A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  NEWTON’S SLEEP

  When the government of the Atlantic Union, which had sponsored the SPES Society as a classified project, fell in the Leap Year Coup, Maston and his men were prepared; overnight the Society’s assets, documents, and members were spirited across the border into the United States of America. After a brief regrouping, they petitioned the Republic of California for settlement land as a millenarian cult group and were permitted to settle in the depopulated chemical marshlands of the San Joaquin Valley. The dometown they built there was a prototype of the Special Earth Satellite itself, and livable enough that a few colonists asked why go to the vast expense of wealth and work, why not settle here? But the breakdown of the Calmex treaty and the first invasions from the south, along with a new epidemic of the fungal plague, proved yet again that earth was not a viable option. Construction crews shuttled back and forth four times a year for four years. Seven years after the move to California, ten last trips between the launchpad on earth and the golden bubble hovering at the libration point carried the colonists to Spes and safety. Only five weeks later, the monitors in Spes reported that Ramirez’ hordes had overrun Bakersfield, destroying the launch tower, looting what little was left, burning the dome.

  “A hairbreadth escape,” Noah said to his father, Ike. Noah was eleven, and read a lot. He discovered each literary cliché for himself and used it with solemn pleasure.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Esther, fifteen, “is why everybody else didn’t do what we did.” She pushed up her glasses, frowning at the display on the monitor screens. Corrective surgery had done little for her severe vision deficiencies, and, given her immune-system problems and allergic reactivities, eye transplant was out of the question; she could not even wear contact lenses. She wore glasses, like some slum kid. But a couple of years here in the absolutely pollution-free environment of Spes ought to clear up her problems, the doctors had assured Ike, to the point where she could pick out a pair of 20-20s from the organ-freeze. “Then you’ll be my blue-eyed girl!” her father had joked to her, after the failure of the third operation, when she was thirteen. The important thing was that the defect was developmental, not genetically coded. “Even your genes are blue,” Ike had told her. “Noah and I have the recessive for scoliosis, but you, my girl, are helically flawless. Noah’ll have to find a mate in B or G Group, but you can pick from the whole colony—you’re Unrestricted. There’re only twelve other Unrestricteds in the lot of us.”

  “So I can be promiscuous,” Esther had said, poker-faced under the bandages. “Long live Number Thirteen.”

  She stood now beside her brother; Ike had called them into the monitor center to see what had happened to Bakersfield Dome. Some of the women and children on Spes were inclined to be sentimental, “homesick” they said; he wanted his children to see what earth was and why they had left it. The AI, programmed to select for information of interest to the Colony, finished the Bakersfield report with a projection of Ramirez’ conquests and then shifted to a Peruvian meteorological study of the Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains filled the screen, while the voice-over, a running English translation by the AI, droned away. “Look at it,” Esther said, peering, pushing her glasses up. “It’s all dead. How come everybody isn’t up here?”

  “Money,” her mother said.

  “Because most people aren’t willing to trust reason,” Ike said. “The money, the means, are a secondary factor. For a hundred years anybody willing to look at the world rationally has been able to see what’s happening: resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government. But to act on a rational understanding, you have to trust reason. Most people would rather trust luck or God or one of the easy fixes. Reason’s tough. It’s tough to plan carefully, to wait years, to make hard choices, to raise money over and over, to keep a secret so it won’t be co-opted or wrecked by greed or soft-mindedness. How many people can stick to a straight course in a disintegrating world? Reason’s the compass that brought us through.”

  “Nobody else even tried?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “There were the Foys,” Noah piped up. “I read about it. They put thousands of people into like organfreezes, whole people alive, and built all these cheap rockets and shot them off, and they were all supposed to get to some star in about a thousand years and wake up. And they didn’t even know if the star had a planet.”

  “And their leader, the Reverend Keven Foy, would be there to welcome them to the Promised Land,” Ike said. “Pie in the sky and you die.… Poor fishsticks! That’s what people called them. I was about your age, I watched them on the news, climbing into those Toys.’ Half of them already either fungoids or RMV-positive. Carrying babies, singing. That was not people trusting reason. That was people abandoning it in despair.”

  The holovid showed an immense dust storm moving slowly, vaguely across the deserts of Amazonia. It was a dull, dark red-grey-brown, dirt color.

  “We’re lucky,” Esther said. “I guess.”

  “No,” her father said. “Luck has nothing to do with it. Nor are we a chosen people. We chose.” Ike was a soft-spoken man, but there was a harsh tremor in his voice now that made both his children glance at him and his wife look at him for a long moment. Her eyes were a clear, light brown.

  “And we sacrificed,” she said.

  He nodded.

