the wind's twelve quarters (32 page)

“What’s that?”
 

“A device that makes distant things clear to the eye.” “How come?” one of the miners asked, baffled. The astronomer answered him with growing assurance. “By virtue of certain properties of light and lenses. The eye is a delicate instrument, but it is blind to half the universe—far more than half. The night sky is black, we say: between the stars is void and darkness. But turn the telescope-eye on that space between the stars, and lo, the stars! Stars too faint and far for the eye alone to see, rank behind rank, glory beyond glory, out to the uttermost boundaries of the universe. Beyond all imagination, in the outer darkness, there is light: a great glory of sunlight. I have seen it. I have seen it, night after night, and mapped the stars, the beacons of God on the shores of darkness. And here too there is light! There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is downcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark. Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart’s faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.” He spoke with that authority which the miners knew belonged by rights to the priests, to the great words priests spoke in the echoing churches. It did not belong here, in the hole where they grubbed their living, in the words of a crazy fugitive. Later on, one talking to another, they shook their heads, or tapped them. Per said, “The madness is growing in him,” and Hanno said, “Poor soul, poor soul!” Yet there was not one of them who did not, also, believe what the astronomer had told them.
 

“Show me,” said old Bran, finding Guennar alone in a deep eastern drift, busy with his intricate device. It was Bran who had first followed Guennar, and brought him food, and led him back to the others.
 

The astronomer willingly stood aside and showed Bran how to hold the device pointing downward at the tunnel floor, and how to aim and focus it, and tried to describe its function and what Bran might see: all hesitantly, since he was not used to explaining to the ignorant, but without impatience when Bran did not understand.
 

“I don’t see nothing but the ground,” the old man said after a long and solemn observation with the instrument. “And the little dust and pebbles on it.”
 

“The lamp blinds your eyes, perhaps,” the astronomer said with humility. “It is better to look without light. I can do it because I have done it for so long. It is all practice—like placing the gads, which you always do right, and I always do wrong.”
 

“Aye. Maybe. Tell me what you see—” Bran hesitated. He had not long ago realized who Guennar must be. Knowing him to be a heretic made no difference but knowing him to be a learned man made it hard to call him “mate” or “lad.” And yet here, and
after all this time, he could not call him Master. There were times when, for all his
mildness, the fugitive spoke with great words, gripping one’s soul, times when it would have been easy to call him Master. But it would have frightened him.
 

The astronomer put his hand on the frame of his mechanism and replied in a soft voice, “There are... constellations.”
 

“What’s that, constellations?”
 

The astronomer looked at Bran as if from a great way off, and said presently, “The Wain, the Scorpion, the Sickle by the Milky Way in summer, those are constellations. Patterns of stars, gatherings of stars, parenthoods, semblances...”
 

“And you see those here, with this?”
 

Still looking at him through the weak lamplight with clear brooding eyes, the astronomer nodded, and did not speak, but pointed downward, at the rock on which they stood, the hewn floor of the mine.
 

“What are they like?” Bran’s voice was hushed.
 

“I have only glimpsed them. Only for a moment. I have not learned the skill; it is a somewhat different skill.... But they are there, Bran.”
 

Often now he was not in the stope where they worked, when they came to work, and did not join them even for their meal, though they always left him a share of food. He knew the ways of the mine now better than any of them, even Bran, not only the “living” mine but the “dead” one, the abandoned workings and exploratory tunnels that ran eastward, ever deeper, towards the caves. There he was most often; and they did not follow him.
 

When he did appear amongst them and they talked with him, they were more timid with him, and did not laugh.
 

One night as they were all going back with the last cartload to the main shaft, he came to meet them, stepping suddenly out of a crosscut to their right. As always he wore his ragged sheepskin coat, black with the clay and dirt of the tunnels. His fair hair had gone grey. His eyes were clear. “Bran,” he said, “come, I can show you now.”
 

“Show me what?”
 

“The stars. The stars beneath the rock. There’s a great constellation in the stope on the old fourth level, where the white granite cuts down through the black.”
 

“I know the place.”
 

“It’s there: underfoot, by that wall of white rock. A great shining and assembly of stars. Their radiance beats up through the darkness. They are like the faces of dancers, the eyes of angels. Come and see them, Bran!”
 

The miners stood there, Per and Hanno with backs braced to hold the cart from rolling: stooped men with tired, dirty faces and big hands bent and hardened by the grip of shovel and pick and sledge. They were embarrassed, compassionate, impatient.
 

“We’re just quitting. Off home to supper. Tomorrow,” Bran said.
 

The astronomer looked from one face to another and said nothing.
 

Hanno said in his hoarse gentle voice, “Come up with us, for this once, lad. It’s dark night out, and likely raining; it’s November now; no soul will see you if you come and sit at my hearth, for once, and eat hot food, and sleep beneath a roof and not under the heavy earth all by yourself alone!”
 

Guennar stepped back. It was as if a light went out, as his face went into shadow. “No,” he said. “They will burn out my eyes.”
 

“Leave him be,” said Per, and set the heavy ore-cart moving towards the shaft.
 

“Look where I told you,” Guennar said to Bran. “The mine is not dead. Look with your own eyes.”
 

“Aye. I’ll come with you and see. Good night!”
 

“Good night,” said the astronomer, and turned back to the side-tunnel as they went
on. He carried no lamp or candle; they saw him one moment, darkness the next.
 

In the morning he was not there to meet them. He did not come.
 

