Newton’s Sleep

URSULA K. LE GUIN

W

HEN 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 cliche 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 20-20’s from the organfreeze. “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 in 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 ‘Foys.” 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-gray-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 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. He had always been a night person anyhow, needing only three or four hours of sleep, 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 blob 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 had 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 spacedwellers. 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 noninfantilization 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 sub-specialties. “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 overabstract. “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 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 as a souvenir from Mount Sinai 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 gray 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 calls 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, superstition.”

“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.”

“Down below, yes, but here, in the Colony, in Spes—”

“Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed? Very elitist people. How could we be anything but?”

“Conservative? Conventional? What are you talking about?”

“Well, look at us! Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century! I’m not complaining, you know. I chose it too. I love feeling safe. I wanted the kids to be safe. But you pay for safety.”

“I don’t understand your attitude. We risked everything for Spes— because we’re future oriented. These are the people who chose to leave the past behind, to start fresh. To form a true human community and to do it right, to do it right, for once! These people are innovators, intellectually courageous, not a bunch of gutbrains sunk in their bigotries! Our average IQ is 165—”

“Ike, I know. I know the average IQ.”

“The boy is rebelling,” Ike said after a short silence. “Just as Esther is. Using the foulest language they know, trying to shock the adults. It’s meaningless.”

“And John Kelly tonight?”

“Look, Mo was going on and on. All that about his damned souvenir pebble—he plays cute a good deal, you know. The kids he teaches eat it up, but it gets pretty tiresome in committee. If John cut him off, he asked for it”

They were at the door of their unit. It looked like the door of a New England frame house, though it hissed open sideways when Ike touched the doorbell.

Esther had gone to her cube, of course. Lately she spent as little time as possible with them in the livingcube. Noah and Jason had spread their diagrams, printouts, workbooks, a tri-di checkerboard all over the builtins and the floor, and sat in the middle of it eating prochips and chattering away. “Tom’s sister says she saw her in the OR,” Jason was saying. “Hi, Ike, hi, Susan. I don’t know, you can’t believe something some six-year-old says.”

“Yeah, she’s probably just imitating what Linda said, trying to get attention. Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. Hey, did you hear about this burned woman Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack say they saw?”

“What do you mean, a burned woman?”

“Over by school in C-1 Corridor. They were going along, going to some girls’ meeting thing—”

“Dahncing clahss,” Jason interjected, striking a pose somewhere between a dying swan and a vomiting twelve-year-old.

“—and they claim they saw this woman they’d never seen before, how about that? How could there be anybody in Spes they’d never even seen? And she was like burned all over, and sort of lurking along the side of the corridor like she was afraid of being seen. And they say she went down C-3 just before they got there, and when they did they couldn’t see her. And she wasn’t in any of the cubes along C-3. And then Tom Fort’s little sister says she saw her in the OR, Jason says, but she’s probably just trying to get attention too.”

“She said she had white eyes,” Jason said, rolling his own blue ones. “Really gutwrenching.”

“Did the girls report this to anybody?” Ike asked.

“Treese and Linda? I don’t know,” Noah said, losing interest. “So, are we going to get more hands-on time with the Schoenfeldt?”

“I requested it,” Ike said. He was upset, disturbed. Esther’s unjustifiable anger, Susan’s lack of sympathy, and now Noah and Jason telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls about white-eyed phantoms: it was discouraging.

He went into his study cube and got to work projecting designs for the second ship, following Levaitis’s proposals. No fake scenery, no props; the curves and angles of the structure exposed. The structural elements were rationally beautiful in their necessity. Form follows function. Instead of an illusion like the Common, the major space in each quadrant would be just that, a big space; call it the quad, maybe. Ten meters high, two hundred across, the arches of the hull reaching across it magnificently. He sketched it out on the holo, viewed it from different angles, walked around it… It was past three when he went to bed, excited and satisfied by his work. Susan was fast asleep. He lay by her inert warmth and looked back on the events of the evening; his mind was clearer in the dark. There was no anti-Semitism in Spes. Look how many of the colonists were Jews. He was going to count, but found that he didn’t have to; the number seventeen was ready in his mind. It seemed less somehow than he had thought. He ran through the names and came out with seventeen. Not as many as it might have been, out of eight hundred, but a lot better than some other groups. There had been no problem recruiting people of Asiatic ancestry, in fact it seemed the reverse, but the lack of African-ancestry colonists had caused long and bitter struggles of conscience over policy, back in the Union. But there had been no way around the fact that in a closed community of only eight hundred, every single person must be fit, not only genetically, but intellectually. And after the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training. There had been few black applicants, even, and almost none of them had passed the rigorous tests. They had been wonderful people, of course, but that wasn’t enough. Every adult on board had to be outstandingly competent in several areas of expertise. There was no time to train people who, through no fault of their own, had been disadvantaged from the start. It came down to what D. H. Maston, the “Father of Spes,” called the cold equations, from an old story he liked to tell. “No dead weight on board!” was the moral of the story. “Too many lives depend on every choice we make! If we could afford to be sentimental—if we could take the easy way—nobody would rejoice more sincerely than I. But we can have only one criterion: excellence. Physical and mental excellence in every respect. Any applicant who meets that criterion is in. Anyone who doesn’t, is out.”

