The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Guennar stepped back. It was as if a light went out, as his face went into shadow. “No,” he said. “They will burn out my eyes.”

  “Leave him be,” said Per, and set the heavy ore-cart moving towards the shaft.

  “Look where I told you,” Guennar said to Bran. “The mine is not dead. Look with your own eyes.”

  “Aye. I’ll come with you and see. Good night!”

  “Good night,” said the astronomer, and turned back to the side-tunnel as they went on. He carried no lamp or candle; they saw him one moment, darkness the next.

  In the morning he was not there to meet them. He did not come.

  Bran and Hanno sought him, idly at first, then for one whole day. They went as far down as they dared, and came at last to the entrance of the caves, and entered, calling sometimes, though in the great caverns even they, miners all their lives, dared not call aloud because of the terror of the endless echoes in the dark.

  “He has gone down,” Bran said. “Down farther. That’s what he said. Go farther, you must go farther, to find the light.”

  “There is no light,” Hanno whispered. “There was never light here. Not since the world’s creation.”

  But Bran was an obstinate old man, with a literal and credulous mind; and Per listened to him. One day the two went to the place the astronomer had spoken of, where a great vein of hard light granite that cut down through the darker rock had been left untouched, fifty years ago, as barren stone. They re-timbered the roof of the old stope where the supports had weakened, and began to dig, not into the white rock but down, beside it; the astronomer had left a mark there, a kind of chart or symbol drawn with candle-black on the stone floor. They came on silver ore a foot down, beneath the shell of quartz; and under that—all eight of them working now—the striking picks laid bare the raw silver, the veins and branches and knots and nodes shining among broken crystals in the shattered rock, like stars and gatherings of stars, depth below depth without end, the light.

  THE FIELD OF VISION

  I hardly know what to say about “The Field of Vision”; it is a sort of sublimated temper tantrum. An indignant Letter to the Editor. A raspberry.

  Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.

  I saw Eternity the other night

  Like a great Ring of pure and endless light. . . .

  —Henry Vaughan, 1621-1695

  Reports from Psyche XIV came in regularly, all routine, until just before their return window opened. Then all at once Commander Rogers radioed that they had left surface, had rejoined the ship, and were commencing departure procedures—82 hours 18 minutes early. Houston of course demanded explanations, but Psyche’s answers were erratic. The 220-second answer lag didn’t help. Psyche kept breaking contact. Once Rogers said, “We have got to bring her home now if we’re going to do it at all,” apparently in answer to Houston’s questions, but the next thing was Hughes asking for a reading, and then something about a dosage. The sun was noisy and reception was very bad. The voice transmission ceased without sign-off.

  The automatic information feed from the ship continued. Departure was normal. Normal reports came in during the twenty-six days of flight which the astronauts spent in drugged sleep on HKL and I.V. hookups. There was no medical monitor on Psyche missions. The only link with the crew was voice contact. When they did not call in on Day 2, the long tension at Houston tightened to despair.

  The onboard automatics, directed by the ground crew, had just about established Psyche’s re-entry course when the dead speakers suddenly said in Hughes’s voice, “Houston, can you give me readings. Optical interference here.” They tried to direct him, but the one attempt he made at a manual correction was disastrous, and took ground control five hours to compensate. They told him hands off, they’d bring in the ship. Almost immediately after that they lost voice contact again.

  The great pale parachutes opened above the grey Pacific, roses slowly falling out of heaven. The speed-burnt ship screamed steam, plunging; popped back up and rocked, quiet, on the long deep swells. Ground control had done a beautiful job. She was down within a half-kilo of the California. Helicopters hovered, rafts assembled, the ship was stabilized, the hatch was opened. Nobody scrambled out.

  They went in and brought them out.

  Commander Rogers was in his flight seat, still strapped down and plugged into the HKL and I.V.s. He had been dead about ten days, and it was clear why the others had not opened his suit.

  Captain Temski seemed physically unhurt, but dazed and bewildered. He did not speak, or respond to instructions. They had to manhandle him to haul him out of the ship, though he put up no active resistance.

  Dr Hughes was in a state of collapse, but fully conscious; he appeared to be blind.

  “Please . . .”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Yes! Please let me have the blindfold.”

  “Do you see this light I’m showing? What color is it, Dr Hughes?”

  “All colors, white, it’s too bright.”

  “Will you point towards it, please?”

  “It’s everywhere. It’s too bright.”

  “The room’s quite dark, Dr Hughes. Now, will you open your eyes again, please.”

  “It isn’t dark.”

  “Mmmh. Possible supersensitivity here. All right now, how about that? Dark enough for you?”

  “Make it dark!”

  “No, keep your hands down, please. Take it easy. All right, we’ll put the compresses back on.”

  The struggling man relaxed as soon as his eyes were covered, and lay still, breathing hard. His narrow face, framed in a month’s growth of dark beard, was oiled with sweat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “We’ll try again later on when you’ve rested.”

  “Will you open your eyes, please. The room’s quite dark.”

  “Why do you tell me that when it’s not dark?”

  “Dr Hughes, I can hardly make out your face; I’ve got the faintest red illumination on my scope—nothing else. Can you see me?”

