The Compass Rose

by Ursula K LeGuin

  “Do you think I never thought of that?” she retorted in silence. “Idiot! Do you think I don’t know the metas are hard on your guts? Didn’t I try fifty different combinations while you were a kid, trying to get rid of the side effects? But it’s not as bad as being allergic to the whole damn planet! You know better than the doctor, do you? Don’t give me that. You’re trying to—” But she broke off the silent dialogue abruptly. Genya was not trying to kill himself. He was not. He would not. He had courage, that one. And brains.

  “All right,” she said to the quiet young man in her mind. “All right! If you’ll stay in the infirmary, under observation—for two weeks, and do exactly what I say—all right, I’ll try it!”

  Because, said another, even quieter voice deep in her, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever you do or don’t do, he will die. This year; next year. Two hours; twenty-four years. The sicklies can’t adjust to this world. And neither can we, neither can we. We weren’t meant to live here, Genya my dear. We weren’t made for this world, nor it for us. We were made of Earth, by Earth, to live on Earth, under the blue sky and the golden sun.

  The dinner gong began to ring. Going into the refectory she met little Shura. The child carried a bunch of the repulsive blackish-purple native weeds, as a child at home would carry a bunch of white daisies, red poppies picked in the fields. Shura’s eyes were teary as usual, but she smiled up at Auntie Doctor. Her lips looked pallid in the red-orange light of sunset through the windows. Everybody’s lips looked pallid. Everybody’s face looked tired, set, stoical, after the long day’s work, as they went into the Settlement dining hall, all together, the three hundred exiles of Ararat on Zion, the eleventh lost tribe.

  He was doing very well. She had to admit it. “You’re doing well,” she said, and he, with his grin, “I told you so!”

  “It could be because you’re not doing anything else,” she said, “smart ass.”

  “Not doing anything? I filed health records for Geza all morning, I played games with Rosie and Moishe for two hours, I’ve been grinding colors all afternoon—say, I need more mineral oil, can I have another litre? It’s a much better pigment vehicle than the vegetable oil.”

  “Sure. But listen. I have something for you better than that. Little Tel Aviv has got their pulp mill going full time. They sent a truck over yesterday with paper—”

  “Paper?”

  “Half a ton of it! I took two hundred sheets for you. It’s in the office.” He was off like a shot, and was into the bundle of paper before she even got there. “Oh, God,” he said, holding up a sheet, “beautiful, it’s beautiful!” And she thought how often she had heard him say that, “beautiful!” of one drab useful thing or another. He didn’t know what beauty was; he’d never seen any. The paper was thick, substantial, greyish, in big sheets, intended to be cut small and used sparingly, of course; but let him have it for his painting. There was little enough else she could give him.

  “When you let me out of here,” Genya said, hugging the unwieldy bundle with both arms, “I’ll go over to Tel Aviv and paint their pulp mill, I’ll immortalise their pulp mill!”

  “You’d better go lie down.”

  “No, listen, I promised Moishe I’d beat him at chess. What’s wrong with him, anyhow?”

  “Rashes, edema.”

  “He’s like me?”

  Miriam shrugged. “He was fine till this year. Puberty triggered something. Not unusual with allergic symptoms.”

  “What is allergy, anyhow?”

  “Well, call it a failure of adaptation. Back home, people used to feed babies cows’ milk, from bottles. Some of the babies could adapt to it, but some got rashes, breathing trouble, colic. The cow’s key didn’t fit their metabolic lock. Well, New Zion’s protein keys don’t fit our locks; so we have to change our metabolism with the metas.”

  “Would Moishe or I have been an allergic on Earth?”

  “I don’t know. Prematures often are. Irving, he died, oh, twenty years ago, he was allergic to this terrible list of things on Earth, they should never have let him come, poor thing, he spends his life on Earth half suffocated and comes here and starves to death even on a quadruple dose of metas.”

  “Aha,” said Genya, “you shouldn’t have given him metas at all. Just Zion mush.”

  “Zion mush?” Only one of the native grains yielded enough to be worth harvesting, and it produced a gluey meal which could not be baked.

  “I ate three bowls of it for lunch.”

  “He lies around the hospital all day complaining,” Miriam said, “and then stuffs his belly with that slop. How can an artistic soul eat something that tastes like jellied bilge?”

  “You feed it to your helpless child patients in your own hospital! I just ate the leftovers.”

  “Oh, get along with you.”

