Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

Human nature. A strange combination of words.

Luis thought about the man in Quad Three, last year, who had attacked a woman sexually, beaten her unconscious, and then killed himself by drinking liquid oxygen. He had been a Five, and the event, disturbing to everyone in the world, was particularly horrible and haunting to the people of his generation. They asked themselves could I have done that? could that happen to me? None of them seemed to know the answer. That man, 5-Wolfson Ad, had lost control over his “animal” or “natural” needs and so had ended up without any freedom at all, not making choices, not able even to stay alive. Maybe some people couldn’t handle freedom.

The angels never talked about freedom. Follow orders, attain Bliss.

What would the angels do in the Year 201?

That was an interesting question, actually. What would any of them do, what would happen to the controlled experiment, when the laboratory ship reached the Destination? Shindychew was a planet—another huge mass of wild stuff, uncontrollable “nature,” where they wouldn’t even know what the rules were. On Dichew, at least their ancestors had been familiar with “nature,” knew how to use it, how to get around in it, which animals were dangerous or poisonous, how to grow the wild plants, and so on. On the New Earth they wouldn’t know anything.

The books talked about that, a little, not much. After all there was still half a century to go before they got there. But it would be interesting to find out what they did know about Shindychew.

When he asked his history teacher, 3-Tranh Eti, she said that the education program would provide Generation Six with a whole lot of education about the Destination and living there. Generation Five people would mostly be so old when they got there that it wasn’t really their problem, she said, though of course they would be allowed to “land” if they wished to. The program was designed to keep the “middle generations” (“That’s us,” the old woman said drily) content with their world. A practical approach, she said, and well meant, but perhaps it had encouraged the mentality that was now so very prevalent among the proponents of Bliss.

She spoke frankly to Luis, her best student, and he told her as frankly that whether he got there or not, no matter how old he’d be if he got there, he wanted to find out now where he was going. He understood why; he didn’t need to understand how; but he did want to understand where.

Tranh Eti gave him some help in accessing information, but it turned out that the education program for Generation Six was not accessible at present. It was being reviewed by the Educational Committee.

His other teachers advised him to finish his studies in high school and college and worry about the Destination later. If at all.

He went to the Head Librarian, old 3-Tan, his friend Bingdi’s grandfather.

“To speculate about our destination,” Tan said, “is to increase anxiety, impatience, and erroneous expectations.” He smiled slightly. He spoke slowly, with pauses between sentences. “Our job is to travel. A different job from arrival.” After a pause he went on, “But a generation that knows only how to travel—can they teach a generation how to arrive?”

Luis continued to pursue his interest. He went back, on his own, to Jungle.

He had to follow the trail, of course. However through-composed a virtual-reality program was, you could do in it only what there was to do. It was like a dream, any dream, especially a nightmare: only certain choices are offered, if any.

There was the trail. You had to take the trail. The trail would lead to the ugly, degraded little savages, and they would scream and shoot poisoned darts, and then he would have to make one of the choices. Methodically, Luis made them, one after another.

Attempts to reason with the savages or run away from them ended quickly in blackout, which was, of course, v-death.

Once when they attacked him he fired the gun and killed one of the men. This was horrible beyond anything he had ever imagined and he escaped the program within moments of firing the weapon. That night he dreamed that he had a secret name that nobody knew, not even himself. A woman he had never seen before came to him and said, “Add your name to the wolf.”

He went back into Jungle, though it was not easy. He found that if he showed no fear, threatened them with the gun if they attacked but did not fire it, the little men eventually, very suddenly, accepted his presence. After that another set of choice-forks opened out. He could keep his weapon in evidence and force the savages to lead him to the Lost City (which was supposed to be why you’d entered the jungle). He could make them obey him, but always he blacked out before he got far; the savages had murdered him. Or, if he behaved without fear, not threatening them and asking nothing of them, he could stay with them, living in a half-ruined hut. They accepted him as some kind of crazy man. The women gave him food and showed him how to do things, and he began to learn their language and customs. These were surprisingly intricate, formal, and fascinating. It was only v-learning; it only went so far, and seemed more than it was; when you came out you didn’t come out with much. A program could hold only so much, even in implication. But what little he recalled of it had strangely enriched his thinking. He intended to go back some time, work his way to that final choice, and redo living with the savages.

But he had a different purpose, this time. This time when he entered Jungle, he moved as slowly as he could, and once he was well in he stopped and stood still on the path. He was no longer afraid of meeting the savages. Now that he knew them, had lived among them, it would have been sad to see them come at him, as they inevitably would, screaming and trying to kill him. He wanted not to meet them, this time. They were virtual human beings made by human beings. He had come to try to experience a place where nothing was human.

As he stood there, beginning to sweat at once, smelling the stinks, slapping at the creatures that buzzed and flickered around him and landed on his skin and bit, listening to the uncanny noises, he thought about Hsing. She would not admit VR as experience. She never went to V-Dichew unless it was required by a teacher. She never played v-games, wouldn’t even try the really interesting one Luis and Bingdi had worked out using “Borges’s Garden” as a matrix. “I don’t want to be in another person’s world, I want to be in mine,” she said.

“You read novels,” he said.

“Sure. But I do reading. The writer puts the story there, and I do it. I make it be. The v-programmer uses me to do his story. Nobody uses my body and my mind but me. OK?” She always got fierce.

She had a point; but what struck Luis, standing alert and tense on the narrow incredibly intricate jungle pathway like a corridor gone crazy, watching something full of legs crawl away into the sinister darkness under a huge thing that he decided was a tree, but a tree lying down instead of standing up—what struck him was not only the choking, senseless complexity of this place, its quality of chaos, even though it was only a re-creation, the program of a sensation-field—but also how hostile it was. Dangerous, frightening. Was he experiencing the programmer’s hostility?

There were plenty of sadistic programs; some people got hooked on them. How could he tell whether “nature” was in fact so terrible?

Certainly there were VR programs in which Dichew appeared simpler, more comprehensible—Countryside or Walking to the Mountains. And watching films, where the only sensations you had to cope with were sight and hearing, you could see that even though it was chaotic, “nature” could be pretty. Some people got hooked on those films, too, and were always watching sea turtles swimming in the sea and sky birds flying in the sky. But looking was one thing and feeling was another, even if it was only virtual feeling.