Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

How could anybody actually live their whole life in a place like Jungle? The discomfort of the sensation-field was constant, the heat, the creatures, the changes of temperature, the rough, gritty, filthy surfaces of things, the endless unevenness—every step you took you had to look to see what your foot was going to land on. He remembered the natives’ disgusting food. They killed animals and ate pieces of animal. The women chewed the root of some kind of plant, spat the chewed mass into a dish, let it rot a while, and then everybody ate it. If these stinging and biting poisonous animals were real not virtual, you’d come out of Jungle full of toxins. Indeed, what finally happened to you in the choice-fork where you lived with the savages was that you put your hand on a vine and it was a poisonous animal with no legs. It bit your hand, and within a few minutes you felt terrible pain and nausea, and then blackout. They had to end the program one way or another, of course; it was ten cycles subjective, ten actual hours, the maximum permitted length of a v-program. He had been not only virtually dead, but actually extremely stiff, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and distressed when he came out of it.

Was the program honest? Did people on Dichew actually live in such misery? Not for ten cycles/hours, but for a lifetime? In constant fear of dangerous animals, fear of enemy savages, fear of each other, in constant pain from the thorns on plants, bites and stings, muscle strains from carrying heavy loads, feet bruised by the terrible uneven surfaces, and enduring still greater horrors, starvation, diseases, broken or deformed limbs, blindness? Not one of the savages, not even the baby and its young mother, was sound and clean. Their lesions and sores and scabs and calluses, bleared eyes, twisted limbs, filthy feet, filthy hair had only become more painful to look at as he began to know them as people. He had kept wanting to help them.

As he stood now on the v-path there was a noise near him in the darkness of the trees and long stringy plants, epiphytes like Yao’s, only huge and knotted. Something among all these weird crowded-together lives that made the jungle had made a noise. He stood stiller than ever, remembering the garan.

He had gone with the men of the savage tribe, understanding that they were doing “hunting.” They had glimpsed a flash of spotted golden light. One of the men had whispered a word, garan , which he remembered when he came back. He looked for it but it was not in the dictionary.

Now it came out of the chaos-darkness, the garan. It walked across the pathway from left to right a few meters in front of him. It was long, low, golden with black spots. It walked with indescribable softness and skill on four round feet, the head low, followed by a long graceful extension of itself, a tail, the tip just twitching as it vanished into the darkness again in utter silence. It never glanced at Luis.

He stood transfixed. It’s VR, it’s a program, he said to himself. Every time I came into Jungle, if I stood here just so long, the garan would walk across the path. If I was ready for it, if I wanted to, I could shoot at it with my v-gun. If the program includes “hunting,” I would kill it. If the program doesn’t include “hunting,” my gun wouldn’t fire. I could not make anything happen. The garan would walk on and vanish in silence, the tip of its tail just twitching as it disappears. This is not the wilderness. This is not nature. This is supreme control.

He turned around and walked out of the program.

He met Bingdi on his way to the gym to run laps. “I want to develop a technology for VU,” he said.

“Sure,” Bingdi said, after a moment, and grinned. “Let’s do it.”

Programs, photographs, descriptions—all representations of Dichew were suspect, since they were products of technology, of the human mind. They were interpretations. The planet of origin was inaccessible to direct understanding.

The planet of destination was less even than that. As he continued to explore the Library, Luis began to understand why the Zero Generation had been so eager for information about Shindychew. They had none.

The discovery of what they called a “Terran planet” within “accessible range” had set off the whole Discovery project. The sub-Zeroes had studied it as exhaustively as their instruments permitted. But neither spectrum analysis nor any form of direct observation of a small non-self-luminous body at that distance could tell them all they needed to know. Life had been established as a universal emergent within certain parameters, and all the parameters they were able to establish were highly favorable. All the same, as he read in an ancient article called “Where Are They Going?” it was possible that a very small difference from “Earth” could make “New Earth” utterly uninhabitable for humans. Chemical incompatibility of the life forms with human chemistry, making everything there poisonous. A slightly different balance of the gases of the atmosphere, so that people could not breathe the air.

Air is freedom, Luis thought.

The Librarian was reading at a table nearby. Luis went over and sat down by him. He showed old Tan the article. “It says it’s possible that we won’t be able to breathe there.”

The Librarian glanced over the article. “I certainly won’t be able to,” he observed. After the usual pause between sentences, he explained. “I’ll be dead.” He smiled a benign, semi-circular smile.

“What I’m trying to find,” Luis said, “is something about what they expected us to do when we got there. Are there instructions somewhere—for the various possibilities—?”

“At present,” the old man said, “if there are such instructions, they are sealed.”

Luis started to speak, then stopped, waiting for Tan’s pause to end.

“Information has always been controlled.”

“By whom?”

“Primarily, by the decisions of the Zero Generation. Secondarily, by the decisions of the Educational Council.”

“Why would the Zeroes hide information about our destination? Is it that bad?”

“Perhaps they thought, since so little was known, the middle generations needn’t worry about it. And the Sixth Generation would find out. And send them the information. This is a voyage of scientific discovery.” He looked up at Luis, his face impassive. “If the air is not breathable, or there are other problems, people can go out in suits. Evamen. Live inside, study outside. Observe. Send information to the Discovery in orbit. And thence back to Ti Chiu.” He pronounced the Chinese word in Chinese. “There are Unreplaceable Supplies for twelve generations, not six. In case we could not stay there. Or chose not to. Chose to go back to Ti Chiu.”

It took Tan quite a while to say all this. Luis’s mind filled the pauses with imaginings, as if he were illustrating a text: the vast trajectory slowing, slowing towards a certain star; the little shipworld hovering above the surface of the immense planetworld; tiny figures in evasuits swarming out into Jungle…Vivid, improbable. Virtual Unreality.

“‘Back,’” he said. “What’s ‘back’? None of us came from Dichew. Back or forward, what’s the difference?”

“‘How much difference between yes and no? What difference between good and bad?’” the old man said, looking at him approvingly, yet with that expression in his eyes that Luis could not interpret. Was it sorrow?

He knew the quotation. Hsing and her father Yao had both studied with 3-Tan, who as well as being the Librarian was a scholar of the Chinese classics, and all three were fans of Old Long-Ears. Growing up in Quad Two, Luis had heard the book quoted till he read a translation of it in self-defense. Recently he had re-read it, trying to figure out how much of it made sense to him. Liu Yao had copied the whole thing out in the ancient Chinese characters. It had taken over a year. “Just practicing calligraphy,” he said. Watching the complex, mysterious figures flow from Yao’s brush, Luis had been moved more strongly than he ever had been moved by the seemingly comprehensible translated words. As if not to understand was to understand.