The Lathe Of Heaven

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  “The Aldebaranians? Well?”

  “I just thought of one I saw on the street, coming here.”

  “And that reminded you, consciously or unconsciously, of the euthanasia you saw performed. Right? O.K. That might explain the funny business here down in the emotive centers, the Augmentor picked it up and exaggerated it.

  You must have felt that—something special, unusual going on in your mind?”

  “No,” Orr said, truthfully. It had not felt unusual.

  “O.K. Now look, in case my reactions worried you there, you should know that I’ve had this Augmentor hooked up to my own brain several hundred times, and on lab subjects, some forty-five different subjects in fact. It’s not going to hurt you any more than it did them. But that reading was a very unusual one for an adult subject, and I simply wanted to check with you to see if you felt it subjectively.”

  Haber was reassuring himself, not Orr, but it didn’t matter. Orr was past reassurance.

  “O.K. Here we go again.” Haber restarted the EEG, and approached the ON button of the Augmentor. Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.

  But they were not there. Nor was he downtown talking to a nine-foot turtle. He remained sitting on the comfortable couch looking at the misty, blue-gray cone of St. Helen out the window. And, quiet as a thief in the night, a sense of well-being came into him, a certainty that things were all right, and that he was in the middle of things. Self is universe. He would not be allowed to be isolated, to be stranded. He was back where he belonged. He felt an equanimity, a perfect certainty as to where he was and where everything else was. This feeling did not come to him as blissful or mystical, but simply as normal. It was the way he generally had felt, except in times of crisis, of agony; it was the mood of his childhood and all the best and profoundest hours of the boyhood and maturity; it was his natural mode of being. These last years he had lost it, gradually but almost entirely, scarcely realizing that he had lost it. Four years ago this month, four years ago in April, something had happened that had made him lose that balance altogether for a while; and recently the drugs he had taken, the dreams he had dreamed, the constant jumping from one life-memory to another, the worsening of the texture of life the more Haber unproved it, all this had sent him clear off course. Now, all at once, he was back where he belonged.

  He knew that this was nothing he had accomplished by himself.

  He said aloud, “Did the Augmentor do that?”

  “Do what?” said Haber, leaning around the machinery again to watch the EEG screen.

  “Oh... I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t doing anything, in your sense,” Haber replied with a touch of irritation. Haber was likable at moments like this, playing no role and pretending no response, wholly absorbed in what he was trying to learn from the quick and subtle reactions of his machines. “It’s merely amplifying what your own brain’s doing at the moment, selectively reinforcing the activity, and your brain’s doing absolutely nothing interesting.... There.” He made a rapid note of something, returned to the Augmentor, then leaned back to observe the jiggling lines on the little screen. He separated three that had seemed one, by turning dials, then reunified them. Orr did not interrupt him again. Once Haber said sharply, “Shut your eyes. Roll the eyeballs upward. Right. Keep them shut, try to visualize something—a red cube. Right....”

  When at last he turned the machines off and began to detach the electrodes, the serenity Orr had felt did not lapse, like the induced mood of a drug or alcohol. It remained. Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr. Haber, I can’t let you use my effective dreams any more.”

  “Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr’s brain, not on Orr.

  “I can’t let you use my dreams any more.”

  “‘Use’ them?”

  “Use them.”

  “Call it what you like,” Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning. Your God is a jealous God. “I’m sorry, George, but you’re not in a position to say that.”

  Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.

  “Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.

  Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door. He crossed the room. He sat down behind his desk. Orr now stood up and stretched a little.

  Haber stroked his black beard with a big, gray hand.

  “I am on the verge—no, I’m in the midst—of a breakthrough,” he said, his deep voice not booming or jovial but dark, powerful. “Using your brain patterns in a feedback-elimination-replication-augmentation routine, I am programming the Augmentor to reproduce the EEG rhythms that obtain during effective dreaming. I call these e-state rhythms. When I have them sufficiently generalized, I will be able to superimpose them on the d-state rhythms of another brain, and after a period of synchronization they will, I believe, induce effective dreaming in that brain. Do you understand what that means? I’ll be able to induce the e-state in a properly selected and trained brain, as easily as a psychologist using ESB induces rage in a cat, or tranquillity in a psychotic human—more easily, for I can stimulate without implanting contacts or chemicals. I am within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of accomplishing this goal. Once I do, you’re off the hook. You will be unnecessary. I don’t like working with an unwilling subject, and progress will be much faster with a suitably equipped and oriented subject. But until I’m ready, I need you. This research must be finished. It is probably the most important piece of scientific research that has ever been done. I need you to the extent that—if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here—then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther— of Personal Welfare Constraint. If necessary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psychotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me.”

  “It really wouldn’t make any difference to you,” Orr said, without belligerence.

  “Why are you fighting me—now? Why now, George? When you’ve contributed so much, and we’re so near the goal?” Your God is a reproachful God. But guilt was not the way to get at George Orr; if he had been a man much given to guilt feelings he would not have lived to thirty.

