Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

Read the histories, say the teachers. History tells us who we are, how we have behaved, therefore how we will behave.

Does it? The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder—that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us? History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.

The foam of the salt ocean has tossed up a bubble. It floats free.

To learn who we are, look not at history but at the arts, the record of our best, our genius. The elderly, sorrowful, Dutch faces gaze out of the darkness of a lost century. The mother’s beautiful grave head is bowed above the dead son who lies across her lap. The old mad king cries over his murdered daughter, “Never, never, never, never, never!” With infinite gentleness the Compassionate One murmurs, “It does not last, it cannot satisfy, it has no being.” “Sleep, sleep,” say the cradle songs, and “Set me free” cry the yearning slave-songs. The symphonies rise, a glory out of darkness. And the poets, the crazy poets cry out, “A terrible beauty is born.” But they’re all crazy. They’re all old and mad. All their beauty is terrible. Don’t read the poets. They don’t last, they can’t satisfy, they have no being. They wrote about another world, the dirt world. That too, too solid world which the Zeroes made naught of.

Ti Chiu, Dichew, the dirt-ball. Earth. The “garbage” world. The “trash” planet.

These words are archaic, history-words, attached only to history-images: receptacles were filled with “dirty” “garbage” that was poured into vehicles which carried it to “trash dumps” to “throw away.” What does that mean? Where is “away”?

When she was sixteen Hsing read the Diaries of 0-Fayez Roxana. That self-probing mind, forever questioning its own honesty, was attractive to the adolescent. Roxana was rather like Luis, Hsing thought, but a woman. Sometimes she needed to be with a woman’s mind, not a man’s, but Lena was obsessed with her basketball scores, and Rosa had gone totally angel, and Grandmother had died. Hsing read Roxana’s Diaries.

She realised for the first time that the people of the Zero Generation, the worldmakers, had believed that they were imposing an immense sacrifice on their descendants. What the Zeroes gave up, what they lost in leaving Earth—Roxana always used the English word—was compensated to them by their mission, their hope, and (as Roxana was well aware) by the tremendous power they had wielded in creating the very fabric of life for thousands of people for generations to come. “We are the gods of Discovery ,” Roxana wrote. “May the true gods forgive us our arrogance!”

But when she speculated on the years to come, she did not write of her descendants as children of the gods, but as victims, seeing them with fear, guilt, and pity, helpless prisoners of their ancestor’s will and desire. “How will they forgive us?” she mourned. “We who took the world from them before they were ever born—we who took the seas, the mountains, the meadowlands, the cities, the sunlight from them, all their birthright? We have left them trapped in a cage, a tin can, a specimen box, to live and die like laboratory rats and never see the moon, never run across a field, never know what freedom is!”

I don’t know what cages or tin cans or specimen boxes are, Hsing thought with impatience, but whatever a laboratory rat is, I’m not. I’ve run across a v-field in Countryside. You don’t need fields and hills and all that stuff to be free! Freedom’s what your mind does, what your soul is. It has nothing to do with all that Dichew-stuff. Don’t worry, Grandmother! she said to the long-dead writer. It all worked out just fine. You made a wonderful world. You were a very wise, kind god.

When Roxana got depressed about her poor deprived descendants she also tended to go on and on about Shindychew, which she called the destination planet or just the Destination. Sometimes it cheered her up to imagine what it might be like, but mostly she worried about it. Would it be habitable? Would there be life on it? What kind of life? What would “the settlers” find, how would they cope with what they found, would they send the information back to Earth? That was so important to her. It was funny, poor Roxana worrying about what kind of signals her great-great-great-grandchildren would send “back” in two hundred years to a place they’d never been! But the bizarre idea was a great consolation to her. It was her justification for what they had done. It was the reason. Discovery would build a vast and delicate rainbow bridge across Space, and across it the true gods would walk: information, knowledge. The rational gods. That was Roxana’s recurring image, her solace.

Hsing found her god-imagery tiresome. People with a monotheist ancestry seemed unable to get over it. Roxana’s lower-case metaphorical deities were preferable to the capitalised Gods and Fathers in History and Lit, but she had very little patience with any of them.

Disappointed with Roxana, Hsing quarreled with her friend.

“Rosie, I wish you’d talk about other stuff,” she said.

“I just want to share my happiness with you,” Rosa said in her Bliss voice, soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.

“We used to be happy together without dragging in Bliss.”

Rosa looked at her with a general lovingness that insulted Hsing obscurely but very deeply. We were friends , Rosie! she wanted to cry.

“Why do you think we’re here, Hsing?”

Mistrusting the question, she pondered a bit before she answered. “If you mean that literally, we’re here because the Zero Generation arranged that we should be here. If you mean it in some abstract sense, then I reject the question as loaded. To ask ‘why’ assumes purpose, a final cause. Zero Generation had a purpose: to send a ship to another planet. We’re carrying it out.”

“But where are we going?” Rosa asked with the intense sweetness, the sweet intensity, that made Hsing feel tight, sour, and defensive.

“To the Destination. Shindychew. And you and I will be old grannies when we get there!”

“Why are we going there?”

“To get information and send it back,” Hsing said, having no answer ready except Roxana’s, and then hesitated. She realised that it was a fair question, and that she had never really asked or answered it. “And to live there,” she said. “To find out—about the universe. We are a—we are a voyage. Of discovery. The voyage of the Discovery .”

She discovered the meaning of the name of the world as she said it.

“To discover—?”

“Rosie, this leading-question bit belongs in babygarden. ‘And what do we call this nice curly letter?’ Come on. Talk to me, don’t manipulate me!”

“Don’t be afraid, angel,” Rosa said, smiling at Hsing’s anger. “Don’t be afraid of joy.”

“Don’t call me angel. I liked you when you were just you, Rosa.”

“I never had any idea who I was before I knew Bliss,” Rosa said, no longer smiling, and with such simplicity that Hsing felt both awed and ashamed.

But when she left Rosa, she was bereft. She had lost her friend for years, her beloved for a while. They wouldn’t link when they grew up, as she had dreamed. She was damned if she’d be an angel! But oh, Rosie, Rosie. She tried to write a poem. Only two lines came: