The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  There was a pause. “That takes courage,” said Shapir.

  “What do you mean?” the astronaut said sharply.

  “Well . . . To have the sensory input which is most important to the conscious mind—sight—reporting non-existent and incomprehensible things, in flagrant contradiction with all other sensory input—your touch, your hearing, your sense of balance, and so on—to have that going on, every time you try to open your eyes, and not only to live with it but to attempt to investigate it . . . It doesn’t sound easy.”

  “So mostly I keep my eyes shut,” Hughes said, dour. “Like a damned see-no-evil monkey.”

  “When you do have your eyes open, and you look towards some object you know is there—your own hand, for instance—what do you see?”

  “‘A blooming, buzzing confusion.’”

  “William James,” Shapir said with satisfaction. “What was he talking about—how a baby perceives the world, eh?” He had a pleasant voice with a mild, glancing quality to it, non-percussive; one could not imagine him scolding or yelling. He nodded several times, thinking out the implications of what Hughes had said. “To learn how to see, you said. To learn. That’s how you feel about it?”

  Hughes hesitated, then said with a sudden, marked increase of trust, “I have to. What else can I do? Apparently I’m never going to be able to—to see the way I used to, the way other people do, again. But I still do see. Only I don’t understand what I see, it doesn’t make sense. There are no outlines, no distinctions, even between nearer and farther. There is something there—only I can’t say that, because there aren’t any things. No forms. Instead of forms, I see transformations—transfigurations. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “I think it does,” Shapir said, “only it’s enormously difficult to put a direct experience into words. And when the experience is new, unique, overwhelming . . .”

  “And irrational. That’s it.” Hughes spoke now with real gratitude. “If only I could show it to you,” he said wistfully.

  The two astronauts were being kept on the tenth floor of a big military hospital in Maryland now. They were not permitted to leave that floor, and anyone who visited it still spent ten days in quarantine before he rejoined the outer world: the Martian plague theory was currently on top. At Shapir’s insistence, Hughes was allowed to go up to the roof garden of the hospital (after which the elevator was elaborately sterilized and roped off for three days).

  They demanded that Hughes wear a surgical mask; and Shapir had asked him not to wear his goggles. Docile, he went up the elevator with his mouth and nose covered, his eyes uncovered, but tightly shut.

  The change from the dusk of the elevator to the hot smoggy sunlight of July on the open roof did not, as far as Shapir could see, affect those shut eyes. Hughes did not screw them tighter against the flooding light, though he raised his face to it as if he felt the heat pleasant on his skin, and took a deep breath through the binding gauze.

  “I haven’t been outside since March,” he said.

  It was true, of course. He had been in a spacesuit or in a hospital room, breathing canned or conditioned air.

  “Have you got your compass bearings?” Shapir asked.

  “Not the faintest. It makes me feel blinder, being outdoors. Afraid to walk off the edge.” Hughes had refused assistance coming through the corridors and in the elevator, feeling his way adeptly with his hands, and now despite his joke about falling off he began to explore the roof garden. He was exhilarated: an active man released from long confinement. Shapir watched him, brooding. The low furniture was a hazard to him but he learned at once how to feel for it; he had tactile intelligence; there was grace in his movements, even as he blundered in blindness.

  “Will you open your eyes?” Shapir said in his glancing, reluctant voice.

  Hughes stopped. “All right,” he said; but he turned towards Shapir, and his right hand came up gropingly. Shapir came forward and let that hand take his arm.

  The grip of it tightened, as Hughes opened his eyes. Then Hughes let go, and took a step away, stretching out both his arms. A cry broke from him. He reached forward and upward, his head back, his eyes wide open, staring at the empty sky. “Oh, my God!” he whispered, and dropped, like a man hit by a sledgehammer.

  Psychiatric counselling session, 18 July. S. Shapir, Geraint Hughes.

  S.Hello. Sidney. . . . I won’t stay long. Listen, that wasn’t such a bright idea of mine. The roof. I’m sorry. I had no idea. But no right, either. . . . Would you rather I left?

  H.No.

