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“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

by Ursula K LeGuin - from The Wind's Twelve Quarters

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of

Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing

of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between

houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown

gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public

buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls

rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the

singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,

where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and

girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and

long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The

horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were

braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their

nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly

excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our

ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains

stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so

clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned

with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark

blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that

marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of

the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout the

city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful

faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered

together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of

Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do

not say the words of cheer much anymore. All smiles have become

archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain

assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next

for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his

noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled

slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep

slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of

their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they

did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the

stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the

bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet

shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex

than us.

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: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the

terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it

hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to

embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost

lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any

celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?

They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in

fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose

lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it

better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a

city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps

it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming

it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For

instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or

helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that

the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just

discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor

destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category,

however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of

comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have

central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of

marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources,

fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of

that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that

people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to Omelas

during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains

and double-decked trams, and that the trains station of Omelas is

actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the

magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that

Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells,

parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would

help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which

issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy

and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who

desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my

first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in

Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. 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 gory 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. One thing

I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there

be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is

puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of

drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a

great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after

some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very

arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the

pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For

more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. 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. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the

right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. 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. I don't think many of them

need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A

marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of

the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in

the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are

entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are

beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old

woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket,

and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of

nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden

flute.

People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him,

for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly

rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

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.

Do you believe? 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,

or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there

is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps

in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed

window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a

couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a

rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar

dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet

or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a

boy or a girl. 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 or genitals, as it sits

hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is

afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it

knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and

nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes,

except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or

interval--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, who has not always

lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's

voice, 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. Its buttocks

and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own

excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have

come to see it, 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 tenderness of their friendships, the health of

their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their

makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of

their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and

twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and 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 and sickened at the sight. 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. To

exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that

single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands

for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within

the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word

spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, 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: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food,

no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to

know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of

fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane

treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without

walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own

excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they

begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept

it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity

and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true

source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid,

irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not

free. They know compassion. 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. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with

children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling

in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful

music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the

sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one

more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does

not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at

all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day

or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and

walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out

of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking

across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl,

man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the

houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the

fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They

go on. 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 to most of us 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.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

by Ursula K LeGuin - from The Wind's Twelve Quarters

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of

Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing

of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between

houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown

gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public

buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls

rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the

singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,

where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and

girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and

long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The

horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were

braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their

nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly

excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our

ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains

stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so

clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned

with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark

blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that

marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of

the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout the

city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful

faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered

together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of

Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do

not say the words of cheer much anymore. All smiles have become

archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain

assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next

for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his

noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled

slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep

slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of

their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they

did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the

stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the

bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet

shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex

than us.

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: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the

terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it

hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to

embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost

lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any

celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?

They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in

fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose

lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it

better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a

city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps

it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming

it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For

instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or

helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that

the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just

discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor

destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category,

however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of

comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have

central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of

marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources,

fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of

that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that

people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to Omelas

during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains

and double-decked trams, and that the trains station of Omelas is

actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the

magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that

Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells,

parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would

help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which

issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy

and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who

desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my

first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in

Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. 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 gory 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. One thing

I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there

be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is

puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of

drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a

great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after

some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very

arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the

pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For

more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. 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. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the

right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. 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. I don't think many of them

need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A

marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of

the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in

the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are

entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are

beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old

woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket,

and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of

nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden

flute.

People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him,

for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly

rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

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.

Do you believe? 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,

or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there

is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps

in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed

window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a

couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a

rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar

dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet

or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a

boy or a girl. 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 or genitals, as it sits

hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is

afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it

knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and

nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes,

except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or

interval--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, who has not always

lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's

voice, 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. Its buttocks

and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own

excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have

come to see it, 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 tenderness of their friendships, the health of

their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their

makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of

their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and

twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and 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 and sickened at the sight. 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. To

exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that

single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands

for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within

the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word

spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, 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: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food,

no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to

know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of

fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane

treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without

walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own

excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they

begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept

it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity

and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true

source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid,

irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not

free. They know compassion. 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. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with

children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling

in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful

music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the

sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one

more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does

not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at

all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day

or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and

walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out

of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking

across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl,

man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the

houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the

fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They

go on. 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 to most of us 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.