  “Because the longer you go on the worse it gets. And now, instead of preventing me from having effective dreams, you’re going to start having them yourself. I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.”

  “What do you mean by that: ‘the worse it gets’? Look here, George.” Man to man. Reason will prevail. If only we sit down and talk things over.... “In the few weeks that we’ve worked together, this is what we’ve done. Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major killer.” He began to bend his strong, gray fingers down, enumerating. “Eliminated the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. Eliminated the risk of species deterioration and the fostering of deleterious gene stocks. Eliminated—no, say in process of eliminating—poverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world. What else? Mental illness, maladjustment to reality: that’ll take a while, but we’ve made the first steps already. Under HURAD direction, the reduction of human misery, physical and psychic, and the constant increase of valid individual self-expression, is an ongoing thing, a constant progress. Progress, George! We’ve made more progress in six weeks than humanity made in six hundred thousand years!”

  Orr felt that all these arguments should be answer
ed. He began, “But where’s democratic government got to? People can’t choose anything at all any more for themselves. Why is everything so shoddy, why is everybody so joyless? You can’t even tell people apart—and the younger they are the more that’s so. This business of World State bringing up all the children in those Centers—”

  But Haber interrupted, really angry. “The Child Centers were your invention, not mine! I simply outlined the desiderata to you among the suggestions for a dream, as I always do; I tried to suggest how to implement some of them, but those suggestions never seem to take hold, or they get twisted out of all recognition by your damned primary-process thinking. You don’t have to tell me that you resist and resent everything I’m trying to accomplish for humanity, you know—that’s been obvious from the start. Every step forward that I force you to take, you cancel, you cripple with the deviousness or stupidity of the means your dream takes to realize it. You try, each time, to take a step backward. Your own drives are totally negative. If you weren’t under strong hypnotic compulsion when you dream, you’d have reduced the world to ashes, weeks ago! Look what you almost did, that one night when you ran off with that woman lawyer—”

  “She’s dead,” Orr said.

  “Good. She was a destructive influence on you. Irresponsible. You have no social conscience, no altruism. You’re a moral jellyfish. I have to instill social responsibility in you hypnotically, every time. And every time it’s thwarted, spoiled. That’s what happened with the Child Centers. I suggested that the nuclear family being the prime shaper of neurotic personality structures, there were certain ways in which it might, in an ideal society, be modified. Your dream simply grabbed at the crudest interpretation of these, mixed it up with cheap Utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian concepts perhaps, and produced the Centers. Which, all the same, are better than what they replaced! There is very little schizophrenia in this world—did you know that? It’s a rare disease!” Haber’s dark eyes shone, his lips grinned.

  “Things are better than they—than they were once,” Orr said, abandoning hope of discussion. “But as you go on they get worse. I’m not trying to thwart you, it’s that you’re trying to do something that can’t be done. I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it. To use it only when I must. When there is no other alternative. There are alternatives now. I’ve got to stop.”

  “We can’t stop—we’ve just begun! We’re just beginning to get any control at all over this power of yours. I’m within sight of doing so, and I will do so. No personal fears can stand in the way of the good that can be done for all men with this new capacity of the human brain!”

  Haber was speechmaking. Orr looked at him, but the opaque eyes, gazing straight at him, did not return his look, did not see him. The speech went on.

  “What I’m doing is making this new capacity replicable. There’s an analogy with the invention of printing, with the application of any new technological or scientific concept. If the experiment or technique cannot be repeated successfully by others, it is of no use. Similarly, the e-state, so long as it was locked into the brain of a single man, was no more use to humanity than a key locked inside a room, or a single, sterile genius mutation. But I’ll have the means of getting the key out of that room. And that ‘key’ will be as great a milestone in human evolution as the development of the reasoning brain itself! Any brain capable of using it, deserving of using it, will be able to. When a suitable, trained, prepared subject enters the e-state under the Augmentor stimulus, he will be under complete autohypnotic control. Nothing will be left to chance, to random impulse, to irrational narcissistic whim. There will be none of this tension between your will to nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes and my conscious, careful planning for the good of all. When I have made sure of my techniques, then you’ll be free to go. Absolutely free. And since you’ve claimed all along that all you want is to be free of responsibility, incapable of dreaming effectively, then I’ll promise that my very first effective dream will include your ‘cure’—you’ll never have an effective dream again.”

  Orr had risen; he stood still, looking at Haber; his face was calm but intensely alert and centered. “You will control your own dreams,” he said, “by yourself—no one helping, or supervising you—?”

  “I’ve controlled yours for weeks now. In my own case, and of course I’ll be the first subject of my own experiment, that’s an absolute ethical obligation, in my own case the control will be complete.”