  S.All right . . . I’m getting stir-crazy myself. Need a good walk. I walk a good deal, usually. About two miles to my office and the same back. Then I add detours. Whatever they say, New York is a beautiful town to walk in. If you know how to pick your route. Listen, I have a queer story about Joe Temski. Not a story, just a queer fact, actually. Did you know that they have written on his record that he is “functionally deaf”?

  H.Deaf?

  S.Yes, deaf. Well, you know, I began to wonder. I go in and talk to Joe, you know, touch him, try to make eye contact, any kind of contact, to get through. No go. I’ve had patients tell me in so many words, “I can’t hear you.” A metaphor. But what if it isn’t a metaphor? It happens sometimes with little kids, they’re called retarded and it turns out they’ve got thirty, sixty, eighty percent hearing dysfunction. Well, maybe Joe really can’t hear me. Just like you can’t see me.

  H.[pause of forty seconds] Do you mean he’s hearing things? Listening?

  S.It’s possible.

  H.[pause of twenty seconds] You can’t shut your ears.

  S.That’s what I thought, too. It could be rough, couldn’t it? Well, what I thought was, what about trying to shut them for him? Put earplugs in his ears.

  H.He still wouldn’t be able to hear you.

  S.No, but he wouldn’t be distracted. If you had to watch your light show all the time, you wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to me or anything else, right? Maybe it’s like that with Joe. Maybe there’s this noise drowning out everything else for him.

  H.[pause of twenty seconds] It would be more than noise.

  S.I don’t suppose you want to talk about . . . on the roof. . . . No, all right.

  H.You’d like to know what I saw, wouldn’t you?

  S.Sure I would. But in your own time.

  H.Yeah, I’ve got so much else to do here besides talk to you. All the books I can read and the beautiful women I can look at. You know damned well I’ll tell you eventually, because I haven’t got anybody else to talk to.

  S.Oh, hell, Geraint. [pause of ten seconds]

  H.Shit. I’m sorry, Sidney. If I didn’t have you to talk to, I’d have cracked completely. I know that. You’re very patient with me.

  S.Whatever you saw, up there, disturbs you. That’s one reason why I want to know what it was. But what the hell, if you can handle it alone, do. That’s the idea, after all. My curiosity is my problem, not yours! Listen. Let’s forget talking. Let me read you this article in Science. Your Colonel Wood gave it to me, said you might be interested. I was. It’s on what they found inside the Argentinian meteorite. The authors are suggesting we go comb the Meteor Belt for remnants of a trans-stellar fleet that came to grief in our solar system about six hundred million years ago. They would have landed on Mars first, of course. Are these guys nuts?

  H.I don’t know. Read the article.

  Temski slept heavily, and it was easy for Shapir to insert ordinary wax plugs like those insomniacs use into his ears while he was asleep. When Temski woke he did nothing unusual at first. He sat up, yawned, stretched, scratched, looked lazily around to see if anything to eat was handy, in that serene way which Shapir privately felt was altogether unlike any psychotic behavior he had ever seen, and in fact unlike any human behavior he had ever seen. Temski reminded him of a healthy, poised, contented, tame animal. Not a chimpanzee; something milder, more contemplative, an orang, maybe.

  But the orang be
gan to feel uncomfortable.

  Temski looked around, left and right, nervous. Perhaps he was not looking but moving his head trying to find the vanished sounds. The lost chord, Shapir thought. Temski grew more and more disturbed and alert. He got up, still turning his head restlessly. He looked across the room. For the first time in seventeen days of daily contact, he saw Shapir.

  His handsome face was now contorted with anxiety or bewilderment.

  “Where,” he said, “where—”

  His hands, groping at his ears to find the cause of silence, found the earplugs and removed one. That was enough. “Ah,” he said, and stood still. His eyes were still directed towards Shapir, but he did not see him. His face relaxed.

  Later attempts were more successful. Though bewildered at first, Temski was cooperative while artificially deafened, and responded readily to Shapir’s attempts to communicate with him by touch, by sign, and finally by writing. After the fifth such session, Temski consented to longer sessions involving the use of a drug which would deaden his auditory nerve endings for about five hours at a time.