Bran and Hanno sought him, idly at first, then for one whole day. They went as far down as they dared, and came at last to the entrance of the caves, and entered, calling sometimes, though in the great caverns even they, miners all their lives, dared not call aloud because of the terror of the endless echoes in the dark.
 

“He has gone down,” Bran said. “Down farther. That’s what he said. Go farther, you must go farther, to find the light.”
 

“There is no light,” Hanno whispered. “There was never light here. Not since the world’s creation.”
 

But Bran was an obstinate old man, with a literal and credulous mind; and Per listened to him. One day the two went to the place the astronomer had spoken of, where a great vein of hard light granite that cut down through the darker rock had been left untouched, fifty years ago, as barren stone. They re-timbered the roof of the old stope where the supports had weakened, and began to dig, not into the white rock but down, beside it; the astronomer had left a mark there, a kind of chart or symbol drawn with candle-black on the stone floor. They came on silver ore a foot down, beneath the shell of quartz; and under that—all eight of them working now—the striking picks laid bare the raw silver, the veins and branches and knots and nodes shining among broken crystals in the shattered rock, like stars and gatherings of stars, depth below depth without end, the light.
 

I hardly know what to say about "The Field of Vision"; it is a sort of sublimated temper tantrum. An indignant Letter to the Editor. A raspberry.
 

Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.
 

I saw Eternity the other night
 

Lika a great Ring of pure and endless light....
 

-Henry Vaughan, 1621-1695
 

Reports from Psyche XIV came in regularly, all routine, until just before their return window opened. Then all at once Commander Rogers radioed that they had left surface, had rejoined the ship, and were commencing departure procedures—82 hours 18 minutes early. Houston of course demanded explanations, but Psyche’s answers were erratic. The 220-second answer lag didn’t help. Psyche kept breaking contact. Once Rogers said, “We have got to bring her home now if we’re going to do it at all,” apparently in answer to Houston’s questions, but the next thing was Hughes asking for a reading, and then something about a dosage. The sun was noisy and reception was very bad. The voice transmission ceased without sign off.
 

The automatic information feed from the ship continued. Departure was normal. Normal reports came in during the twenty-six days of flight which the astronauts spent in drugged sleep on HKL and I.V. hookups. There was no medical monitor on Psyche missions. The only link with the crew was voice contact. When they did not call in on Day 2, the long tension at Houston tightened to despair.
 

The onboard automatics, directed by the ground crew, had just about established Psyche’s re-entry course when the dead speakers suddenly said in Hughes’s voice, “Houston, can you give me readings. Optical interference here.” They tried to direct him, but the one attempt he made at a manual correction was disastrous, and took ground control five hours to compensate. They told him hands off, they’d bring in the ship. Almost immediately after that they lost voice contact again.
 

The great pale parachutes opened above the grey Pacific, roses slowly falling out of heaven. The speed-burnt ship screamed steam, plunging; popped back up and rocked, quiet, on the long deep swells. Ground control had done a beautiful job. She was down within a half-kilo of the California. Helicopters hovered, rafts assembled, the ship was stabilized, the hatch was opened. Nobody scrambled out.
 

They went in and brought them out.
 

Commander Rogers was in his flight seat, still strapped down and plugged into the HKL and I.V.s. He had been dead about ten days, and it was clear why the others had not opened his suit.
 

Captain Temski seemed physically unhurt, but dazed and bewildered. He did not speak, or respond to instructions. They had to manhandle him to haul him out of the ship, though he put up no active resistance.
 

Dr Hughes was in a state of collapse, but fully conscious; he appeared to be blind.
 

“Please...”
 

“Can you see anything?”
 

“Yes! Please let me have the blindfold.”
 

“Do you see this light I’m showing? What color is it, Dr Hughes?”
 

“All colors, white, it’s too bright.”
 

“Will you point towards it, please?”
 

“It’s everywhere. It’s too bright.”
 

“The room’s quite dark, Dr Hughes. Now, will you open your eyes again, please.”
 

“It isn’t dark.”
 

“Mmmh. Possible supersensitivity here. All right now, how about that? Dark enough for you?”
 

“Make it dark!”
 

“No, keep your hands down, please. Take it easy. All right, we’ll put the compresses back on.”
 

The struggling man relaxed as soon as his eyes were covered, and lay still, breathing hard. His narrow face, framed in a month’s growth of dark beard, was oiled with sweat. “I’m sorry,” he said.
 

“We’ll try again later on when you’ve rested.”
 

“Will you open your eyes, please. The room’s quite dark.”
 

“Why do you tell me that when it’s not dark?”
 

“Dr Hughes, I can hardly make out your face; I’ve got the faintest red illumination on my scope—nothing else. Can you see me?”
 

“No! I can’t see for the light!”
 

The doctor increased the illumination until he could see Hughes’s face, the clenched jaw, the open, dazzled, frightened eyes.
 

“There, does that make it any darker?” he asked with the sarcasm of helplessness.
 

“No!” Hughes shut his eyes; he had gone dead white. “Get dizzy,” he muttered, “the whirling,” then he gasped for breath and began to vomit.
 

Hughes was unmarried and had no immediate kin. His closest friend was known to be Bernard Decelis. They had trained together; Decelis had been specialist on Psyche XII, the mission that had discovered the City of Mars, as Hughes was on XIV. They flew Decelis to the debriefing station in Pasadena and instructed him to go in and talk with his friend. The conversation was of course recorded.