“You read novels,” he said.
“Sure. But I do reading. The writer puts the story there, and I do it. I make it be. The v-programmer uses me to do his story. Nobody uses my body and my mind but me. OK?” She always got fierce.
She had a point; but what struck Luis, standing alert and tense on the narrow incredibly intricate jungle pathway like a corridor gone crazy, watching something full of legs crawl away into the sinister darkness under a huge thing that he decided was a tree, but a tree lying down instead of standing up — what struck him was not only the choking, senseless complexity of this place, its quality of chaos, even though it was only a re-creation, the program of a sensation-field — but also how hostile it was. Dangerous, frightening. Was he experiencing the programmer’s hostility?
There were plenty of sadistic programs; some people got hooked on them. How could he tell whether “nature” was in fact so terrible?
Certainly there were VR programs in which Dichew appeared simpler, more comprehensible — Countryside or Walking to the Mountains. And watching films, where the only sensations you had to cope with were sight and hearing, you could see that even though it was chaotic, “nature” could be pretty. Some people got hooked on those films, too, and were always watching sea turtles swimming in the sea and sky birds flying in the sky. But looking was one thing and feeling was another, even if it was only virtual feeling.
How could anybody actually live their whole life in a place like Jungle? The discomfort of the sensation-field was constant, the heat, the creatures, the changes of temperature, the rough, gritty, filthy surfaces of things, the endless unevenness — every step you took you had to look to see what your foot was going to land on. He remembered the natives’ disgusting food. They killed animals and ate pieces of animal. The women chewed the root of some kind of plant, spat the chewed mass into a dish, let it rot a while, and then everybody ate it. If these stinging and biting poisonous animals were real not virtual, you’d come out of Jungle full of toxins. Indeed, what finally happened to you in the choice-fork where you lived with the savages was that you put your hand on a vine and it was a poisonous animal with no legs. It bit your hand, and within a few minutes you felt terrible pain and nausea, and then blackout. They had to end the program one way or another, of course; it was ten cycles subjective, ten actual hours, the maximum permitted length of a v-program. He had been not only virtually dead, but actually extremely stiff, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and distressed when he came out of it.
Was the program honest? Did people on Dichew actually live in such misery? Not for ten cycles/hours, but for a lifetime? In constant fear of dangerous animals, fear of enemy savages, fear of each other, in constant pain from the thorns on plants, bites and stings, muscle strains from carrying heavy loads, feet bruised by the terrible uneven surfaces, and enduring still greater horrors, starvation, diseases, broken or deformed limbs, blindness? Not one of the savages, not even the baby and its young mother, was sound and clean. Their lesions and sores and scabs and calluses, bleared eyes, twisted limbs, filthy feet, filthy hair had only become more painful to look at as he began to know them as people. He had kept wanting to help them.
As he stood now on the v-path there was a noise near him in the darkness of the trees and long stringy plants, epiphytes like Yao’s, only huge and knotted. Something among all these weird crowded-together lives that made the jungle had made a noise. He stood stiller than ever, remembering the garan.
He had gone with the men of the savage tribe, understanding that they were doing “hunting.” They had glimpsed a flash of spotted golden light. One of the men had whispered a word, garan, which he remembered when he came back. He looked for it but it was not in the dictionary.
Now it came out of the chaos-darkness, the garan. It walked across the pathway from left to right a few meters in front of him. It was long, low, golden with black spots. It walked with indescribable softness and skill on four round feet, the head low, followed by a long graceful extension of itself, a tail, the tip just twitching as it vanished into the darkness again in utter silence. It never glanced at Luis.
He stood transfixed. It’s VR, it’s a program, he said to himself. Every time I came into Jungle, if I stood here just so long, the garan would walk across the path. If I was ready for it, if I wanted to, I could shoot at it with my v-gun. If the program includes “hunting,” I would kill it. If the program doesn’t include “hunting,” my gun wouldn’t fire. I could not make anything happen. The garan would walk on and vanish in silence, the tip of its tail just twitching as it disappears. This is not the wilderness. This is not nature. This is supreme control.
He turned around and walked out of the program.
He met Bingdi on his way to the gym to run laps. “I want to develop a technology for VU,” he said.
“Sure,” Bingdi said, after a moment, and grinned. “Let’s do it.”
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Programs, photographs, descriptions — all representations of Dichew were suspect, since they were products of technology, of the human mind. They were interpretations. The planet of origin was inaccessible to direct understanding.
The planet of destination was less even than that. As he continued to explore the Library, Luis began to understand why the Zero Generation had been so eager for information about Shindychew. They had none.
The discovery of what they called a “Terran planet” within “accessible range” had set off the whole Discovery project. The sub-Zeroes had studied it as exhaustively as their instruments permitted. But neither spectrum analysis nor any form of direct observation of a small non-self-luminous body at that distance could tell them all they needed to know. Life had been established as a universal emergent within certain parameters, and all the parameters they were able to establish were highly favorable. All the same, as he read in an ancient article called “Where Are They Going?” it was possible that a very small difference from “Earth” could make “New Earth” utterly uninhabitable for humans. Chemical incompatibility of the life forms with human chemistry, making everything there poisonous. A slightly different balance of the gases of the atmosphere, so that people could not breathe the air.