  He thought she was probably thinking of his mother. Sarah Rose had qualified for one of the four slots for specially qualified women past childbearing. But when Ike told her that he had got her in, she had exploded—”Live in that awful little thing, that ball bearing going around in nothing? No air, no room?” He had tried to explain about the landscapes, but she had brushed it all aside. “Isaac, in Chicago Dome, a mile across, I was claustrophobic! Forget it. Take Susan, take the kids, leave me to breathe smog, OK? You go. Send me postcards from Mars.” She died of RMV-3 less than three years later. When Ike’s sister called to say Sarah was dying, Ike had already been decontaminated; to leave Bakersfield Dome would mean going through decontamination again, as well as exposing himself to infection by this newest and worst form of the rapidly mutating virus which had accounted so far for about two billion human deaths, more than the slowrad syndrome and almost as much as famine. Ike did not go. Presently his sister’s message came, “Mother died Wednesday night, funeral 10 Friday.” He faxed, netted, vidded, but never got through, or his sister would not accept his messages. It was an old ache now. They had chosen. They had sacrificed.

  His children stood before him, the beautiful children for whom the sacrifice was made, the hope, the future. On earth now, it was the children who were sacrificed. To the past.

  “We chose,” he said, “we sacrificed, and we were spared.” The word surprised him as he said it.

  “Hey,” Noah said, “come on, Es, it’s fifteen, we’ll miss the show.” And they were off, the spindly boy and the chunky girl, out the door and across the Common.

  The Roses lived in Vermont. Any of the landscapes would have suited Ike, but Susan said that Florida and Boulder were hokey and Urban would drive her up the wall. So their unit faced on Vermont Common. The Assembly Unit the kids were headed for had a white facade with a prim steeple, and the horizon projection was of sheltering, blue, forested hills. The light in Vermont Quadrant was just the right number of degrees off vertical, Susan said—”It’s either late morning or early afternoon, there’s always time to get things done.” That was juggling a bit with reality, but not dangerously, Ike thought, and said nothing. Needing only three or four hours of sleep, he had always been a night person anyhow, and he liked the fact that he could count now on the nights being always the same length, instead of too short in summer.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said to Susan, following up on his thoughts about the children and on that long look she had given him.

  “What’s that?” she asked, watching the holovid, which showed the dust storm from the stratosphere, an ugly drifting b
lob with long tendrils.

  “I don’t like the monitors. I don’t like to look down.”

  It cost him something to admit it, to say it aloud; but Susan only smiled and said, “I know.”

  He wanted a little more than that. Probably she had not really understood what he meant. “Sometimes I wish we could turn it off,” he said, and laughed. “Not really. But—it’s a lien, a tie, an umbilicus. I wish we could cut it. I wish they could start fresh. Absolutely clean and clear. The kids, I mean.”

  She nodded. “It might be best,” she said.

  “Their kids will, anyhow … There’s an interesting discussion going on now in E.D.Com.” Ike was an engineering physicist, handpicked by Maston as Spes’s chief specialist in Schoenfeldt AI; currently the most hi-pri of his eight jobs was as leader of the Environmental Design group for the second Spes ship, now under construction in the Workbays.

  “What about?”

  “Al Levaitis proposed that we don’t make any landscapes. He made quite a speech of it. He said it’s a matter of honesty. Let’s use each area honestly, let it find its own aesthetic, instead of disguising it in any way. If Spes is our world, let’s accept it as such. The next generation—what will these pretenses of earth scenery mean to them? A lot of us feel he has a real point.”

  “Sure he does,” Susan said.

  “Could you live with that? No expanse-illusion, no horizon—no village church—Maybe no astroturf even, just clean metal and ceramic—would you accept that?”

  “Would you?”

  “I think so. It would—simplify … And like Al said, it would be honest. It would turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future. You know, it was such a long haul that it’s hard to remember that we made it—we’re here. And already building the next colony. When there’s a cluster of colonies at every optimum—or if they decide to build the Big Ship and cut free of the solar system—what relevance is anything about earth going to have to those people? They’ll be true space dwellers. And that’s the whole idea—that freedom. I wouldn’t mind a taste of it right now.”

  “Fair enough,” his wife said. “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”

  “But that spire—what will it mean to spaceborn, spacebred people? Meaningless clutter. A dead past.”

  “I don’t know what it means to me,” she said. “It sure isn’t my past.” But the scan had caught Ike’s attention—

  “Look at that,” he said. It was a graphic of the coastline of Peru in 1990 and in 2040, the overlay showing the extent of land loss. “Weather,” Ike said. “Weather was the worst! Just to get free of that stupid, impossible unpredictability!”

  A crumbling tower poked up from the waves, all that was left of Miraflores. The sea was rough, the sky low, dull, foggy. Ike looked from the holovid to the serene illusory New England and saw the true shelter that lay behind it, holding them safe, safe and free, in haven. The truth shall make you free, he thought and, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders, he said it aloud.

  She hugged him back and said, “You’re a dear,” reducing the great statement to the merely personal, but it pleased him all the same. As he went off to the elevator bank he realized that he was happy—absolutely happy. The negative ions in the atmosphere would have something to do with that, he reminded himself. But it was more than just bodily. It was what man had sought so long and never found, never could find, on earth: a rational happiness. Down there, all they had ever had was life, liberty, and the pursuit. Now they didn’t even have that. The Four Horsemen pursued them through the dust of a dying world. And once more that strange word came into his mind: spared. We have been spared.

