Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

When these followers of Kim Terry began to preface their kin-name with Angel as a kind of title, there was a good deal of disapproval and discussion in the councils. The angels agreed that such group identification was potentially divisive. Terry himself told his followers not to go against the will of the majority: “For, whether or not we know it, are we not all angels?”

Yuko, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s little son Inbliss lived with Terry in the homespace he had shared with his mother. They led the nightly meetings. Kim Terry himself become increasingly reclusive. In the early years he now and then spoke to meetings held in the Quad One Circus or the Temenos, but as the years went by he appeared less and less often in public, speaking to his followers only over the innet. To those who went to the meetings at his homespace he might appear briefly, blessing and encouraging them; but his followers believed that his bodily presence was unimportant compared to his angelic presence, which was continual. Bodily matters darkened bliss, obscuring the soul’s needs. “The corridors I walk are not these corridors,” Terry said.

His death in the year 123 brought on a deep hysteria of mourning combined with festivity, for his followers, embracing his doctrine of Actuality as explained by his energetic interpreter, 3-Patel Inbliss, celebrated his apparent death as a rebirth into the Real World, to which the shipworld was merely the means of access, the “vehicle of bliss.”

Patel Inbliss lived on alone in the Kim homespace after Terry’s and his parents’ death, holding meetings there, speaking at home Rejoicings, talking on the innet, working on and circulating the collection of sayings and meditations called The Angel to the Angels . Patel Inbliss was a man of great intelligence, ambition, and devotion, with a genius for organisation. Under his guidance the Rejoicings had become less disorderly and ecstatic, indeed were now quite sedate. He discouraged the wearing of special clothing—undyed shorts and kurtas for men, white clothing and headscarves for women—which many angels had adopted. To dress differently was divisive, he said. Are we not all angels?

Under his leadership, indeed, more and more people declared themselves to be angels. The number of conversions in the first decades of the second century brought on a call for an Article 4 hearing on Religious Manipulation by a group who claimed that Patel Inbliss had formed and promulgated a religious cult which worshipped Terry as a god, thus threatening secular authority. The Central Council never actually called a committee to investigate the charge. The angels asserted that, though they venerated Kim Terry as a guide and teacher, they held him to be no more divine than the least of them. Are we not all angels? And Patel Inbliss argued cogently that the practice of Bliss in no way conflicted with polity and governance, but on the contrary supported it in every particular: for the laws and ways of the world were the laws and ways of Bliss. The Constitution of Discovery was holy writ. The life of the ship was bliss itself—the joyful mortal imitation of immortal reality. “Why would the followers of perfect law disobey it?” he asked. “Why would those who enjoy the angelic order seek disorder? Why would the inhabitants of heaven seek any other place or way to live?”

Angels were, in fact, extremely good citizens, active and cooperative in all civic duties, ready to fulfil communal obligations, diligent committee and Council members. In fact, more than half the Central Council at the time were angels. Not seraphim or archangels, as the very devout and those close to Patel Inbliss were nicknamed, but just everyday angels, enjoying the serenity and good fellowship of the Rejoicings, which were by now a familiar, accepted element of life for many people. The idea that the beliefs and practices of Bliss could in any way run counter to morality, that to be an angel was to be a rebel, was clearly ridiculous.

Patel Inbliss, now in his seventies, indomitably active, still occupied the Kim homespace.

“Could it be that there are two kinds of people…” Luis said to Hsing. Then he paused for so long that she replied crisply, “Yes. Possibly even three. Daring thinkers have postulated as many as five.”

“No. Only two. People who can roll their tongue sideways into a tube and people who can’t.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. They had known since they were six that he could make his tongue into a tube and whistle through it, that she couldn’t, and that it was genetically determined.

“One kind,” he said, “has a need, a lack, they have to have a certain vitamin. The other kind doesn’t.”

“Well?”

“Vitamin Belief.”

She considered.

“Not genetic,” he said. “Cultural. Metaorganic. But as individually real and definite as a metabolic deficiency. People either need to believe or they don’t.”

She still pondered.

“The ones that do don’t believe that the others don’t. They don’t believe that there are people who don’t believe.”

“Hope?” she offered, tentative.

“Hope isn’t belief. Hope’s contingent upon reality, even when it’s not very realistic. Belief dismisses reality.”

“‘The name you can say isn’t the right name,’” said Hsing.

“The corridor you can walk in isn’t the right corridor,” said Luis.

“What’s the harm in believing?”

“It’s dangerous to confuse reality with unreality,” he said promptly. “To confuse desire with power, ego with cosmos. Extremely dangerous.”

“Oooh.” She made a face at his pomposity. After a while she said, “Is that what Terry’s mother meant—‘People need God like a three-year-old needs a chensa.’ What was a chensa, I wonder?”

“A weapon, maybe.”

“I used to go to Rejoicings sometimes with Rosa before she went seraph. I liked a lot of it, actually. The songs. And when they praise things, you know, just ordinary things, and say how everything you do is sacred. I don’t know, I liked it,” she said, a little defensive. He nodded. “But then they’d get into reading all the weird stuff out of the book, about what the ‘voyage’ really is, and what ‘discovery’ actually means, and I’d get claustro. Basically they were saying that there is nothing at all outside. The whole universe is inside. It was weird.”

“They’re right.”

“Oh?”

“For us—they’re right. There is nothing at all outside. Vacuum. Dust.”

“The stars—the galaxies!”

“Light-specks on a screen. We can’t reach them, we can’t get to them. Not us. Not in our lifetime. Our universe is this ship.”

It was an idea so familiar as to be banal and so strange it unnerved her. She pondered.

“And life here is perfect,” Luis said.

“It is?”

“Peace and plenty. Light and warmth. Safety and freedom.”

Well, of course, Hsing thought, and her face showed it.

Luis pressed on—“You did History. All that suffering. Did anybody in the subzero generations ever live as well as we live? Half as well? Most of them were afraid all the time. In pain. They were ignorant. They fought each other over money and religions. They died from diseases and wars and food shortage. It was all like Inner City 2000 or Jungle. It was hell. And this is heaven. Angel Terry was right.”

She was puzzled by his intensity. “So?”

“So did our ancestors arrange to send us from one hell to another hell, by way of heaven? Do you see potential danger in that arrangement?”

“Well,” Hsing said. She considered his metaphor. “Well, for the Sixes, maybe it’ll seem kind of unfair. It’s not going to make much difference to us. We’ll be too doddering to go eva at all, I suppose. Although I’d like to dodder out and see what it looks like. Even if it is hell.”