The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (9 page)

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 opposed 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.