So even in the Union days there had only been three blacks in the Society. The genius mathematician Madison Aless had tragically developed slowrad symptoms, and after his suicide, the Vezys, a brilliant young couple from England, had dropped out and gone home; a loss not only to ethnicity but to multinationality in Spes, for it left only a handful from countries other than the Union and the U.S.A. But, as Maston had pointed out, that meant nothing, because the concept of nationality meant nothing, while the concept of community meant everything.

David Henry Maston had applied the cold equations to himself. Sixty-one when the Colony moved to California, he had stayed behind in the States. “By the time Spes is built,” he had said, “I’ll be seventy. A seventy-year-old man take up the place a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid could fill? Don’t make jokes!” Maston was still alive, down there. Now and then he came in on the Network from Indianapolis with some advice, always masterful, imperative, though sometimes, these days, a bit off the mark.

But why was Ike lying here thinking about old Maston? His train of thought trailed off into the incoherencies of advancing sleep. Just as he relaxed, a thrill of terror jolted through him, stiffening every muscle for a moment—the old fear from far, far back, the fear of being helpless, mindless, the fear of sleep itself. Then that too was gone. Ike Rose was gone. A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.

* * * *

Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack were twelve. When Esther stopped them to ask questions they were partly shy with her, and partly rude, because even if she was sixteen she was really gutwrenching-looking with those glass things she wore, and Timmy Kelly called her Kikey, and Timmy Kelly was so incredibly gorge. So Linda sort of looked away and acted like she didn’t hear her, but Treese was kind of flattered, actually. She laughed and said yeah they really had absolutely seen this gutwrenching woman and she was really like burned all over, shiny, even her clothes burned off except sort of a rag thing. “Her breasts were just hanging there and they were really weird, really long,” Treese said, “they were really gut, right? Hanging down. God!”

“Did she have white eyes?”

“You mean like Punky Fort said she saw? I don’t know. We weren’t all that close.”

“It was her teeth were white,” Linda said, unable to let Treese do all the describing. “They were all white, like a skull would be, right, and like she had too many teeth.”

“Like in those history vids,” Treese said, “you know, all those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right, Africa? That’s what she looked like. Like those famine people. Do you think there was some accident they didn’t tell us about? Maybe EVA? And she got like fried, and went crazy, and she’s hiding now.”

They weren’t stupid, Treese and Linda, not at all—no doubt IQ’s over 150 like everybody else—but they’d been born in the Colony. They’d never lived outside.

Esther had. She remembered. The Roses had joined when she was seven. She remembered all sorts of stuff about the city where they had lived before they joined, Philadelphia; stuff like cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, and her best friend in the building, Saviora, who had ten million little tiny short braids, each one tied with a red thread and a blue bead. Her best friend in the building and in the Building Mothers’ School and in the world. Until she had to go live in the United States and then Bakersfield and be decontaminated, decontaminated of everything, the germs and viruses and funguses, the roaches and the radiation and the rain, the red threads and the blue beads and the bright eyes. “Hey I’ll see for you, ole blindy-eyes,” Saviora had said when Esther had the first operation and it didn’t help. “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK, in arithmetic?”

It was weird how she could remember that, nearly ten years ago. She could hear Saviora’s voice, the way she sang the word “arithmetic,” with a fall and rise in it so it sounded like something foreign, incomprehensible, marvelous, blue and red…

“Arith-metic,” she said aloud, going down BB Corridor, but she could not say it right.

