Ursula Le Guin

The Field of Vision

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.

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.

D. Hullo, Gerry. Decelis.

H. Barnie?

D. How you doing?

H. Fine. You been OK?

D. Sure. No picnic, was it?

H. How’s Gloria?

D. Fine, just fine.

H. She got past ‘Aunt Rhody’ yet?

D. [laughs] Oh, Christ, yeah. She can play ‘Greensleeves’ now.

At least she calls it ‘Greensleeves’. H. What have they got you in this dump for? D. To see you.

H. Wish I could return the compliment.

D. You will. Listen. I’ve been assured by three different oculists, or whatever the hell they are, opthamollywhoggers, eye-doctors here, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes. Three opthamacadamizers and a neurologist, in fact. It’s a sort of chorus they have. But they sure as hell seem sure of it.

H. So what’s wrong is my brain, evidently.

D. In the sense of a crossed connection, maybe.

H. What about Joe Temski?

D. I don’t know. Haven’t seen him.

H. What did they tell you about him?

D. They didn’t have a chorus line worked out for him. Just said he’s inclined to be withdrawn.

H. Withdrawn! Jesus, I’ll say so. Like a rock is withdrawn.

D. Temski? That joker?

H. It started with him.

D. What did?

H. At the site. He stopped answering. D. What happened?

H. Just that. He stopped answering. Stopped talking. Stopped noticing. Dwight thought it was cafard. Is that what they’re still calling it?

D. It’s mentioned as one possibility. Was there anything special happened, there at the site?

H. We found the room.

D. The room, yeah. That all came back on your reports. I’ve seen them, and some of the holos you brought back with you. Fantastic. What the hell is it, Gerry?

H. I don’t know.

D. Is it a construct?

H. I don’t know. What’s the whole City?

D. It was built, made; it must have been.

H. How do you know, how can you tell, when you don’t know what made it? Is a seashell ‘made’? If you didn’t know, if you didn’t have any background and couldn’t assume any likeness, and you looked at a seashell and a ceramic ashtray, could you tell, could you say which was ‘made’? And what for? What does it mean? Or what about a ceramic seashell? Or a paperwasp’s nest? Or a geode?

D. Yeah, OK. But what about those things, that...

arrangement that you call ‘pigeonholes’ in the reports? I saw the holos. What did you make of them?

H. What did you make of them?

D. I don’t know. They’re weird. I thought of running the spatial arrangements through a computer, looking for meaningful pattern... You don’t think much of that.

H. No. Fine. Only what are you going to program for ‘meaning’?

D. Mathematical relationships. Any kind of geometrical pattern, regularity, code. I don’t know. What was the place like, Gerry?

H. I don’t know.

D. You were in there a lot?

H. All the time, after we found it.

D. That’s where you noticed this kind of eye trouble you’ve got? How did it start?

H. Things going out of focus. Like eye strain. It was worse outside the room. Came on over several days. I could still make things out all right when we were taking the ML up to the ship. But getting worse. There’d be these flashes of light, left my depth perception all screwed up, I’d get dizzy. Dwight and I set up the course, one or the other of us was functioning most of the time. But he was getting kind of wild. Didn’t want to use the radio, wouldn’t touch the onboard computer.

D. What was... wrong with him?

H. I don’t know. When I told him about my eyes he said he’d been having something like shaking fits. I said we’d better get the hell up to the ship while we could. He said OK, because Joe was really beginning to not function. Before we even launched he started having some kind of seizures, like epilepsy—Dwight, I mean. When he came out of one he was shaky, but he seemed rational. He took us up OK, but as soon as we docked in he went into another fit, and they kept getting longer. He started hallucinating in between them. I gave him some tranquillizers and strapped him in; it was wearing him out. When I took the sleep, I don’t know, he could have been dead already then.

D. No, he died in the sleep. About ten days out from Earth.

H. They didn’t tell me that.

D. There wasn’t anything you could have done, Gerry.

H. I don’t know. Those attacks he had, they were like overloads. Like all his fuses blew. Burned him out. He talked, while he was in them. Sort of in bursts, like barking—as if he was trying to say a whole sentence at once. Epileptics don’t talk, do they, when they’re having a seizure?

D. I don’t know. Epilepsy’s so well controlled now you don’t hear much about it. They catch the tendency, and cure it first. If Rogers had had the tendency....

H. Yeah. He never would have been in the program. Christ, he’d had six months in space. D. What had you had—six days? H. Like you. One Moon hop.

