Ursula Le Guin - The Lathe Of Heaven

Creative/destructive, on the Ramirez scale—same thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left. Now, Walters down at the Med School reads the results a bit differently; he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment, whatever that is, and that what I see as self-cancellation is a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony. By which you can see that, let’s face it, old Walters is a pious fraud, he’s never outgrown the mysticism of the seventies; but he means well. So there you have it, anyway: you’re the man in the middle of the graph. There we are, now to hook up the glumdalclitch with the brobding-nag, and we’re all set.... Hell!” He had knocked his head on a panel getting up. He left the Augmentor open. “Well, you’re a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about you is that there’s nothing queer about you!” He laughed his huge, gusty laugh. “So, today we try a new tack. No hypnosis. No sleep. No d-state and no dreams. Today I want to hook you up with the Augmentor in a waking state.”

Orr’s heart sank, though he did not know why. “What for?” he said.

“Principally to get a record of your normal waking brain rhythms when augmented. I got a full analysis your first session, but that was before the Augmentor could do anything but fall in with the rhythm you were currently emitting. Now I’ll be able to use it to stimulate and trace certain individual characteristics of your brain activity more clearly, particularly that tracer-shell effect you have in the hippocampus. Then I can compare them with your d-state patterns, and with the patterns of other brains, normal and abnormal. I’m looking for what makes you tick, George, so that I can find what makes your dreams work.”

“What for?” Orr repeated.

“What for? Well, isn’t that what you’re here for?” “I came here to be cured. To learn how not to dream effectively.”

“If you’d been a simple one-two-three cure, would you have been sent up here to the Institute, to HURAD—to me?”

Orr put his head in his hands, and said nothing.

“I can’t show you how to stop, George, until I can find out what it is you’re doing.”

“But if you do find out, will you tell me how to stop?”

Haber rocked back largely on his heels. “Why are you so afraid of yourself, George?”

“I’m not,” Orr said. His hands were sweaty. “I’m afraid of—” But he was too afraid, in fact, to say the pronoun.

“Of changing things, as you call it. O.K. I know. We’ve been through that many times. Why, George? You’ve got to ask yourself that question. What’s wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life—evolution—the whole universe of space/time, matter/ energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”

“That is one aspect of it,” Orr said. “The other is stillness.”

“When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is—and the more life. I’m pro-life, George. Life itself is a huge gamble against the odds, against all odds! You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It’s not how you get there, but where you get to that counts. What you’re afraid to accept, here, is that we’re engaged in a really great experiment, you and I. We’re on the brink of discovering and controlling, for the good of all mankind., a whole new force, an entire new field of antientropic energy, of the life-force, of the will to act, to do, to change!”

“All that is true. But there is—”

“What, George?” He was fatherly and patient, now; and Orr forced himself to go on, knowing it was no good.

“We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

Haber walked up and down the room, pausing before the huge window that framed a view northward of the serene and nonerupting cone of Mount St. Helen. He nodded several times. “I understand,” he said with his back turned. “I understand completely. But let me put it this way, George, and perhaps you’ll understand what it is I’m after. You’re alone in the jungle, in the Mato Grosso, and you find a native woman lying on the path, dying of snakebite. You have serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it because ‘this is the way it is’—do you ‘let her be’?”

“It would depend,” Orr said.

“Depend on what?”

“Well... I don’t know. If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village. I know you’d give her the serum, because you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don’t know whether what you’re doing is good or evil or both....”

“O.K.! Granted! I know what snakebite serum does, but I don’t know what I’m doing—O.K., I’ll buy it on those terms, gladly. And say what’s the difference? I freely admit that I don’t know, about 85 per cent of the time, what the hell I’m doing with this screwball brain of yours, and you don’t either, but we’re doing it—so, can we get on with it?” His virile, genial vigor was overwhelming; he laughed, and Orr found a weak smile on his lips.

While the electrodes were being applied, however, he ‘ made one last effort to communicate with Haber. “I saw a Citizen’s Arrest for euthanasia on the way here,” he said.

“What for?”

“Eugenics. Cancer.”

Haber nodded, alert. “No wonder you’re depressed. You haven’t yet fully accepted the use of controlled violence for the good of the community; you may never be able to. This is a tough-minded world we’ve got going here, George. A realistic one. But as I said, life can’t be safe. This society is tough-minded, and getting tougher yearly: the future will justify it. We need health. We simply have no room for the incurables, the gene-damaged who degrade the species; we have no time for wasted, useless suffering.” He spoke with an enthusiasm that rang hollower than usual; Orr wondered how well, in fact, Haber liked this world he had indubitably made. “Now just sit like that, I. don’t want you going to sleep from force of habit. O.K., great. You may get bored. I want you just to sit for a while. Keep your eyes open, think about anything you like. I’ll be fiddling with Baby’s guts, here. Now, here we go: bingo.” He pressed the white ON button in the wall panel to the right of the Augmentor, by the head of the couch.

A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on the mall; it raised its left elbow to apologize, and Orr muttered, “Sorry.” It stopped, half blocking his way: and he too halted, startled and impressed by its nine-foot, greenish, armored impassivity. It was grotesque to the point of being funny; like a sea turtle, and yet like a sea turtle it possessed a strange, large beauty, a serener beauty than that of any dweller, in sunlight, any walker on the earth.