  During the second of these long periods he asked to see Hughes. Shapir had already been instructed to let the two astronauts talk together if possible; there was a feeling that this might elicit more information, if they talked freely together. It was necessary for Hughes to write, since Temski was artificially deafened; as he knew touch typing he carried on his part of the dialogue on a portable typewriter. Not all the material found in the wastebasket, however, could be successfully collated in to the tape of Temski’s spoken conversation. The two men mostly discussed the return journey and Commander Rogers’s illness and death, which Temski could not recall; Hughes described all this as he had done before without new information. They did not talk about the “room” (Site D) or their respective disabilities, except as follows:

  T.It’s not inside, is it?

  H.If it was, earplugs wd improve yr reception

  T.It’s real, then.

  H.Hell yes

  T.See, when they first stuck those plugs in my ears, when I woke up and there was this silence, I was really spooked. It took me a long time to come back from where I’d been. And I didn’t much want to come back. But when Shapir began telling me how long it had been, and I realized this was Earth, you know, that’s what spooked me—I thought, maybe all this has been some sort of, like, hallucination. You know. Jesus, have I been off my chump? That scared me. Like I was two different people. But I began to put it together, to see that it wasn’t a split, but a . . .

  H.Change

  T.Exactly, it changed me, it had changed me. It’s real. Because when I can hear, that’s what I hear. And when you can see, that’s what you see. Right? In other words, it is real. We have to be artificially blinded and made deaf to not hear it and see it. That’s it, isn’t it?

  [Hughes’s typed responses for the following section were not identifiable in the wastebasket material.]

  H.. . . . . .

  T.Oh, no. Beautiful. It took me a long time, at least I know now it was a long time, to begin to get it. At first it didn’t make any sense, Jesus, it scared the balls off me at first. You or Dwight would say something, and there’d be this kind of chords all around your voice, like rainbows around a prism so you can’t even see the prism—yeah, that’s what it’s like for you, isn’t it? It’s the same, only this is with hearing, it’s like everything turns into this music, only it isn’t music, it’s . . . At first like I said I didn’t know how to hear it. I thought it was something wrong with my suit radio! Jesus! [laughs] I couldn’t follow the patterns, you know, the modulations, like, the transformations. It was all so different. But you learn. The more you listen the more you hear. I wish you could hear it. You know, you tell me it’s two months since we left Mars, and so on, and shit, I believe you, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter—does it, Gerry?

  H.. . . . . .

  T.I wish I could see it, the way you do. It must be tremendous. But I’ll tell you, I’m glad they pull me out of it like this, every day now. I think it’s meant to be that way. I was kind of, I don’t know, swamped, overwhelmed, it’s too much. We’re not built right, not quite strong enough, maybe. At least at first. Can’t take it all at once. What I’d like to try to do while I’m out of touch is try to write some of it down.

  H.. . . . . .

  T.No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t have to be music. See, it isn’t music, that’s just like a way of describing it because it’s beautiful. I think I could get it into words just as well. Maybe better. To say what it means.

  H.. . . . . .

  T.Afraid of what?

  Bernard Decelis and his wife called Hughes every couple of days on the telephone, though they were prevented by the quarantine from coming to see him. On the 27th of July Hughes and Decelis had a significant conversation concerning the so-called room, site D of the Psyche XIV survey. Decelis said, “If I don’t get on the Sixteen team and see that damned place, I’ll flip.”

  “Seeing is believing,” Hughes remarked. He was not as excitable as he had been earlier, tending to be terse and rather bitter.

  “Listen, Gerry. Was there ever machinery in those pigeonholes?”

  “No.”

  “Hah! There’s a definite answer! I thought you wouldn’t assert anything about Site D except its incomprehensibility to the human mind. You softening up?”

  “No. Learning.”

  “Learning what?”

  “How to see.”

  After a pause Decelis asked cautiously, “See what?”

  “Site D. Since it’s all I can see.”

  “You mean, that’s what you—when your eyes are open—”

  “No.” Hughes spoke wearily and with reluctance. “It’s more complex than that. I don’t see Site D. I see . . . the world in the light cast by Site D. . . . A new light. The man you ought to ask is Joe Temski. Or, listen, did you ever run the pigeonholes through Algie, like you said?”

