuffy. Ed couldn’t blame him.

  “It’s not really a big deal,” Ed said.

  “It is for you,” Luis said. “So I guess it is for me.”

  “No, what I mean — ” But Ed could not say what he meant. “It’s not just fun,” he said lamely.

  A pause.

  “Beats jerking off,” Ed said.

  Luis nodded, evidently in full agreement.

  A pause.

  “I just want to figure out how to, maybe, you know, how to find my own way, in all that,” the boy said, not as fast with the words as usual.

  “That’s OK,” the father said, and they parted with mutual relief. The boy might be slow, Ed thought, but at least he’d grown up in a homespace with plenty of healthy, open, happy sex as an example.

  ON NATURE

  It was interesting to know that Ed had slept with men; it must have been youthful experiment, for he’d never to Luis’s knowledge brought a man home. But he brought women home. Probably every woman of his own generation, Luis thought, and now he was bringing home some of the older Fives. Luis knew the sound of his orgasms by heart — a harsh, increasing hah! hah! HAH! — and had heard every conceivable form of ecstatic female shriek, wail, howl, grunt, gasp, and bellow. The most notable bellower was 4-Yep Sosi, a physical therapist from Quad Three. She had been coming over every now and then ever since Luis could remember. She always brought star-cookies for Luis, even now. Sosi started out going aah, like a lot of them, but her aahs got louder and louder and more and more continuous, rising to a relentless, mindless ululation, so piercing that once Granny 2-Wong down the corridor thought it was an alarm siren and roused up everybody in the Wong compound. It didn’t embarrass Ed at all. Nothing did. “It’s perfectly natural,” he said.

  It was a favorite phrase of his. Anything to do with the body was “perfectly natural.” Anything to do with the mind wasn’t.

  So, what was “nature”?

  As far as Luis could think it through, and he thought about it a good deal his last year in high school, Ed was quite correct. In this world — on this ship, he corrected himself, for he was trying to train his mind in certain habits — on this ship, “nature” was the human body. And to some extent the plants, soils, and water in hydroponics; and the bacterial population. Those only to some extent, because they were so closely controlled by the techs, even more closely controlled than human bodies were.

  “Nature,” on the original planet, had meant what was not controlled by human beings. “Nature” was what was substantially previous to control, the raw material for control, or what had escaped from control. Thus the areas of Dichew where few people lived, quadrants that were undesirably dry or cold or steep, had been called “nature,” “wilderness,” or “nature preserves.” In these areas lived the animals, which were also called “natural” or “wild.” And all the “animal” functions of the human body were therefore “natural” — eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, sex, reflex, sleep, shouting, and going off like a siren when somebody licked your clitoris.

  Control over these functions wasn’t called unnatural, however, except possibly by Ed. It was called civilisation. Control started affecting the natural body as soon as it was born. And it really began to click in, Luis saw, at seven when you put on clothes and undertook to be a citizen instead of one of the kidherd, the wild bunch, the naked little savages.

  Wonderful words! — wild — savage — civilisation — citizen —

  No matter how you civilised it, the body remained somewhat wild, or sava
ge, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions, or die. It could never be fully tamed, fully controlled. Even plants, Luis learned from listening to Hsing’s father, however manipulated to serve their symbiotic functions, were not totally predictable or obedient; and the bacteria populations came up constantly with “wild” breeds, possibly dangerous mutations. The only things that could be perfectly controlled were inanimate, the matter of the world, the elements and compounds, solid, liquid, or gas, and the artifacts made from them.

  What about the controller, the civiliser itself, the mind? Was it civilised? Did it control itself?

  There seemed to be no reason why it should not; yet its failures to do so constituted most of what was taught as History. But that was inevitable, Luis thought, because on Dichew “Nature” had been so huge and so strong. Nothing there was really, absolutely under control, except v-stuff.

