Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

“It’s not your decision to make.”

“Will you take it out of my hands?”

“Someone will. And when they do, it will appear that you’ve been lying for years, you and your friends, in order to have sole power. How else can they see it? You will be dishonored.” Her voice still sounded low and rough. After a moment, biting her lip, she added, “Your question to me just now was dishonorable.”

“It was rhetorical,” he said.

There was another long silence.

He said, “It was dishonorable. I beg your pardon, Hsing.”

She nodded. She sat looking down at her hands.

“What action do you recommend?” he asked.

“Talk to Tan Bingdi, Nova Luis, Gupta Lena—the group that’s behind the ad hoc committee. They’re working to expose Patel’s power-tactics. Tell them whatever you like about how it happened, but tell them that we’re going to be at the Destination in three years—unless Patel prevents it.”

“Or Diamant,” he said.

She winced. She spoke more cautiously, more patiently: “The danger isn’t people like Diamant, Hiroshi. It’s a fanatic gaining access to the Bridge for two minutes to damage, disable the course-computers—that’s always been a possibility, but now there’s a reason for somebody to do it. Now they want us never to arrive. At least that’s out in the open, since Patel’s speech. So now the fact that we are arriving has to come out in the open, because we need all the support we can get to make it happen. We must have support. You can’t go on alone with your hand over the hole in the world!”

She had felt him withdraw when she said the name Nova Luis. She grew more urgent and eloquent as she spoke, losing ground; she ended up pleading. She waited and he made no response. Her arguments and urgency ebbed away slowly into a dry flatness of nonfeeling.

At last she said, drily and flatly, “Or perhaps you can. But I can’t go on lying to colleagues and friends. I won’t give you away, but I won’t collude any more. I will say nothing at all to anyone.”

“Not a very practical plan,” he said, looking up at her with a stiff smile. “Be patient, Hsing. That’s all I ask.”

She stood up. “The evil of this is that we don’t trust each other.”

“I trust you.”

“You don’t. Me, or my silence, or my friends. The lie sucks trust out. Into nothing.”

Again he did not speak; and presently she turned and left the Bridge. After she had walked a while she realised that she was at Quad Two, at Turning 2-3, heading for her old homespace, where her father lived alone. She wanted to see Yao, but felt it would be somehow disloyal to Hiroshi to go see him now. She turned around and started back to the Canaval-Liu homespace in Quad Four. The corridors seemed tight and narrow, crowded. She spoke to people who spoke to her. She remembered a part of her old nightmare dream that she had not thought to tell Hiroshi. The hole in the wall of the world had not been made by something from outside, a bit of dust or rock; when she saw it she knew, as one knows in a dream, that it had been there ever since the ship was made.

The Chair of the Plenary Council put a notice on the innet of an “announcement of extraordinary importance” to be made at twenty hours. The last such announcement had been made over fifteen years ago to explain the necessity of an alteration in profession quotas.

People gathered in the homespace or compound or meetingspace or workplace to hear. The Plenary Council held session.

Chatterji Uma came on the screen precisely at twenty and said, “Dear fellow passengers of the ship Discovery , we must prepare ourselves for a great change. From this night forward, our lives will be different—will be transformed.” She smiled; her smile was charming. “Do not be apprehensive. This is a matter for rejoicing. The great goal of our voyage, the destination for which this ship and its crew were intended from the very beginning of our voyage, is closer than we dreamed. Not our children, but we ourselves, may be the ones to set foot upon a new world. Now Canaval Hiroshi, our Chief Navigator, will tell you the great discovery he and others on the Bridge have made, and what it means, and what we may expect.”

Hiroshi replaced Uma on the screens. The thickness and blackness of his eyebrows gave him a sometimes threatening, sometimes questioning look. His voice however was reassuring, quiet, positive, and rather pedantic. He began by telling them what had happened five years ago as the ship passed through a gravity sink near a very large area of cosmic dust.

Hsing, watching him alone in their livingspace, could tell when he began to lie, not only because she knew the actual figures and dates but because when he began lying he became both more authoritative and more persuasive. The lies concerned the rates of acceleration and deceleration, the time of the discovery of the computer error, and the navigators’ response.

Without being specific about dates, Hiroshi implied that the first suspicions of anomalies in the ship’s rate of acceleration had arisen less than a year ago. The magnitude of the computer error and its implications had been only gradually revealed. He sketched a scenario of incredulous but intrepid humans wresting their secrets from computers whose programming forced them to resist any override of their response to the original misreading, of navigators forced to try to outwit their instruments, trick them into re-compensating for their immense overcompensation, slowing the ship down from the incredible speed it had achieved.

Until this moment, he said, that struggle had been so chancy, they had been so unsure of what had happened and was happening, that they had felt it unwise to make any announcement. “To avoid causing panic by a premature or incorrect disclosure was our chief concern. We know now that there is no cause for alarm. None. Our operations were entirely successful. Just as the acceleration exceeded all speculative limits, we have been able to decelerate very much more quickly than had been thought possible. We are on course and in control. The only change is that we are well ahead of schedule.”

He looked up, as if looking out of the screen, his black eyes unreadable. He was speaking slowly, carefully, a little monotonously, letting each sentence stand by itself. “We are continuing to decelerate, and will do so for the next 3.2 years.

“Late in the year 164, we will enter orbit around the planet of destination, Hsin Ti Chiu or New Earth.

“That event, as we all know, was scheduled to occur in the year 201. Our voyage of discovery has been shortened by nearly forty years.

“Ours is a fortunate generation. We will see the end of our long voyage. We will reach its goal.

“We have much work to do in these two years. We must prepare our minds and bodies to leave our little world and walk upon a wide new earth. We must prepare our eyes and souls for the light of a new sun.”

“It doesn’t make sense, Luis,” Rosa said. “It doesn’t mean anything. The Zeroes just didn’t understand. How could they? They thought we were too sinful to be able to live in heaven forever. They were earthen, they couldn’t help it, so they thought we’d have to be earthen too. But we aren’t—how could we be, born here, on the way? Why would we want to live any life other than this one? They made it perfect. They sent us to heaven. They made the world for us so we could learn the way to everlasting life in bliss by living in mortal bliss. How could we learn it on some kind of earthen black world? Outside, unprotected, unguided? How can we keep going on the True Way if we leave the True Way? How can we reach heaven by stopping on an earth?”