The Lathe Of Heaven

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  The only thing left of that terrible first of April, in fact, seemed to be the return of Mount Hood to active-volcano status. No bomb had hit it, for no bombs had fallen, this time. It had simply waked up. A long, gray-brown plume of smoke drifted northward from it now. Zigzag and Rhododendron had gone the way of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A fumarole had opened up recently near the tiny, old crater in Mount Tabor Park, well within the city limits. People in the Mount Tabor area were moving out to the thriving new suburbs of West Eastmont, Chestnut Hills Estates, and Sunny Slopes Subdivision. They could live with Mount Hood fuming softly on the horizon, but an eruption just up the street was too much.

  Orr bought a tasteless plateful of fish and chips with African peanut sauce at a crowded counter-restaurant; while he ate it he thought sorrowfully, well, once I stood her up at Dave’s, and now she’s stood me up.

  He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed. He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste and the people were all gray.

  Outside the glass doors of the restaurant the crowds were thickening: people streaming toward the Portland Palace of Sport, a huge and lavish coliseum down on the river, for the afternoon show. People didn’t sit home and watch TV much any more; Fed-peep television was on only two hours a day. The modern way of life was togetherness. This was Thursday; it would be the hand-to-hands, the biggest attraction of the week except for Saturday night football. More athletes actually got killed in the hand-to-hands, but they lacked the dramatic, cathartic aspects of football, the sheer carnage when 144 men were involved at once, the drenching of the arena stands with blood. The skill of the single fighters was fine, but lacked the splendid abreactive release of mass killing.

  No more war, Orr said to himself, giving up on the last soggy splinters of potato. He went out into the crowd. Ain’t gonna... war no more.... There had been a song. Once. An old song. Ain’t gonna... What was the verb? Not fight, it didn’t scan. Ain’t gonna ... war no more ....

  He walked straight into a Citizen’s Arrest. A tall man with a long, wrinkled, gray face seized a short man with a round, shiny, gray face, grabbing him by the front of his tunic. The crowd bumped around the pair, some stopping to watch, others pressing on toward the Palace of Sport. “This is a Citizen’s Arrest, passersby please take notice!” the tall man was saying in a piercing, nervous tenor. “This man, Harvey T. Gonno, is ill with an incurable malignant abdominal cancer but has concealed his whereabouts from the authorities and continues to live with his wife. My name is Ernest Ringo Marin, of 2624287 South West Eastwood Drive, Sunny Slopes Subdivision, Greater Portland. Are there ten witnesses?” One of the witnesses helped hold the feebly struggling criminal, while Ernest Ringo Marin counted heads. Orr escaped, pushing head-down through the crowd, before Marin administered euthanasia with the hypodermic gun worn by all adult citizens who had earned their Civic Responsibility Certificate. He himself wore one. It was a legal obligation. His, at the moment, was not loaded; its charge had been removed when he became a psychiatric patient under PWC; but they had left him the weapon so that his temporary lapse of status should not be a public humiliation to him. A mental illness such as he was being treated for, they had explained to him, must not be confused with a punishable crime such as a serious communicable or hereditary disease. He was not to feel that he was in any way a danger to the Race or a second-class citizen, and his weapon would be reloaded as soon as Dr. Haber discharged him as cured.

  A tumor, a tumor... Hadn’t the carcinomic Plague, by killing off all those liable to cancer, either during the Crash or at infancy, left the survivors free of the scourge? It had, in another dream. Not in this one. Cancer had evidently broken out again, like Mount Tabor and Mount Hood.

  Study. That’s it. Ain’t gonna study war no more....

  He got onto the funicular at Fourth and Alder; and swooped up over the gray-green city to the HURAD Tower which crowned the west hills, on the site of the old Pittock mansion high in Washington Park.

  It overlooked everything—the city, the rivers, the hazy valleys westward, the great dark hills of Forest Park stretching north. Over the pillared portico, incised in white concrete in the straight Roman capitals whose proportions lend nobility to any phrase whatsoever, was the legend: THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER.

  Indoors the immense black-marble foyer, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, bore a smaller inscription picked out in gold around the drum of the central dome: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN- A. POPE-1688- 1744.

  The building was larger in ground area, Orr had been told, than the British Museum, and five stories taller. It was also earthquake-proof.. It was not bombproof, for there were no bombs. What nuclear stockpiles remained after the Cislunar War had been taken off and exploded in a series of interesting experiments out in the Asteroid Belt. This building could stand up to anything left on Earth, except perhaps Mount Hood. Or a bad dream.

  He took the walkbelt to the West Wing, and the broad helical escalator to the top floor.

