The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Factor ten?”

  “By the time Chierek came to me with the figures and I realised that it could only be explained as a computer compensation error, we’d accelerated to .82 and were forty years ahead of schedule.”

  She was indignant at his joking, trying to fool her, saying these enormities. “Point eight two is not possible,” she said, cold, dismissive.

  “Oh yes,” Hiroshi said with a grin that was equally cold, “it’s possible. It’s actual. We did it. We traveled at .82 for ninety-one days. Everything you know about acceleration, Gegaard’s calculations, the massgain limit — it was all wrong. That’s where the errors were! In the basic assumptions! Error is opportunity. It’s all clear enough, once you have the records and can do the computations. We can tell the physicists back on Dichew all about it when we get to Shindychew. Tell them where they went wrong. Tell them how to use a sink to whiplash an object up to eight tenths lightspeed. This is the voyage of the Discovery, all right. We could have made it in eighty years.” His face was hard with triumph, the conqueror’s face. “We’re going to arrive at the target system five years from now,” he said. “In the first half of Year 164.”

  She felt nothing but anger.

  “If this is true,” she said at last, slowly and without expression, “why are you telling me now? Why are you telling me at all? You’ve kept this from everybody else. Why?”

  It was not only the enormous shock of what he was telling her, it was his victorious look, his triumphant tone, that brought up the surge of rage in her — the opposition he had feared at the beginning, the question How dare you? But her anger now didn’t affect him; he was unshaken, borne up by his conviction of rightness.

  “It’s the only power we have,” he said.

  “ ‘We?’ Who?”

  “We who aren’t angels.”

  TO COUNT THE NUMBER OF ANGELS

  When Luis was told that the Educational Agenda for the Sixth Generation was not accessible because it was being revised, he said, “But that’s what I was told when I asked to see it eight years ago.”

  The woman on the Education Center info screen, a motherly sort, shook her head sympathetically. “Oh, it’s always under revision or under consideration, angel,” she said. “They have to keep updating it.”

  “I see,” said Luis, “thank you,” and switched out.

  Old Tan had died two years ago, but his grandson was a promising replacement. “Listen, Bingdi,” Luis said across their sharespace, “does the bodycount register angels?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Librarians are the masters of useful trivia.”

  “You mean, are angels listed as such? No. Why would they be? The old religious affiliations weren’t ever listed. Listing would be divisive.” Bingdi did not speak quite as slowly as his grandfather, but in a similar rhythm, each sentence followed by a small, thoughtful silence, a quarternote rest. “I suppose Bliss is a religious affiliation. I don’t know how else it could be defined. Though I’m not sure how religion is defined.”

  “So there’s no way to know accurately how many angels there are. Or put it another way: There’s no way to know who is an angel and who isn’t.”

  “You could ask.”

  “Certainly. I will.”

  “You’ll go from corridor to corridor throughout the world,” Bingdi said, “inquiring of each person you pass, Are you an angel?”

  “ ‘Are we not all angels?’ ” said Luis.

  “Sometimes it seems that way.”

  “It does indeed.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “It’s what I can’t get at that worries me. The education program for the Sixes, for instance.”

  Bingdi looked mildly startled. “Are you planning on procreating a baby Six?”

  “No. I want to find out something about Shindychew. The Sixes are going to land on Shindychew. It seems reasonable to assume they’ll be educated to do so. Informed of what to expect. How to cope with living outside. Trained in doing long-term eva on a planet surface. That’s going to be their job, after all. The Zeroes must have included information on it in the education program. Your grandfather said they did. Where is it? And who is going to train them?”

  “Well, there aren’t any Sixes even wearing clothes yet,” Bingdi said. “A bit soon to terrify the poor little noodles with tales of an unknown world, isn’t it?”

  “Better too soon than never,” said Luis. “Destination Date is forty-four years from now. We might want to go do eva on Shindychew. Dodder forth, as Hsing put it.”

  “May I think about it after a couple of decades?” Bingdi said. “Just now I need to finish this bit of useful trivia.”

