Ursula Le Guin - The Field of Vision

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.