The Compass Rose

by Ursula K LeGuin

  It was the trouble in the State of Australia that precipitated the Government crisis. Some Psychometric Bureau officials accused the Australian Evaluators of actually falsifying Test returns, but that is impossible since all the computers are linked to the World Government Central Computer Bank in Keokuk. Dr. Speakie suspected that the Australian Evaluators had been falsifying the Test itself, and insisted that they themselves all be tested immediately. Of course he was right. It had been a conspiracy, and the suspiciously low Australian Test scores had resulted from the use of a false Test. Many of the conspirators tested higher than 80 when forced to take the genuine Test! The State Government in Canberra had been unforgivably lax. If they had just admitted it everything would have been all right. But they got hysterical, and moved the State Government to a sheep station in Queensland, and tried to withdraw from the World Government. (Dr. Speakie said this was a typical mass psychosis: reality evasion, followed by fugue and autistic withdrawal.) Unfortunately the Presidium seemed to be paralysed. Australia seceded on the day before the President and Presidium were due to take their monthly Test, and probably they were afraid of overstraining their SQ with agonising decisions. So the Psychometric Bureau volunteered to handle the episode. Dr. Speakie himself flew on the plane with the H-bombs, and helped to drop the information leaflets. He never lacked personal courage.

  When the Australian incident was over, it turned out that most of the Presidium, including President Singh, had scored over 50. So the Psychometric Bureau took over their functions temporarily. Even on a long-term basis this made good sense, since all the problems now facing the world Government had to do with administering and evaluating the Test, training the Staff, and providing full self-sufficiency structuration to all Asylums.

  What this meant in personal terms was that Dr. Speakie, as Chief of the Psychometric Bureau, was now Interim President of the United States of the World. As his personal secretary I was, I will admit it, just terribly proud of him. But he never let it go to his head.

  He was so modest. Sometimes he used to say to people, when he introduced me, “This is Mary Ann, my secretary,” he’d say with a little twinkle, “and if it wasn’t for her I’d have been scoring over 50 long ago!”

  There were times, as the World SQ scores rose and rose, that I would become a little discouraged. Once the week’s Test figures came in on the readout, and the average score was 71. I said, “Doctor, there are moments I believe the whole world is going insane!”

  But he said, “Look at it this way, Mary Ann. Look at those people in the Asylums—3.1 billion inmates now, and 1.8 billion staff—but look at them. What are they doing? They’re pursuing their therapy, doing rehabilitation work on the farms and in the factories, and striving all the time, too, to help each other towards mental health. The preponderant inverse sanity quotient is certainly very high at the moment; they’re mostly insane, yes. But you have to admire them. They are fighting for mental health. They will—they will win through!” And then he dropped his voice and said as if to himself, gazing out the window and bouncing just a little on the balls of his feet, “If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t go on.”

  And I knew he was thinking of his wife.

  Mrs. Speakie had scored 88 on the very first American Universal Test. She had been in the Greater Los Angeles Territory Asylum for years now.

  Anybody who still thinks Dr. Speakie wasn’t sincere should think about that for a mintue! He gave up everything for his belief.

  And even when the Asylums were all running quite well, and the epidemics in South Africa and the famines in Texas and the Ukraine were under control, still the workload on Dr. Speakie never got any lighter, because every month the personnel of the Psychometric Bureau got smaller, since some of them always flunked their monthly Test and were committed to Bethesda. I never could keep any of my secretarial staff any more for longerthan a month or two. It was harder and harder to find replacements, too, because most sane young people volunteered for Staff work in the Asylums, since life was much easier and more sociable inside the Asylums than outside. Everything so convenient, and lots of friends and acquaintances! I used to positively envy those girls! But I knew where my job was.

  At least it was much less hectic here in the U.N. Building, or the Psychometry Tower as it had been renamed long ago. Often there wouldn’t be anybody around the whole building all day long but Dr. Speakie and myself, and maybe Bill the janitor (Bill scored 32 regular as clockwork every quarter). All the restaurants were closed, in fact most of Manhattan was closed, but we had fun picnicking in the old General Assembly Hall. And there was always the odd call from Buenos Aires or Reykjavik, asking Dr. Speakie’s advice as Interim President about some problem, to break the silence.

  But last November 8, I will never forget the date, when Dr. Speakie was dictating the Referendum for World Economic Growth for the next five-year period, he suddenly interrupted himself. “By the way, Mary Ann,” he said, “how was your last score?”

  We had taken the Test two days before, on the sixth. We always took the Test every first Monday. Dr. Speakie never would have dreamed of excepting himself from Universal Testing regulations.

  “I scored 12,” I said, before I thought how strange it was of him to ask. Or, not just to ask, because we often mentioned our scores to each other; but to ask then, in the middle of executing important world government business.

  “Wonderful,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re wonderful, Mary Ann! Down two from last month’s Test, aren’t you?”

  “I’m always between 10 and 14,” I said. “Nothing new about that, Doctor.”