Air is freedom, Luis thought.
The Librarian was reading at a table nearby. Luis went over and sat down by him. He showed old Tan the article. “It says it’s possible that we won’t be able to breathe there.”
The Librarian glanced over the article. “I certainly won’t be able to,” he observed. After the usual pause between sentences, he explained. “I’ll be dead.” He smiled a benign, semi-circular smile.
“What I’m trying to find,” Luis said, “is something about what they expected us to do when we got there. Are there instructions somewhere — for the various possibilities — ?”
“At present,” the old man said, “if there are such instructions, they are sealed.”
Luis started to speak, then stopped, waiting for Tan’s pause to end.
“Information has always been controlled.”
“By whom?”
“Primarily, by the decisions of the Zero Generation. Secondarily, by the decisions of the Educational Council.”
“Why would the Zeroes hide information about our destination? Is it that bad?”
“Perhaps they thought, since so little was known, the middle generations needn’t worry about it. And the Sixth Generation would find out. And send them the information. This is a voyage of scientific discovery.” He looked up at Luis, his face impassive. “If the air is not breathable, or there are other problems, people can go out in suits. Evamen. Live inside, study outside. Observe. Send information to the Discovery in orbit. And thence back to Ti Chiu.” He pronounced the Chinese word in Chinese. “There are Unreplaceable Supplies for twelve generations, not six. In case we could not stay there. Or chose not to. Chose to go back to Ti Chiu.”
It took Tan quite a while to say all this. Luis’s mind filled the pauses with imaginings, as if he were
illustrating a text: the vast trajectory slowing, slowing towards a certain star; the little shipworld hovering above the surface of the immense planetworld; tiny figures in evasuits swarming out into Jungle. . . . Vivid, improbable. Virtual Unreality.
“ ‘Back,’ ” he said. “What’s ‘back’? None of us came from Dichew. Back or forward, what’s the difference?”
“ ‘How much difference between yes and no? What difference between good and bad?’ ” the old man said, looking at him approvingly, yet with that expression in his eyes that Luis could not interpret. Was it sorrow?
He knew the quotation. Hsing and her father Yao had both studied with 3-Tan, who as well as being the Librarian was a scholar of the Chinese classics, and all three were fans of Old Long-Ears. Growing up in Quad Two, Luis had heard the book quoted till he read a translation of it in self-defense. Recently he had re-read it, trying to figure out how much of it made sense to him. Liu Yao had copied the whole thing out in the ancient Chinese characters. It had taken over a year. “Just practicing calligraphy,” he said. Watching the complex, mysterious figures flow from Yao’s brush, Luis had been moved more strongly than he ever had been moved by the seemingly comprehensible translated words. As if not to understand was to understand.
CIRCULATION
Paper, made from rice straw, was rare stuff. Little writing was done by hand. Yao had got permission to use several meters of paper for his copying, but he could not keep it out of circulation for long. He gave pieces of the scroll to Chi-An friends. They would put them up on the wall for a while, then recycle them. No inessential artifact could survive more than a few years. Clothes, artworks, paper copies of texts, toys, all were given back to the cycle, sometimes with a ceremony of grief. A funeral for the beloved doll. The portrait of Grandfather might be copied into the electronic memory bank when the original was recycled. Arts were practical or ephemeral or immaterial — a wedding shirt, bodypaint, a song, a story in an allnet magazine. The cycle was inexorable. The people of Discovery were their own raw material. They had everything they needed, they had nothing they could keep. The only poverty such a world could suffer would follow from the loss or waste of energy/matter tied up in useless objects or ejected into space.
Or, in the very long run, from entropy.
Once upon a time a dermatologist doing eva to repair a slight encounter-graze on the underhull had tossed his alloy gun to his companion a few meters away, who missed the catch. The film-story of the Lost Gun was a dramatic moment in second-grade Ecology. Oh! the children cried in horror as the tool, gently revolving, drifted among the stars, farther and farther away. There — look — it’s going to away! It’s going to away forever!
The light of the stars moved the world. Hydrogen acceptors fed the tiny fusion reactors that powered the electrical and mechanical systems and the Fresno accelerators that sped Discovery on its way. The little world was affected from outside only by dust and photons. It accepted nothing from outside but atoms of hydrogen.
Within itself it was entirely self-sustaining, self-renewing. Every cell shed by human skin, every speck of dust worn from a fabric or a bearing, every molecule of vapor from leaf or lung, was drawn into the filters and the reconverters, saved, recombined, re-used, reconfigured, reborn. The system was in equilibrium. There were reserves for emergencies, never yet called upon, and the store of Unreplaceable Supplies Tan had mentioned, some of them raw materials, others hi-tech items which the ship lacked the means to duplicate: a surprisingly small amount, stored in two cargobays. The effect of the second law of thermodynamics operating in this almost-closed system had been reduced to almost-nil.