  Oddly enough he had learned that interesting fact from a virtual. He hacked his way through a tropical jungle buzzing with things that flew, bit, crawled, stung, snapped, and tormented the flesh, gasping for breath in a malodorous clinging heat that took his strength away, until he came to an open place where a horrible little group of humans deformed by disease, malnutrition, and self-mutilation rushed out of huts, screaming at the sight of him, and shot poisoned darts at him through blowguns. It was part of a lesson in Ethical Dilemmas, using the V-Dichew program Jungle. The words tropic, jungle, trees, insects, sting, huts, tattoos, darts had been in the Preliminary Vocabulary yesterday. But right now the Ethical Dilemma was pressing. Should he run away? try to parley? ask for mercy? shoot back? His v-persona carried a lethal weapon and wore a heavy garment, which might deflect the darts or might not.

  It was an interesting lesson, and they had a good debate in class afterwards. But what stuck with Luis long after was the sheer, overwhelming enormity of that “jungle,” that “wild nature” in which the savage human beings seemed so insignificant as to be accidental, and the civilised human being was completely foreign. He did not belong there. No sane person did. No wonder the subzero generations had had trouble maintaining civilisation and self-control, against odds like that.

  A CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

  Although he found the arguments of the angels both rather silly and rather disturbing, he thought that they might be right in one fundamental matter: that the destination of this ship was not as important as the voyage itself. Having read history, and experienced Jungle and Inner City, Luis wondered if part of the Zero Generation’s intent might have been to give at least a few thousand people a place where they could escape such horrors. A place where human existence could be controlled, as in a laboratory experiment. A controlled experiment in control.

  Or a controlled experiment in freedom?

  That was the biggest word Luis knew.

  He mentally perceived words as having various sizes, densities, depths; words were dark stars, some small and dull and solid, some immense, complex, subtle, with a powerful gravity-field that attracted infinite meanings to them. Freedom was the biggest of the dark stars.

  For what it meant to him personally he had a clear, precise image. His asthma attacks were infrequent, but vivid to his mind; and once when he was thirteen, in gymnastics, he had been under Big Ling at the wrong moment and Big Ling had come down right on him. Being about twice Luis’s weight, Ling had squashed the air entirely out of Luis’s lungs. After an endless time of gasping for air, the first breath, raw, dragging, searingly painful: that was freedom. Breath. What you breathed.

  Without it you suffocated, went dark, and died.

  People who had to live on the animal level might have been able to move around a lot, but never had enough air for their minds to breathe; they had no freedom. That was clear to him in the history readings and the historical v-worlds. Inner City 2000 was so shocking because it wasn’t “wild nature” that made the people there crazy, sick, dangerous, and incredibly ugly, but their own lack of control over their own supposedly civilised “nature.”

  Human nature. A strange combination of words.

  Luis thought about the man in Quad Three, last year, who had attacked a woman sexually, beaten her unconscious, and then killed himself by drinking liquid oxygen. He had been a Five, and the event, disturbing to everyone in the world, was particularly horrible and haunting to the people of his generation. They asked themselves could I have done that? could that happen to me? None of them seemed to know the answer. That man, 5-Wolfson Ad, had lost control over his “animal” or “natural” needs and so had ended up without any freedom at all, not making choices, not able even to stay alive. Maybe some people couldn’t handle freedom.

  The angels never talked about freedom. Follow orders, attain Bliss.

  What would the angels do in the Year 201?

  That was an interesting question, actually. What would any of them do, what would happen to the controlled experiment, when the laboratory ship reached the Destination? Shindychew was a planet — another huge mass of wild stuff, uncontrollable “nature,” where they wouldn’t even know what the rules were. On Dichew, at least their ancestors had been familiar with “nature,” knew how to use it, how to get around in it, which animals were dangerous or poisonous, how to grow the wild plants, and so on. On the New Earth they wouldn’t know anything.

  The books talked about that, a little, not much. After all there was still half a century to go before they got there. But it would be interesting to find out what they did know about Shindychew.

