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In the city of joy, nature reigns. Human and otherwise.
Down tree-sheltered avenues children race with laughing hounds. Flowers spring from pavement seams or crowd their way out of brimming gardens. In the corner of your eye, the fluttering shape of a butterfly or bird rises from a briskly-swept ash heap.
In Omelas, no king builds a power base from fear, no priest cultivates shame, but the nature of our kind is this: shame and fear arise, and in the city of joy are vanquished, an ever-repeating miracle.
-Marie-
Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all.
From the Festival of Summer springs the life of the infant Marie. That she loses her only parent when quite small means little to the girl, for she is surrounded by adults who gladly care for her. The hurt, initially vast, fades as close to nothing as you would want for her.
At eight years old she is taken to the house of sorrow for the first time. It's a shock--she has heard of the place, of the miserable room where the naked child sleeps, but she couldn't have imagined this: the fire-blackened foundation stones, the foul dirt flooring, the animal cries of the wretched one. She asks questions, clinging to the waist of her primary guardian, and receives comfort. Not until years later does she realize that it could have been her. That the terrible lottery must have spared her.
She goes to see the child again, to look through the door and breathe the mildewed air and struggle to understand. She emerges sickened, leans dizzied against a tree, and an old bald man in a hoverchair stops to speak to her.
He is a schoolmaster. A typical child of Omelas, she expects to like all school faculty, who of course can be trusted to nurture and guide like an aunt or uncle. And this old man knows Marie's distress because within his every cell lies the blueprints of a power once believed beyond humankind.
A power lies within her, too, though this isn't why he invites her to attend his school.
When her ability manifests, it becomes apparent that she will struggle with it all her life. She hungers for physical contact with other people, but cannot have it without harming them.
She thinks again of the house of sorrow, the wretched child whose comfort would be the downfall of everyone.
She accepts the counsel and gentleness of those around her. They don't understand her deprivation, but they want to, and she allows herself to be warmed by that. Her power, as much as it torments her, becomes her gift. Because she touches no one, she is between everyone. Counselor, negotiator, bridge--a balm to troubled souls.
-Erik-
They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.
Perhaps you think a child cannot blaze with anger--certainly not a child who has never known tragedy. Sorrow, yes; Erik grieved when his grandmother died, but that loss was no artificial injustice, not like this. He emerges from his first visit to the wretched one screaming and kicking, his mama struggling to hold him without getting hurt. But she doesn't give up, and he can't bear to hurt her.
It stays with him. He has days when he turns mulish and sullen with it, when he tests the patience of his teachers and parents, and they show him firmness and kindness but never understanding, until he must speak, until he's bursting with it. And they love him even more for his compassion, his conviction, but as they consult among themselves they acknowledge: this again. The boy appears to believe their explanations, but a few weeks later they do it all over again.
At school, he notices when his classmates have visited the troubling place. At moments like these he can pour his rage into a ready ear. He triumphs in their shared discontent.
What can children do against the united refusal of their elders? A great deal, in fact--he proves it. He and his growing cadre of little followers write letters, hold marches, stand on stacked soapboxes to public applause.
What Erik cannot do is control all of the consequences of his precocious demagoguery. He demands that the other children be thoughtful and clever and persistent about this social problem; fine. He demands their unwavering consideration of the wretched one; good. Adults appreciate his contribution to their offspring's maturation process. But he spreads unhappiness like a contagion. Erik's followers feel they must move mountains. They feel that they hate their parents. They can't sleep for nightmares of being thrown into the cellar with the wretched one. They are confused and soul-sick.
The parents indulge them to alleviate this suffering. See the children surround the house of sorrow, shouting demands. See the wretched one carried out to universal applause. See the leathery grandfathers wiping tears from their eyes, as touched and relieved as the little ones.
And the children in turn see their parents instead of monsters. Though another little orphan is installed in the terrible room by nightfall, what they have accomplished is a marvel. They understand that more letters must be written.
