Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

The brief funeral was held in Peony Compound; then the body of 3-Liu Meiling was taken by her son and granddaughter and the technician to the Life Center to be recycled, a chemical process of breakdown and re-use with which as a chemist she had been perfectly familiar. She would still be part of their world, not as a being but as an endless becoming. She would be part of the children Hsing would bear. They were all part of one another. All used and users, all eaters, all eaten.

Inside a bubble where there is so much air and no more, so much water and no more, so much food and no more, so much energy and no more—in an aquarium, perfectly self-contained in its tiny balancing act: one catfish, two sticklebacks, three waterweeds, plenty of algae, three snails, maybe four, but no dragonfly larvae—inside a bubble, the population must be strictly controlled.

When Meiling dies she is replaced. But she is no more than replaced. Everybody can have a child. Some can’t or won’t or don’t have children and some children die young, and so most of those who want two children can have two children. Four thousand isn’t a great number. It is a carefully maintained number. Four thousand isn’t a great gene pool, but it is a carefully selected and managed one. The anthrogeneticists are just as watchful and dispassionate as Yao in the plant labs. But they do not experiment. Sometimes they can catch a fault at the source, but they have not the resources to meddle with twists and recombinations. All such massive, elaborate technologies, supported by the continuous exploitation of the resources of a planet, were left behind by the Zero Generation. The anthrogeneticists have good tools and know their job, and their job is maintenance. They maintain the quality, literally, of life.

Everyone who wants to can have a child. One child, two at most. A woman has her motherchild. A man has his fatherchild.

The arrangement is unfair to men, who have to persuade a woman to bear a child for them. The arrangement is unfair to women, who are expected to spend three-quarters of a year of their life bearing somebody else’s child. To women who want a child and cannot conceive or whose sexual life is with other women, so that they have to persuade both a man and a woman to get and give them a child, the arrangement is doubly unfair. The arrangement is, in fact, unfair. Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common. Love and friendship and conscience and kindness and obstinacy find ways to make the unfair arrangement work, though not without anxiety, not without anguish, and not always.

Marriage and linking are informal options, often chosen while the children are young, for many women find it hard to part with a fatherchild, and a homespace for four is luxuriously spacious.

Many women do not want to bear or bring up a child at all, many feel their fertility to be a privilege and obligation, and some pride themselves on it. Now and then there is a woman who boasts of the number of her fatherchildren, as of a basketball score.

4-Steinfeld Jael bore Hsing; she’s Hsing’s mother, but Hsing isn’t her child. Hsing is 4-Liu Yao’s child, his fatherdaughter. Jael’s child is Joel, her motherson, six years older than his halfsister Hsing, two years younger than his halfbrother 4-Adami Seth.

Everybody has a homespace. A single is one and one half rooms; a room is a space of 960 cubic feet. The commonest shape is 10’ x 12’ x 8’, but since the partitions are movable the proportions can be altered freely within the limits of the structural space. A double, like the 4-5 Lius’, is usually arranged as two little sleepcells and a large sharespace: two privacies and a commonality. When people link, and if they each have one or two children, their homespace may get quite large. The 3-4-5-Steinman-Adamis, Jael and Joel and 3-Adami Manhattan, to whom she has been linked for years, and his fatherson Seth, have 3,840 cubic feet of homespace. They live in Quad Four, where a lot of Nor-Ans live, Northamerican and European Ancestry people. With her usual flair for the dramatic, Jael has found an area in the outer arc where there’s room for ten-foot ceilings. “Like the sky!” she cries. She has painted the ceilings bright blue. “Feel the difference?” she says. “The sense of liberation—of freedom?” In fact, when she goes to stay with Jael on visits, Hsing finds the rooms rather disagreeable; they seem deep and cold, with all that waste space overhead. But Jael fills them with her warmth, her golden, inexhaustible voice, her bright clothing, her abundance of being.

When Hsing began menstruating and learning how to use prevention and brooding about sex, both Jael and Meiling told her that having a baby is a piece of luck. They were very different women, but they used the same word. “The best luck,” Meiling said. “So interesting! Nothing else uses all of you.” And Jael talked about how your relation to the baby in your womb and the newborn baby nursing was part of sex, an extension and completion of it that you were really lucky to know. Hsing listened with the modest, cynical reserve of the virgin. She’d make up her own mind about all that when the time came.

Many Chi-Ans had, more or less silently, disapproved of Yao’s asking a woman of another quadrant and a different ancestry to bear his child. Many people of Jael’s ancestry had asked her if she wanted an exotic experience or what. The fact was Jael and Yao had fallen desperately in love. They were old enough to realise that love was all they had in common. Jael had asked Yao if she could have his child. Moved to the heart, he had agreed. Hsing was born of an undying passion. Whenever Yao came to bring Hsing for a visit, Jael flung her arms about him crying “Oh Yao, it’s you!” with such utter, ravished joy and delight that only a man as thoroughly satisfied and self-satisfied as Adami Manhattan could have escaped agonies of jealousy. Manhattan was a huge, hairy man. Perhaps being fifteen years older, eight inches taller, and a great deal hairier than Yao helped him to be unjealous of him.

Grandparents provided another way to increase the size of a homespace. Sometimes relatives, halfsibs, their parents, their children grouped together in still larger spaces. Next down the corridor from the 4-5 Lius’ was the 3-4-5-Wangs’—Lotus Compound—eleven contiguous homespaces, the partitions arranged so as to provide a central atrium, the scene of ceaseless noise and activity. Peony Compound, where Meiling had lived all her life, always had from eight to eighteen homespaces. None of the other ancestries lived in such large groupings.

In fact by the fifth generation many people had lost any sense of what ancestry was, found it irrelevant, and disapproved of people who based their identity or their community on it. In Council, disapproval was frequently expressed of Chinese-Ancestry clannishness, referred to by its critics as “Quad Two separatism” or more darkly as “racism,” and by those who practiced it as “keeping to our ways.” The Chi-Ans protested the new Schools Administration policy of shifting teachers around from quad to quad, so that children would be taught by people from other ancestries, other communities; but they were outvoted in Council.

Dangers, risks. In the glass bubble, the fragile world, the danger of schism, of conspiracy, the danger of aberrant behavior, madness, the violence of madness. No decision of any consequence at all was to be made by a single person acting without counsel. Nobody ever, since the beginning, had been allowed alone at any of the systems controls. Always a backup, a watcher. Yet there had been incidents. None had yet wreaked permanent damage.

But what of the merely normal, usual behavior of human beings? What is aberrant? Who’s sane?