  He turned to his screen, but in a minute he looked round again at Luis. “What’s the connection of that with the number of angels?” he said, in the voice of one who glimpses the answer as he asks the question.

  ENEMIES OF BLISS

  She did not know 5-Chin Ramon well, though he was one of Hiroshi’s circle. He had been on the Managerial Counsel for a couple of years now. She had not voted for him. He identified as Chinese Ancestry and lived in Pine Mountain Compound, which was mostly Chins and Lees. A lot of the Chins had become angels early on. Ramon had risen, as they said, high in Bliss. He seemed a colorless, conventional man; like many male angels he treated women in a defensive, distancing, facetious manner Hsing found despicable. She had been displeased as well as very surprised to find he was one of the ten — now eleven — people who knew that the ship was decelerating towards an early arrival at the Destination.

  “So you made this tape without telling the people you were taping them?” she asked him, not trying to keep contempt and distrust out of her voice.

  “Yes,” Ramon said, without expression.

  Ramon had had a crisis of conscience: so Hiroshi said. 5-Chatterji Uma explained it to Hsing. Hsing liked and admired Uma, a bright, elegant little woman, elected to chair the Managerial Counsel four years running; she had to listen to her. Ramon, Uma explained, had been admitted to Patel Inbliss’s inner circle, the archangels; and what he heard and learned there had so disturbed him that he had broken his vow of secrecy, made notes of things said among the archangels, and given them to Uma. She had taken his report to Canaval and the others. They had requested Ramon to prove his allegations. So he had surreptitiously taped a session of the archangels.

  “How can you trust a person who would do such a thing?” Hsing had demanded.

  “It was the only way he could provide us evidence.” Uma had looked with sympathy at Hsing. “Paranoid suspicions — rumors of plots to take over navigation, tamper with our genes, put untested drugs in the water supply — how many have we all heard! This was the only way Ramon could convince us that he wasn’t paranoid, or simply malicious.”

  “Tapes are easy to fake.”

  “Fakes are easy to spot,” said 4-Garcia Teo with a smile; he was a big, craggy, kindly engineer whom Hsing could not help trusting, hard as she was working to distrust everybody in this room. “It’s real.”

  “Listen to it, Hsing,” Canaval said, and she nodded, though with a sullen heart. She hated it, this secrecy, lying, hiding, plotting. She did not want to be part of it, did not want to be with these people, to be one of them, to share the power they had seized — seized because they had to, they kept saying; but nobody had to lie. Nobody had the right to do what they were doing, to control everybody’s life without telling them.

  The voices on the tape meant nothing to her. Men’s voices, talking about some business she did not understand, none of her business in any case. Let the angels have their secrets, let Canaval and Uma have theirs, just leave me out of it, she thought.

  But she was caught by the sound of Patel Inbliss’s voice, a soft, old voice, iron-soft, familiar to her all her life. Through her resistance, her disgust at being forced to eavesdrop, her incredulity, she heard that voice say, “Canaval must be discredited before we can count on the Bridge. And Cha
tterji.”

  “And Tranh,” said another voice, at which 5-Tranh Golo, also a member of the Counsel, nodded his head in a wry pantomime of thanks-very-much.

  “What strategy have you formed?”

  “Chatterji is easy,” said the other, deeper voice, “she’s indiscreet and arrogant. Whispers will cripple her influence. With Canaval it is going to have to be a matter of his health.”

  Hsing felt a curious chill. She glanced at Hiroshi. He sat as impassive as if in his morning meditation.

  “Canaval is an enemy of bliss,” said the old voice, Patel’s.

  “In a position of unique authority,” said one of the others, to which the deep voice replied, “He must be replaced. On the Bridge, and in the College. We must have a good man in both those positions.” The tone of the deep voice was mild, full of reasoned certainty.

  The discussion went on; much of it was incomprehensible to Hsing, but she listened intently now, trying to understand. All at once the tape ended midword.