  Dr. Haber still kept his analyst’s couch in his office, a kind of ostentatiously humble reminder of his beginnings as a private practitioner, when he dealt with people by ones not by millions. But it took a while to get to the couch, for his suite covered about half an acre and included seven different rooms. Orr announced himself to the autoreceptionist at the door of the waiting room, then went on past Miss Crouch, who was feeding her computer, and past the official office, a stately room just lacking a throne, where the Director received ambassadors, delegations, and Nobel Prize winners, until at last he came to the smaller office with the wall-to-ceiling window, and the couch. There the antique redwood panels of one entire wall were slid back, exposing a magnificent array of research machinery: Haber was halfway into the exposed entrails of the Augmentor. “Hullo, George!” he boomed from within, not looking around. “Just hooking a new ergismatch into Baby’s hormocouple. Half a mo. I think we’ll have a session without hypnosis today. Sit down, I’ll be a while at this, I’ve been doing a bit of tinkering again. .. . Listen. You remember that battery of tests they gave you, when you first showed up down at the Med School? Personality inventories, IQ, Rorschach, and so on and so on. Then I gave you the TAT and some simulated encounter situations, about your third session here. Remember? Ever wonder how you did on ‘em?”

  Haber’s face, gray, framed by curly black hair and beard, appeared suddenly above the pulled-out chassis of the Augmentor. His eyes, as he gazed at Orr, reflected the light of the wall-sized window.

  “I guess so,” Orr said; actually he had never given it a thought.

  “I believe it’s time for you to know that, within the frame of reference of those standardized but extremely subtle and useful tests, you are so sane as to be an anomaly. Of course, I’m using the lay word ‘sane,’ which has no precise objective meaning; in quantifiable terms, you’re median. Your extraversion/introversion score, for instance, was 49.1. That is, you’re more introverted than extraverted by .9 of a degree. That’s not unusual; what is, is the emergence of the same damn pattern everywhere, right across the board. If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. Dominance, for example; I think you were 48.8 on that. Neither dominant nor submissive. Independence/dependence—same thing.

  Creative/destructive, on the Ramirez scale—same thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left. Now, Walters down at the Med School reads the results a bit differently; he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment, whatever that is, and that what I see as self-cancellation is a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony. By which you can see that, let’s face it, old Walters is a pious fraud, he’s never outgrown the mysticism of the seventies; but he means well. So there you have it, anyway: you’re the
man in the middle of the graph. There we are, now to hook up the glumdalclitch with the brobding-nag, and we’re all set.... Hell!” He had knocked his head on a panel getting up. He left the Augmentor open. “Well, you’re a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about you is that there’s nothing queer about you!” He laughed his huge, gusty laugh. “So, today we try a new tack. No hypnosis. No sleep. No d-state and no dreams. Today I want to hook you up with the Augmentor in a waking state.”

  Orr’s heart sank, though he did not know why. “What for?” he said.

  “Principally to get a record of your normal waking brain rhythms when augmented. I got a full analysis your first session, but that was before the Augmentor could do anything but fall in with the rhythm you were currently emitting. Now I’ll be able to use it to stimulate and trace certain individual characteristics of your brain activity more clearly, particularly that tracer-shell effect you have in the hippocampus. Then I can compare them with your d-state patterns, and with the patterns of other brains, normal and abnormal. I’m looking for what makes you tick, George, so that I can find what makes your dreams work.”

  “What for?” Orr repeated.

  “What for? Well, isn’t that what you’re here for?” “I came here to be cured. To learn how not to dream effectively.”

  “If you’d been a simple one-two-three cure, would you have been sent up here to the Institute, to HURAD—to me?”

  Orr put his head in his hands, and said nothing.

  “I can’t show you how to stop, George, until I can find out what it is you’re doing.”

  “But if you do find out, will you tell me how to stop?”

  Haber rocked back largely on his heels. “Why are you so afraid of yourself, George?”

  “I’m not,” Orr said. His hands were sweaty. “I’m afraid of—” But he was too afraid, in fact, to say the pronoun.

  “Of changing things, as you call it. O.K. I know. We’ve been through that many times. Why, George? You’ve got to ask yourself that question. What’s wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life—evolution—the whole universe of space/time, matter/ energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”

  “That is one aspect of it,” Orr said. “The other is stillness.”

  “When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is—and the more life. I’m pro-life, George. Life itself is a huge gamble against the odds, against all odds! You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It’s not how you get there, but where you get to that counts. What you’re afraid to accept, here, is that we’re engaged in a really great experiment, you and I. We’re on the brink of discovering and controlling, for the good of all mankind., a whole new force, an entire new field of antientropic energy, of the life-force, of the will to act, to do, to change!”