D. It isn’t that, then. Do you think...

H. What?

D. Some kind of virus?

H. Space plague? Martian fever? Mysterious ancient spores madden astronauts?

D. All right, it sounds dumb. But look, the room had been sealed. And it does sound like all of you—

H. Dwight gets a cortical overcharge, Joe goes catatonic, I start seeing things. What’s the connection?

D. Nervous system.

H. Why different symptoms in each of us?

D. Well, drugs affect people differently—

H. Do you think we found some kind of God damned Martian psychogenic mushrooms in there? There isn’t anything there, it’s dead, like all the rest of Mars. You know, you’ve been there! There aren’t any God damned germs or viruses, there’s no life there, no life.

D. But there may have been—

H. What makes you think so?

D. The room you found. The City we found.

H. City! For Christ’s sake, Barnie, you talk like some damned pop journalist, you know damned well the whole thing is a set of mud concretions for all we can tell. There’s no way to tell. It’s too old, conditions are too different, we have no context. We don’t understand, we can’t understand, it’s something the human mind is outside of. Cities, rooms, all that—we’re just analogizing, trying to make sense in our terms. But it’s not in our terms. There is no sense. I can see that now. That’s the only thing I can see!

D. See what, Gerry?

H. What I see when I open my eyes!

D. What?

H. Everything that isn’t there and doesn’t make sense. Oh—I—D. Here, come on. Take it easy. Look, it’ll be OK. It’s going to be OK, Gerry, you’ll be OK. H. [unclear] light, and the [unclear] try to see what I touch and I can’t, I don’t understand and I can’t [unclear] D. Hang on. I’m right here. Take it easy, old man.

Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination. His performance had been solid and his behavior irreproachable; but now it was frequently recalled that he was, after all, an intellectual.

Temski was harder to explain. He was a crack test pilot, an Air Force captain, and a baseball fan, but now his behavior was even more aberrant than Hughes’s.

All Temski did was sit. He was capable of looking after himself, and did so. That is, when he was hungry and food was present, he ate some with his fingers; when he had to relieve himself, he went to a corner and did so; when he was sleepy, he lay down on the floor and slept. The rest of the time he sat. He was in good physical condition and quite calm. Nothing said to him produced the slightest reaction, nor did he take any interest in anything that went on. His wife was brought in to see him in hopes of producing a response. She was taken away weeping after five minutes.

Since Temski wouldn’t respond, and Rogers, being dead, couldn’t respond, it was quite natural to look upon Hughes as being, somehow, responsible.

There was nothing wrong with him except a case of something like hysterical blindness, so it was to be expected that he should answer questions rationally and explain precisely what had happened. This, however, he could not, or would not, do.

A psychiatric consultant was brought in, a distinguished New York doctor called Shapir. He was requested to work with both Temski and Hughes. It was of course unthinkable to admit that the mission had been a failure (the word ‘disaster’ was not even mentioned), but a couple of rumors had leaked out to the press despite all security precautions. Irresponsible journalists demanded to know why the crew of Psyche XIV was being held incommunicado, and claimed the ‘right’ of the American people to ‘know’, etc. It had been necessary to issue a statement concerning a new health test being run on astronauts who had spent over fifteen days in space, due to Commander Rogers’s unexpected and tragic death from heart failure, and to have a whole new series of articles written for the papers concerning plans for a ‘Little America’ dome city on Mars, to maintain a positive attitude in the public. The real people of course knew that the rest of the Psyche program was in jeopardy; and they instructed Dr Shapir to diagnose and cure the astronauts with all deliberate speed.

Shapir talked with Hughes for half an hour about the food in the hospital, Cal Tech, and the latest Chinese report on their Alpha Centauri probe, all very relaxed and trivial. Then he said, ‘What is it you see, when you open your eyes?’

Hughes, who was up and dressed now, sat silent for a while. Opaque goggles covered his eyes entirely, giving him the arrogant, staring look of people who affect dark glasses. ‘Nobody’s asked that,’ he said.

‘Didn’t the oculists?’

‘Yes, I guess Kray did. Early on. Before they decided I was a mental case.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘It’s hard to describe. The point is, it’s indescribable. At first it was things going out of focus, going transparent, going away. Then the light. Too much light. Like overexposing a film, bleaching everything out. But with that, a kind of whirling. Changing positions and relationships, changing perspectives, constant transformation. It made me get dizzy. My eyes kept sending signals to my inner ears, I guess. Like that inner-ear disease, only in reverse. Doesn’t it foul up your spatial orientation?’

