The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Navigation was an honored profession but not a glamorous one, not like being an evaman or an innet entertainer. To many people the idea of navigation was a little threatening. They explained it by saying that in most jobs you could make a mistake and of course it would cause trouble (any event in a glass bowl is likely to affect everything in the glass bowl), but in jobs like atmosphere control and navigation, a mistake could hurt or even kill people — hurt or kill everybody.

  All the systems were full of failsafes and backups and redundancies, but there was, notoriously, no way to failsafe navigation. The computers, of course, were infallible, but they had to be operated by humans; the course had to be continually adjusted; all the navigators could do was check and re-check their calculations and the computers’ calculations and operations, check and re-check input and feedback, check and correct for error, and keep on doing it, over and over and over. If the calculations and operations all agreed with each other, if it all checked out, then nothing happened. You just did it all over again forever.

  Navigation was about as thrilling as running the bacteria counts, also an unpopular job. And the mathematical talent and training required to do it was formidable. Not many students took Nav for more than the required first year, and very few went on to specialise in it. 4-Canaval was looking for candidates, or victims, as some of his students said.

  If the unpopularity of the subject rose from some deeper discomfort, some dread of what it dealt with — the voyage through space, the very movement of the shipworld, its course, its goal — nobody talked about it. But Hsing thought about it sometimes.

  Canaval Hiroshi was in his forties, a short, straight-backed man with coarse, bushy black hair and a blunt face, like the pictures of Zen Masters, Hsing thought. He was related to Luis; they were half-cousins; at moments Hsing saw a resemblance. In class he was brusque, impatient, intolerant of error. Students complained: one insignificant mistake in a computer simulation and he tossed the whole thing out, hours of work — “worthless.” He was certainly both arrogant and obsessive, but Hsing defended him against charges of megalomania. “It’s not his ego,” she said. “I don’t think he has an ego. All he has is his work. And it does have to be right. Without error. I mean, if we get too close to a gravity sink, does it matter whether it’s by a parsec or by a kilometer?”

  “All right, but a millimeter isn’t going to do any harm,” said Aki, who had just had a beautiful charting deleted as “worthless.”

  “A millimeter now, a parsec in ten years,” Hsing said priggishly. She saw Aki roll his eyes. She didn’t care. Nobody else seemed to understand the excitement of doing what Canaval did, the thrill of getting it right — not nearly right, but exactly right. Perfection. It was beautiful, the work. It was abstract, yet human, even humble, because what you wanted didn’t matter. And you couldn’t rush it; you had to get all the small things right, take care of all the details, in order to get to the great thing. There was a way to follow. It took constant, ceaseless, alert attention to that way to stay on it. It was not a matter of following your wish or your will, but of following what was. Being aware, all the time, being centered. Celestial Navigation: heaven-sailing. Out there was infinity. Through it there was one way.

  And if knowing this went to your head, you always got reminded, immediately and inarguably, that you were completely dependent on the computers.

  In third-year Nav, Canaval always gave a problem: The computers are down for five seconds. Using the coordinates and settings given, plot course for the next five seconds without using the computers. — Students either gave it up within hours, or worked days at it and then gave it up as a waste of time. Hsing did not hand the problem back in. At the end of term, Canaval asked her for it. “I thought I’d play around with it in vacation,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I like the computations. And I want to know how long it’ll take me.”

  “How long so far?”

  “Forty-four hours.”

  He nodded so slightly that perhaps he didn’t nod, and turned away. He was incapable of showing approval.

  He did, however, have a capacity for pleasure, and laughed when he found things funny, usually quite simple things, silly mistakes, foolish mishaps. His laughter was a loud, childish ha! ha! ha! After he laughed he always said, smiling broadly, “Stupid! Stupid!”

  “He really is a Zen Master,” she told Luis in the snackery. “I mean really. He sits zazen. He gets up at four to sit. Three hours. I wish I could do that. But I’d have to go to bed at twenty, I’d never get any studying done.” Observing a lack of response in Luis, she said, “And how is your v-corpse?”

  “Reduced to a virtual skeleton,” Luis said, still looking a bit absent.

  College students chose a professional course in third year. Hsing was in Nav, Luis in Med. They no longer had any classes together, but they met daily in the snackery, the gyms, or the library. They no longer visited each other’s room.

  SEX IN THE GLASS BOWL

  Lovers do not run away (where is away?). Lovers’ meetings are public matters. Your procreative capacity is a matter of intense and immediate social interest and concern. Contraception is guaranteed by an injection every twenty-five days, for girls from the onset of menstruation, for boys at a time determined by medical staff. Failure to come to the Clinic for your conshot at the due date and hour is followed by immediate public inquiry: Clinic staff people come to your class, your gym, your section, corridor, homespace, announcing your name and your delinquency loud and clear.