Everything had been thought about, seen to, provided for. All the necessities of life. Why am I here? Why am I? A purpose for living: a reason. That, too, the Zeroes had tried to provide.
For all the middle generations of the two-century voyage, their reason for being was to be alive and well, to keep the ship in good running order, and to furnish it with another generation, so that it could accomplish its mission, their mission, the purpose to which they were all essential. A purpose which had meant so much to the Zeroes, the earthborn. Discovery. Exploration of the universe. Scientific information. Knowledge.
An irrelevant knowledge, useless, meaningless to people living and dying in the closed, complete world of the ship.
What did they need to know that they didn’t know?
They knew that life was inside: light, warmth, breath, companionship. They knew that outside was nothing. The void. Death. Death silent, immediate, absolute.
SYNDROMES
“Infectious diseases” were something you read about or saw hideous pictures of in history films. In every generation there were a few cancers, a few systemic disorders; kids broke their arms, athletes overdid it; hearts and other organs went wrong or wore out; cells followed their programs, aged, died; people aged, died. A major responsibility of doctors was seeing that death did not come too hard.
The angels spared them even that responsibility, being strong on “positive dying,” which made of death a devout communal exercise, leading the dying person into trance induced by hypnosis, chanting, music, and other techniques; the death itself was greeted by ecstatic rejoicing.
Many doctors dealt almost entirely with gestation, birth, and death: “easy out, easy in.” Diseases were words in textbooks.
But there were syndromes.
In the First and Second Generations many men in their thirties and forties had suffered rashes, lethargy, joint pains, nausea, weakness, inability to concentrate. The syndrome was tagged SD, somatic depression. The doctors judged it to be psychogenic.
It was in response to the SD syndrome that certain areas of professional work had been gender-restricted. A measure was put up for discussion and vote: men were to do all structural maintenance and dermatology. The last — repair and upkeep of the skin of the world where it interfaced with space — was the only job that required doing eva: going outside the world.
There were loud protests. The “division of labor,” perhaps the oldest and deepest-founded of all the institutions of power-imbalance — was that irrational, fanciful set of prescriptions and proscriptions to be reinstituted here, where sanity and balance must, at the cost of life itself, be preserved?
Discussions in Council and quad meetings went on for a long time. The argument for gender-restriction was that men, unable to bear and nourish children, needed a compensatory responsibility to valorise their greater muscular strength as well as their hormone-related aggressivity and need for display.
A great many men and women found this argument insupportable in every sense of the word. A slightly larger number found it convincing. The citizens voted to restrict all evas to men.
After a generation had passed, the arrangement was seldom questioned. Its popular justification was that since men were biologically more expendable than women they should do the dangerous work. In fact no one had ever been killed doing eva, or even taken a dangerous dose of radiation; but the sense of danger glamorised the rule. Active, athletic boys volunteered for dermatology in numbers far larger than were needed, and so served on a reserve rota with regular training evas. Evamen had a distinctive way of dressing: brown canvas shorts, a carefully embroidered sleeve-patch of stars on black.
The outbreak of SD had leveled off eventually to a low endemic level, a drop that some said was connected to the eva restrictions and some said was not.
The Thirds had dealt with a high incidence of spontaneous abortions and stillbirths, never explained, and fortunately lasting only a few years. The episode had caused an increase in late pregnancies and two-child families until the optimum replacement ratio was recovered.
In the Fourth and Fifth generations a perhaps related, even more debilitating set of symptoms appeared, diagnosed but as yet unexplained, tagged TSS, tactile sensitivity syndrome. The symptoms were random pains and extreme neural sensitivity. TSS sufferers avoided crowds, could not eat in the refectories, comp
lained that everything they touched hurt; they used dark glasses and earplugs and covered their hands and feet with things called sox. As no explanation or cure had been found, myths of prevention sprang up and folk remedies flourished. Quad Two had a low incidence of TSS, and so the Chi-An food style — rice, soy, ginger, garlic — was imitated. A reclusive life seemed to ease the symptoms, so some people with TSS tried to keep their children out of kidherd and school. But here the law intervened. No parental decision was permitted to impair the welfare of the child and of the community as determined by the Constitution and the judgment of the Council on Education. The children went to school and suffered no visible ill effects. Dark glasses, earplugs, and sox were a brief fad among high-schoolers, but the disorder affected few people under twenty. The angels asserted that no practitoner of Bliss suffered from TSS, and that to escape it, all you had to do was learn to rejoice.
ANCESTORS OF THE ANGELS
0-Kim Jan had been the youngest of the Zeroes, ten days old at Embarkation.
0-Kim Jan was a power in the Council for many years. Her genius was for organisation, order, a firm, impartial administration. The Chi-Ans called her Lady Confucius.
She had a late-born son, 1-Kim Terry. Her son led an obscure life, interrupted by bouts of somatic depression, as a programmer for the primary schools innet, until 0-Kim died in the year 79. She was the last of the Zeroes, the earthborn. Her death was felt as momentous.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories Page 30
