The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
Page 35
He blessed them again, and some thought his sermon was done, but as if given new energy by his words he was speaking on: “Do not mistake the goal of our discovery, the purpose of our lives! Do not mistake symbol and metaphor for reality! Our ancestors did not send us on this great voyage only to return to where it began. They did not free us from gravity only to sink again into gravity. They did not free us from Earth to doom us to another earth! That is literalism — scientific fundamentalism — a dreadful mental myopia. Our origin was on a planet, in darkness and misery, yes, but that is not our destination! How could it be?
“Our ancestors spoke of the Destination as a world, because they knew nothing else. They had lived only in darkness, in filth, in fear, dragged down by gravity. When they tried to imagine bliss, they could only imagine a better, brighter world, and so they called it a ‘new earth.’ But we can see the meaning of that obscure symbol, and translate it into truth: not a planet, a world, a place of darkness, fear, pain, and death — but the bright journey of mortal life into endless life, the unceasing, everlasting pilgrimage into unceasing, everlasting bliss. O my fellow angels! our voyage is sacred, and it is eternal!”
“Ahh,” sighed the forest leaves.
“Ah!” said Luis, watching and listening in his homespace with Bingdi and several friends, known among themselves as the Turd Group.
“Hah!” said Hiroshi, watching and listening in his homespace with Hsing.
ON THE BRIDGE, YEAR 161, DAY 101
“Diamant asked me yesterday about an anomaly he noticed in the acceleration figures. He’s been following up on it for a couple of tendays.”
“Lead him astray,” Hiroshi said, comparing two sets of figures.
“I will not.”
After some minutes he said, “What will you do?”
“Nothing.”
His hands were flickering over the workboard. “Leaving it to me.”
“If you choose.”
“I have no choice.”
He worked on. Hsing worked on.
She stopped working and said, “When I was about ten I had a terrible dream. I dreamed I was in one of the cargo bays, wandering around, and I realised that there was a little hole in the wall, in the skin of the ship. A hole in the world. It was very small. Nothing was happening, but I knew what had to happen was that all the air would rush out the hole, because outside was vacuum. The nothing outside the ship. So I put my hand over the hole. My hand covered it. But if I took my hand away, I knew the air would begin to rush out. I called and called, but nobody was near. Nobody heard. And finally I thought I had to go get help, and tried to take my hand off the hole, but I couldn’t. It was held there. By the nothing outside.”
“A terrible dream,” Hiroshi said. As she spoke he had turned from the workboard and sat facing her with his hands on his knees, straight-backed, expressionless. “Do you recall it because you feel yourself in a similar position now?”
“No. I see you in that position.”
He considered this awhile. “And do you see a way out of that position?”
“Shout for help.”
He shook his head very slightly.
“Hiroshi, one or another of the students or the engineers is going to find out what you’ve been doing and talk about it before you can mislead, or co-opt, or silence them. In fact, I think it’s already happening. Diamant’s been going after this as if he’s trying to prove something. He’s very bright and extremely anti-authoritarian — I was in classes with him. He will not be easy to mislead or co-opt.”
He made no reply.
“As I was,” she added, dryly but without rancor.
“What do you mean by ‘shout for help’?”
“Tell him the truth.”
“Only him?”
She shook her head. She said in a low voice, “Tell the truth.”
“Hsing,” he said, “I know you think our tactics are mistaken. I’m grateful to you for bringing up your disagreement so seldom, and only with me. I wish we could agree on what is right. But I cannot put the power to change our course into the hands of the cultists until it is literally too late for them to do so.”
“It’s not your decision to make.”
“Will you take it out of my hands?”
“Someone will. And when they do, it will appear that you’ve been lying for years, you and your friends, in order to have sole power. How else can they see it? You will be dishonored.” Her voice still sounded low and rough. After a moment, biting her lip, she added, “Your question to me just now was dishonorable.”
“It was rhetorical,” he said.
There was another long silence.
He said, “It was dishonorable. I beg your pardon, Hsing.”
She nodded. She sat looking down at her hands.
“What action do you recommend?” he asked.
“Talk to Tan Bingdi, Nova Luis, Gupta Lena — the group that’s behind the ad hoc committee. They’re working to expose Patel’s power-tactics. Tell them whatever you like about how it happened, but tell them that we’re going to be at the Destination in three years — unless Patel prevents it.”
“Or Diamant,” he said.
She winced. She spoke more cautiously, more patiently: “The danger isn’t people like Diamant, Hiroshi. It’s a fanatic gaining access to the Bridge for two minutes to damage, disable the course-computers — that’s always been a possibility, but now there’s a reason for somebody to do it. Now they want us never to arrive. At least that’s out in the open, since Patel’s speech. So now the fact that we are arriving has to come out in the open, because we need all the support we can get to make it happen. We must have support. You can’t go on alone with your hand over the hole in the world!”
She had felt him withdraw when she said the name Nova Luis. She grew more urgent and eloquent as she spoke, losing ground; she ended up pleading. She waited and he made no response. Her arguments and urgency ebbed away slowly into a dry flatness of nonfeeling.
At last she said, drily and flatly, “Or perhaps you can. But I can’t go on lying to colleagues and friends. I won’t give you away, but I won’t collude any more. I will say nothing at all to anyone.”
“Not a very practical plan,” he said, looking up at her with a stiff smile. “Be patient, Hsing. That’s all I ask.”
She stood up. “The evil of this is that we don’t trust each other.”
“I trust you.”
“You don’t. Me, or my silence, or my friends. The lie sucks trust out. Into nothing.”
Again he did not speak; and presently she turned and left the Bridge. After she had walked a while she realised that she was at Quad Two, at Turning 2-3, heading for her old homespace, where her father lived alone. She wanted to see Yao, but felt it would be somehow disloyal to Hiroshi to go see him now. She turned around and started back to the Canaval-Liu homespace in Quad Four. The corridors seemed tight and narrow, crowded. She spoke to people who spoke to her. She remembered a part of her old nightmare dream that she had not thought to tell Hiroshi. The hole in the wall of the world had not been made by something from outside, a bit of dust or rock; when she saw it she knew, as one knows in a dream, that it had been there ever since the ship was made.
AN ANNOUNCEMENT OF EXTRAORDINARY IMPORTANCE, YEAR 161, DAY 202
The Chair of the Plenary Council put a notice on the innet of an “announcement of extraordinary importance” to be made at twenty hours. The last such announcement had been made over fifteen years ago to explain the necessity of an alteration in profession quotas.
People gathered in the homespace or compound or meetingspace or workplace to hear. The Plenary Council held session.
Chatterji Uma came on the screen precisely at twenty and said, “Dear fellow passengers of the ship Discovery, we must prepare ourselves for a great change. From this night forward, our lives will be different — will be transformed.” She smiled; her smile was charming. “Do not be apprehensive. This is a matter for rejoicing. The g
reat goal of our voyage, the destination for which this ship and its crew were intended from the very beginning of our voyage, is closer than we dreamed. Not our children, but we ourselves, may be the ones to set foot upon a new world. Now Canaval Hiroshi, our Chief Navigator, will tell you the great discovery he and others on the Bridge have made, and what it means, and what we may expect.”
Hiroshi replaced Uma on the screens. The thickness and blackness of his eyebrows gave him a sometimes threatening, sometimes questioning look. His voice however was reassuring, quiet, positive, and rather pedantic. He began by telling them what had happened five years ago as the ship passed through a gravity sink near a very large area of cosmic dust.
Hsing, watching him alone in their livingspace, could tell when he began to lie, not only because she knew the actual figures and dates but because when he began lying he became both more authoritative and more persuasive. The lies concerned the rates of acceleration and deceleration, the time of the discovery of the computer error, and the navigators’ response.
Without being specific about dates, Hiroshi implied that the first suspicions of anomalies in the ship’s rate of acceleration had arisen less than a year ago. The magnitude of the computer error and its implications had been only gradually revealed. He sketched a scenario of incredulous but intrepid humans wresting their secrets from computers whose programming forced them to resist any override of their response to the original misreading, of navigators forced to try to outwit their instruments, trick them into re-compensating for their immense overcompensation, slowing the ship down from the incredible speed it had achieved.
Until this moment, he said, that struggle had been so chancy, they had been so unsure of what had happened and was happening, that they had felt it unwise to make any announcement. “To avoid causing panic by a premature or incorrect disclosure was our chief concern. We know now that there is no cause for alarm. None. Our operations were entirely successful. Just as the acceleration exceeded all speculative limits, we have been able to decelerate very much more quickly than had been thought possible. We are on course and in control. The only change is that we are well ahead of schedule.”
He looked up, as if looking out of the screen, his black eyes unreadable. He was speaking slowly, carefully, a little monotonously, letting each sentence stand by itself. “We are continuing to decelerate, and will do so for the next 3.2 years.
“Late in the year 164, we will enter orbit around the planet of destination, Hsin Ti Chiu or New Earth.
“That event, as we all know, was scheduled to occur in the year 201. Our voyage of discovery has been shortened by nearly forty years.
“Ours is a fortunate generation. We will see the end of our long voyage. We will reach its goal.
“We have much work to do in these two years. We must prepare our minds and bodies to leave our little world and walk upon a wide new earth. We must prepare our eyes and souls for the light of a new sun.”
THE TRUE WAY
“It doesn’t make sense, Luis,” Rosa said. “It doesn’t mean anything. The Zeroes just didn’t understand. How could they? They thought we were too sinful to be able to live in heaven forever. They were earthen, they couldn’t help it, so they thought we’d have to be earthen too. But we aren’t — how could we be, born here, on the way? Why would we want to live any life other than this one? They made it perfect. They sent us to heaven. They made the world for us so we could learn the way to everlasting life in bliss by living in mortal bliss. How could we learn it on some kind of earthen black world? Outside, unprotected, unguided? How can we keep going on the True Way if we leave the True Way? How can we reach heaven by stopping on an earth?”