Erik becomes quieter. His followers labor on, but he drifts away from them.
There is little more that I can tell you. He grows tall, weds his heart's delight, works at some modest but dignified profession. Perhaps he constructs spacious houses and beautiful public buildings. I don't know the details because his private thoughts for the most part remain his own. When it comes up in conversation, he says his childhood quest didn't accomplish all he hoped, but he has learned that nothing is in vain.
Life is good to him, until the fire.
Even in the city of joy, houses may burn. Beloved daughters may die. Wives may leave. A grieving father--well. You expected him to grieve alone, didn't you? But in the city of joy no one lets the heart-hurt struggle alone, to conquer their pain or fall. We may imagine him comforted as much as a man can be in his circumstances. We can only expect that time will do the rest.
A few weeks later, the people are roused in the night by an explosion in the city center. When the smoke clears the damage comes to light: the house of sorrow has fallen, its minders slaughtered. Some hapless schoolteacher perished in the flames, as did the poor child who was imprisoned there. Why?
But there can be no use looking for sense in it, or in supposing that the execution may have deviated from the plan, if plan there ever was. Madness, his actions. They remember the good deeds he did, the beautiful family he made, and they mourn for him.
-Hank-
It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.
His drive to know, to discover, to build: this outweighs all else, even his own perverse inclination to despise himself for being different.
No one teaches the children not to bully each other for their differences. No one has to, because it never occurs to them to bully. In the city of joy, difference and sameness are each celebrated as one or another kind of good fortune. Therefore Hank's self-loathing has no obvious cause. I must imagine that it arises as a side effect of the extraordinary workings of his mind. He struggles at times with the temptation to remake himself, to risk everything to do so, or perhaps to punish himself for his imperfections. He fixates on his feet as the source of his distress.
One day he stands in shocked witness as the physician assigned to monitor the wretched one begins to crumble. She weeps and cannot stop. She is replaced by another, who carries on with the sickening but necessary tasks for several years before he too comes near to breaking. The child in the cellar rarely survives to adulthood; the physician rarely lasts the whole cycle. This is how it is.
Hank thinks often of expanding the boundaries of the possible. He knows of other countries, far outside the reach of Omelas, rife with misery. Omelas is paradise. He thinks of the child on whom his city depends for its happiness; he strives every day to earn the respect of his peers and the simple material comforts of his existence.
He decides to study medicine.
On rare occasions, he takes drooz. The haze it induces frightens him a little, but afterwards he feels fresh, nimble, free. Months pass before he thinks again of self-harm.
And when he does, he thinks of the one who suffers without understanding, and he stays his hand. His eyes sting with gratitude.
-Angel-
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist.
Firstly, I must tell you of Angel's dancing. A great audience attends her every performance, for Angel goes beyond virtuosity; she has invented a choreography no other dancer can execute. Her performances tell thrilling tales, or amaze you as feats of grace and timing, or make you shiver with erotic longing. Or all three at once. Her dances are pure joy.
She trains as a storyteller as well, and though her audiences remain small, she never despairs, never supposes that she has failed or that her efforts are wasted. She doesn't worry about the reason for her obscurity in this art form, but we may speculate. Perhaps in her narratives she can't hide that she doesn't love Omelas as others do.
A fear at times haunts her that the wretched one might be her sibling. This is impossible, she knows. But she fears it anyway.
Her wings contribute greatly to her problem, though not in the way you think. If she stayed on the ground among her peers, they might talk the guilt out of her. But she wants to fly, and no one will tell her to be less extraordinary than she is.
Every day she soars above the beauty of the city and it galls her a little more. The music of the bells, the celebrations in the streets, the horse races and the flute player on the hill. Few walk by the house of sorrow.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit of considering happiness as rather selfish: passive and wicked.
