Ursula Le Guin - The Lathe Of Heaven

“I can’t hear you over that damn creek. I thought the wilderness was supposed to be silent. Go on!”

“But I’ve had so many childhoods, now,” he said. “Which one should I tell you about? In one both my parents died in the first year of the Plague. In one there wasn’t any Plague. I don’t know.... None of them were very interesting. I mean, nothing to tell. All I ever did was survive.”

“Well. That’s the main thing.”

“It gets harder all the time. The Plague, and now the Aliens...” He gave a feckless laugh, but when she looked around at him his face was weary and miserable.

“I can’t believe you dreamed them up. I just can’t. I’ve been scared of them for so long, six years! But I knew you did, as soon as I thought about it, because they weren’t in that other—time-track or whatever it is. But actually, they aren’t any worse than that awful overcrowding. That horrible little flat I lived in, with four other women, in a Business Girls Condominium, for Christsake! And riding that ghastly subway, and my teeth were terrible, and there never was anything decent to eat, and not half enough either. Do you know, I weighed 101 then, and I’m 122 now. I gained twenty-one pounds since Friday!”

“That’s right. You were awfully thin, that first time I saw you. In your law office.”

“You were, too. You looked scrawny. Only everybody else did, so I didn’t notice it. Now you look like you’d be a fairly solid type, if you ever got any sleep.”

He said nothing.

“Everybody else looks a lot better, too, when you come to think of it. Look. If you can’t help what you do, and what you do makes things a little better, then you shouldn’t feel any guilt about it. Maybe your dreams are just a new way for evolution to act, sort of. A hot line. Survival of the fittest and all. With crash priority.”

“Oh, worse than that,” he said in the same airy, foolish tone; he sat down on the bed. “Do you—” He stuttered several times. “Do you remember anything about April, four years ago—in ‘98?”

“April? No, nothing special.”

“That’s when the world ended,” Orr said. A muscular spasm disfigured his face, and he gulped as if for air. “Nobody else remembers,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, obscurely frightened. April, April 1998, she thought, do I remember April ‘98? She thought she did not, and knew she must; and she was frightened—by him? With him? For him?

“It isn’t evolution. It’s just self-preservation. I can’t— Well, it was a lot worse. Worse than you remember. It was the same world as that first one you remember, with a population of seven billion, only it—it was worse. Nobody but some of the European countries got rationing and pollution control and birth control going early enough, in the seventies, and so when we finally did try to control food distribution it was too late, there wasn’t enough, and the Mafia ran the black market, everybody had to buy on the black market to get anything to eat, and a lot of people didn’t get anything. They rewrote the Constitution in 1984, the way you remember, but things were so bad by then that it was a lot worse, it didn’t even pretend to be a democracy any more, it was a sort of police state, but it didn’t work, it fell apart right away. When I was fifteen the schools closed. There wasn’t any Plague, but there were epidemics, one after another, dysentery and hepatitis and then bubonic. But mostly people starved. And then in ‘93 the war started up in the Near East, but it was different. It was Israel against the Arabs and Egypt. All the big countries got in on it. One of the African states came in on the Arab side, and used nuclear bombs on two cities in Israel, and so we helped them retaliate, and....” He was silent for some while and then went on, apparently not realizing that there was any gap in his telling, “I was trying to get out of the city. I wanted to get into Forest Park. I was sick, I couldn’t go on walking and I sat down on the steps of this house up in the west hills, the houses were all burnt out but the steps were cement, I remember there were some dandelions flowering in a crack between the steps. I sat there and I couldn’t get up again and I knew I couldn’t. I kept thinking that I was standing up and going on, getting out of the city, but it was just delirium, I’d come to and see the dandelions again and know I was dying. And that everything else was dying. And then I had the—I had this dream.” His voice had hoarsened; now it choked off.

“I was all right,” he said at last. “I dreamed about being home. I woke up and I was all right. I was in bed at home. Only it wasn’t any home I’d ever had, the other time, the first time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn’t remember it. I mostly don’t. I can’t. I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.”

She believed him, and denied her belief with fury. “So what? Maybe that’s all it’s ever been! Whatever it is, it’s all right. You don’t suppose you’d be allowed to do anything you weren’t supposed to do, do you? Who the hell do you think you are! There is nothing that doesn’t fit, nothing happens that isn’t supposed to happen. Ever! What does it matter whether you call it real or dreams? It’s all one— isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Orr said in agony; and she went to him and held him as she would have held a child in pain, or a dying man.

The head on her shoulder was heavy, the fair, square hand on her knee lay relaxed.

“You’re asleep,” she said. He made no denial. She had to shake him pretty hard to get him even to deny it. “No I’m not,” he said, starting and sitting upright. “No.” He sagged again.

“George!” It was true: the use of his name helped. He kept his eyes open long enough to look at her. “Stay awake, stay awake just a little. I want to try the hypnosis. So you can sleep.” She had meant to ask him what he wanted to dream, what she should impress on him hypnotically concerning Haber, but he was too far gone now. “Look, sit there on the cot. Look at ... look at the flame of the lamp, that ought to do it. But don’t go to sleep.” She set the oil lamp on the center of the table, amidst eggshells and wreckage. “Just keep your eyes on it, and don’t go to sleep! You’ll relax and feel easy, but you won’t go to sleep yet, not till I say ‘Go to sleep.’ That’s it. Now you’re feeling easy and comfortable....” With a sense of play acting, she proceeded with the hypnotist’s spiel. He went under almost at once. She couldn’t believe it, and tested him. “You can’t lift your left hand,” she said, “you’re trying, but it’s too heavy, it won’t come.... Now it’s light again, you can lift it. There... well. In a minute now you’re going to fall asleep. You’ll dream some, but they’ll just be regular ordinary dreams like everybody has, not special ones, not—not effective ones. All except one. You’ll have one effective dream. In it—” She halted. All of a sudden she was scared; a cold qualm took her. What was she doing? This was no play, no game, nothing for a fool to meddle in. He was in her power: and his power was incalculable. What unimaginable responsibility had she undertaken?

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

But she was caught in a role and couldn’t back out of it now. “In that one dream, you’ll dream that... that Dr. Haber is benevolent, that he’s not trying to hurt you and will be honest with you,” She didn’t know what to say, how to say it, knowing that whatever she said could go wrong. “And you’ll dream that the Aliens aren’t out there on the Moon any longer,” she added hastily; she could get that load off his shoulders, anyhow. “And in the morning you’ll wake up quite rested, everything will be all right. Now: Go to sleep.”