Free The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 by Ursula K. Le Guin

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