Damon Knight - Orbit 20

The politics of the book reflect a similar bias, faintly. I find it rather dreary that the non-rabbit animal characters are “humorous foreigners” of the type dear to English cheap fiction decades ago. They’re so funny, don’t you know, they can’t speak English properly! The satirical projection of a rabbit Police State is superb, and the description of its destruction is a marvelous stretch of suspense and strategy; but I find the rabbit Utopia that replaces it to be curiously unsatisfying. Everybody “knows his place” so well. It seems just a touch Victorian, for either rabbits or Utopia.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, in Hedgehog #/, 1977

Behind my own work with the government are three basic imperatives with which I have been concerned since 1950:

to avoid nuclear war, not only year-by-year but for the long term;

to bring the annual growth rate of the world population to zero —not to 2 per cent or 1 per cent;

to avoid a transformation of our society into a system of social organization or government where individual values have no influence.

These are imperatives because their negatives are irreversible transformations, which will mean the end of our society, if not of human life. We can not see or plan beyond these catastrophes, which are thus in the nature of essential singularities. Any of the three could bring the world to a life among the ruins of a vaguely remembered past splendor of science, law and architecture. . . .

Zero population growth rate is necessary if we are to look more than a few decades into the future and to avoid making irrevocable choices. After all, a growth rate of 1 per cent per year, corresponding to the difference, I suppose, between 2.6 children per family and 2.0 per family, means a factor 3 in population in a hundred years, a factor 30 in three hundred years and so on. There is no long-term future for humanity unless the average population growth rate is strictly zero. . . .

There is also a great imbalance in the public reaction to many of these problems. For instance, the problem of nuclear reactor accident, or more particularly the possibility of terrorist attack against nuclear reactors, looms fairly large in the public press. At the same time, it is national policy expressed through the public health service that children no longer should be vaccinated against smallpox. But the smallpox virus persists; it is in storage in many places all over the world. When we have a population that is not vaccinated against smallpox, one terrorist distribution of this virus will kill not tens of thousands, but tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people in the U. S.

—Richard L. Garwin, speech on acceptance of the Leo Szilard Award, April 27, 1976: quoted in Physics Today, February 1977

It came with the moonlight over the cliff— something so alien that it profoundly changed everyone who experienced it, each in his own very different way.

When anyone asked Victoria what the GoMarCorp actually did, she answered vaguely, “You know, light bulbs, electronics, stuff like that.” When her father pressed her, she admitted she didn’t know much about the company except for her own office in the claims department of the Mining Division. She always felt that somehow she had disappointed her father, that she had failed him. Because the thought and the attendant guilt angered her she seldom dwelled on it. She had a good apartment, nice clothes, money enough to save over and above the shares of stock the company handed out regularly. She was doing all right. At work she typed up the claims reports on standard forms, ran a computer check and pulled cards where any similarities appeared— same mine, same claimants, same kinds of claims . . . She made up a folder for each claim, clipped together all the forms, cards, correspondence, and placed the folder in her superior’s in-basket. What happened to it after that she never knew.

Just a job, she thought, but when it was lunch time, she went to lunch. When it was quitting time, she walked away and gave no more thought to it until 8:30 the next morning. Mimi, on the other hand, boasted about her great job with the travel agency, and never knew if she would make it to lunch or not. Victoria checked her watch against the wall clock in the Crêpe Shop and when the waiter came she ordered. She ate lunch, had an extra coffee; Mimi still had not arrived when she left the restaurant and walked back to her office. “Rich bitch, couldn’t make up her mind how to get to Rio,” Mimi would say airily. “I’m sending her by dugout.”

Late in the afternoon Diego called to say Mimi had had an accident that morning; she was in the hospital with a broken leg. “You can’t see her until tomorrow. They’ve knocked her out back into last week to set it, so I’ll come by later with the keys and maps and stuff. You’ll have to go get Sam alone.”

“I can’t drive the camper alone in the mountains!”

“Gotta go. See you later, sugar.”

“Diego! Wait . . .” He had hung up.

Victoria stared at the report in her typewriter and thought about Sam. He had worked here as a claims investigator eight years ago. She had been married then; she and Sam had developed a close nodding relationship. He was in and out for two years, then had grown a beard and either quit or been fired. She hadn’t seen him again until six months ago, when they had met by chance on a comer near the office.

His beard was full, his hair long, he was dressed in jeans and sandals.

“You’re still there?” he asked incredulously.

“It’s a job,” she said. “What are you up to?”

“You’ll never believe me.”

“Probably not.”

“I’ll show you.” He took her arm and began to propel her across the street.

“Hey! I’m on lunch hour.”

“Call in sick.”

“I can’t,” she protested, but he was laughing at her, and in the end, she called in sick. When she told Sam it was the first time she had done that, he was astonished.

He drove an old VW, so cluttered with boxes, papers, magazines, other miscellaneous junk, there was hardly room for her to sit. He took her to a garage that was a jumble of rocks. Rocks on the floor, in cartons, on benches, on a picnic table, rocks everywhere.

“Aquamarine,” he said, pointing. “Tourmaline, tiger-eye,jadeite from Wyoming, fire opal . . .”

There was blue agate and banded agate, sunstones, jasper, garnet, carnelian . . . But, no matter how enthusiastic he was, no matter by what exotic names he called them, they were rocks, Victoria thought in dismay.

When he said he made jewelry, she thought of the clunky pieces teenaged girls bought in craft shops.

“I’ll show you,” he said, opening a safe. He pulled out a tray and she caught her breath sharply. Rings, brooches, necklaces— lovely fragile gold chains with single teardrop opals that flared and paled with a motion; blood red carnelians flecked with gold, set in ornate gold rings; sea-colored aquamarines in silver . . .

A few weeks later he had a show in a local art store and she realized that Sam Dumarie was more than an excellent craftsman. He was an artist.

“You get off at noon on Good Friday,” Sam had said early that spring. “Don’t deny it. I lived with GoMar rules for years, remember. And you have Monday off. That’s enough time. You and Mimi drive the camper up to get me and I’ll show you some of the most terrific desert you can imagine.”

“Let’s do it!” Mimi cried. “We’ve both asked off until Wednesday. We were going to my parents’ house for the weekend, but this is more exciting! Let’s do it, Vickie.” With hardly a pause she asked if Diego could join them. “He’s a dear friend,” she said to Sam, her eyes glittering. “But he wants to be so much more than that. Who knows what might develop out on the desert?”