  “Some day,” he said, and his face took on the expression it had when he gave his great speech about the Asylums, “some day, this world of ours will be governed by men fit to govern it. Men whose SQ score is Zero. Zero, Mary Ann!”

  “Well, my goodness, Doctor,” I said jokingly—his intensity almost alarmed me a little—“even you never scored lower than 3, and you haven’t done that for a year or more now!”

  He stared at me almost as if he didn’t see me. It was quite uncanny. “Some day,” he said in just the same way, “nobody in the world will have a Quotient higher than 50. Some day, nobody in the world will have a Quotient higher than 30! Higher than 10! The Therapy will be perfected. I was only the diagnostician. But the Therapy will be perfected! The cure will be found! Some day!” And he went on staring at me, and then he said, “Do you know what my score was on Monday?”

  “7,” I guessed promptly. The last time he had told me his score it had been 7.

  “92,” he said.

  I laughed, because he seemed to be laughing. He had always had a puckish sense of humor. But I thought we really should get back to the World Economic Growth Plan, so I said laughingly, “That really is a very bad joke, Doctor!”

  “92,” he said, “and you don’t believe me, Mary Ann, but that’s because of the cantaloupe.”

  I said, “What cantaloupe, Doctor?” and that was when he jumped across his desk and began to try to bite through my jugular vein.

  I used a judo hold and shouted to Bill the janitor, and when he came I called a robo-ambulance to take Dr. Speakie to Bethesda Asylum.

  That was six months ago. I visit Dr. Speakie every Saturday. It is very sad. He is in the McLean Area, which is the Violent Ward, and every time he sees me he screams and foams. But I do not take it personally. One should never take mental ill health personally. When the Therapy is perfected he will be completely rehabilitated. Meanwhile, I just hold on here. Bill keeps the floors clean, and I run the World Government. It really isn’t as difficult as you might think.

  Small Change

  “Small change,” my aunt said as I put the obol on her tongue. “I’ll need more than that where I’m going.”

  It is true that the change was very small. She looked exactly as she had looked a few hours before, except that she was not breathing.

  “Goodbye, Aunt,” I said.

  “I’
m not going yet!” she snapped. I always tried her patience. “There are rooms in this house I’ve never even opened the door of!”

  I did not know what she was talking about. Our house has two rooms.

  “This obol tastes funny,” she said after a long silence. “Where did you get it?”

  I did not want to tell her that it was a good-luck piece, a copper sequin, not money though it was round like a coin, which I had carried for a year or more in my pocket, ever since I picked it up by the gate of the bricklayer’s yard. I had rubbed it clean, of course, but my aunt had a keen tongue, and it was trodden mud, dog turds, brick dust, and the inside of my pocket that she was tasting, along with the dry-blood taste of copper. I pretended that I had not understood her question.

  “A wonder you had it at all,” my aunt said. “If you have a penny in your pocket after a month without me, I’ll be surprised. Poor thing!” She would have sighed if she had been breathing. I had not known that she would continue to worry about me after she died. I began to cry.

  “That’s good,” my aunt said with satisfaction. “Just don’t keep it up too long. I’m not going far, now. I just want very much to find out what room that door leads to.”

  She looked younger when she got up, younger than she was when I was born. She went across the room lightly and opened a door I had not known was there.

  I heard her say in a pleased, surprised voice, “Lila!” Lila was the name of her sister, my mother.

  “For goodness’ sake, Lila,” my aunt said, “you haven’t been waiting in here for eleven years?”

  I could not hear what my mother said.

  “I’m very sorry about leaving the girl,” my aunt said. “I did what I could, I tried my best. She’s a good girl. But what will become of her now!”

  My aunt never cried, and now she had no tears; but her anxiety over me made me cry again in alarm and self-pity.

  My mother came out of that new room in the form of a lacewing fly and saw me crying. Tears taste salt to the living but sweet to the dead, and they have a taste for sweets, at first. I did not know all that, then. I was just glad to have my mother with me even as a tiny fly. It was a gladness the size of a fly.

  That was all there was left of my mother in the house, and she had got what she wanted; so my aunt went on.

  The room she was in was large and rather shadowy, lighted only by a skylight, like a storeroom. Along one wall stood distaffs full of spun flax, in a row, and in the place where the light fell from the skylight stood a loom. My aunt had been a notable spinster and weaver all her life, and was sorely tempted now by those rolls of fine, even thread, as well spun as any she had ever spun herself; the loom was warped, and there lay the shuttle ready. But linen weaving is a careful art. If she began a shroud now she would be at it for a long time, and much as she wanted a proper shroud, she never had been one to start a job and then drop it unfinished. So it was that she kept worrying about what would become of me. But she had already made up her mind to leave the housework undone (since housework is never done anyhow), and now she admitted that she must let other people see to her winding sheet. She hoped she could trust me to choose a clean sheet, at least, and a well-patched one. But she could not resist picking up the end thread of one of the distaffs and feeding out a length between her thumb and finger to test it for evenness and strength; and she kept the thread running between thumb and finger as she walked on.