  In the third quarter of the second year of Spes, a school curriculum revision meeting was called. Ike attended as a concerned parent, Susan as parent and part-time teacher (nutrition was her hi-pri), and Esther because teenagers were invited as part of the policy of non-infantilization and her father wanted her to be there. The Education Committee chairman, Dick Allardice, gave a goals-and-achievements talk, and a few teachers had reports and suggestions to make. Ike spoke briefly about increasing AI instruction. It was all routine until Sonny Wigtree got up. Sonny was a drawling, smiling good ole boy from the CSA with four or five degrees from good universities and a mind like a steel trap lined with razors. “Ah’d lahk to know,” he said, all soft and self-deprecating, “whut y’all bin thankin about goan oan teachin jollajy? Y’know? An lahk thet.”

  Ike was still mentally translating into his own Connecticut dialect when Sam Henderson got up to reply. Geology was one of Sam’s subspecialties. “What do you mean, Sonny,” he said in his Ohio twang, “are you proposing to take geology out of the curriculum?”

  “Ah was jes askin what y’all thought?”

  Ike could translate that easily: Sonny had got the key votes lined up and was about to make his move. Sam, knowing the language, played along: “Well, I personally think it’s well worth discussing.”

  Alison Jones-Kurawa, who taught earth sciences to the Level Threes, leaped up, and Ike expected the predictable emotional defense—must not let the children of Spes grow up ignorant of the Home Planet, etc. But Alison argued rationally enough that a scientific understanding limited to the composition and contents of Spes itself was dangerously over-abstract. “If down the line we decide to terraform the moon, for example, instead of building the Big Ship—hadn’t they better know what a rock is?” Point taken, Ike thought, but still beside the point, because the point was not the necessity of geology in the curriculum, but the influence of Sonny Wigtree, John Padopoulos, and John Kelly on the Education Committee. The discourse concerned power, and the teachers didn’t understand it; few women did. The outcome was as predictable as the discussion. The only unexpected thing was John Kelly’s jumping Mo Orenstein. Mo argued that the earth was a laboratory for Spes and ought to be used as such, going off into a story of how his chemistry class had learned to identify a whole series of reactions by cooking a pebble, which he had brought from Mount Sinai as a souvenir and as a lab specimen—”following the principle of multiple purpose, you see, use plus sentiment—” at which point John Kelly broke in abruptly, “All right! The subject’s geology, not ethnicity!” and while Mo was silent, taken aback by John’s tone, Padopoulos made the motion.

  “Mo seems to get under John Kelly’s hide,” Ike said as they went down A Corridor to the elevators.

  “Oh, shit, Daddy,” Esther said.

  At sixteen, Esther had got a little more height, though she still hunched over as if her head was pulled forward by her effort to see through the thick glasses that kept sliding down her nose. Her temper was pretty moody. Ike couldn’t seem to say much lately without her jumping him.

  “ ‘Shit’ isn’t a statement that furthers discussion, Esther,” he said mildly.

  “What discussion?”

  “The topic, as I understood it, was John Kelly’s impatience with Mo, and what might motivate it.”

  “Oh, shit, Daddy!”

  “Stop it, Esther,” Susan said.

  “Stop what?”

  “If you know, as your tone implies you do, what was annoying John,” Ike said, “would you share your knowledge with us?”

  When you worked hard not to give in to irrational impulses, it was discouraging to get no response at all but emotionality. His perfectly fair request merely drove the girl into speechless fury. The thick glasses glared at him a moment. He could scarcely see her grey eyes through them. She stalked ahead and got into an elevator that seemed to open to accommodate her rage. She didn’t hold the doors for them.

  “So,” Ike said tiredly, waiting for the next elevator to Vermont. “What was that all about?”

  Susan shrugged a little.

  “I don’t understand this behavior. Why is she so hostile, so aggressive?”

  It wasn’t a new question, perhaps, but Susan didn’t even make an effort to answer it. Her silence was almost hostile, and he resented it.
“What does she think this kind of behavior gains her? What is it she wants?”

  “Timmy Kelly calls you Kike Rose,” Susan said. “So Esther told me. He calles her Kikey Rose at school. She said she liked ‘Glasseyes’ better.”

  “Oh,” Ike said. “Oh—shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  They rode down to Vermont in silence.

  Crossing the Common under the pseudostars he said, “I don’t even understand where he learned the word.”

  “Who?”

  “Timmy Kelly. He’s Esther’s age—a year younger. He grew up in the Colony just as she did. The Kellys joined the year after we did. My God! We can keep out every virus, every bacterium, every spore, but this—this gets in? How? How can it be?—I tell you, Susan, I think the monitors should be closed. Everything these children see and hear from earth is a lesson in violence, bigotry, supersition.”

  “He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.” Her tone was almost patronizingly patient.

  “I worked with John at Moonshadow, close quarters, daily, for eight months,” he said. “There was nothing, nothing of this sort.”

  “It’s Pat more than John, actually,” Susan said in the same disagreeably dispassionate way. “Little sub-snubs on the Nutritional Planning Committee, for years. Little jokes. ‘Would that be kosher—Susan?’ Well. So. You live with it.”