Part Ⅱ
Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?
No? Then let me describe one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, there is a room. It has one locked door and no windows. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch. The room is about three paces long and two wide. In the room, a child is sitting. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes, as it sits hunched in the corner. It shuts its eyes.
The door is locked; nobody will come. Except that sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, and it sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please, let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. 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.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, while others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weather of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve. Most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked at the sight. They feel outrage 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 out of that place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, all the prosperity and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness of every life in Omelas for that single improvement, to throw away the happiness of thousands for the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom. It is too degraded to know any real joy. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls around it to protect it.
Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality and to accept it. Theirs is no irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there in the dark, the other one, the flute player, could make no joyful music as the young riders lined up for the race.
Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell you, and this is quite incredible.
At times, one of the adolescent girls or boys who goes to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes a man or woman much older falls silent and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.