  She started, looked around at the others: Uma, Teo, Golo, and Ramdas, whom she thought of as friends; Chin Ramon and two women, an engineer and a Counsel member, whom she knew as members of the secret circle but did not think of as friends. And Hiroshi, still sitting zazen. They were in Uma’s homespace, furnished “nomad style,” a recent fad, no biltins, only carpeting and pillows in bright paisleys.

  “What was that about your health?” Hsing demanded. “And then they were talking about something about heart valves?”

  “I have a congenital heart deformity,” he said. “It’s on my H-folder.”

  Everyone had an H-folder: genetic map, health record, school records, work history. You held the code on it; nobody could see your H-folder without your permission, until you died and the file went from Records to Archives. A considerable mystique of privacy surrounded these personal files. No one but a coparent or a doctor would ever ask to see your H-folder. That anyone could break or steal the code and look at it without your permission was unthinkable. Hsing had not seen Hiroshi’s H-folder and had never asked to, since they weren’t planning on a child. She did not understand why he had mentioned it.

  “Records staff is about ninety percent angels,” Ramon said, seeing her blank expression.

  She resented his pushing her, forcing her to realise what Hiroshi had meant. She resented Ramon altogether, his too-soft voice, his tight, hard face. Whenever Ramon was around, Hiroshi got tense, too, tight-mouthed, obsessed with all this stuff about the angels taking over. Now Ramon had got control over her too, forcing her to collude, to listen to the tape he’d made betraying people who trusted him.

  To her dismay she found that she felt like crying. She had not cried for years. What was there to cry about?

  Chatterji Uma’s sympathetic gaze was on her. “Hsing,” she said quietly, as the others began talking, “when Ramon showed me his notes, I told him to get out. Then I threw up all night.”

  “But,” Hsing said. “But. But why would they do all this?” Her voice came out unmodulated, loud. The others turned.

  Both Ramon and Hiroshi answered: “Power,” one said, the other said, “Control.”

  She did not look at either of them. She looked at the Counselwoman, the woman, for an answer that made sense.

  “Because — if I understand it — ” Uma said, “Patel Inbliss has taught the angels that our destination is not a stopping place — not a place at all.”

  Hsing stared. “You mean they think Shindychew doesn’t exist?”

  “Nothing exists outside the ship. Nothing exists but the Voyage.”

  SOUL, SAY WHAT DEATH IS

  “Rejoice in the voyage of life, from life, to life,

  Life everlasting, bliss everlasting.

  We are flying, O my angels, we will fly!”

  All the celebrants sang out the last line, sweet and exultant, and Rose turned to smile at Luis. They sat in a row, Luis, Rosa with her baby Jellika, her husband Ruiz Jen holding his two-year-old Joy on his lap. Angels were strong on what they called “whole families” and “true brotherhood,” couples who had and brought up both their children together. Mother sweet to cherish, Father strong to guide, little boy, little girl, growing side by side. Luis’s head was full of tags and rhymes and sayings. He had read almost nothing but angelic literature for the last four tendays. He had read The Angel to the Angels through twice, and Patel Inbliss’s New Commentaries three times, and many other texts; he had talked to angel friends and acquaintances, and listened much more than he talked. He had asked Rosa if he could come to Rejoicings with her, and she had of course told him happily that nothing could make her happier.

  “I’m not going to become an angel, Rosie,” he said, “that’s not why I want to come,” but she laughed and took his hands — “Oh, you already are an angel, Luis. Don’t worry about that. I would just love to bring you into bliss!”

  After the singing there was the Session in Peace, during which the celebrants sat in silence until one of them was moved to speak. Luis had come to look forward to these sessions. What was said was usually quite brief — a joy shared, or a fear or sorrow, in trustful expectation of sympathy. The first time he had come with Rosa, she stood up to say, “I am so glad because my dear friend Luis is here!” and people had turned and smiled at her and him. There were cut-and-dried speeches about thankfulness and remembering to be joyful, but often people spoke from the heart. Last meeting, an old man whose wife had died said, “I know Ada is flying in bliss, but I am lonely walking in the corridors without her. If you know how, please help me learn not to grieve her joy.”

