The Ones Who Stay in Omelas
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Release came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. It was a new festival, or rather an old one given a new name, and the people wore white ribbons at their wrists to mark the anniversary. Ten years, now, since the door of the little room had been unlocked. Ten years since the child had been carried, blinking and whimpering, up the cellar stairs into a sunlight it had almost forgotten, and laid in a bed with clean sheets, and spoken to in a kind voice, and given a name.
The name was Aven. She was nineteen years old at the time of the festival I am describing, though she looked younger, being small, and she walked with a slight limp, and she did not much care for crowds. She lived in a yellow house near the north gate, with the family who had taken her in, and she was learning — slowly, and with a patience that everyone around her found beautiful and terrible in equal measure — to read.
You want to know how it happened. You want to know what kind of people, having been told that their joy depended upon a single abomination, finally said no. I will tell you. They were not saints. They were not even, most of them, particularly brave. What they were, in the end, was tired. Tired of the visits to the basement. Tired of the explanations offered to their children at the age of ten. Tired of the small private wincing each time they passed a certain public building and thought of what was under it. A generation of scholars had been quietly working on the problem for decades, and when at last one of them stood up at a council meeting and said, We believe we have found another way, the room was silent for a long moment, and then someone began, softly, to weep, and then everyone was weeping, and the vote was taken before the tears had dried.
So the child was released. And Omelas did not wither. The harvests came in. The Eighteen Peaks still burned white-gold above the bay in the clear mornings. The flute-player in the square still played, and the horses still pranced with their manes braided in silver and green. For a full year the city held its breath, waiting for the catastrophe that the old terms had promised, and the catastrophe did not come, and at the end of that year there was dancing in the streets such as had not been seen in living memory, and the ones who had walked away — some of them, at least, who had not gone too far — came back through the gates and were embraced without a word.
Do you believe it? Do you accept the reform, the rehabilitation, the yellow house, the girl named Aven learning her letters at nineteen? No? Good. I would not trust you if you did. Let me describe one more thing.
In the basement of the yellow house near the north gate, as in the basement of every house in Omelas — every house, without exception, whether it be the mansion of a merchant or the two-room cottage of a widow — there is a small wire cage. The cage is perhaps the length of a man’s forearm on each side. Inside the cage there is a chicken. The chicken cannot stand fully upright; the cage is not tall enough. It cannot turn around without difficulty. Its feathers, where they remain, are patchy and soiled. Its feet have grown around the wire of the cage floor in a way that the scholars assure us is not, strictly speaking, painful, though only the chicken would really know. A tube delivers water. A small hopper delivers feed. A tray beneath the cage catches what falls through. Once a week a member of the household goes down into the basement and empties the tray and checks the tube and the hopper, and this visit need not take more than a few minutes, and one is not required to look at the chicken, though some do.
This, it turns out, was what the scholars had discovered. The terms had not been abolished; they had only been — the word they used was distributed. The happiness of Omelas, the beauty of its architecture, the poignancy of its music, the profundity of its science, the kindly weathers of its skies: all of this still required a price, and the price still had to be paid in the currency of suffering, and the suffering still had to be real, and witnessed, and chosen. What the scholars had found was only that the suffering did not have to be concentrated in a single body. It could be divided. It could be spread across many small lives, of a humbler kind, so that no one bore the whole of it, and no single creature was made to bear what should never have been asked of a child. This was presented, and accepted, as a moral advance. In a certain sense it plainly was.
I should say that the people of Omelas are not stupid, and the arguments were made. They were made at length, in the letter pages of the city’s three newspapers and in the taverns and around the dinner tables of the yellow house and every other house. Some said: one child is not ten thousand chickens. Some said: ten thousand chickens are not one child. Some said that suffering could not be added up across species, across nervous systems, across the different kinds of darkness in which a mind might sit. Some said that of course it could, and that anyone who said otherwise had simply decided in advance what answer they wanted. Some said that the chickens, unlike the child, had never known sunlight or a mother’s voice, and therefore could not miss them, and therefore suffered less. Some said this was precisely the horror: that a creature could be made for whom the basement was the whole of the world, and not even the memory of something better was left to it. Some said the word natural, and the word did a great deal of work, and not all of it honest. Some said nothing, and went down to the basement once a week, and came back up, and sat by themselves for a little while before rejoining their families at the table.
The children of Omelas are told, now, at the age of ten, about the cage in the basement. It is usually a parent who tells them, and the telling is done gently, and the child is taken by the hand down the cellar stairs and shown. Some children cry. Some are angry. Some are quiet for a long time and then ask a question that their parents cannot answer. Nearly all of them, within a few years, have made a private peace with the thing, because the thing is in every house, and the thing is only a chicken, and the life of the city goes on above it, shining, and it is very hard to be the only person on your street who refuses. It is very hard, in particular, because refusing does not free any chicken but your own, and freeing your own — this has been tried — seems to be followed by some small private withering: a child’s illness, a crop that fails, a marriage that goes cold; nothing so dramatic as the fall of a city, only the quiet subtraction of a portion of your household’s luck. One family’s bargain is a small thing. The city does not fall. Only you fall, a little, or seem to, and your neighbors notice, and after a while most people buy another chicken, and put it in the cage, and do not speak of it.
Now: the ones who walk away. They still exist. They are fewer than they used to be, and this is not, I think, because the people of Omelas have grown crueler, but because the question of where has become much harder to answer. In the old days one could walk out through the beautiful gates and know that with each step one was placing more distance between oneself and the locked room. The locked room stayed behind. The locked room was in one place. But a cage in every basement is not in one place. It is in the village you pass through on the first night, where yellow windows glow with the same domestic warmth and the same basements lie beneath them. It is in the farmhouse where you beg a cup of water. Whether it is also in whatever place lies beyond, no one has come back to say. To walk away from Omelas now may not be to walk toward anywhere at all.
And still, some walk. On certain evenings a figure can be seen passing through the north gate alone, carrying very little, moving with the particular steadiness of a person who has decided something and does not intend to discuss it. They do not look back. They do not, for the most part, look like heroes; they look like people who have reached the end of what they can endure, and would rather bear the road than one more short descent into the basement. Where they go, I cannot tell you. It is possible, as I said before, that the place they are going to does not exist. It is also possible that the walking is itself the place, and that what they are doing is not arriving anywhere but refusing, with their whole bodies, for as long as their bodies will carry them, to be at peace with the cage.
I will tell you one last thing. The girl Aven, who was taken out of the basement ten years ago and given a name and a yellow house and a patient family and the slow gift of letters — Aven does not keep a chicken. Her foster family keeps one, as every family must, and she has never asked them to stop, because she understands, better than anyone in Omelas, what the stopping would cost them. But she herself will not go down the cellar stairs. She has not been down them once in ten years. On the day of the Festival of Release, while the bells rang and the white ribbons fluttered at every wrist and the city celebrated her freedom, she sat in the garden of the yellow house with her back to the cellar door and played, very softly and not very well, on a wooden flute that someone had given her when she was still learning to hold things.
She is nineteen now. She has been seen, lately, walking near the north gate in the evenings, looking at it for a long time, and then turning and going home. No one knows yet what she will decide. I do not know either. But I find that I think of her often, and that when I think of her I am thinking also of you, and of myself, and of the small descending stairs in the house where each of us, in our own way, already lives.