‘Meniere’s syndrome, I think it’s called, yes, it does. Especially on stairs and slopes.’

‘It’s as if I was looking from a great height, or ... up at a great height....’

‘Heights ever worry you?’

‘Hell no. They don’t even mean anything to me. What’s up and down, in space? No, see, I’m not giving you the picture. There is no picture. I’ve been trying to look more, to learn to ... how to see ... it’s not much good.’

There was a pause. ‘That takes courage,’ said Shapir.

‘What do you mean?’ the astronaut said sharply.

‘Well... To have the sensory input which is most important to the conscious mind—sight—reporting non-existent and incomprehensible things, in flagrant contradiction with all other sensory input—your touch, your hearing, your sense of balance, and so on—to have that going on, every time you try to open your eyes, and not only to live with it but to attempt to investigate it... It doesn’t sound easy.’

‘So mostly I keep my eyes shut,’ Hughes said, dour. ‘Like a damned see-no-evil monkey.’

‘When you do have your eyes open, and you look towards some object you know is there—your own hand, for instance -what do you see?’

‘ "A blooming, buzzing confusion." ’

‘William James,’ Shapir said with satisfaction. ‘What was he talking about—how a baby perceives the world, eh?’ He had a pleasant voice with a mild, glancing quality to it, non-percussive; one could not imagine him scolding or yelling. He nodded several times, thinking out the implications of what Hughes had said. ‘To learn how to see, you said. To learn. That’s how you feel about it?’

Hughes hesitated, then said with a sudden, marked increase of trust, ‘I have to. What else can I do? Apparently I’m never going to be able to—to see the way I used to, the way other people do, again. But I still do see. Only I don’t understand what I see, it doesn’t make sense. There are no outlines, no distinctions, even between nearer and farther. There is something there—only I can’t say that, because there aren’t any things. No forms. Instead of forms, I see transformations -transfigurations. Does that make any sense at all?’

‘I think it does,’ Shapir said, ‘only it’s enormously difficult to put a direct experience into words. And when the experience is new, unique, overwhelming...’

‘And irrational. That’s it.’ Hughes spoke now with real gratitude. ‘If only I could show it to you,’ he said wistfully.

The two astronauts were being kept on the tenth floor of a big military hospital in Maryland now. They were not permitted to leave that floor, and anyone who visited it still spent ten days in quarantine before he rejoined the outer world: the Martian plague theory was currently on top. At Shapir’s insistence, Hughes was allowed to go up to the roof garden of the hospital (after which the elevator was elaborately sterilized and roped off for three days).

They demanded that Hughes wear a surgical mask; and Shapir had asked him not to wear his goggles. Docile, he went up the elevator with his mouth and nose covered, his eyes uncovered, but tightly shut.

The change from the dusk of the elevator to the hot smoggy sunlight of July on the open roof did not, as far as Shapir could see, affect those shut eyes. Hughes did not screw them tighter against the flooding light, though he raised his face to it as if he felt the heat pleasant on his skin, and took a deep breath through the binding gauze.

‘I haven’t been outside since March,’ he said.

It was true, of course. He had been in a spacesuit or in a hospital room, breathing canned or conditioned air.

‘Have you got your compass bearings?’ Shapir asked.

‘Not the faintest. It makes me feel blinder, being outdoors. Afraid to walk off the edge.’ Hughes had refused assistance coming through the corridors and in the elevator, feeling his way adeptly with his hands, and now despite his joke about falling off he began to explore the roof garden. He was exhilarated: an active man released from long confinement. Shapir watched him, brooding. The low furniture was a hazard to him but he learned at once how to feel for it; he had tactile intelligence; there was grace in his movements, even as he blundered in blindness.

‘Will you open your eyes?’ Shapir said in his glancing, reluctant voice.

Hughes stopped. ‘All right,’ he said; but he turned towards Shapir, and his right hand came up gropingly. Shapir came forward and let that hand take his arm.

The grip of it tightened, as Hughes opened his eyes. Then Hughes let go, and took a step away, stretching out both his arms. A cry broke from him. He reached forward and upward, his head back, his eyes wide open, staring at the empty sky. ‘Oh, my God!’ he whispered, and dropped, like a man hit by a sledgehammer.

Psychiatric counselling session, 18th July. S. Shapir, Geraint Hughes.