  “I am. I want to paint while the sun’s still up. On a piece of new paper, a whole piece of new paper ”

  It had been a long day at the clinic, but there were no inpatients. She had sent Osip home last night in a cast with a good scolding for being so careless as to tip his tractor over, endangering not only his life but the tractor, which was even harder to replace. And young Moishe had gone back to the children’s house, though she didn’t like the way his rash kept coming back. And Rosie was over her asthma, and the Commander’s heart was doing as well as could be expected; so the ward was empty, except for her permanent inmate of the past two weeks, Genya.

  He was sprawled out on his bed under the window, so lax and still that she had a moment of alarm; but his color was good, he breathed evenly, he was simply asleep,deeply asleep, the way people slept after a hard day in the fields, exhausted.

  He had been painting. He had cleaned up the rags and brushes, he always cleaned up promptly and thoroughly, but the picture stood on his makeshift easel. Usually these days he was secretive about his paintings, hid them, since people had stopped admiring them. The Commander had murmured to her, “What ugly stuff, poor boy!” But she had heard young Moishe, watching Genya paint, say, “How do you do it, Genya, how do you make it so pretty?” and Genya answer, “Beauty’s in the eye, Moishe.”

  Well, that was true, and she went closer to look at the painting in the dull afternoon light. Genya had painted the view out the big window of the ward. Nothing vague and half created this time: realistic, all too realistic. Hideously recognisable. There was the flat ridge of Ararat, the mud-colored trees and fields, the hazy sky, the storage barn and a corner of the school building in the foreground. Her eyes went from the painted scene to the real one. To spend hours, days, painting that! What a waste, what a waste.

  It was hard on Genya, it was sad, the way he hid his paintings now, knowing that nobody would want to see them, except maybe a child like Moishe fascinated with the mere skill of the hand, the craftsman’s dexterity.

  That night as Genya helped her straighten up the injection cabinets—he was a good deal of help around the infirmary these days—she said, “I like the picture you painted today.”

  “I finished it today,” he corrected her. “Damn thing took all week. I’m just beginning to learn to see.”

  “Can I put it up in the Living Room?”

  He looked at her across a tray of hypodermic needles, his eyes quiet and a little quizzical. “In the Living Room? But that’s all pictures of Home.”

  “It’s time maybe we had some pictures of our new home there.”

  “A moral gesture, eh? Sure. If you like it.”

  “I like it very much,” she lied blandly.“It isn’t bad,” he said. “I’ll do better, though, when I’ve learned how to fit myself to the pattern.”

  “What pattern?”

  “Well, you know, you have to look until you see the pattern, till it makes sense, and then you have to get that into your hand, too.” He made large, vague, shaping gestures with a bottle of absolute alcohol.

  “Anybody who asks a painter a question in words deserves what they get, I guess,” said Miriam. “Babb
le, babble. You take the picture over tomorrow and put it up. Artists are so temperamental about where they get their pictures hung, and the lighting. Besides, it’s time you were getting out. A little. An hour or two a day. No more.”

  “Can I eat dinner in the dining hall, then?”

  “All right. It’ll keep Tina from coming here to keep you from being lonely and eating up all the infirmary rations. That girl eats like a vacuum pump. Listen, if you go out in the middle of the day, will you kindly take the trouble to wear a hat?”

  “You think I’m right, then.”

  “Right?”

  “That it was sunstroke.”

  “That was my diagnosis, if you will recall.”

  “All right: but my addition was that I do better without metas.”

  “I have no idea. You’ve got along fine before for weeks, and then poof, down again. Nothing whatever has been proved.”

  “But a pattern has been established! I’ve lived a month without metas, and gained six pounds.”

  “And edema of the head, Mr. Know It All?”

  She saw him the next day sitting with Rachel, just before dinnertime, on the slope below the storage barn. Rachel had not come to see him in the infirmary. They sat side by side, very close together, motionless, not talking.

  Miriam went on to the Living Room. A half hour there before dinner had become a habit with her lately. It seemed to rest her from the weariness of the day. But the room was less peaceful than usual this evening; the Commander was awake, and talking with Reine and Avram. “Well, where did it come from then?” he was saying in his heavy Italian accent—he had not learned Hebrew till he was forty, in the Transit Camp. “Who put it there?” Then seeing Miriam he greeted her as always with a grand cordiality of voice and gesture. “Ah, Doctor! Please, join us, come, solve our mystery for us. You know each picture in this room as well as I do. Where, do you think, and when did we acquire the new one? You see?”