  “I had trouble setting up the program.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” Hughes said with a short laugh. “Send the stuff on up here. I’ll set it up. Blindfolded.”

  Temski came into Hughes’s room, radiant. “Gerry,” he said, “I’ve got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “I’ve got it together. I heard you. No, I wasn’t lip-reading. Say something with your back turned. Go on!”

  “Ptomaine poisoning.”

  “‘Ptomaine poisoning.’ —OK? See, I’m hearing you. But I haven’t lost the music. I’ve got it all together!”

  Blue-eyed and fair, Temski was ordinarily a handsome man; now he was magnificent Hughes could not see him (though the spy camera in the ventilator grille could and did), but he heard the vibration of his voice, and was moved, and frightened.

  “Take off your blinkers, Gerry,” the gentle, vibrant voice said.

  Hughes shook his head.

  “You can’t sit in the dark inside yourself forever. Come out. You can’t choose blindness, Gerry.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Not after you’ve seen the light.”

  “What light?”

  “The light, the word, the truth we have been taught to perceive and to know,” Temski said, with the gentleness of utter certainty, and a warmth in his voice, a warmth like sunlight.

  “Get out,” Hughes said. “Get out, Temski!”

  Twelve weeks had passed since Psyche XIV splashdown. Nobody on the debriefing staff had come down with any symptoms more alarming than boredom. Hughes was no worse, and Temski was now completely recovered. It could be safely assumed that whatever had affected the crew of Psyche XIV, it had not been an infection vectored by a virus, spore, bacterium, or other physical agent. The hypothesis accepted tentatively and with various reservations by the majority, including Dr Shapir, was that something in the arrangement of the elements constituting the “room,” Site D, had, during their prolonged and intense study of the site, caused a degree of brain-wave disruptio
n in all three men, analogous to the brain-function disturbance caused by strobe lights at certain frequencies, etc. Precisely what elements of the “room” were involved was not yet known, though the holographs were being examined intensively by experts. Psyche XV was to make a still more thorough investigation of the site, taking due precautions to protect and monitor the astronauts.

  These suspect elements of Site D were so numerous and so intricately interrelated that it was very hard for a single mind to attempt to arrange or order them. Some Martianologists were sure the peculiar properties of the “room” were only a geological accident, and that all the “room” had to “tell” us was the kind of information furnished so concisely and beautifully by the strata of rocks, the rings of a tree, the lines of a spectrum. Others were as convinced that intelligent beings had built the City, and that in studying it we might learn something of their nature and the way their minds worked—those unimaginable minds of six hundred million years ago (for the radioactive-decay dating of the site was absolutely definite now). The job of doing so, however, was daunting. T. A. Newman of the Smithsonian Institution put it well: “Archaeologists are used to getting a lot of information out of very simple things—potsherds, bits of flint, a wall here, a grave there. But what if all we had of an ancient civilization was a very complicated thing, complicated in more than a technological sense—let’s say, one copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Now let’s assume that the achaeologists who find this copy of Hamlet are not humanoid, don’t have books, don’t have plays, don’t speak, write, or think at all as we do. What are they going to make of that little physical artifact, the evident complexity and purposefulness of it, the repetition of certain elements and the non-repetition of others, the semi-regularity of line lengths, and so on? How are they going to read Hamlet?”

  To those who accepted the “Hamlet theory,” the obvious first step was to employ computers, and a number of them had been set to work analyzing the various elements of Site D: the spacing, size, depth, and configurations of the “pigeonholes,” the proportions of the first, middle, and third “subchambers,” the extraordinary acoustical properties of the “room” as a whole, and so on. None of these programs had as yet produced any sure evidence of conscious planning or rational pattern; none, that is, except the program set up by Decelis and Hughes on NASA’s new Algebraic V, which had certainly got results, though they could not be called rational. Indeed, that print-out had given a shudder to the NASA brass, and a good laugh to those few scientists to whom Decelis had shown it before it was suppressed as being probably a fraud and certainly an embarrassment. The entire print-out read as follows: