The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “You must know that nobody can emit a false empathic message, Haito. You can’t send something that doesn’t exist.”

  “But we don’t intend harm, we are friendly.”

  “Are we? In the forest, when you picked me up, did you feel friendly?”

  “No. Terrified. But that’s—it, the forest, the plants, not my own fear, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the difference? It’s all you felt. Can’t you see,” and Osden’s voice rose in exasperation, “why I dislike you and you dislike me, all of you? Can’t you see that I retransmit every negative or aggressive affect you’ve felt towards me since we first met? I return your hostility, with thanks. I do it in self-defense. Like Porlock. It is self-defense, though; it’s the only technique I developed to replace my original defense of total withdrawal from others. Unfortunately it creates a closed circuit, self-sustaining and self-reinforcing. Your initial reaction to me was the instinctive antipathy to a cripple; by now of course it’s hatred. Can you fail to see my point? The forest-mind out there transmits only terror, now, and the only message I can send it is terror, because when exposed to it I can feel nothing except terror!”

  “What must we do, then?” said Tomiko, and Mannon replied promptly, “Move camp. To another continent. If there are plant-minds there, they’ll be slow to notice us, as this one was; maybe they won’t notice us at all.”

  “It would be a considerable relief,” Osden observed stiffly. The others had been watching him with a new curiosity. He had revealed himself, they had seen him as he was, a helpless man in a trap. Perhaps, like Tomiko, they had seen that the trap itself, his crass and cruel egotism, was their own construction, not his. They had built the cage and locked him in it, and like a caged ape he threw filth out through the bars. If, meeting him, they had offered trust, if they had been strong enough to offer him love, how might he have appeared to them?

  None of them could have done so, and it was too late now. Given time, given solitude, Tomiko might have built up with him a slow resonance of feeling, a consonance of trust, a harmony; but there was no time, their job must be done. There was not room enough for the cultivation of so great a thing, and they must make do with sympathy, with pity, the small change of love. Even that much had given her strength, but it was nowhere near enough for him. She could see in his flayed face now his savage resentment of their curiosity, even of her pity.

  “Go lie down, that gash is bleeding again,” she said, and he obeyed her.

  Next morning they packed up, melted down the sprayform hangar and living quarters, lifted Gum on mechanical drive and took her halfway round World 4470, over the red and green lands, the many warm green seas. They had picked out a likely spot on Continent G: a prairie, twenty thousand square kilos of windswept graminiformes. No forest was within a hundred kilos of the site, and there were no lone trees or groves on the plain. The plant-forms occurred only in large species-colonies, never intermingled, except for certain tiny ubiquitous saprophytes and spore-bearers. The team sprayed holomeld over structure forms, and by evening of the thirty-two-hour day were settled in to the new camp. Eskwana was still asleep and Porlock still sedated, but everyone else was cheerful. “You can breathe here!” they kept saying.

  Osden got on his feet and went shakily to the doorway; leaning there he looked through twilight over the dim reaches of the swaying grass that was not grass. There was a faint, sweet odor of pollen on the wind; no sound but the soft, vast sibilance of wind. His bandaged head cocked a little, the empath stood motionless for a long time. Darkness came, and the stars, lights in the windows of the distant house of Man. The wind had ceased, there was no sound. He listened.

  In the long night Haito Tomiko listened. She lay still and heard the blood in her arteries, the breathing of sleepers, the wind blowing, the dark veins running, the dreams advancing, the vast static of stars increasing as the universe died slowly, the sound of death walking. She struggled out of her bed, fled the tiny solitude of her cubicle. Eskwana alone slept. Porlock lay straitjacketed, raving softly in his obscure native tongue. Olleroo and Jenny Chong were playing cards, grim-faced. Poswet To was in the therapy niche, plugged in. Asnanifoil was drawing a mandala, the Third Pattern of the Primes. Mannon and Harfex were sitting up with Osden.