  When he asked his history teacher, 3-Tranh Eti, she said that the education program would provide Generation Six with a whole lot of education about the Destination and living there. Generation Five people would mostly be so old when they got there that it wasn’t really their problem, she said, though of course they would be allowed to “land” if they wished to. The program was designed to keep the “middle generations” (“That’s us,” the old woman said drily) content with their world. A practical approach, she said, and well meant, but perhaps it had encouraged the mentality that was now so very prevalent among the proponents of Bliss.

  She spoke frankly to Luis, her best student, and he told her as frankly that whether he got there or not, no matter how old he’d be if he got there, he wanted to find out now where he was going. He understood why; he didn’t need to understand how; but he did want to understand where.

  Tranh Eti gave him some help in accessing information, but it turned out that the education program for Generation Six was not accessible at present. It was being reviewed by the Educational Committee.

  His other teachers advised him to finish his studies in high school and college and worry about the Destination later. If at all.

  He went to the Head Librarian, old 3-Tan, his friend Bingdi’s grandfather.

  “To speculate about our destination,” Tan said, “is to increase anxiety, impatience, and erroneous expectations.” He smiled slightly. He spoke slowly, with pauses between sentences. “Our job is to travel. A different job from arrival.” After a pause he went on, “But a generation that knows only how to travel — can they teach a generation how to arrive?”

  THE GARAN

  Luis continued to pursue his interest. He went back, on his own, to Jungle.

  He had to follow the trail, of course. However through-composed a virtual-reality program was, you could do in it only what there was to do. It was like a dream, any dream, especially a nightmare: only certain choices are offered, if any.

  There was the trail. You had to take the trail. The trail would lead to the ugly, degraded little savages, and they would scream and shoot poisoned darts, and then he would have to make one of the choices. Methodically, Luis made them, one after another.

  Attempts to reason with the savages or run away from them ended quickly in blackout, which was, of course, v-death.

  Once when they attacked him he fired the gun and killed one of the men. This was horrible beyond anything he had ever imagined and he escaped the program within m
oments of firing the weapon. That night he dreamed that he had a secret name that nobody knew, not even himself. A woman he had never seen before came to him and said, “Add your name to the wolf.”

  He went back into Jungle, though it was not easy. He found that if he showed no fear, threatened them with the gun if they attacked but did not fire it, the little men eventually, very suddenly, accepted his presence. After that another set of choice-forks opened out. He could keep his weapon in evidence and force the savages to lead him to the Lost City (which was supposed to be why you’d entered the jungle). He could make them obey him, but always he blacked out before he got far; the savages had murdered him. Or, if he behaved without fear, not threatening them and asking nothing of them, he could stay with them, living in a half-ruined hut. They accepted him as some kind of crazy man. The women gave him food and showed him how to do things, and he began to learn their language and customs. These were surprisingly intricate, formal, and fascinating. It was only v-learning; it only went so far, and seemed more than it was; when you came out you didn’t come out with much. A program could hold only so much, even in implication. But what little he recalled of it had strangely enriched his thinking. He intended to go back some time, work his way to that final choice, and redo living with the savages.

  But he had a different purpose, this time. This time when he entered Jungle, he moved as slowly as he could, and once he was well in he stopped and stood still on the path. He was no longer afraid of meeting the savages. Now that he knew them, had lived among them, it would have been sad to see them come at him, as they inevitably would, screaming and trying to kill him. He wanted not to meet them, this time. They were virtual human beings made by human beings. He had come to try to experience a place where nothing was human.

  As he stood there, beginning to sweat at once, smelling the stinks, slapping at the creatures that buzzed and flickered around him and landed on his skin and bit, listening to the uncanny noises, he thought about Hsing. She would not admit VR as experience. She never went to V-Dichew unless it was required by a teacher. She never played v-games, wouldn’t even try the really interesting one Luis and Bingdi had worked out using “Borges’s Garden” as a matrix. “I don’t want to be in another person’s world, I want to be in mine,” she said.