S. Hello. Sidney... I won’t stay long. Listen, that wasn’t such a bright idea of mine. The roof. I’m sorry. I had no idea. But no right, either... Would you rather I left?

H. No.

S. All right... I’m getting stir-crazy myself. Need a good walk. I walk a good deal, usually. About two miles to my office and the same back. Then I add detours. Whatever they say, New York is a beautiful town to walk in. If you know how to pick your route. Listen, I have a queer story about Joe Temski. Not a story, just a queer fact, actually. Did you know that they have written on his record that he is ‘functionally deaf’?

H. Deaf?

S. Yes, deaf. Well, you know, I began to wonder. I go in and talk to Joe, you know, touch him, try to make eye contact, any kind of contact, to get through. No go. I’ve had patients tell me in so many words, ‘I can’t hear you.’ A metaphor. But what if it isn’t a metaphor? It happens sometimes with little kids, they’re called retarded and it turns out they’ve got thirty, sixty, eighty percent hearing dysfunction. Well, maybe Joe really can’t hear me. Just like you can’t see me.

H. [pause of forty seconds] Do you mean he’s hearing things? Listening?

S. It’s possible.

H. [pause of twenty seconds] You can’t shut your ears.

S. That’s what I thought, too. It could be rough, couldn’t it? Well, what I thought was, what about trying to shut them for him? Put earplugs in his ears.

H. He still wouldn’t be able to hear you.

S. No, but he wouldn’t be distracted. If you had to watch your light show all the time, you wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to me or anything else, right? Maybe it’s like that with Joe. Maybe there’s this noise drowning out everything else for him.

H. [pause of twenty seconds] It would be more than noise.

S. I don’t suppose you want to talk about...on the roof...

No, all right.

H. You’d like to know what I saw, wouldn’t you?

S. Sure I would. But in your own time.

H. Yeah, I’ve got so much else to do here besides talk to you.

All the books I can read and the beautiful women I can look at. You know damned well I’ll tell you eventually, because I haven’t got anybody else to talk to.

S. Oh, hell, Geraint. [pause of ten seconds]

H. Shit. I’m sorry, Sidney. If I didn’t have you to talk to, I’d have cracked completely. I know that. You’re very patient with me.

S. Whatever you saw, up there, disturbs you. That’s one reason why I want to know what it was. But what the hell, if you can handle it alone, do. That’s the idea, after all. My curiosity is my problem, not yours! Listen. Let’s forget talking. Let me read you this article in Science. Your Colonel Wood gave it to me, said you might be interested. I was. It’s on what they found inside the Argentinian meteorite. The authors are suggesting we go comb the Meteor Belt for remnants of a trans-stellar fleet that came to grief in our solar system about six hundred million years ago. They would have landed on Mars first, of course. Are these guys nuts?

H. I don’t know. Read the article.

Temski slept heavily, and it was easy for Shapir to insert ordinary wax plugs like those insomniacs use into his ears while he was asleep. When Temski woke he did nothing unusual at first. He sat up, yawned, stretched, scratched, looked lazily around to see if anything to eat was handy, in that serene way which Shapir privately felt was altogether unlike any psychotic behavior he had ever seen, and in fact unlike any human behavior he had ever seen. Temski reminded him of a healthy, poised, contented, tame animal. Not a chimpanzee; something milder, more contemplative, an orang, maybe.

But the orang began to feel uncomfortable.

Temski looked around, left and right, nervous. Perhaps he was not looking but moving his head trying to find the vanished sounds. The lost chord, Shapir thought. Temski grew more and more disturbed and alert. He got up, still turning his head restlessly. He looked across the room. For the first time in seventeen days of daily contact, he saw Shapir.

His handsome face was now contorted with anxiety or bewilderment.

‘Where,’ he said, ‘where—’

His hands, groping at his ears to find the cause of silence, found the earplugs and removed one. That was enough. ‘Ah,’ he said, and stood still. His eyes were still directed towards Shapir, but he did not see him. His face relaxed.

Later attempts were more successful. Though bewildered at first, Temski was cooperative while artificially deafened, and responded readily to Shapir’s attempts to communicate with him by touch, by sign, and finally by writing. After the fifth such session, Temski consented to longer sessions involving the use of a drug which would deaden his auditory nerve endings for about five hours at a time.

During the second of these long periods he asked to see Hughes. Shapir had already been instructed to let the two astronauts talk together if possible; there was a feeling that this might elicit more information, if they talked freely together. It was necessary for Hughes to write, since Temski was artificially deafened; as he knew touch typing he carried on his part of the dialogue on a portable typewriter. Not all the material found in the wastebasket, however, could be successfully collated in to the tape of Temski’s spoken conversation. The two men mostly discussed the return journey and Commander Rogers’s illness and death, which Temski could not recall; Hughes described all this as he had done before without new information. They did not talk about the ‘room’ (Site D) or their respective disabilities, except as follows:

T. It’s not inside, is it?

H. If it was, earplugs wd improve yr reception.

T. It’s real, then.

H. Hell yes.

T. See, when they first stuck those plugs in my ears, when I woke up and there was this silence, I was really spooked. It took me a long time to come back from where I’d been. And I didn’t much want to come back. But when Shapir began telling me how long it had been, and I realized this was Earth, you know, that’s what spooked me—I thought, maybe all this has been some sort of, like, hallucination. You know. Jesus, have I been off my chump? That scared me. Like I was two different people. But I began to put it together, to see that it wasn’t a split, but a...

H. Change.

T. Exactly, it changed me, it had changed me. It’s real.

Because when I can hear, that’s what I hear. And when you can see, that’s what you see. Right? In other words, it is real.

We have to be artificially blinded and made deaf to not hear it and see it. That’s it, isn’t it? [Hughes’s typed responses for the following section were not identifiable in the wastebasket material.]

H. ...

T. Oh, no. Beautiful. It took me a long time, at least I know now it was a long time, to begin to get it. At first it didn’t make any sense, Jesus, it scared the balls off me at first. You or Dwight would say something, and there’d be this kind of chords all around your voice, like rainbows around a prism so you can’t even see the prism—yeah, that’s what it’s like for you, isn’t it? It’s the same, only this is with hearing, it’s like everything turns into this music, only it isn’t music, it’s... At first like I said I didn’t know how to hear it. I thought it was something wrong with my suit radio! Jesus! [laughs] I couldn’t follow the patterns, you know, the modulations, like, the transformations. It was all so different. But you learn. The more you listen the more you hear. I wish you could hear it. You know, you tell me it’s two months since we left Mars, and so on, and shit, I believe you, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter—does it, Gerry?

H....

T. I wish I could see it, the way you do. It must be tremendous. But I’ll tell you, I’m glad they pull me out of it like this, every day now. I think it’s meant to be that way. I was kind of, I don’t know, swamped, overwhelmed, it’s too much. We’re not built right, not quite strong enough, maybe. At least at first. Can’t take it all at once. What I’d like to try to do while I’m out of touch is try to write some of it down.

H....

T. No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t have to be music. See, it isn’t music, that’s just like a way of describing it because it’s beautiful. I think I could get it into words just as well.

Maybe better. To say what it means.

H. ...

T. Afraid of what?

Bernard Decelis and his wife called Hughes every couple of days on the telephone, though they were prevented by the quarantine from coming to see him. On the 27th of July Hughes and Decelis had a significant conversation concerning the so-called room, site D of the Psyche XIV survey. Decelis said, ‘If I don’t get on the Sixteen team and see that damned place, I’ll flip.’

‘Seeing is believing,’ Hughes remarked. He was not as excitable as he had been earlier, tending to be terse and rather bitter.

‘Listen, Terry. Was there ever machinery in those pigeonholes?’

‘No.’

‘Hah! There’s a definite answer! I thought you wouldn’t assert anything about Site D except its incomprehensibility to the human mind. You softening up?’

‘No. Learning.’

‘Learning what?’

‘How to see.’

After a pause Decelis asked cautiously, ‘See what?’

‘Site D. Since it’s all I can see.’

‘You mean, that’s what you—when your eyes are open—’

‘No.’ Hughes spoke wearily and with reluctance. ‘It’s more complex than that. I don’t see Site D. I see ... the world in the light cast by Site D ... A new light. The man you ought to ask is Joe Temski. Or, listen, did you ever run the pigeonholes through Algie, like you said?’

‘I had trouble setting up the program.’

‘I’ll bet you did,’ Hughes said with a short laugh. ‘Send the stuff on up here. I’ll set it up. Blindfolded.’

Temski came into Hughes’s room, radiant. ‘Gerry,’ he said, ‘I’ve got it.’

‘Got what?’