  “No! I can’t see for the light!”

  The doctor increased the illumination until he could see Hughes’s face, the clenched jaw, the open, dazzled, frightened eyes.

  “There, does that make it any darker?” he asked with the sarcasm of helplessness.

  “No!” Hughes shut his eyes; he had gone dead white. “Get dizzy,” he muttered, “the whirling,” then he gasped for breath and began to vomit.

  Hughes was unmarried and had no immediate kin. His closest friend was known to be Bernard Decelis. They had trained together; Decelis had been specialist on Psyche XII, the mission that had discovered the City of Mars, as Hughes was on XIV. They flew Decelis to the debriefing station in Pasadena and instructed him to go in and talk with his friend. The conversation was of course recorded.

  D.Hullo, Gerry. Decelis.

  H.Barnie?

  D.How you doing?

  H.Fine. You been OK?

  D.Sure. No picnic, was it?

  H.How’s Gloria?

  D.Fine, just fine.

  H.She got past “Aunt Rhody” yet?

  D.[laughs] Oh, Christ, yeah. She can play “Greensleeves” now. At least she calls it “Greensleeves”

  H.What have they got you in this dump for?

  D.To see you.

  H.Wish I could return the compliment.

  D.You will. Listen. I’ve been assured by three different oculists, or whatever the hell they are, opthamollywhoggers, eye-doctors here, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes. Three opthamacadamizers and a neurologist, in fact. It’s a sort of chorus they have. But they sure as hell seem sure of it.

  H.So what’s wrong is my brain, evidently.

  D.In the sense of a crossed connection, maybe.

  H.What about Joe Temski?
<
br />   D.I don’t know. Haven’t seen him.

  H.What did they tell you about him?

  D.They didn’t have a chorus line worked out for him. Just said he’s inclined to be withdrawn.

  H.Withdrawn! Jesus, I’ll say so. Like a rock is withdrawn.

  D.Temski? That joker?

  H.It started with him.

  D.What did?

  H.At the site. He stopped answering.

  D.What happened?

  H.Just that. He stopped answering. Stopped talking. Stopped noticing. Dwight thought it was cafard. Is that what they’re still calling it?

  D.It’s mentioned as one possibility. Was there anything special happened, there at the site?

  H.We found the room.

  D.The room, yeah. That all came back on your reports. I’ve seen them, and some of the holos you brought back with you. Fantastic. What the hell is it, Gerry?

  H.I don’t know.

  D.Is it a construct?

  H.I don’t know. What’s the whole City?

  D.It was built, made; it must have been.

  H.How do you know, how can you tell, when you don’t know what made it? Is a seashell “made”? If you didn’t know, if you didn’t have any background and couldn’t assume any likeness, and you looked at a seashell and a ceramic ashtray, could you tell, could you say which was “made”? And what for? What does it mean? Or what about a ceramic seashell? Or a paperwasp’s nest? Or a geode?

  D.Yeah, OK. But what about those things, that . . . arrangement that you call “pigeonholes” in the reports? I saw the holos. What did you make of them?

  H.What did you make of them?

  D.I don’t know. They’re weird. I thought of running the spatial arrangements through a computer, looking for meaningful pattern. . . . You don’t think much of that.

  H.No. Fine. Only what are you going to program for “meaning”?

  D.Mathematical relationships. Any kind of geometrical pattern, regularity, code. I don’t know. What was the place like, Gerry?

  H.I don’t know.

  D.You were in there a lot?

  H.All the time, after we found it.

  D.That’s where you noticed this kind of eye trouble you’ve got? How did it start?

  H.Things going out of focus. Like eye strain. It was worse outside the room. Came on over several days. I could still make things out all right when we were taking the ML up to the ship. But getting worse. There’d be these flashes of light, left my depth perception all screwed up, I’d get dizzy. Dwight and I set up the course, one or the other of us was functioning most of the time. But he was getting kind of wild. Didn’t want to use the radio, wouldn’t touch the onboard computer.

  D.What was . . . wrong with him?

  H.I don’t know. When I told him about my eyes he said he’d been having something like shaking fits. I said we’d better get the hell up to the ship while we could. He said OK, because Joe was really beginning to not function. Before we even launched he started having some kind of seizures, like epilepsy—Dwight, I mean. When he came out of one he was shaky, but he seemed rational. He took us up OK, but as soon as we docked in he went into another fit, and they kept getting longer. He started hallucinating in between them. I gave him some tranquillizers and strapped him in; it was wearing him out. When I took the sleep, I don’t know, he could have been dead already then.

  D.No, he died in the sleep. About ten days out from Earth.

  H.They didn’t tell me that.

  D.There wasn’t anything you could have done, Gerry.

  H.I don’t know. Those attacks he had, they were like overloads. Like all his fuses blew. Burned him out. He talked, while he was in them. Sort of in bursts, like barking—as if he was trying to say a whole sentence at once. Epileptics don’t talk, do they, when they’re having a seizure?

  D.I don’t know. Epilepsy’s so well controlled now you don’t hear much about it. They catch the tendency, and cure it first. If Rogers had had the tendency . . .