  “All that is true. But there is—”

  “What, George?” He was fatherly and patient, now; and Orr forced himself to go on, knowing it was no good.

  “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

  Haber walked up and down the room, pausing before the huge window that framed a view northward of the serene and nonerupting cone of Mount St. Helen. He nodded several times. “I understand,” he said with his back turned. “I understand completely. But let me put it this way, George, and perhaps you’ll understand what it is I’m after. You’re alone in the jungle, in the Mato Grosso, and you find a native woman lying on the path, dying of snakebite. You have serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it because ‘this is the way it is’—do you ‘let her be’?”

  “It would depend,” Orr said.

  “Depend on what?”

  “Well... I don’t know. If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village. I know you’d give her the serum, because you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don’t know whether what you’re doing is good or evil or both....”

  “O.K.! Granted! I know what snakebite serum does, but I don’t know what I’m doing—O.K., I’ll buy it on those terms, gladly. And say what’s the difference? I freely admit that I don’t know, about 85 per cent of the time, what the hell I’m doing with this screwball brain of yours, and you don’t either, but we’re doing it—so, can we get on with it?” His virile, genial vigor was overwhelming; he laughed, and Orr found a weak smile on his lips.

  While the electrodes were being applied, however, he ‘ made one last effort to communicate with Haber. “I saw a Citizen’s Arrest for euthanasia on the way here,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Eugenics. Cancer.”

  Haber nodded, alert. “No wonder you’re depressed. You haven’t yet fully accepted the use of controlled violence for the good of the community; you may never be able to. This is a tough-minded world we’ve got going here, George. A realistic one. But as I said, life can’t be safe. This society is tough-minded, and getting tougher yearly: the future will justify it. We need health. We simply have no room for the incurables, the gene-damaged who degrade the species; we have no time for wasted, useless suffering.” He spoke with an enthusiasm that rang hollower than usual; Orr wondered how well, in fact, Haber liked this world he had indubitably made. “Now just sit like that, I. don’t want you going to sleep from force of habit. O.K., great. You may get bored. I want you just to sit for a while. Keep your eyes open, think about anything you like. I’ll be fiddling with Baby’s guts, here. Now, here we go: bingo.” He pressed the white ON button in the wall panel to the right of the Augmentor, by the head of the couch.

  A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on the mall; it raised its left elbow to apologize, and Orr muttered, “Sorry.” It stopped, half blocking his way: and he too halted, startled and impressed by its nine-foot, greenish, armored impassivity. It was grotesque to the point of being funny; like a sea turtle, and yet like a sea turtle it possessed a strange, large beauty, a serener beauty than that of any dweller, in sunlight, any walker on the earth.

  From the still-lifted left elbow the voice issued flatly: “Jor Jor,” it said.

  After a moment Orr recognized his own name in this Barsoomian bisyllable, and said with some embarrassment, “Yes, I’m Orr.”

  “Please forgive warranted interruption. You are human capable of iahklu’ as previously noted. This troubles self.”

  “I don’t—I think—”

  “We also have been variously disturbed. Concepts cross in mist. Perception is difficult. Volcanoes emit fire. Help is offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all. Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned, in immediate-following fashion: Er’ perrehnne!”

  “Er’ perrehnne,”Orr repeated automatically, his whole mind intent on trying to understand what the Alien was telling him.

  “If desired. Speech is silver, silence is gold. Self is universe. Please forgive interruption, crossing in mist.” The Alien, though neckless and waistless, gave an impression o
f bowing, and passed on, huge and greenish above the gray-faced crowd. Orr stood staring after him until Haber said, “George!”

  “What?” He looked stupidly around at the room, the desk, the window.

  “What the hell did you do?”

  “Nothing,” Orr said. He was still sitting on the couch, his hair full of electrodes. Haber had pushed the OFF button of the Augmentor and had come around in front of the couch, staring first at Orr and then at the EEG screen.

  He opened the machine and checked the permanent record inside it, recorded by pens on paper tape. “Thought I’d misread the screen,” he said, and gave a peculiar laugh, a very clipped version of his usual full-throated roar. “Queer stuff going on in your cortex there, and I wasn’t even feeding your cortex at all with the Augmentor, I’d just begun a slight stimulus to the pons, nothing specific.... What’s this.... Christ, that must be 150 mv there.” He turned suddenly to Orr. “What were you thinking? Reconstruct it.”

  An extreme reluctance possessed Orr, amounting to a sense of threat, of danger.

  “I thought—I was thinking about the Aliens.”