‘I’ve got it together. I heard you. No, I wasn’t lip-reading. Say something with your back turned. Go on!’

‘Ptomaine poisoning.’

‘ "Ptomaine poisoning."—OK? See, I’m hearing you. But I haven’t lost the music. I’ve got it all together!’

Blue-eyed and fair, Temski was ordinarily a handsome man; now he was magnificent. Hughes could not see him (though the spy camera in the ventilator grille could and did), but he heard the vibration of his voice, and was moved, and frightened.

‘Take off your blinkers, Gerry,’ the gentle, vibrant voice said.

Hughes shook his head.

‘You can’t sit in the dark inside yourself forever. Come out: You can’t choose blindness, Gerry.’

‘Why can’t I?’

‘Not after you’ve seen the light.’

‘What light?’

‘The light, the word, the truth we have been taught to perceive and to know,’ Temski said, with the gentleness of utter certainty, and a warmth in his voice, a warmth like sunlight.

‘Get out,’ Hughes said. ‘Get out, Temski!’

Twelve weeks had passed since Psyche XIV splashdown. Nobody on the debriefing staff had come down with any symptoms more alarming than boredom. Hughes was no worse, and Temski was now completely recovered. It could be safely assumed that whatever had affected the crew of Psyche XIV, it had not been an infection vectored by a virus, spore, bacterium, or other physical agent. The hypothesis accepted tentatively and with various reservations by the majority, including Dr Shapir, was that something in the arrangement of the elements constituting the ‘room’, Site D, had, during their prolonged and intense study of the site, caused a degree of brain-wave disruption in all three men, analogous to the brain-function disturbance caused by strobe lights at certain frequencies, etc. Precisely what elements of the ‘room’ were involved was not yet known, though the holographs were being examined intensively by experts. Psyche XV was to make a still more thorough investigation of the site, taking due precautions to protect and monitor the astronauts.

These suspect elements of Site D were so numerous and so intricately interrelated that it was very hard for a single mind to attempt to arrange or order them. Some Martianologists were sure the peculiar properties of the ‘room’ were only a geological accident, and that all the ‘room’ had to ‘tell’ us was the kind of information furnished so concisely and beautifully by the strata of rocks, the rings of a tree, the lines of a spectrum. Others were as convinced that intelligent beings had built the City, and that in studying it we might learn something of their nature and the way their minds worked—those unimaginable minds of six hundred million years ago (for the radioactive-decay dating of the site was absolutely definite now). The job of doing so, however, was daunting. T. A. Newman of the Smithsonian Institution put it well: ‘Archaeologists are used to getting a lot of information out of very simple things—potsherds, bits of flint, a wall here, a grave there. But what if all we had of an ancient civilization was a very complicated thing, complicated in more than a technological sense—let’s say, one copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Now let’s assume that the archaeologists who find this copy of Hamlet are not humanoid, don’t have books, don’t have plays, don’t speak, write, or think at all as we do. What are they going to make of that little physical artifact, the evident complexity and purposefulness of it, the repetition of certain elements and the non-repetition of others, the semi-regularity of line lengths, and so on? How are they going to read Hamlet?’

To those who accepted the ‘Hamlet theory’, the obvious first step was to employ computers, and a number of them had been set to work analyzing the various elements of Site D: the spacing, size, depth, and configurations of the ‘pigeonholes’, the proportions of the first, middle, and third ‘subchambers’, the extraordinary acoustical properties of the ‘room’ as a whole, and so on. None of these programs had as yet produced any sure evidence of conscious planning or rational pattern; none, that is, except the program set up by Decelis and Hughes on NASA’s new Algebraic V, which had certainly got results, though they could not be called rational. Indeed, that print-out had given a shudder to the NASA brass, and a good laugh to those few scientists to whom Decelis had shown it before it was suppressed as being probably a fraud and certainly an embarrassment. The entire print-out read as follows:

RUN

PIGEONHOLES SITE D MARS SECTOR NINE DECELIS HUGHES

GOD

GOOD GOD GOD GOOD YOU ARE GOD RESET

RESET TOTALITY COMPREHENSION NONSENSE PERCEIVE NONSENSE NO SENSE REAL GOOD GOD

PERCEIVE RECEIVE DIRECTIONS DIRECTION

PROCEED INFORM UNINFORMED

GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD

END RUN

Shapir came in to find Hughes lying on his bed, as he now did most of the time, wearing his black goggles. He looked white and ill.

‘I think you’ve been overdoing it.’