  She changed the bandages on Osden’s head. His lank, reddish hair, where she had not had to shave it, looked strange. It was salted with white, now. Her hands shook as she worked. Nobody had yet said anything.

  “How can the fear be here too?” she said, and her voice rang flat and false in the terrific silence.

  “It’s not just the trees; the grasses too . . .”

  “But we’re twelve thousand kilos from where we were this morning, we left it on the other side of the planet.”

  “It’s all one,” Osden said. “One big green thought. How long does it take a thought to get from one side of your brain to the other?”

  “It doesn’t think. It isn’t thinking,” Harfex said, lifelessly. “It’s merely a network of processes. The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctures between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windborne sentience, connecting overseas. But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated. . . .”

  “Isolated,” said Osden. “That’s it! That’s the fear. It isn’t that we’re motile, or destructive. It’s just that we are. We are other. There has never been any other.”

  “You’re right,” Mannon said, almost whispering. “It has no peers. No enemies. No relationship with anything but itself. One alone forever.”

  “Then what’s the function of its intelligence in species-survival?”

  “None, maybe,” Osden said. “Why are you getting teleological, Harfex? Aren’t you a Hainishman? Isn’t the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?”

  Harfex did not take the bait. He looked ill. “We should leave this world,” he said.

  “Now you know why I always want to get out, get away from you,” Osden said with a kind of morbid geniality. “It isn’t pleasant, is it—the other’s fear. . . ? If only it were an animal intelligence. I can get through to animals. I get along with cobras and tigers; superior intelligence gives one the advantage. I should have been used in a zoo, not on a human team. . . . If I could get through to the damned stupid potato! If it wasn’t so overwhelming . . . I still pick up more than the fear, you know. And before it panicked it had a—there was a serenity. I couldn’t take it in, then, I didn’t realize how big it was. To know the whole daylight, after all, and the whole night. All the winds and lulls together. The winter stars and the summer stars at the same time. To have roots, and no enemies. To be entire. Do you see? No invasion. No others. To be whole . . .”

  He had never spoken before, Tomiko thought.

  “You are defenseless against it, Osden,” she said. “Your personality has changed already. You’re vulnerable to it. We may not all go mad, but you will, if we don’t leave.”

  He hesitated, then he looked up at Tomiko, the first time he had ever met her eyes, a long, still look, clear as water.

  “What’s sanity ever done for me?” he said, mocking. “But you have a point, Haito. You have something there.”

  “We should get away,” Harfex muttered.

  “If I gave in to it,” Osden mused, “could I communicate?”

  “By ‘give in,’” Mannon said in a rapid, nervous voice, “I assume that you mean, stop sending back the empathic information which you receive from the plant-entity: stop rejecting the fear, and absorb it. That will either kill you at once, or drive you back into total psychological withdrawal, autism.”

  “Why?” said Osden. “Its message is rejection. But my salvation is rejection. It’s not intelligent. But I am.”

  “The s
cale is wrong. What can a single human brain achieve against something so vast?”

  “A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.”

  Mannon looked from one to the other of them; Harfex was silent.

  “It’d be easier in the forest,” Osden said. “Which of you will fly me over?”

  “When?”

  “Now. Before you all crack up or go violent.”

  “I will,” Tomiko said.

  “None of us will,” Harfex said.

  “I can’t,” Mannon said. “I . . . I am too frightened. I’d crash the jet.”

  “Bring Eskwana along. If I can pull this off, he might serve as a medium.”

  “Are you accepting the Sensor’s plan, Coordinator?” Harfex asked formally.

  “Yes.”

  “I disapprove. I will come with you, however.”

  “I think we’re compelled, Harfex,” Tomiko said, looking at Osden’s face, the ugly white mask transfigured, eager as a lover’s face.

  Olleroo and Jenny Chong, playing cards to keep their thoughts from their haunted beds, their mounting dread, chattered like scared children. “This thing, it’s in the forest, it’ll get you—”

  “Scared of the dark?” Osden jeered.

