The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (12 page)

'How
do you know what's in the earth, in the rock under your feet, Per?'

'I
know the signs, lad. Who should know better?'

'But
if the signs are hidden?'

'Then
the silver's hidden.'

'Yet
you know it is there, if you knew where to dig, if you could see into the rock.
And what else is there? You find the metal, because you seek it, and dig for
it. But what else might you find, deeper than the mine, if you sought, if you
knew where to dig?'

'Rock,'
said Per. 'Rock, and rock, and rock.'

'And
then?'

'And
then? Hellfire, for all I know. Why else does it get hotter as the shafts go
deeper? That's what they say. Getting nearer hell.'

'No,'
the astronomer said, clear and firm. 'No. There is no hell beneath the rocks.'

'What
is there, then, underneath it all?'

'The
stars.'

'Ah,'
said the miner, floored. He scratched his rough, tallow-clotted hair, and
laughed. 'There's a poser,' he said, and stared at Guennar with pity and
admiration. He knew Guennar was mad, but the size of his madness was a new
thing to him, and admirable. 'Will you find 'em then, the stars?'

'If
I learn how to look,' Guennar said, so calmly that Per had no response but to
heft his shovel and get back to loading the cart.

One
morning when the miners came down they found Guennar still sleeping, rolled up
in the battered cloak Count Bord had given him, and by him a strange object, a
contraption made of silver tubing, tin struts and wires beaten from old
headlamp-sockets, a frame of pick handles carefully carved and fitted, cogged
wheels, a bit of twinkling glass. It was elusive, makeshift, delicate, crazy,
intricate.

'What
the devil's that?'

They
stood about and stared at the thing, the lights of their headlamps centering on
it, a yellow beam sometimes flickering over the sleeping man as one or another
glanced at him.

'He
made it, sure.'

'Sure
enough.'

'What
for?'

'Don't
touch it.'

'I
wasn't going to.'

Roused
by their voices, the astronomer sat up. The yellow beams of the candles brought
his face out white against the dark. He rubbed his eyes and greeted them.

'What
would that be, lad?'

He
looked troubled or confused when he saw the object of their curiosity. He put a
hand on it protectively, yet he looked at it himself without seeming to
recognize it for a while. At last he said, frowning and speaking in a whisper,
'It's a telescope.'

'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 the 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 outcast, 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.

THE
FIELD OF VISION

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 un-authenticated, 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. Like 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.