  “I tried autohypnosis, before I ever used the dream-suppressing drugs—”

  “Yes, you mentioned that before; you failed, of course. The question of a resistant subject achieving successful autosuggestion is an interesting one, but this was no test of it whatever; you’re not a professional psychologist, you’re not a trained hypnotist, and you were already emotionally disturbed about the whole issue; you got nowhere, of course. But I am a professional, and I know precisely what I’m doing. I can autosuggest an entire dream and dream it in every detail precisely as thought out by my waking mind. I’ve done so, every night this past week, getting in training. When the Augmentor synchronizes the generalized e-state pattern with my own d-state, such dreams will be effectivized. And then—and then—” The lips within the curly beard parted in a straining, staring smile, a grin of ecstasy that made Orr turn away as if he had seen something never meant to be seen, both terrifying and pathetic. “Then this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!”

  “We are, we are already,” Orr said, but the other paid no heed.

  “There is nothing to fear. The dangerous time—had we known it—was when you alone possessed the capacity for e-dreaming, and didn’t know what to do with it. If you hadn’t come to me, if you hadn’t been sent into trained, scientific hands, who knows what might have happened. But you were here, and I was here: as they say, genius consists in being in the right time in the right place!” He boomed a laugh. “So now there’s nothing to fear, and it’s all out of your hands. I know, scientifically and morally, what I’m doing and how to do it. I know where I’m going.”

  “Volcanoes emit fire,” Orr murmured.

  “What?”

  “May I go now?”

  “Tomorrow at five.”

  “I’ll come,” Orr said, and left.

  10

  Il descend, reveille, l’autre cote du reve.

  Hugo, Contemplations

  It was only three o’clock, and he should have gone back to his office in the Parks Department and finished up the plans for southeast suburban play areas; but he didn’t. He gave it one thought and dismissed it. Although his memory assured him that he had held that position for five years now, he disbelieved his memory; the job had no reality to him. It was not work he had to do. It was not his job.

  He was aware that in thus relegating to irreality a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the loss of the sense of free will. He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. But the void was there. This life lacked realness; it was hollow; the dream, creating where there was no necessity to create, had worn thin and sleazy. If this was being, perhaps the void was better. He would accept the monsters and the necessities beyond reason. He would go home, and take no drugs, but sleep, and dream what dreams might come.

  He got off the funicular downtown, but instead of taking the trolley he set out walking toward his own district; he had always liked to walk.

  Along past Lovejoy Park a piece of the old freeway was still standing, a huge ramp, probably dating from the last frenetic convulsions of highway-mania in the seventies; it must have led up to the Marquam Bridge, once, but now ended abruptly in mid-air thirty feet above Front Avenue. It had not been destroyed when the city was cleaned up and rebuilt after the Plague Years, perhaps because it was so large, so usel
ess, and so ugly as to be, to the American eye, invisible. There it stood, and a few bushes had taken root up on the roadway, while underneath it a huddle of buildings had grown up, like swallows’ nests in a cliff. In this rather dowdy and noncommittal bit of the city there were still small shops, independent markets, unappetizing little restaurants, and so on, struggling along despite the stringencies of total Consumer Product Equity-Rationing and the overwhelming competition of the great WPC Marts and Outlets, through which 90 per cent of world trade was now channeled.

  One of these shops under the ramp was a secondhand store; the sign above the windows said ANTIQUES and a poorly lettered, peeling sign painted on the glass said JUNQUE. There was some squat handmade pottery in one window, an old rocker with a motheaten paisley shawl draped over it in the other, and, scattered around these main displays, all kinds of cultural litter: a horseshoe, a hand-wound clock, something enigmatic from a dairy, a framed photograph of President Eisenhower, a slightly chipped glass globe containing three Ecuadorian coins, a plastic toilet-seat cover decorated with baby crabs and seaweed, a well-thumbed rosary, and a stack of old hi-fi 45 rpm records, marked “Gd Cond,” but obviously scratched. Just the sort of place, Orr thought, where Heather’s mother might have worked for a while. Moved by the impulse, he went in.

  It was cool and rather dark inside. A leg of the ramp formed one wall, a high blank dark expanse of concrete, like the wall of an undersea cave. From the receding prospect of shadows, bulky furniture, decrepit acres of Action Paintings and fake-antique spinning wheels now becoming genuinely antique though still useless, from these tenebrous reaches of no-man’s-things, a huge form emerged, seeming to float forward slowly, silent and reptilian: The proprietor was an Alien.

  It raised its crooked left elbow and said, “Good day. Do you wish an object?”

  “Thanks, I was just looking.”

  “Please continue this activity,” the proprietor said. It withdrew a little way into the shadows and stood quite motionless. Orr looked at the light play on some ratty old peacock feathers, observed a 1950 home-movie projector, a blue and white saki set, a heap of Mad magazines, priced quite high. He hefted a solid steel hammer and admired its balance; it was a well-made tool, a good thing. “Is this your own choice?” he asked the proprietor, wondering what the Aliens themselves might prize from all this flotsam of the affluent years of America.