  “But look at Eskwana, and Porlock, and even Asnanifoil—”

  “It can’t hurt you. It’s an impulse passing through synapses, a wind passing through branches. It is only a nightmare.”

  They took off in a helijet, Eskwana curled up still sound asleep in the rear compartment, Tomiko piloting, Harfex and Osden silent, watching ahead for the dark line of forest across the vague grey miles of starlit plain.

  They neared the black line, crossed it; now under them was darkness.

  She sought a landing place, flying low, though she had to fight her frantic wish to fly high, to get out, get away. The huge vitality of the plant-world was far stronger here in the forest, and its panic beat in immense dark waves. There was a pale patch ahead, a bare knoll-top a little higher than the tallest of the black shapes around it; the not-trees; the rooted; the parts of the whole. She set the helijet down in the glade, a bad landing. Her hands on the stick were slippery, as if she had rubbed them with cold soap.

  About them now stood the forest, black in darkness.

  Tomiko cowered and shut her eyes. Eskwana moaned in his sleep. Harfex’s breath came short and loud, and he sat rigid, even when Osden reached across him and slid the door open.

  Osden stood up; his back and bandaged head were just visible in the dim glow of the control panel as he paused stooping in the doorway.

  Tomiko was shaking. She could not raise her head. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she said in a whisper. “No. No. No.”

  Osden moved suddenly and quietly, swinging out of the doorway, down into the dark. He was gone.

  I am coming! said a great voice that made no sound.

  Tomiko screamed. Harfex coughed; he seemed to be trying to stand up, but did not do so.

  Tomiko drew in upon herself, all centered in the blind eye in her belly, in the center of her being; and outside that there was nothing but the fear.

  It ceased.

  She raised her head; slowly unclenched her hands. She sat up straight. The night was dark, and stars shone over the forest. There was nothing else.

  “Osden,” she said, but her voice would not come. She spoke again, louder, a lone bullfrog croak. There was no reply.

  She began to realize that something had gone wrong with Harfex. She was trying to find his head in the darkness, for he had slipped down from the seat, when all at once, in the dead quiet, in the dark rear compartment of the craft, a voice spoke. “Good,” it said.

  It was Eskwana’s voice. She snapped on the interior lights and saw the engineer lying curled up asleep, his hand half over his mouth.

  The mouth opened and spoke. “All well,” it said.

  “Osden—”

  “All well,” said the soft voice from Eskwana’s mouth.

  “Where are you?”

  Silence.

  “Come back.”

  A wind was rising. “I’ll stay here,” the soft voice said.

  “You can’t stay—”

  Silence.

  “You’d be alone, Osden!”

  “Listen.” The voice was fainter, slurred, as if lost in the sound of wind. “Listen. I will you well.”

  She called his name after that, but there was no answer. Eskwana lay still. Harfex lay stiller.

  “Osden!” she cried, leaning out the doorway into the dark, wind-shaken silence of the forest of being. “I will come back. I must get Harfex to the base. I will come back, Osden!”

  Silence and wind in leaves.

  They finished the prescribed survey of World 4470, the eight of them; it took them forty-one days more. Asnanifoil and one or another of the women went into the forest daily at first, searching for Osden in the region around the bare knoll, though Tomiko was not in her heart sure which bare knoll they had landed on that night in the very heart and vortex of terror. They left piles of supplies for Osden, food enough for fifty years, clothing, tents, tools. They did not go on searching; there was no way to find a man alone, hiding, if he wanted to hide, in those unending labyrinths and dim corridors vine-entangled, root-floored. They might have passed within arm’s reach of him and never seen him.

  But he was there; for there was no fear any more.

  Rational, and valuing reason more highly after an intolerable experience of the immortal mindless, Tomiko tried to understand rationally what Osden had done. But the words escaped her control. He had taken the fear into himself, and, accepting, had transcended it. He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self. —But this is not the vocabulary of reason.