“Well, maybe we can’t, but we do have a job to do,” Luis said. “They sent us to learn about that earth. And to tell them what we learn. Learning was important to them. Discovery. They named our ship Discovery.”
“Exactly! The discovery of bliss! Learning the True Way! The archangels are sending back what we’ve learned all the time, you know, Luis. We’re teaching them the way — just as they hoped we would. The goal is a spiritual goal. Don’t you see, we’ve attained the Destination? Why do we have to stop our beautiful voyage at some evil, terrible, earthen place and do eva?”
AN ELECTION, YEAR 162, DAY 112
5-Nova Luis was elected Chair of the Plenary Council. The general trust he had earned as a conciliator, negotiator, and peacemaker during the troubles of the past half-year made his election inevitable, and popular even among the angels. His year in office was indeed one of reconciliation and healing.
A DEATH, YEAR 162, DAY 205
At the age of eighty-seven, 4-Patel Inbliss suffered a massive stroke and began to die, amid a continuous frenzy of tearful prayer, song, and rejoicing. For thirteen days the celebrants occupied all the corridors surrounding the Kim homespace in Quadrant One, where Inbliss was born and had lived all his life. As his dying went on and on, weariness and tension grew among the mourner-rejoicers. People feared an outbreak of hysteria and violence like that which had followed the announcement of Arrival. Many non-angel occupants of the quadrant went to stay with friends or relatives in other quads.
When at last an archangel announced that the Father had passed to Eternal Bliss, there was much weeping in the corridors, but no violence, except for a man in Quad Four named 5-Garr Joyful who beat his wife and her daughter to death “so that they could enter Eternal Bliss with the Father,” he said; he omitted, however, to kill himself.
The Temenos was filled solid for the funeral of Patel Inbliss. There were many speeches, but their tone was subdued. He had no child to deliver the final speech. The archangel Van Wing sang the dark devotional, “Eye, what do you see?” to end the ceremony. The crowd dispersed in the silence of exhaustion. The corridors that night were empty.
A BIRTH, YEAR 162, DAY 223
5-Canaval Hiroshi’s child was born to his wife 5-Liu Hsing, and was given the name 6-Canaval Alejo by his father.
Though Nova Luis was not practicing medicine during his term as council chair, Hsing had asked him to attend the birth, and he did so. It was an entirely uneventful delivery.
When he came the next day to see his patients, he sat for a while with them. Hiroshi was on the Bridge. Hsing’s milk had not come in yet, but the baby was rooting diligently at her breast or anything else that offered itself. “What did you want me for?” Luis said. “You obviously know how to have a baby a lot better than I do.”
“I guess I found out,” she said. “Learn by doing! — remember Teacher Mimi in third grade?” She was sitting up in bed, still looking tired, triumphant, flushed, and soft. She looked down at the small head covered with very fine black hair. “It’s so tiny, I can’t believe it’s the same species,” she said. “What do you call this stuff I’m leaking?”
“Colostrum. It’s the only thing his species eats.”
“Amazing,” she said, very softly touching the black fuzz with the back of a finger.
“Amazing,” Luis agreed soberly.
“Oh Luis, it was so — To have you here. I did need you.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said, still soberly.
The baby went through some spasms, and was discovered to have had a miniature bowel movement. “Well done, well done. He’ll be a member of the Turd Group yet,” Luis said. “Give him here, I’ll clean him up. Well, will you look at that? A bobwob! A veritable bobwob! A fine specimen, too.”
“It’s a gowbondo,” Hsing whispered. He looked up at her and saw she was in tears.
He laid the baby, swallowed up by its clean diaper, in her arms; she went on crying. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“New mothers cry, flatface.”
She wept very bitterly for a moment, gasping, then got control.
“Luis, what is — have you noticed anything about Hiroshi — “
“As a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I guess so. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. Has he been particularly tired?”
She nodded. “He fainted twice last week,” she said in a whisper.
“Well, my guess would be congestive heart failure. I know a good deal about it because as an asthmatic I’m liable to it myself, though I haven’t managed to achieve it yet. You can live with it for a long time. There are medicines he can take, various treatments and regimes. Send him to Regis Chandra at the Hospital.”
“I’ll try,” she whispered.
“Do it.” Luis spoke sternly. “Tell him that he owes his son a father.”
He stood up to leave. Hsing said, “Luis — ”
“Take it easy, don’t worry. It’ll be all right. This fellow will see to it.” He touched the baby’s ear.
“Luis, when we land, will you go outside?”
“Of course I will, if we can. What do you think I’m insisting on all this education and training for? To watch a bunch of evajocks running around in space suits on a vidscreen?”
“It seems like so many people want to stay here.”
“Well, we’ll find out when we get there. It’s going to be interesting. It already is interesting. We found out what a whole section in Storage D is. We thought it was very heavy protective clothing, but the pieces were too large. It’s temporary livingspaces. You prop them up somehow and live inside them. And there are inflatable toruses which Bose thinks are meant to float on water. Ships. Imagine enough water to float a ship on! No. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. . . . I’ll look in tomorrow.”