  H.Yeah. He never would have been in the program. Christ, he’d had six months in space.

  D.What had you had—six days?

  H.Like you. One Moon hop.

  D.It isn’t that, then. Do you think . . .

  H.What?

  D.Some kind of virus?

  H.Space plague? Martian fever? Mysterious ancient spores madden astronauts?

  D.All right, it sounds dumb. But look, the room had been sealed. And it does sound like all of you—

  H.Dwight gets a cortical overcharge, Joe goes catatonic, I start seeing things. What’s the connection?

  D.Nervous system.

  H.Why different symptoms in each of us?

  D.Well, drugs affect people differently—

  H.Do you think we found some kind of God damned Martian psychogenic mushrooms in there? There isn’t anything there, it’s dead, like all the rest of Mars. You know, you’ve been there! There aren’t any God damned germs or viruses, there’s no life there, no life.

  D.But there may have been—

  H.What makes you think so?

  D.The room you found. The City we found.

  H.City! For Christ’s sake, Barnie, you talk like some damned pop journalist, you know damned well the whole thing is a set of mud concretions for all we can tell. There’s no way to tell. It’s too old, conditions are too different, we have no context. We don’t understand, we can’t understand, it’s something the human mind is outside of. Cities, rooms, all that—we’re just analogizing, trying to make sense in our terms. But it’s not in our terms. There is no sense. I can see that now. That’s the only thing I can see!

  D.See what, Gerry?

  H.What I see when I open my eyes!

  D.What?

  H.Everything that isn’t there and doesn’t make sense. Oh—I—

  D.Here, come on. Take it easy. Look, it’ll be OK. It’s going to be OK, Gerry, you’ll be OK.

  H.[unclear] light, and the [unclear] try to see what I touch and I can’t, I don’t understand and I can’t [unclear]

  D.Hang on. I’m right here. Take it easy, old man.

  Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination. His performance had been solid and his behavior irreproachable; but now it was frequently recalled that he was, after all, an intellectual.

  Temski was harder to explain. He was a crack test pilot, an Air Force captain, and a baseball fan, but now his behavior was even more aberrant than Hughes’s.

  All Temski did was sit. He was capable of looking after himself, and did so. That is, when he was hungry and food was present, he ate some with his fingers; when he had to relieve himself, he went to a corner and did so; when he was sleepy, he lay down on the floor and slept. The rest of the time he sat. He was in good physical condition and quite calm. Nothing said to him produced the slightest reaction, nor did he take any interest in anything that went on. His wife was brought in to see him in hopes of producing a response. She was taken away weeping after five minutes.

  Since Temski wouldn’t respond, and Rogers, being dead, couldn’t respond, it was quite natural to look upon Hughes as being, somehow, responsible.

  There was nothing wrong with him except a case of something like hysterical blindness, so it was to be expected that he should answer questions rationally and explain precisely what had happened. This, however, he could not, or would not, do.

  A psychiatric consultant was brought in, a distinguished New York doctor called Shapir. He was requested to work with both Temski and Hughes. It was of course unthinkable to admit that the mission had been a failure (the word “disaster” was not even mentioned), but a couple of rumors had leaked out to the press despite all security precautions. Irresponsible journalists demanded to know why the crew of Psyche XIV was being held incommunicado, and claimed the “right” of the American people to “know,” etc. It
had been necessary to issue a statement concerning a new health test being run on astronauts who had spent over fifteen days in space, due to Commander Rogers’s unexpected and tragic death from heart failure, and to have a whole new series of articles written for the papers concerning plans for a “Little America” dome city on Mars, to maintain a positive attitude in the public. The real people of course knew that the rest of the Psyche program was in jeopardy; and they instructed Dr Shapir to diagnose and cure the astronauts with all deliberate speed.

  Shapir talked with Hughes for half an hour about the food in the hospital, Cal Tech, and the latest Chinese report on their Alpha Centauri probe, all very relaxed and trivial. Then he said, “What is it you see, when you open your eyes?”

  Hughes, who was up and dressed now, sat silent for a while. Opaque goggles covered his eyes entirely, giving him the arrogant, staring look of people who affect dark glasses. “Nobody’s asked that,” he said.

  “Didn’t the oculists?”

  “Yes, I guess Kray did. Early on. Before they decided I was a mental case.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “It’s hard to describe. The point is, it’s indescribable. At first it was things going out of focus, going transparent, going away. Then the light. Too much light. Like overexposing a film, bleaching everything out. But with that, a kind of whirling. Changing positions and relationships, changing perspectives, constant transformation. It made me get dizzy. My eyes kept sending signals to my inner ears, I guess. Like that inner-ear disease, only in reverse. Doesn’t it foul up your spatial orientation?”

  “Ménière’s syndrome, I think it’s called, yes, it does. Especially on stairs and slopes.”

  “It’s as if I was looking from a great height, or . . . up at a great height. . . .”

  “Heights ever worry you?”

  “Hell no. They don’t even mean anything to me. What’s up and down, in space? No, see, I’m not giving you the picture. There is no picture. I’ve been trying to look more, to learn to . . . how to see . . . it’s not much good.”