  Today people were shy of talking and said only conventional things, probably because an archangel was present. Archangels visited home or sectional Rejoicings to give brief talks or teachings. Some of them were singers who performed the songs called “devotionals,” to which the celebrants listened rapt. Luis had found these songs musically and intellectually rich and complex, and readied himself to listen with interest when the singer, 5-Van Wing, was introduced.

  “I will sing a new song,” Wing said with angelic simplicity, paused, and began. His unaccompanied voice was a strong, sure tenor. He sang a devotional of a kind Luis had not heard before. The tune was a free, ecstatic outpouring, evidently largely ex tempore, built on a few linked patterns, but the words were at odds with the music; they were allusive, brief, obscure.

  Eye, what do you see?

  Blackness, the void.

  Ear, what do you hear?

  Silence, no voice.

  Soul, say what death is?

  Silent, black, outside.

  Let life be purified!

  Fly ever to rejoice,

  O vehicle of bliss!

  The last three lines rose in conventionally joyous cadences, but the song had lingered darkly on the words before them, repeating them many times, the singer imbuing them with a tremor of horror which Luis felt as strongly as the others.

  It was a remarkable performance, and Van Wing was a real artist, he thought.

  He recognised as he did so that he was defending himself against the song, trying to trivialise the effect those lines had had on him.

  Soul, say what death is?

  Silent, black, outside.

  As he went back through the crowded corridors to his homespace in Four, the words kept singing their dark song in his head. When he woke next morning, he understood what they meant to him.

  Sitting on his bed he began to write in a blank book Hsing had made for him as a birthday present when they were sixteen. Though he had always used it sparingly, over the years most of the pages had been covered top to bottom and edge to edge with his small clear handwriting. Only a few were left. The flyleaf was inscribed: “A Box to Hold Luis’s Mind. Made with Love by Hsing,” her name not in letters but in the ancient ideogram: . He read the inscription whenever he opened the book.

  He wrote: “Life/ship/vehicle/passage: mortal means to immortality (true bliss). Destination metaphorical — f
or Destination read Destiny. All meaning is inside. Nothing is outside. Outside is nothing. Negation, nil, void: Death. Life is inside. To go outside is denial, is blasphemy.” He stared at the last word a while, then leaned over and brought up the OED on his innetscreen. He studied the definition and derivation of “blasphemy” for some time. He then looked up “heresy, heretic, heretical,” and then “orthodoxy,” which he quit abruptly to begin writing again in the blank book: “Hu. sp. highly ADAPTABLE! Bliss a psych./metaorganic adaptation to existence in transit — near-perfect homeostasis. Follow rules, live inside, live forever. Maladaptation to arrival. Arrival equated with phys./spir. DEATH.” He paused again, then wrote, “How to counteract, causing least possible argument, factionalism, distress?”

  He stopped writing and sat for a long time thinking, brooding. The soft, steady, unvarying flow of air at 22o C from the atmosphere-intake of his sleepspace stirred the thin leaves of the book and laid them gently down to the right, revealing the flyleaf again. “A Box to Hold Luis’s Mind.” The word love. The ideogram that meant Hsing, that meant star. There really was nobody else to talk to.

  She did not answer his first message, and when he got through to her she was busy, sorry, things are so busy just now, I just can’t get away from work. . . . She could not possibly have become self-important. Canaval was self-important, not without justification. But Hsing pompous, Hsing evasive? No. Busy. Why so busy? What kind of work kept one from answering a friend? Probably she was still afraid of him. That grieved him, but it was not a new grief. And since it was herself she feared, not him, it really was her problem, not his. So he insisted. He refused to be put off. “I will come tomorrow at ten,” and at ten he was at the door of her homespace. She was there; Canaval was not. She was brusque, awkward. They sat down facing each other on the biltin couch. “Is something wrong, Luis?”

  “I need to tell you what I’ve learned about the angels.”