Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

by The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2

  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 scale 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, windshaken 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 oppose
d 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.

  The man at the door said: 'Guennar! Master Guennar!'

  The man in the dome stopped still, looking towards the door. He had just picked up something from the mess of wreckage and half-burnt stuff on the floor. He put this object mechanically into his coat pocket, still peering at the door. He came towards it. His eyes were red and swollen almost shut, he breathed harshly in gasps, his hair and clothes were scorched and smeared with black ash.

  'Where were you?'

  The man in the dome pointed vaguely at the ground.

  'There's a cellar? That's where you were during the fire? By God! Gone to ground! I knew it, I knew you'd be here.' Bord laughed, a little crazily, taking Guennar's arm. 'Come on. Come out of there, for the love of God. There's light in the east already.'

  The astronomer came reluctantly, looking not at the gray east but back up at the slit in the dome, where a few stars burned clear. Bord pulled him outside, made him mount the horse, and then, bridle in hand, set off down the hill leading the horse at a fast walk.

  The astronomer held the pommel with one hand. The other hand, which had been burned across the palm and fingers when he picked up a metal fragment still red-hot under its coat of cinders, he kept pressed against his thigh. He was not conscious of doing so, or of the pain. Sometimes his senses told him, 'I am on horseback', or 'It's getting lighter', but there fragmentary messages made no sense to him. He shivered with cold as the dawn wind rose, rattling the dark woods by which the two men and the horse now passed in a deep lane overhung by teasel and briar; but the woods, the wind, the whitening sky, the cold were all remote from his mind, in which there was nothing but a darkness shot with the reek and heat of burning.

  Bord made him dismount. There was sunlight around them now, lying long on rocks above a river valley. There was a dark place, and Bord urged him and pulled him into the dark place. It was not hot and close there but cold and silent. As soon as Bord let him stop he sank down, for his knees would not bear; and he felt the cold rock against his seared and throbbing hands.

  'Gone to earth, by God!' said Bord, looking about at the veined walls, marked with the scars of miners' picks, in the light of his lanterned candle. 'I'll be back; after dark, maybe. Don't come out. Don't go farther in. This is an old adit, they haven't worked this end of the mine for years. May be slips and pitfalls in these old tunnels. Don't come out! Lie low. When the hounds are gone, we'll run you across the border.'

  Bord turned and went back up the adit in darkness. When the sound of his steps had long since died away, the astronomer lifted his head and looked around him at the dark walls and the little burning candle. Presently he blew it out. There came upon him the earth-smelling darkness, silent and complete. He saw green shapes, ocherous blots drifting on the black; these faded slowly. The dull, chill black was balm to his inflamed and aching eyes, and to his mind.

  If he thought, sitting there in the dark, his thoughts found no words. He was feverish from exhaustion and smoke inhalation and a few slight burns, and in an abnormal condition of mind; but perhaps his mind's workings, though lucid and serene, had never been normal. It is not normal for a man to spend twenty years grinding lenses, building telescopes, peering at stars, making calculations, lists, maps and charts of things which no one knows or cares about, things which cannot be reached, or touched, or held. And now all he had spent his life on was gone, burned. What was left of him might as well be, as it was, buried.

  But it did not occur to him, this idea of being buried. All he was keenly aware of was a great burden of anger and grief, a burden he was unfit to carry. It was crushing his mind, crushing out reason. And the darkness here seemed to relieve that pressure. He was accustomed to the dark, he had lived at night. The weight here was only rock, only earth. No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty. The earth's black innocence enfolded him. He lay down within it, trembling a little with pain and with relief from pain, and slept.

  Light waked him. Count Bord was there, lighting the candle with flint and steel. Bord's face was vivid in the light: the high color and blue eyes of a keen huntsman, a red mouth, sensual and obstinate. 'They're on the scent,' he was saying. 'They know you got away.'

  'Why...' said the astronomer. His voice was weak; his throat, like his eyes, was still smoke-inflamed. 'Why are they after me?'

  'Why? Do you still need telling? To burn you alive, man! For heresy!' Bord's blue eyes glared through the steadying glow of the candle.

  'But it's gone, burned, all I did.'

  'Aye, the earth's stopped, all right, but where's their fox? They want their fox! But damned if I'll let them get you.'

  The astronomer's eyes, light and wide-set, met his and held. 'Why?'

  'You think I'm a fool,' Bord said with a grin that was not a smile, a wolf's grin, the grin of the hunted and the hunter. 'And I am one. I was a fool to warn you. You never listened. I was a fool to listen to you. But I liked to listen to you. I liked to hear you talk about the stars and the courses of the planets and the ends of time. Who else ever talked to me of anyt
hing but seed corn and cow dung? Do you see? And I don't like soldiers and strangers, and trials and burnings. Your truth, their truth, what do I know about the truth? Am I a master? Do I know the courses of the stars? Maybe you do. Maybe they do. All I know is you have sat at my table and talked to me. Am I to watch you burn? God's fire, they say; but you said the stars are the fires of God. Why do you ask me that, "Why?" Why do you ask a fool's question of a fool?'

  'I am sorry,' the astronomer said.

  'What do you know about men?' the count said. 'You thought they'd let you be. And you thought I'd let you burn.' He looked at Guennar through the candlelight, grinning like a driven wolf, but in his blue eyes there was a glint of real amusement. 'We who live down on the earth, you see, not up among the stars...'

  He had brought a tinderbox and three tallow candles, a bottle of water, a ball of peas-pudding, a sack of bread. He left soon, warning the astronomer again not to venture out of the mine.

  When Guennar woke again a strangeness in his situation troubled him, not one which would have worried most people hiding in a hole to save their skins, but most distressing to him: he did not know the time.

  It was not clocks he missed, the sweet banging of the church bells in the villages calling to morning and evening prayer, the delicate and willing accuracy of the timepiece he used in his observatory and on whose refinement so many of his discoveries had depended; it was not the clocks he missed, but the great clock.

  Not seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of time, the sun's bright arch and the moon's phases, the planet's dance, the wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was woven.

  Here there was no time.

  'O my God,' Guennar the astronomer prayed in the darkness underground, 'how can it offend you to be praised? All I ever saw in my telescopes was one spark of your glory, one least fragment of the order of your creation. You could not be jealous of that, my Lord! And there were few enough who believed me, even so. Was it my arrogance in daring to describe your works? But how could I help it, Lord, when you let me see the endless fields of stars? Could I see and be silent? O my God, do not punish me any more, let me rebuild the smaller telescope. I will not speak, I will not publish, if it troubles your holy Church. I will not say anything more about the orbits of the planets or the nature of the stars. I will not speak, Lord, only let me see!'