Happiness is indeed selfish. But if it's good for someone else to feed you and please you, why scorn to feed and please yourself? Happiness is not passive, no, Angel's dancing is not sloth. She is happy, and in her happiness she thinks of leaving forever.
She knows of the bandit gangs that prey on the borders, thieving from and often murdering the merchants and visitors and would-be immigrants to the city of joy. Survival is brutal out in the world. Leaving could cost her everything. But since leaving would mean abandoning her unknown brother or sister, it will in any case cost her soul.
There are those who walk from Omelas in search, in belief that a better country can be found or built. Conversely, there are those who dream no greater dream than Omelas itself--yet who wander, who believe in, who search for far worse.
We must let her go.
-Charles-
The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
For Charles, read Erik.
They are different people, of course, different minds, different paths; Charles doesn't direct his boyhood anger outwardly, overtly. In adolescence he gathers more friends and fewer followers. His drive and ability to lead do not emerge until adulthood, when he has already become an accomplished scholar.
He makes speeches, charismatic and uncompromising; spends money carefully; he builds things. A better, wiser Omelas. A school.
He builds it within sight of the house of sorrow.
-Armando-
Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free.
We haven't spoken of the city's governance, but I imagine that they hold most of the important meetings outdoors, the easier for anyone interested to attend. As talk flows over the crowd, a middle-aged woman shapes figures in clay, a stenographer takes notes on a handheld computer, a young man braids fibers into a basket. Later a figurine is passed from hand to hand, still soft, sculpted by a dozen minds before the sun touches the horizon and the cooks bring out great platters for a communal meal and lazy dancing. And Armando sits among them, drawing botanical diagrams and scribbling his observations about the process with a soft graphite pencil.
Although no one he knows has ever been seriously endangered by the fear of difference, he intuits that this fear is a part of the human mind; he believes there can be danger in standing out. And you'd think that a man who can adapt to anything, fit in anywhere, would not stand out, but Armando draws people to him by choice.
The thing is he doesn't believe that the child's suffering helps anyone at all. Omelas would be Omelas without that dank cell, that miserable creature. And because Omelas is Omelas, he is fearless enough to say so. Often his listeners ponder and nod. At worst, they laugh him off.
He isn't angry. He doesn't burn. It's not his nature.
You might think him a better person for having worried for the wretched one, for having questioned a society that could produce this senseless suffering, but he is aware that none of his virtues have reached into the filthy cellar to make a difference as Erik once did. That in the long run Erik's ways didn't work.
I imagine that Armando is not yet in his prime, but for now he thinks he's going nowhere. He lives by the needs of the moment, has no plans or commitments, until the day he's offered a job by a man whose beliefs are... not the same as his, but close enough. "Come teach at my school," the man says, and Armando does.
He loves these kids. He does everything he can to deepen their understanding of the unfortunate one's suffering, and he hopes they'll... he's not sure. He hopes they'll come to doubt what they've been told. He thinks they will.
He'd do anything for these kids. Even die for them.
-Logan-
What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers... A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.
Logan isn't precisely an outlaw. He thinks of himself as a soldier temporarily without an army. When he meets the old woman with dragonfly wings, he recognizes her as his own kind in more than one sense.
So it is that (like you and I) Logan hears of Omelas from a storyteller, uncertain whether or how to take her at her word. A city of happiness: ridiculous. A society that makes a winged child feel as normal and wanted as any other: impossible.
The horrible cellar: why does one miserable detail make it all seem like it might really exist? Could we be judging truth, not by the limits of nature, but by the limits of our imaginations?
Logan has to see for himself. On an ordinary market day he arrives by train and finds himself a place as groundskeeper at a school. The building itself wasn't here when Angel left (her description of the house of sorrow and its surroundings are as vivid to Logan as personal recollection) but the marks of age begin to show, in those portions of the mortar which remain visible--for vines have overgrown its walls and the school has bloomed into a great block of flowers.