  People are permitted to go without conshots on the following conditions or undertakings: sterilization, or completion of menopause; a pledge either of chastity or of strict homosexuality; or an intention to conceive, formally declared by both the man and the woman. A woman who violates her undertaking to be chaste or conceives a child with anyone but the declared partner can get a morning-after shot, but both she and her sexual partner must then go back to conshots for two years. Unauthorised conceptions are aborted. The inexorable social and genetic reasons for all this are made clear during your education. But all the reasons in the world wouldn’t work if you could keep your sexual life private. You can’t.

  Your corridor knows, your family knows, your section, your ancestry, your whole quadrant knows who you are and where you are and what you do and who you do it with, and they all talk. Shame and honor are powerful social engines. If enforced by total publicity and attached to rational need, rather than to hierarchic fantasies and the will to dominate, shame and honor can keep a society running steadily for a long time.

  A teenager may move out of the parent’s homespace and find a single on another corridor, in another section, even change quadrants; but everybody in that new corridor, section, quad will know who goes in and out your door. They will be observant, and interested, and vigilant, and curious, and mostly well-disposed, and always hoping for a scandal, and they will talk.

  The Warn, or Warren, was the first place many young people moved to when they left parentspace. It was a set of corridors in Quad Four, close to the College; all the spaces were singles; due to the shape of the housing of the main accelerator, walls in the Warn weren’t all at right angles, and some of the spaces were substandard size. The students moved partitions around and created a maze of cubicles and sharespaces. The Warn was noisy and disorganised and smelled of dirty clothes. Sleep there was occasional, sex was casual. But everybody turned up on time at Clinic for their conshot.

  Luis lived near the Warn in a triple with two other medical students, Tan Bingdi and Ortiz Einstein. Hsing was still in the Quad Two homespace with Yao. She had a twenty-minute walk to and from college daily.

  After the usual adolescent period of experimenting around, when she entered college Hsing had pledged chastity. She said she didn’t want conshots controlling her body’s cycles, and didn’t want emotion controlling her mind; not till she was through college.

  Luis continued to get his conshot every twenty-five
days, did not pledge, but did not go to bed with any of his friends. He never had. His only sexual experiences had been the general promiscuities of teenparties.

  They knew all this about each other because it was public knowledge. When they were together they didn’t talk about these matters. Their silences were as deeply and comfortably mutual as their conversations.

  Their friendship was of course equally public. Their friends speculated freely about why Hsing and Luis didn’t have sex and whether and when they’d get around to it.

  Beneath their friendship was something that was not public, and was not friendship: a pledge made without words, but with the body; a non-action with profound results. They were each other’s privacy. They had found where away was. The key to it was silence.

  Hsing broke the pledge, broke the silence.

  “Reduced to a virtual skeleton,” Luis said absently, evidently thinking of something other than the v-cadaver which had been teaching him Anatomy. The cadaver had been programmed by its ghoulish author to guide and chastise the apprentice dissector. “The medulla, idiot!” it would whisper cavernously from moveless lips and lungless rib-cavity, or “Surely you don’t take that for the caecum?” Hsing liked to hear what the cadaver had been saying. If you made no mistakes it occasionally rewarded you with bursts of poetry. “Soul clap hands and sing, and louder sing!” it had cried, even as Luis removed the larynx. But he had no cadaver-tales for her today, and went on sitting at the snackery table, brooding.

  She said, “Luis, Lena — ”

  Luis held up his hand so quickly, so silently, that she fell silent, having said nothing but the name.

  “No,” he said.

  There was a very long pause.

  “Listen. Luis. You’re free.”

  His hand was up again, warding off speech, defending silence.

  She insisted: “I want you to know that you are — ”

  “You can’t free me,” he said. His voice was deepened by anger or some other emotion. “Yes. I’m free. We both are.”

  “I only — ”

  “Don’t, Hsing! Don’t!” He looked straight into her eyes for an instant. He stood up. “Let it be,” he said. “I have to go.” He strode off among the tables. People said “Hi, Luis” and he did not answer. People saw a quarrel. Hsing and Luis had a fight in the snackery today. Hey, what’s up with Hsing and Luis?

  YIN YANG

  A young woman may find it difficult to withstand the urgent sexual advances of an older man in a position of power or authority. Her resistance is further compromised if she finds him attractive. She is likely to deny both the difficulty and the attraction, wishing to maintain her freedom of choice and that of other women. If her desire for independence is strong and clear, she will resist the pressure of his desire, she will resist her own longing to match the strength of her yielding to the strength of his aggression, to take him into herself while crying “Take me!”

  Or she may come to see her freedom precisely in that yielding. Yin is her principle, after all. Yin is called the negative principle, but it is Yin that says “Yes.”

  They met again in the snackery a while after commencement. Both were in intense training in their chosen specialties, Luis interning at the Central Hospital, Hsing as an apprentice in the Bridge Crew. Their work consumed them. They had not seen each other alone for two or three tendays.

  She said, “Luis, I’m living with Canaval.”

  “Somebody said you were.” He still spoke with that vagueness, absentness, a kind of soft cover over something hard and set.

  “I just decided to last week. I wanted to tell you.”

  “If it’s a good thing for you . . .”