  It’s Genya’s, Miriam was about to say, when she saw the new,picture. It wasn’t Genya’s. It was a painting, all right, a landscape, but a landscape of the Earth: a wide valley, the fields green and green-gold, orchards coming into flower, the sweeping slope of a mountain in the distance, a tower, perhaps a castle or medieval farm building, in the foreground, and over all the pure, subtle, sunlit sky. It was a complex and happy painting, a celebration of the spring, an act of praise.

  “How beautiful,” she said, her voice catching. “Didn’t you put it up, Avram?”

  “Me? I can photograph, I can’t paint. Look at it, it’s no reproduction. Some kind of tempera or oils, see?”

  “Somebody brought it from Home. Had it in their baggage,” Reine suggested.

  “For twenty-five years?” said the Commander. “Why? And who? We all know what all the others have!”

  “No. I think”—Miriam was confused, and stammered—“I think it’s something Genya did. I asked him to put up one of his paintings here. Not this one. How did he do this?”

  “Copied from a photograph,” Avram suggested.

  “No no no no, impossible,” old Marca said, outraged. “That is a painting, not a copy! That is a work of art, that was seen, seen with the eyes and the heart!” With the eyes and the heart.

  Miriam looked, and she saw. She saw what the light of NSC 641 had hidden from her, what the artificial Earth daylight of the room revealed to her. She saw what Genya saw: the beauty of the world.

  “I think it must be in Central France, the Auvergne,” Reine was saying wistfully, and the Commander, “Oh no no no, it’s near Lake Como, I am certain,” and Avram, “Well it looks to me like where I grew up in the Caucasus,” when they all turned to look at Miriam. She had made a strange noise, a gasp or laugh or sob. “It’s here,” she said. “Here. That’s Ararat. The mountain. That’s the fields, our fields, our trees. That’s the corner of the school, that tower. See it? It’s here. Zion. It’s how Genya sees it. With the eyes and the heart.”

  “But look, the trees are green, look at the colors, Miriam. It’s Earth—”

  “Yes! It is Earth. Genya’s Earth!”

  “But he can’t—”

  “How do we know? How do we know what a child of Zion sees? We can see the picture in this light that’s like Home. Take it outside, into the daylight, and you’ll see what we always see, the ugly colors, the ugly planet where we’re not at home. But he is at home! He is! It’s we,” Miriam said, laughing in tears, looking at them all, the anxious, tired, elderly faces, “we who lack the key. We with our—with our—” she stumbled and leapt at the idea like a horse at a high wall, “with our meta pills!”

  They all stared at her.

  “With our meta pills, we can survive here, just barely, right? But don’t you see, he lives here! We were all perfectly adjusted to Earth, too well, we can’t fit anywhere else—he wasn’t, wouldn’t have been; allergic, a misfit—the pattern a little wrong, see? The pattern. But there are many patterns, infinite patterns, he fits this one a little better than we do—”

  Avram and the Commander continued to stare. Reine shot an alarmed glance at the picture, but asked gamely, “You’re saying that Genya’s allergies—”

  “Not just Genya! All the sicklies, maybe! For twenty-five years I’ve been feeding them metas, and they’re allergic to Earth proteins, the metas just foul them up, they’re a different pattern, oh, idiot! Idiot! Oh, my God, he and Rachel can get married. They’ve got to marry, he should have kids. What about Rachel taking metas while she’s pregnant, the foetus. I can work it out, I can work it out. I must call Leonid. And Moishe, thank God! maybe he’s another one! Listen, I must go talk to Genya and Rachel, immediately. Excuse me!” She left, a short, grey woman moving like a lightning bolt.

  Marca, Avram, and Reine stood staring after her, at each other, and finally back at Genya’s painting.

  It hung there before them, serene and joyful, full of light.

  “I don’t understand,” said Avram.

  “Patterns,” Reine said thoughtfully.

  “It is very beautiful,” said the old Commander of the Exile Fleet. “Only, it makes me homesick.”

  Mazes

  I have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realised I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing, in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult. When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight.

  The alien’s cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat. The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping, being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting, spatially disquieting. The strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognisable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or inves
tigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature’s purpose was to achieve communication.

  It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to learn to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not. I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.

  The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it. The second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the reassuring, outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding, but a certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that maze, planning all night long, re-imagining the links and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in its entirety.

  It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The evolutions in the ninth encatenation, where the “cloud” theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiralling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow gesture, a dim reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of our being. Performing, I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before.