All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman. But that didn’t explain how she got into 2-C, or the OR, or onto the Plaza in Florida, where a girl called Oona Chang and her little brother claimed to have seen her last night just after sun-out.

Oh, shit, I just wish I could see, Esther Rose thought as she walked across the Common, which to her was a bluegreen blur. What’s the use? That woman could be walking in front of me right now and I wouldn’t even know it, I’d think it was just somebody that belonged. Anyhow, how could there be a stowaway? After a year and a half in space? Where’s she been till now? And there hasn’t been any accident. It’s just kids. Playing ghosts, trying to scare each other and getting scared. Getting scared of those old history vids, those black faces, grinning with famine, when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat. “The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters,” Esther Rose said aloud. She had pored over the Monuments of Western Art file in the library because even though she couldn’t see the world, or even Spes, she could see pictures if they were close enough. Engravings were the best, they didn’t go all to blobs of color when she enlarged them on the screen, but kept making sense, the strong black lines, the shadows and highlights that built up the forms. Goya, it was. The bat things coming out of the man’s head while he slept at a table full of books, and down below were the Spanish words that meant “The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters” in English, the only language she would ever know. Roaches, rain, Spanish, all washed away. Of course Spanish was in the AI. Everything was. You could learn Spanish if you wanted to. But what use could it possibly be, when the AI could translate it into English faster than you could read or think? What use would there be knowing some language that nobody spoke but you?

When she got home she was going to ask Susan about going to live in the A-Ed dorm in Boulder. She would do it. Today. When she got home. She had to get out. The dorm couldn’t be worse than home. Their incredible family, Daddy and Mommy and Bubby and Sis, like something from the nineteens! The womb within the womb! And here’s Uterine Rose, Space Heroine, groping home across the plastic grass… She got there, and hissed the door open, and seeing her mother working on her little kitchen computer, faced her heroically and said, “Susan, I want to go live at the dorms. I just think it would be a lot better. Is that going to make Ike go nova?”

The silence was long enough that she came closer to her mother, and made out that she seemed to be crying.

“Oh,” she said, “oh, I didn’t—”

“It’s OK. It isn’t you, honey. It’s Eddie.”

Her mother’s half brother was the only relative she had left. They kept in touch through the Network outlinks. Not often, because Ike was so strongly against keeping up personal communication with people down below, and Susan didn’t like doing things she couldn’t tell him she was doing. But she had told Esther, and Esther had treasured her mother’s trust.

“Is he sick?” she asked, feeling sick.

“He died. Real fast. One of the RMVs. Bella sent word.”

Susan spoke softly and quite naturally. Esther stood there awhile, then went and touched her mother’s shoulder timidly. Susan turned to her, embraced her, holding on to her, and began to weep aloud and talk. “Oh, Esther, he was so good, he was so good, he was so good! We always stuck it out together, all the stepmothers and the girlfriends and the awful places we had to live, it was always OK because of Eddie, he made it OK. He was my family, Esther. He was my family!”

Maybe the word did mean something.

Her mother quieted down and let her go. “Do you have to not tell Ike?” Esther asked, while she made them some tea.

Susan shook her head. “I don’t care if he knows I talked with Eddie, now. But Bella just put a letter into the Net. We didn’t talk.”

Esther gave her her tea; she sipped it and sighed.

“You want to live in the A-Ed dorms,” she said.

Esther nodded, feeling guilty about talking about it, about deserting her mother. “I guess. I don’t know.”

“I think it’s a good idea. Try it out, anyhow.”

“You do?… But will he, you know, get all… you know.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “But, so?”

“I guess I really want to.”

“So, apply.”

“Does he have to approve the application?”

“No. You’re sixteen. Age of reason. Society Code says so.”

“I don’t always feel so reasonable.”

“You’ll do. A fair imitation.”

“It’s when he gets so, you know, like he has to control everything or everything will be out of control, I get sort of out of control.”

“I know. But he can handle this. He’ll be proud of you for going to A-Ed early. Just let him blow off awhile, he’ll calm down.”

* * * *

Ike surprised them. He did not blow up or blow off. He met Esther’s demand calmly. “Sure,” he said. “After your eye transplant.”

“After—?”

“You don’t intend to start your adult life with a severe curable handicap. That would be stupid, Esther. You want your independence. So you need physical independence. First get your eyes—then fly. You thought I’d try to hold you back? Daughter, I want to see you flying!”

“But—”

He waited.

“Is she ready?” Susan asked. “Have the doctors said something I hadn’t heard?”

“Thirty days of immune-system prep, and she can receive a double eye transplant. I talked to Dick after Health Board yesterday. She can go over and choose a pair tomorrow.”

“Choose eyes?” Noah said. “Gutwrenching!”

“What if I, what if I don’t want to,” Esther said.

“Don’t want to? Don’t want to see?”

She did not look at either of them. Her mother was silent.

“You would be giving in to fear, which is natural, but unworthy of you. And so you would merely cheat yourself out of so many weeks or months of perfect vision.”

“But it says I’m at the age of reason. So I can make my own choices.”

“Of course you can, and will. You’ll make the reasonable choice. I have confidence in you, Daughter. Show me that it’s justified.”

* * * *

Immune-system prep was nearly as bad as decontamination. Some days she couldn’t pay attention to anything but the tubes and machines. Other days she felt human enough to get bored and be glad when Noah came to the Health Center to see her. “Hey,” he said, “did you hear about the Hag? All kinds of people over in Urban have seen her. It started with this baby getting excited, and then its mother saw her, and then a whole bunch of people did. She’s supposed to be real small and old, and she’s sort of Asian, you know, with those eyes like Yukio and Fred have, but she’s all bent over and her legs are weird. And she goes around picking up stuff off the deck, like it was litter, only nothing’s there, and she puts it in this bag she has. And when they walk toward her she just goes out of sight. And she has this real gut mouth without any teeth in it.”

“Is the burned woman still around?”

“Well, some women in Florida were having some committee meeting, and all of a sudden there were these other people sitting at the table and they were black. And they all looked at them, and they just like went out of sight.”

“Wow,” Esther said.

“Dad got himself on this Emergency Committee with mostly psychologists, and they have it all worked out about mass hallucination and environmental deprivation and like that. He’ll tell you all about it.”

“Yeah, he will.”

“Hey Es.”

“Hey No.”

“Are they, I mean. Is it. Do they.”

“Yeah,” she said. “First they take out the old ones. Then they put in the new ones. Then they do the wiring.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you really have to like, go and choose…”

“No. The meds pick out whatever’s most compatible genetically. They got some nice Jewish eyes for me.”

“Honest?”

“I was kidding. Maybe.”

“It’ll be great if you can see really well,” Noah said, and she heard in his voice for the first time the huskiness like a double-reed instrument, oboe or bassoon, the first breaking.

“Hey, have you got your Satyagraha tape, I want to hear that,” she said. They shared a passion for twentieth-century opera.

“It has no intellectual complexity,” Noah said in Ike’s intonation. “I find an absence of thought.”

“Yeah,” said Esther, “and it’s all in Sanskrit”

Noah put on the last act. They listened to the tenor singing ascending scales in Sanskrit. Esther closed her eyes. The high, pure voice went up and up, like mountain peaks above the mists.

* * * *

“We can be optimistic,” the doctor said.

“What do you mean?” Susan said.

“They can’t guarantee, Sue,” Ike said.

“Why not? This was presented as a routine procedure!”

“In an ordinary case—”

“Are there ordinary cases?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “And this one is extraordinary. The operation was absolutely trouble free. So was the IS prep. However her current reaction raises the possibility—a low probability but a possibility—of partial or total rejection.”

“Blindness.”

“Sue, you know that even if she rejects these implants, they can try again.”

“Electronic implants might in fact be the better course. They’ll preserve optical function and give spatial orientation. And there are sonar headbands for periods of visual nonfunction.”

“So we can be optimistic,” Susan said.

“Guardedly,” said the doctor.

* * * *

“I let you do this,” Susan said. “I let you do this, and I could have stopped you.” She turned away from him and went down the corridor.

He was due at the Bays, overdue in fact, but he walked across Urban to the farther elevator bank instead of dropping straight down from the Health Center. He needed a moment to be alone and think. This whole thing about Esther’s operation was hard to handle, on top of the mass-hysteria phenomena, and now if Susan was going to let him down… He kept feeling a driving, aching need to be alone. Not to sit with Esther, not to talk to doctors, not to reason with Susan, not to go to committee meetings, not to listen to hysterics reporting their hallucinations—just to be alone, sitting at his Schoenfeldt screen, in the night, in peace.

“Look at that,” said a tall man, Laxness of EVAC, stopping beside Ike in Urban Square and staring. “What next? What do you think is really going on, Rose?”

Ike followed Laxness’ gaze. He saw the high brick and stone facades of Urban and a boy crossing the street-corridor.

“The kid?”

“Yes. My God. Look at them.”

The kid was gone, but Laxness kept staring, and swallowed as if he felt sick.

“He’s gone, Morten.”

“They must be from some famine,” Laxness said, his gaze unwavering. “You know, the first couple of times, I thought they were holovid projections. I thought somebody had to be doing this to us. Somebody with a screw loose, in Communications or something.”

“We’ve investigated that possibility,” Ike said.

“Look at their arms. Jesus!”

“There’s nothing there, Morten.”

Laxness looked at him. “Are you blind?”

“There is nothing there.”

Laxness stared at him as if he were the hallucination. “What I think it is, is our guilt,” he said, looking back at whatever it was he saw across the Square. “But what are we supposed to do? I don’t understand.” He started forward suddenly, striding with purpose, and then stopped and looked around with the distressed, embarrassed expression Ike was getting used to seeing on people’s faces when their hallucinations popped.

Ike came on past him. He wanted to say something to Laxness, but did not know what to say.

As he entered the streetlike corridor he had a curious sensation of pushing into and through a substance, or substances or presences, crowded thickly, not impeding him, not palpable, only many non-touches like very slight electric shocks on his arms and shoulders, breaths across his face, an intangible resistance. He walked ahead, came to the elevators, dropped down to the Bays. The elevator was full, but he was the only person in it.

“Hey Ike. Seen any ghosts yet?” Hal Bauerman said cheerfully.

“No.”

“Me neither. I feel sort of left out. Here’s the print on the Driver specs, with the new stuff fed in.”

“Mort Laxness was seeing things up in Urban just now. He’s not one I would have picked as hysterical.”

“Ike,” said Larane Gutierrez, the shop assistant, “nobody is hysterical. These people are here.”

“What people?”

“The people from Earth.”

“We’re all from Earth, as far as I know.”

“I mean the people everybody sees.”

“I don’t. Hal doesn’t. Rod doesn’t—”

“Seen some,” Rod Bond muttered. “I don’t know. It’s real crazy, I know, Ike, but all those people that were hanging around Pueblo Corridor all day yesterday—I know you can walk through them, but everybody saw them—they were like washing out a lot of cloths and wringing out the water. It was like some old tape in anthro or something.”

“A group delusion—”

“—isn’t what’s going on,” Larane snapped. She was shrill, aggressive. At any disagreement, Ike thought, she always got strident. “These people are here, Ike, And there’s more of them all the time.”

“So the ship is full of real people that you can walk through?”

“Good way to get a lot of people in a small space,” Hal observed, with a fixed grin.

“And whatever you see is real, of course, even if I don’t see it?”

“I don’t know what you see,” Larane said. “I don’t know what’s real. I know that they’re here. I don’t know who they are; maybe we have to find out. The ones I saw yesterday looked like they were from some really primitive culture, they had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful—the people, I mean. Well fed and very alert-looking, watchful. I had a feeling for the first time they might be seeing us, not just us seeing them, but I wasn’t sure.”

Rod was nodding agreement.

“Next thing is you start talking with them, then? Hi folks, welcome to Spes?”

“So far, if you get close, they just sort of aren’t there, but people are getting closer,” she answered quite seriously.

“Larane,” Ike said, “do you hear yourself ? Rod? Listen, if I came to you and said Hey, guess what, a space alien with three heads has beamed aboard from his flying saucer and here he is— What’s wrong? Don’t you see him? Can’t you see him, Larane? Rod? You don’t? But I do! And you do, too, don’t you, Hal, you see the three-headed space alien?”

“Sure,” Hal said. “Little green bugger.”

“Do you believe us?”

“No,” Larane said. “Because you’re lying. But we’re not.”

“Then you’re insane.”

“To deny what I and the people with me see, that would be just as insane.”

“Hey, this is a really interesting ontological debate,” Hal said, “but we’re about twenty-five minutes overdue on the Driver specs report, folks.”

Working late that night in his cube, Ike felt the soft electric thrilling along his arras and back, the sense of crowding, a murmur below the threshold of hearing, a smell of sweat or musk or human breath. He put his head in his hands for a minute, then looked up again at the Schoenfeldt screen and spoke as if talking to it. “You cannot let this happen,” he said. “This is all the hope we have.”

The cube was empty, the still air was odorless.

He worked on for a while. When he came to bed he lay beside his wife’s deep, sleeping silence. She was as far from him as another world.

And Esther lay in the hospital in her permanent darkness. No, not permanent. Temporary. A healing darkness. She would see.

* * * *

“What are you doing, Noah?”

The boy was standing at the washstand, gazing down into the bowl, which was half full of water. His expression was rapt. He said, “Watching the goldfish. They came out of the tap.”

* * * *

“The question is this: to what extent does the concept of illusion usefully describe a shared experience with elements of interactivity?”

“Well,” Jaime said, “the interactivity could itself be illusory. Joan of Arc and her voices.” But there was no conviction in his own voice, and Helena, who seemed to have taken over the leadership of the Emergency Committee, pursued: “What do you think of inviting some of our guests to sit in on this meeting?”

“Hold on,” Ike said. “You say ‘shared experience,” but it’s not a shared experience; I don’t share it; there are others who don’t; and what justification have you for claiming it’s shared? If these phantoms, these ‘guests,” are impalpable, vanish when you approach, inaudible, they’re not guests, they’re ghosts, you’re abandoning any effort at rationality—”

“Ike, I’m sorry, but you can’t deny their existence because you are unable to perceive them.”

“On what sounder basis could I deny their existence?”

“But you deny that we can use the same basis for accepting it.”

“Lack of hallucinations is considered the basis from which one judges another person’s perceptions as hallucinations.”

“Call them hallucinations, then,” Helena said, “although I liked ghosts better. “Ghosts’ may be in fact quite accurate. But we don’t know how to coexist with ghosts. It’s not something we were trained in. We have to learn how to do it as we go along. And believe me, we have to. They are not going away. They are here, and what ‘here’ is is changing too. Maybe you could be very useful to us, if you were willing to be, Ike, just because you aren’t aware of—of our guests, and the changes. But we who are aware of them have to learn what kind of existence they have, and why. For you to go on denying that they have any is obstructive to the work we’re trying to do.”

“ ‘Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,”“ Ike said, getting up from his seat at the conference table. Nobody else said anything. They all looked embarrassed, looked down. He left the room in silence.

There was a group of people in CC Corridor running and laughing. “Head ‘em off at the pass!” yelled a big man, Stiernen of Flight Engineering, waving his arms as if at some horde or crowd, and a woman shouted, “They’re bison! They’re bison! Let ‘em go down C Corridor, there’s more room!” Ike walked straight ahead, looking straight ahead.

* * * *

“There’s a vine growing by the front door,” Susan said at breakfast. Her tone was so complacent that he thought nothing of it for a moment except that he was glad to hear her speak normally for once.

Then he said, “Sue—”

“What can I do about it, Ike? What do you want? You want me to lie, say nothing, pretend there isn’t a vine growing there? But there is. It looks like a scarlet runner bean. It’s there.”

“Sue, vines grow in dirt. Earth. There is no earth in Spes.”

“I know that.”

“How can you both know it and deny it?”

“It’s going backwards, Dad,” Noah said, in his new, slightly husky voice.

“What is?”

“Well, there were the people first. All those weird old women and cripples and things, remember, and then all the other kinds of people. And then there started being animals, and now plants and stuff. Wow, did you know they saw whales in the Reservoirs, Mom?”

She laughed. “I only saw the horses on the Common,” she said.

“They were really pretty,” Noah said.

“I didn’t see them,” Ike said. “I didn’t see horses on the Common.”

“There were a whole lot of them. They wouldn’t let you get anywhere near, though. I guess they were wild. There were some really neat spotted ones. Appaloosa, Nina said.”

“I didn’t see horses,” Ike said. He put his face in his hands and began to cry.

“Hey, Dad,” he heard Noah’s voice, and then Susan’s, “It’s OK. No. It’s OK. Go on to school. It’s all right, sweetie.” The door hissed.

Her hands were on his head, smoothing his hair, and on his shoulders, gently rocking and shaking him. “It’s OK, Ike…”

“No, it’s not. It’s not OK. It’s not all right. It’s all gone crazy. It’s all ruined, ruined, wasted, wrong. Gone wrong.”

Susan was silent for a long time, kneading and rocking his shoulders. She said at last, “It scares me when I think about it, Ike. It seems like something supernatural, and I don’t think there is anything supernatural. But if I don’t think about it in words like that, if I just look at it, look at the people and the… the horses and the vine by the door—it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are? All it is, is we brought ourselves with us… The horses and the whales and the old women and the sick babies. They’re just us, we’re them, they’re here.”

He said nothing for a while. Finally he drew a long breath. “So,” he said. “Go with the flow. Embrace the unexplainable. Believe because it’s unbelievable. Who cares about understanding, anyhow? Who needs it? Things make a lot better sense if you just don’t think about them. Maybe we could all have lobotomies and really simplify life.”

She took her hands from his shoulders and moved away.

“After the lobotomy, I guess we can have electronic brain implants,” she said. “And sonar headbands. So we don’t bump into ghosts. Is surgery the answer to all your problems?”

He turned around then, but her back was to him.

“I’m going to the hospital,” she said, and left.

* * * *

“Hey! Look out!” they shouted. He did not know what they saw him walking into—a herd of sheep, a troop of naked dancing savages, a cypress swamp—he did not care. He saw the Common, the corridors, the cubes.

Noah came in to change his clothes that he said were mud stained from tag football in the dirt that had covered all the Astroturf in the Common, but Ike walked on plastic grass through dustless, germless air. He walked through the great elms and chestnuts that stood twenty meters high, not between them. He walked to the elevators and pressed the buttons and came to the Health Center.

“Oh, but Esther was released this morning!” the nurse said, smiling.

“Released?”

“Yes. The little black girl came with your wife’s note, first thing this morning.”

“May I see the note?”

“Sure. It’s in her file, just hold on—” She handed it over. It was not a note from Susan. It was in Esther’s scrawling hand, addressed to Isaac Rose. He unfolded it.

I am going up in the mountains for a while.

With love,

Esther.

Outside the Health Center, he stood looking down the corridors. They ran to left, to right, and straight ahead. They were 2.2 meters high, 2.6 meters wide, painted light tan, with colored stripes on the gray floors. The blue stripes ended at the door of the Health Center, or started there, ending and starting were the same thing; but the white arrows set in the blue stripes every 3 meters pointed to the Health Center, not away from it, so they ended there, where he stood. The floors were light gray, except for the colored stripes, and perfectly smooth and almost level, for in Area 8 the curvature of Spes was barely perceptible. Lights shone from panels in the ceilings of the corridors at intervals of 5 meters. He knew all the intervals, all the specifications, all the materials, all the relationships. He had them all in his mind. He had thought about them for years. He had reasoned them. He had planned them.

Nobody could be lost in Spes. All the corridors led to known places. You came to those places following the arrows and the colored stripes. If you followed every corridor and took every elevator you would never get lost and always end up safe where you started from. And you would never stumble, because all the floors were of smooth metal polished and painted light gray, with colored stripes and white arrows guiding you to the desired end.

Ike took two steps and stumbled, falling violently forward. Under his hands was something rough, irregular, painful. A rock, a boulder, protruded through the smooth metal floor of the corridor. It was dark brownish-gray veined with white, pocked and cracked; a little scurf of yellowish lichen grew near his hands. The heel of his right hand hurt, and he raised it to look at it. He had grazed the skin in falling on the rock. He licked the tiny film of blood from the graze. Squatting there, he looked at the rock and then past it. He saw nothing but the corridor. He would have nothing but the rock, until he found her. The rock and the taste of his own blood. He stood up.

“Esther!”

His voice echoed faintly down the corridors.

“Esther, I can’t see. Show me how to see!”

There was no answer.

He set off, walking carefully around the rock, walking carefully forward. It was a long way, and he was never sure he was not lost. He was not sure where he was, though the climbing got steeper and harder and the air began to be very thin and cold. He was not sure of anything until he heard his mother’s voice. “Isaac, dear, are you awake?” she asked rather sharply. He turned and saw her sitting beside Esther on an outcropping of granite beside the steep, dusty trail. Behind them, across a great dropping gulf of air, snow peaks shone in the high, clear light. Esther looked at him. Her eyes were clear also, but dark, and she said, “Now we can go down.”