The retired schoolmaster hides his doubts in didactic paternalism while his proteges take over his legacy. They regard their former leader with a curious mixture of respect and resentment.
In the schoolmaster's rooms, Logan meets a scientist-- "And a physician, sir," he says, with a poised nod of his furry head. He has learned that we don't always get to find out if our actions were right in the end, has learned that one may make a choice and be changed by it forever. They discuss evolution: "I have done considerable research on the subject, experimenting on myself to the opposite of the intended effect. Nevertheless, the results have been enlightening."
Logan does not feel enlightened. He feels almost safe because several of the faculty and students are mutants too, though they don't use that word. They don't have a word for the thing that makes them all different, or regard it as a matter of significant concern.
He ventures onto the wide avenues, incredulous, amazed, delighted, angered, sometimes all at once. He's never seen a city more charming, more perfect. And has he ever lived in a country with no wretched rooms, no needlessly suffering children?
Omelas enrages because it's the only place he's ever hoped.
Frequently in the streets and plazas he encounters a teacher or a student he knows from the school. Quite against his will, he becomes entangled. More to his liking, he hears enough of their lives to judge the accuracy of the old storyteller's weaving; he learns in quick-sketched anecdotes, hearing more than he's told, the extra details encoded in the thunder of a speeding heart and the dull stink of regret.
The city has no skyscrapers. Few ever see over the whole, but Logan does.
More might be said of the house of sorrow, he suspects, important details no one has guessed at, but he doesn't have enough of the pieces. He can't put it together over the lovely, lulling music of the city. And why should this one child matter more to him than the uncounted thousands who suffer outside? If he wanted to play hero, he could have made a lifetime of it.
Nevertheless, in his thoughts there slowly unfolds a diagram of the tactics that have been tried, and those that have not. Erik was mad, yes; if the marches and sit-ins didn't put an end to the institution, neither would destroying the house of sorrow. Just as the prisoner can be replaced, so can the prison. This is what he tells Marie.
You haven't forgotten Marie? She belongs to a wider circle of alumni. She hasn't a single bitter word for Omelas's ways, but these days she is seen often in the company of Armando. He was never her teacher; he wasn't available to teach during her years at the school. She brings Logan to him, introducing them over a simple but savory dinner.
Logan has met a few genuine visionaries before. Armando knows what lies beyond Omelas even though he's never been there, even though Logan can't credit Armando's tale of the provenance of his knowledge. If Marie is a bridge, Armando is the river, carving patiently through rock.
Let us leave these three at the kitchen table, sketching plans in a drop of spilled wine.
As for Erik the madman, Erik the bereaved--Logan hears much of him but never learns where he went. Could he have retired? Died? Gone to the country of those who walked away? I can't tell you; I don't know.
-Jean-
As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope...." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.
Season after year after decade, the child suffers and dies, the physician weakens from stress, and both are replaced. Now a tall young physician nimbly holds the little one for examination in his surprisingly dexterous claws.
He does his duty, but as months pass, he aches.
The physician aches and the child dreams. Its sleep is fitful, its dreams fearful. When the weather turns hot, its synapses fire out explanations based on dim memory: a warm hearth, a flutter of bright feathers, a parental embrace.
One day before exiting, the physician sets a glittering vial on the dank floor. He turns his face to the wall and says a few low words of explanation. He knows this will not endanger the city of joy, for this is not a kind gesture.
He's giving choice to the only person who has none.
The child doesn't touch the vial at first. Perhaps it doesn't understand the offering. A crack in the wall near the ceiling lets in a sliver of light.
The light wanes.
The child has a name, or it dreams that it once did. It can't remember hearing this name from the mouth of another, but in the darkness its lips and tongue move, shaping a syllable or perhaps two.
It reaches for the vial.
Its death is quick but not painless. I will draw a curtain of discretion over the details. Should any city-dweller see the moment of passing they might heed the dire glow that follows: an inferno raging and maturing under ductile skin.
-the end-