Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

“It’s worse than that,” Hsing said. The tight, stricken look had come over her again. She jumped up and walked across the room—a neat, severe room, not like the messy nest she used to live in—and stood with her back to him.

“Well, yes,” Luis said, unsure what she meant, but encouraged at her saying anything at all. “We all need training. We’ll be in our sixties at Arrival. If the planet’s habitable, we’ve got to get used to the idea of at least some of us living there—staying there. While maybe some of us turn around and head back to Dichew…The angels never mention that, by the way. Inbliss seems to think only in a straight line extending to infinity. The flaw in his reasoning is that he assumes a material vehicle is capable of an eternal journey. Entropy does not seem to be part of Bliss.”

“Yes,” Hsing said.

“That’s all,” he said after a minute. He was puzzled and worried by her non-response. He waited a little and said, “I think this must be talked about. So I came to you. To talk about it. And you might want to talk about it to non-angelic people in Management and on the Bridge. They need to be concerned about this revision of our mission.” He paused. “Maybe they already are.”

“Yes,” she said again. She had not turned around.

Luis had very little anger in his temperament and was not given to fits of pique, but he felt let down flat. As he looked at Hsing’s back, her pink cheongsam, her short-legs-no-butt (so she had described her Chi-An figure), her black hair falling bright and straight and cut off sharp at the shoulder, he also felt pain. A hard, deep, sore pain at the heart.

“There was a flaw in my reasoning too,” he said. He stood up.

She turned around. She still looked worried beyond anything he had expected. It had taken him a long time to realise how powerful angelic thinking had become, and he had dumped all his discoveries on her at once—yet none of it had seemed to surprise her. So why this reaction? And why wouldn’t she talk about it?

“What flaw?” she asked, but still distrustful, holding back.

“Nothing. I miss talking with you.”

“I know. The work in Nav, it seems like it never lets up.”

She was looking at him but not looking at him. He couldn’t stand it.

“So. That’s it. Just sharing my worries, as we say in Peace Session. Thanks for the time.”

He was in the doorway when she said, “Luis.”

He stopped, but didn’t turn.

“I want to talk more about all this maybe with you later.”

“Sure. Don’t let it worry you.”

“I have to talk to Hiroshi about it.”

“Sure,” he said again, and went out into the corridor.

He wanted to go somewhere else, not corridor 4-4, not any corridor, not any room, not any place he knew. But there was no place he didn’t know. No place in the world.

“I want to go out,” he said to himself. “Outside.”

Silent, black, outside.

“Tell your friend not to panic,” Hiroshi said. “The angels aren’t in control. Not as long as we are.”

He turned back to his work.

“Hiroshi.”

He did not answer.

She stood a while near his seat at the navigators’ station. Her gaze was on Discovery ’s one “window”: a meter-square screen on which data from the epidermal sensors was represented in visible light. Blackness. Bright dots, dim dots, haze: the local starfield and, in the left lower corner, a bit of the remote central galactic disk.

Children in the third year of school are brought to see the “window.”

Or they used to be.

“Is that actually what’s ahead of us?” she had asked Teo not long ago, and he had said, smiling, “No. Some of it’s behind us. It’s a movie I made. It’s where we’d be if we were on schedule. In case somebody noticed.”

She stared at it now and remembered Luis’s phrase, VU. Virtual Unreality.

Without looking at Hiroshi she began to speak.

“Luis thinks the angels are taking control. You think you’re in control. I think the angels are controlling you. You don’t dare tell people that we’re decades ahead of schedule, because you think that if the archangels knew, they’d take over and change course so as to miss the planet. But if you go on hiding the truth, you’re guaranteeing that they’ll take over when we reach the planet. What are you planning to say? Here we are! Surprise! All the angels will have to say is, These people are crazy, they made a navigation error and then tried to cover it up. We aren’t at Shindychew—it’s forty years too soon—this is some other solar system. So they take over the Bridge and we go on. And on. To nowhere.”

A long time passed, so that she thought he had not listened, had not heard her at all.

“Patel’s people are extremely numerous,” he said. His voice was low. “As your friend has been discovering…It was not an easy decision, Hsing. We have no strength except in the accomplished fact. Actuality against wishful thinking. We arrive, we come into orbit, and we can say: There’s the planet. It’s real. Our job is to land people on it . But if we tell people now…four years or forty, it doesn’t matter. Patel’s people will discredit us, replace us, change course, and…as you say…go on to nowhere. To ‘bliss.’”

“How can you expect anybody to believe you, to support you, if you’ve lied to them right up to the last moment? Ordinary people. Not angels. What justifies you in not telling them the truth?”

He shook his head. “You underestimate Patel,” he said. “We cannot throw away our one advantage.”

“I think you underestimate the people who would support you. Underestimate them to the point of contempt.”

“We must keep personalities out of this matter,” he said with sudden harshness.

She stared at him. “Personalities?”

“Thank you, Chairwoman. My name is Nova Luis. I request the Council discuss formation of an ad hoc Committee on Religious Manipulation, to investigate the educational curriculum, the contents and availability of certain materials in the Records and Archives, and the composition of the fourteen committees and deliberative bodies listed on the screen.”

4-Ferris Kim was on his feet at once: “A Committee on Religious Manipulation can be convened, according to the Constitution, only to investigate ‘an election or the deliberation of a legislative body.’ School curriculum, the materials kept in Records and Archives, and the committees and councils listed cannot be defined as legislative bodies and thus are exempt from examination.”

“The Constitutional Committee will decide that point,” said Uma, chairing the meeting. Ferris sat down looking satisfied.

Luis stood up again. “Since the religion in question is the creed of Bliss, may I suggest that the Chair consider the Constitutional Committee as possibly biased, since five of the six members profess the creed of Bliss.”

Ferris was up again: “Creed? Religion? What kind of misunderstanding is this? There are no creeds or cults in our world. Such words merely echo ancient history, divisive errors which we have long since left behind on our way.” His deep voice grew mellow, gentle. “Do you call the air a ‘creed,’ Doctor, because you breathe it? Do you call life a ‘religion,’ because you live it? Bliss is the ground and goal of our existence. Some of us rejoice in that knowledge; for others that joy lies in the future. But there are no religions here, no warring creeds. We are all united in the fellowship of Discovery .”

“And the goal appointed in our Constitution for Discovery and those who travel in it is to travel through a portion of space to a certain planet, to study that planet, to colonise it if possible, and to send or bring back information about it to our world of origin, Dichew, Earth. We are all united in the resolve to accomplish that goal. Do you agree, Councillor Ferris?”