  It was well that she did so, as the new room opened onto a corridor along which were many doorways, each one leading to other halls and rooms, a maze in which she would certainly have lost her way but for the thread of flax.

  The rooms were clean, a little dusty, and unfurnished. In one of them my aunt found a toy lying on the floor, a wooden horse. It was crudely carved, the forelegs all of a piece and the hind legs the same, a kind of a two-legged horse with round, flat eyes, which she thought she remembered, though she was not sure.

  In another long, narrow room many unused kitchen tools and pans lay on a counter, and three horn buttons in a row.

  At the end of a long corridor into which she was drawn by a gleam or a reflection at the far end, there stood an engine of some kind, which was certainly nothing my aunt had ever seen before.

  In one small room with no skylight an intense, pungent smell hung in the air, filling up the room like a living creature caught in it. My aunt left that room hurriedly, upset.

  Though her curiosity had been roused by finding all these rooms she had not known in her house, her explorations, and the silence, brought on her a sense of oppression and unease. She stood for a moment outside the door of the room where the strong smell was, making up her mind. That never took her long. She began to follow the thread back, winding it about the fingers of her left hand as she took it up. This process needed more attention than the paying out, and lifting her eyes from a tangle in the thread she was puzzled to find herself in a room which she did not recall passing through, but could hardly have crossed without noticing, for it was very large. The walls were of a beautiful fine-grained stone of a pale grey hue, in which certain figures like astrologers’ charts of the constellations, fine lines connecting stars or clusters of stars, were inlaid in gold wire. The ceiling was light and high, the floor of worn, dark marble. It was like a church, my aunt thought, but not a religious church (that is what she thought). The patterns on the walls were like the illustrations in books of learning, and the room itself was like the hall of the great library in the city; there were no books, but the place was majestic and reposeful, having about it a collected stillness very pleasant to the spirit of my aunt. She was tired of walking, and decided to rest there.

  She sat down, since there was no furniture, on the floor in the corner nearest the door to which the thread had led her. My aunt was a woman who liked a wall at her back. The invasions had left her uneasy in open spaces, always looking over her shoulder. Though who could hurt her now? as she said to herself, sitting down!! But, as she said to herself, you never can be sure.

  The line of gold wire on the walls led her eye along them as she sat resting. Some of the figures they made seemed familiar. She began to think that these figures or patterns were a map of the maze which she was in, the wires representing passages and the stars, rooms; or perhaps the stars represented the doors into rooms, the walls of which were not outlined. She could pretty certainly retrace the first corridor back to the room of the distaffs; but on the far side of that, where the old part of our house ought to be, the patterns continued, looking a good deal more like the familiar constellations of the sky in early winter. She was not certain she understood the map at all, but she continued to study it, to let her mind follow the lines from star to star, until she began to see her way. She got up then, and went back, pursuing the flaxen thread and taking it up in her left hand, till she came back.

  There I was in the same room still crying. My mother was gone. Lacewing flies wait years to be born, but they live only a day. The undertaker’s men were just leaving, and I had to follow them, so my aunt came along to her funeral, though she did not want to leave the house. She tried to bring her ball of thread with her, but it broke as she crossed the threshold. I could hear her swear under her breath, the way she always did when she broke a thread or spilled the sugar—“Damn!” in a whisper.

  Neither of us enjoyed the funeral at all. My aunt grew panicky as they began to throw the dirt back into the grave. She cried aloud, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”—which frightened me so much that I thought it was myself speaking, myself suffocating, and I fell down. People had to help me get up, and help me get home. I was so ashamed and confused among them that I lost my aunt

  One of the neighbors, who had never been particularly pleasant to us, took pity on me, and behaved with much kindness. She talked so wisely to me that I got up the courage to ask her, “Where is my aunt? Will she come back?” But she did not know, and only said things meant to comfort me. I am not as clever as most people, but I knew
there was no comfort for me.

  The neighbor made sure I could look after myself, and that evening she sent one of her children over with dinner in a dish for me. I ate it, and it was very good. I had not eaten anything while my aunt was away in the other part of the house.

  At night, after dark, I lay down all alone in the bedroom. At first I felt well and cheerful, because of the food I had eaten, and I pretended my aunt was there sleeping in the same room, the way it had always been. Then I got frightened, and the fright grew in the darkness.

  My aunt came up out of the floor in the middle of the room. The red tiles humped up and cracked apart. Her hair and her head pushed through the tiles, and then her body. She looked very dark, like dirt, and she was much smaller than she had been.

  “Let me be!” she said.

  I was too terrified to speak.

  “Let me go!” my aunt said. But it was not truly my aunt; it was only an old part of her that had come back underground from the graveyard, because I had been wanting her. I did not like that part of her, or want it there. I cried, “Go away! Go back!” and hid my head in my arms.

  My aunt made a little creaking sound like a wicker basket. I kept my eyes hidden so long that I nearly fell asleep. When I looked, no one was there, or only a kind of darker place in the air, and the tiles were not cracked apart. I went to sleep.