  The people of the Survey team walked under the trees, through the vast colonies of life, surrounded by a dreaming silence, a brooding calm that was half aware of them and wholly indifferent to them. There were no hours. Distance was no matter. Had we but world enough and time . . . The planet turned between the sunlight and the great dark; winds of winter and summer blew fine, pale pollen across the quiet seas.

  Gum returned after many surveys, years, and lightyears, to what had several centuries ago been Smeming Port. There were still men there, to receive (incredulously) the team’s reports, and to record its losses: Biologist Harfex, dead of fear, and Sensor Osden, left as a colonist.

  THE STARS BELOW

  The popular notion of science fiction, I guess, is of a story that takes some possible or impossible technological gimmick-of-the-future—Soylent Green, the time machine, the submarine—and makes hay out of it. There certainly are science fiction stories which do just that, but to define science fiction by them is a bit like defining the United States as Kansas.

  Writing “The Stars Below,” I thought I knew what I was doing. As in the early story “The Masters,” I was telling a story not about a gimmick or device or hypothesis, but about science itself—the idea of science. And about what happens to the idea of science when it meets utterly opposed and powerful ideas, embodied in government, as when seventeenth-century astronomy ran up against the Pope, or genetics in the 1930s ran up against Stalin. But all this was cast as a psychomyth, a story outside real time, past or future, in part to generalize it, and in part because I was also using science as a synonym for art. What happens to the creative mind when it is driven underground?

  That was the question, and I thought I knew my answer. It all seemed straightforward, a mere allegory, really. But you don’t go exploring the places underground all that easily. The symbols you thought were simple equivalences, signs, come alive, and take on meanings you did not intend and cannot explain. Long after I wrote the story I came on a passage in Jung’s On the Nature of the Psyche: “We would do well to think of ego-consciousness
as being surrounded by a multitude of little luminosities. . . . Introspective intuitions . . . capture the state of the unconscious: The star-strewn heavens, stars reflected in dark water, nuggets of gold or golden sand scattered in black earth.” And he quotes from an alchemist, “Seminate aurum in terram albam foliatam”—the precious metal strewn in the layers of white clay.

  Perhaps this story is not about science, or about art, but about the mind, my mind, any mind, that turns inward to itself.

  The wooden house and outbuildings caught fire fast, blazed up, burned down, but the dome, built of lathe and plaster above a drum of brick, would not burn. What they did at last was heap up the wreckage of the telescopes, the instruments, the books and charts and drawings, in the middle of the floor under the dome, pour oil on the heap, and set fire to that. The flames spread to the wooden beams of the big telescope frame and to the clockwork mechanisms. Villagers watching from the foot of the hill saw the dome, whitish against the green evening sky, shudder and turn, first in one direction then in the other, while a black and yellow smoke full of sparks gushed from the oblong slit: an ugly and uncanny thing to see.

  It was getting dark, stars were showing in the east. Orders were shouted. The soldiers came down the road in single file, dark men in dark harness, silent.

  The villagers at the foot of the hill stayed on after the soldiers had gone. In a life without change or breadth a fire is as good as a festival. They did not climb the hill, and as the night grew full dark they drew closer together. After a while they began to go back to their villages. Some looked back over their shoulders at the hill, where nothing moved. The stars turned slowly behind the black beehive of the dome, but it did not turn to follow them.

  About an hour before daybreak a man rode up the steep zigzag, dismounted by the ruins of the workshops, and approached the dome on foot. The door had been smashed in. Through it a reddish haze of light was visible, very dim, coming from a massive support-beam that had fallen and had smoldered all night inward to its core. A hanging, sour smoke thickened the air inside the dome. A tall figure moved there and its shadow moved with it, cast upward on the murk. Sometimes it stooped, or stopped, then blundered slowly on.