  “Yes. It is. He wants us to marry.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Hiroshi is — he’s like the fusion core. It’s exciting to be with him.” She spoke earnestly, trying to explain, wanting him to understand. It was important that he understand. He looked up suddenly, smiling. Her face turned dusky red. “Intellectually, emotionally,” she said.

  “Hey, flatface, if it’s good it’s good,” he said. He leaned over and lightly kissed her nose.

  “You and Lena — ” she said, eager.

  He smiled a different smile and replied quietly, mildly, absolutely, “No.”

  INTEGRITY

  It wasn’t that there were pieces missing from Hiroshi. He was complete. He was all one piece. Maybe that’s what was missing — bits of the other Hiroshis who might have read novels, or played solitaire, or stayed in bed late mornings, or done anything but what he did, been anyone other than what he was.

  Hiroshi did what he did and doing it was what he was.

  Hsing had thought, as a young woman might think, that her being in his life would enlarge it, change it. She understood very soon after she came to live with him that the arrangement had changed her life greatly and his not at all. She had become part of what Hiroshi did. An essential part, certainly: because he did only what was essential. Only she had never truly understood what he did.

  That understanding made a greater change in her thinking and her life’s course than having sex and living with him did. Not that the pleasures, tensions, and discoveries of sex didn’t engage and delight and often surprise her; but she found sex, like eating, a splendid physical satisfaction which did not take up a great deal of her mind or even her emotions. Those were occupied by her work.

  And the discovery, the revelation Hiroshi brought her, had nothing to do, or seemed to have nothing to do, with their partnership. It concerned the work he did, they did. Their whole life. The life of everybody in the worldship.

  “You got me to live with you so you could co-opt me,” she said to him, half a year or so later.

  He replied with his usual honesty — for though everything he did served to conceal and perpetuate a deception, he made scrupulous efforts never to lie to a friend — “No, no. I trusted you. But it simplified everything. Doesn’t it?”

  She laughed. “For you. Not for me! For me everything used to be simple. Now everything’s double . . .”

  He looked at her without speaking for a while; then he took her hand and gently put his lips against her palm. He was a formally courteous sexual partner, whose ultimate surrender to passion always moved her to tenderness, so that their lovemaking was a reliable and sometimes amazing joy. All the same she knew that to him she was ultimately only fuel to the fusion core — an element in his overriding, single purpose. She told herself that she did not feel used, or tricked, because she knew now that everything was fuel to Hiroshi, including himself.

  ERRORS

  They had been married for three days when he told her what the purpose of his work was — what he did.

  “You asked me a year ago about discrepancies in the acceleration records,” he said. They were eating alone together in their homespace. Honeymooning, it was called, a word that didn’t have many reverberations in this world without honey or bees to make it, without months or a moon to make them. But a nice custom.

  She nodded. “You showed me I’d left out some factor. I don’t remember what it was.”

  “Falsehood,” he said.

  “No, that isn’t what you said. The constant of — ”

  He interrupted her. “What I said was a falsehood,” he said. “A deliberate deception. To lead you astray. Make you think you’d made an error. Your computations were perfectly correct, you omitted nothing. There are discrepancies. Much greater discrepancies than the one you found.”

  “In the acceleration records?” she said stupidly.

  Hiroshi nodded once. He had stopped eating. She knew that when he spoke so quietly he was very tense.

  She was hungry, and pushed in one good supply of noodles before she put her chopsticks down and said, through noodles, “All right, what are you telling me?”

  His face was strained. His eyes lifted to hers for a moment with an expression of desperation? pleading? — so uncharacteristic that it shocked her, m
oved her as his vulnerability in lovemaking did. “What’s wrong, Hiroshi?” she whispered.

  “The ship has been decelerating for over four years,” he said.

  Her mind moved with terrific rapidity, running through implications, explanations, scenarios.

  “What went wrong?” she asked at last, quite steadily.

  “Nothing. The deceleration is controlled. Deliberate.”

  He was looking down at his bowl. When he glanced up at her and at once looked down again, she realised that he feared her judgment. That he feared her. Though, she thought, his fear would not influence his actions or his words to her.

  “Deliberate?”

  “A decision made four years ago,” he said.

  “By?”

  “Four people on the Bridge. Later, two in Administration. Four people in Engineering and Maintenance also know about it now.”

  “Why?”

  The question seemed to relieve him, perhaps because it was asked quietly, without protest or challenge. He answered in a tone more like his usual one, even with a touch of the lecturer’s assurance and acerbity. “You asked what’s wrong. Nothing is. Nothing went wrong. We have always been on course, with almost no deviance. But an error did occur. An extraordinary, massive error. Which allowed us to take advantage of it. Error is opportunity. Chierek and I spotted it. A fundamental, ongoing error in the trajectory approximations, dating from our passage through the CG440 sink, five years ago, in Year 154. What happened during that passage?”

  “We lost speed,” she answered automatically.

  “We gained it,” he said. He glanced up to meet her incredulity. “Our acceleration increase was so great and so abrupt that the computers assumed a factor-ten error and compensated for it.” He paused to make sure that she was following him.