Hughes did not answer.

Shapir sat down. ‘They’re sending me back to New York,’ he said presently.

Hughes did not answer.

‘Temski’s been released, you know. He’s on his way to Florida now. With his wife. I can’t find out what they plan for you. I asked...’ After a long pause he completed the sentence. ‘I asked for another two weeks here with you. No go.’

‘It’s all right,’ Hughes said.

‘I want to keep in touch with you, Geraint. Obviously we can’t write letters. But there’s the phone. And tapes; I’m leaving a cassette recorder here with you. When you want to talk, please call me. If you can’t get me, talk to the recorder. It’s not the same, but—’

‘You’re a very good man, Sidney,’ Hughes said gently. ‘I wish...’ After a minute he sat up. He reached up to his face and took off the black goggles. They fitted so closely around his eyes sockets that it took him a little while to get them off. When they were off he lowered his hands, and looked across the room, directly at Shapir. His eyes, the pupils enlarged by long privation of light, were almost as dark as the goggles.

‘I see you,’ he said. ‘Hide and seek. I spy. You’re It. Do you want to know what I see?’

‘Yes,’ Shapir said softly.

‘A blot. A shadow. An incompleteness, a rudiment, an obstruction. Something completely unimportant. You see, it doesn’t do any good to be a good man, even...’

‘And when you look at yourself?’

‘The same. Just the same. A hindrance, a triviality. A blot on the field of vision.’

‘The field of vision. What is the field of vision?’

‘What do you think?’ Hughes said, very quietly and wearily. ‘What is true vision of? Reality, of course. I have been re-programmed to perceive reality, to see the truth. I see God.’ He sank his face into his hands, covering his eyes. ‘I was a thinking man,’ he said. ‘I tried to be a rational man. But what good’s reason, when you can see the truth? Seeing is believing...’ He looked up again at Shapir, his dark eyes both piercing and unseeing. ‘If you want a real explanation, go ask Joe Temski. He’s keeping quiet now; he’s biding his time. But he’s the one who can tell you. And he will, when his time comes. He can translate what he hears—translate it into words. It’s harder to do with visual perceptions. Mystics have always had trouble putting their visions into words; except the ones that got the Word, that heard the Voice. They usually got right up and acted, didn’t they? Temski will act. But I will not. I refuse. I will not preach. I will not be a missionary.’

‘A missionary?’

‘Don’t you see? Don’t you see that’s what the "room" is? A training center, a briefing room, a—’

‘A religious center? A church?’

‘Well, in a way. A place where you are taught to see God, and hear God, and know God. And love God. A conversion center. A place where you’re converted! And then you want to go out and preach the knowledge of God to the others—to the heathen. Because now you know how blind they are, and how easy it is to see. No, not just a church; a mission. The Mission. And you learn the Mission, and you come out of it with the Mission. They weren’t explorers. They were missionaries, bearing the truth, bringing it to the other races and the future races, all the poor damned heathens living in the outer darkness. They knew the answer, and they wanted us all to know the answer. Nothing else matters, once you’ve learned the answer. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good man or a bad one, if I’m an intelligent man or a fool. Nothing about us matters except that we are trivial vehicles of the great truth. The earth doesn’t matter, the stars don’t matter, death doesn’t matter, nothing is anything. Only God is.’

‘An alien god?’

‘Not a god. God—the one true God, immanent in all things. Everywhere, forever. I have learned to see God. All I have to do is open my eyes, and I see the Face of God. And I’d give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree, a chair -a plain wooden chair, ordinary—They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!’

On the recommendation of the Army psychiatrist who took over the case of Geraint Hughes after Shapir was dismissed, Hughes was moved to a military hospital for the insane. As he was generally a quiet and cooperative patient he was not kept under strict supervision, and after eleven months of confinement he unfortunately carried out a successful suicide attempt, slashing his wrists with a spoon-handle which he had stolen from the mess hall and sharpened by rubbing against the bed frame. It is an interesting fact that he killed himself on the day the Psyche XV Mission started back to Earth from Mars, bringing the documents and records which, as interpreted by the First Apostle, now form the first chapters of the Revelation of the Ancients, the sacred texts of the holy and universal Church of God, bringer of light to the heathen, sole vehicle of the One Eternal Truth.

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night

Before true light... But as I did their madness so discuss

One whisper’d thus,

This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide

But for his bride.

Content

Ursula Le Guin
The Field of Vision