Ursula Le Guin - The Lathe Of Heaven

Oh shit, she’d forgotten to tell him to lie down first.

He went like a half-stuffed pillow, softly, forward and sideways, till he was a large, warm, inert heap on the floor.

He couldn’t have weighed more than 150, but he might have been a dead elephant for all the help he gave her getting him up on the cot. She had to do it legs first and then heave the shoulders, so as not to tip the cot; he ended up on the sleeping bag, of course, not in it She dragged it out from under him, nearly tipping over the cot again, and got it spread out over him. He slept, slept utterly, through it all. She was out of breath, sweating, and upset He wasn’t.

She sat down at the table and got her breath. After a while she wondered what to do. She cleaned up their dinner-leavings, heated water, washed the pie this, forks, knife, and cups. She built up the fire in the stove. She found several books on a shelf, paperbacks he’d picked up in Lincoln City probably, to beguile his long vigil. No mysteries, hell, a good mystery was what she needed. There was a novel about Russia. One thing about the Space Pact: the U.S. Government wasn’t trying to pretend that nothing between Jerusalem and the Philippines existed because if it did it might threaten the American Way of Life; and so these last few years you could buy Japanese toy paper parasols, and Indian incense, and Russian novels, and things, once more. Human Brotherhood was the New Life-Style, according to President Merdle.

This book, by somebody with a name ending in “evsky”, was about life during the Plague Years in a little town in the Caucasus, and it wasn’t exactly jolly reading, but it caught at her emotions; she read it from ten o’clock till two-thirty. All that time Orr lay fast asleep, scarcely moving, breathing lightly and quietly. She would look up from the Caucasian village and see his face, gilt and shadowed in the dim lamplight, serene. If he dreamed, they were quiet dreams and fleeting. After everybody in the Caucasian village was dead except the village idiot (whose perfect passivity to the inevitable kept making her think of her companion), she tried some rewarmed coffee, but it tasted like lye. She went to the door and stood half inside, half outside for a while, listening to the creek shouting and hollering eternal praise! eternal praise! It was incredible that it had kept up that tremendous noise for hundreds of years before she was even born, and would go on doing it until the mountains moved. And the strangest thing about it, now very late at night in the absolute silence of the woods, was a distant note in it, far away upstream it seemed, like the voices of children singing— very sweet, very strange.

She got shivery; she shut the door on the voices of the unborn children singing in the water, and turned to the small warm room and the sleeping man. She took down a book on home carpentry which he had evidently bought to keep himself busy about the cabin, but it put her to sleep at once. Well, why not? Why did she have to stay up? But where was she supposed to sleep....

She should have left George on the floor. He never would have noticed. It wasn’t fair, he had both the cot and the sleeping bag.

She removed the sleeping bag from him, replacing it with his raincoat and her raincape. He never stirred. She looked at him with affection, then got into the sleeping bag down on the floor. Christ it was cold down here on the floor, and hard. She hadn’t blown out the light. Or did you turn out wick lamps? You should do one and shouldn’t do the other. She remembered that from the commune. But she couldn’t remember which. Oooooh SHIT it was cold down here!

Cold, cold. Hard. Bright. Too bright. Sunrise in the window through shift and flicker of trees. Over the bed. The floor trembled. The hills muttered and dreamed of falling in the sea, and over the hills, faint and horrible, the sirens of distant towns howled, howled, howled.

She sat up. The wolves howled for the world’s end.

Sunrise poured in through the single window, hiding all that lay under its dazzling slant. She felt through excess of light and found the dreamer sprawled on his face, still sleeping. “George! Wake up! Oh, George, please wake up! Something is wrong!”

He woke. He smiled at her, waking.

“Something is wrong —the sirens—what is it?”

Still almost in his dream, he said without emotion, “They’ve landed. “

For he had done just what she told him to do. She had told him to dream that the Aliens were no longer on the Moon.

In the Second World War the only part of the American mainland to suffer direct attack was the State of Oregon. Some Japanese fire balloons set a piece of forest burning on the coast. In the First Interstellar War the only part of the American mainland to be invaded was the State of Oregon. One might lay the blame on her politicians; the historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad, and no military butter is ever put upon the state bread. Oregon had no stockpiles of anything but hay, no missile launch pads, no NASA bases. She was obviously defenseless. The Anti-Alien Ballistic Missiles defending her went up from the enormous underground installations in Walla Walla, Washington, and Round Valley, California. From Idaho, most of which belonged to the U.S. Air Force, huge supersonic XXTT-9900s went screaming west, shattering every eardrum from Boise to Sun Valley, to patrol for any Alien ship that might somehow slip through the infallible network of the AABMs.

Repelled by the Alien ships, which carried a device that took control of the missiles’ guidance systems, the AABMs turned around somewhere in the middle stratosphere and returned, landing and exploding here and there over the State of Oregon. Holocausts raged on the dry eastern slopes of the Cascades. Gold Beach and the Dalles were wiped out by fire storms. Portland was not directly hit; but an errant nuclear-warhead AABM striking Mount Hood near the old crater caused the dormant volcano to wake up. Steam and ground tremors ensued at once, and by noon of the first day of the Alien Invasion, April Fools’ Day, a vent had opened on the northwestern side and was in violent eruption. Lava flow set the snowless, deforested slopes blazing, and threatened the communities of Zigzag and Rhododendron. A cinder cone began to form, and the air in Portland, forty miles away, was soon thickening and gray with ash. As evening came and the wind changed round to the south, the lower air cleared somewhat, revealing the somber orange flicker of the eruption in the eastern clouds. The sky, full of rain and ashes, thundered with the flights of XXTT-9900s vainly seeking Alien ships. Other flights of bombers and fighters were still coming in from the East Coast and from fellow nations of the Pact; these frequently shot each other down. The ground shook with earthquake and the impact of bombs and plane crashes. One of the Alien ships had landed only eight miles from the city limits, and so the southwestern outskirts of town were pulverized, as jet bombers methodically devastated the eleven-square-mile area in which the Alien ship was said to have been. As a matter of fact information had arrived that it was no longer there. But something had to be done. Bombs fell by mistake on many other parts of the city, as will happen with jet bombing. There was no glass left in any window downtown. It lay, instead, in all the downtown streets, in small fragments, an inch or two deep. Refugees from southwest Portland had to walk through it; women carried their children and walked weeping with pain, in thin shoes full of broken glass.

William Haber stood at the great window of his office in the Oregon Oneirological Institute watching the fires flare and wane down in the docks, and the bloody lightning of the eruption. There was still glass in that window; nothing had landed or exploded yet near Washington Park, and the ground tremors that cracked open whole buildings down in the river bottoms so far had done nothing worse up in the hills than rattle the window frames. Very faintly he could hear elephants screaming, over in the zoo. Streaks of an unusual purplish light showed occasionally to the north, perhaps over the area where the Willamette joins the Columbia; it was hard to locate anything for certain in the ashy, misty twilight. Large sections of the city were blacked out by power failure; other parts twinkled faintly, though the streetlights had not been turned on. No one else was in the Institute Building. Haber had spent all day trying to locate George Orr. When his search proved futile, and further search was made impossible by the hysteria and increasing dilapidation of the city, he had come up to the Institute. He had had to walk most of the way, and had found the experience unnerving. A man in his position, with so many calls on his time, of course drove a batcar. But the battery gave out and he couldn’t get to a recharger because the crowds in the street were so thick. He had to get out and walk, against the current of the crowd, facing them all, right in amongst them. That had been distressing. He did not like crowds. But then the crowds had ceased and he was left walking all alone in the vast expanses of lawn and grove and forest of the Park: and that was a great deal worse.