The Unreal and the Real - Vol 2 - Outer Space, Inner Lands

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Martin grunted ignorance, cross-hatching. He straightened his back to glance round at the sun, which squatted feebly like a great red toad on the eastern plain, and at the clock, which said 18:45. “Some big quakes today,” he said, returning to his map. “Feel them down there? Lots of crates were falling around. Take a look at the seismo.”

  The needle jigged and wavered on the roll. It never stopped dancing here. The roll had recorded five quakes of major intensity back in mid-afternoon; twice the needle had hopped off the roll. The attached computer had been activated to emit a slip reading, “Epicenter 61' N by 42' 4" E.”

  “Not in the Trench this time.”

  “I thought it felt a bit different from usual. Sharper.”

  “In Base One I used to lie awake all night feeling the ground jump. Queer how you get used to things.”

  “Go spla if you didn’t. What’s for dinner?”

  “I thought you’d have cooked it.”

  “Waiting for the clone.”

  Feeling put upon, Pugh got out a dozen dinnerboxes; stuck two in the Instobake, pulled them out. “All right, here’s dinner.”

  “Been thinking,” Martin said, coming to table. “What if some clone cloned itself? Illegally. Made a thousand duplicates—ten thousand. Whole army. They could make a tidy power grab, couldn’t they?”

  “But how many millions did this lot cost to rear? Artificial placentae and all that. It would be hard to keep secret, unless they had a planet to themselves…Back before the Famines when Earth had national governments, they talked about that: clone your best soldiers, have whole regiments of them. But the food ran out before they could play that game.”

  They talked amicably, as they used to do.

  “Funny,” Martin said, chewing. “They left early this morning, didn’t they?”

  “All but Kaph and Zayin. They thought they’d get the first payload above ground today. What’s up?”

  “They weren’t back for lunch.”

  “They won’t starve, to be sure.”

  “They left at seven.”

  “So they did.” Then Pugh saw it. The air tanks held eight hours’ supply.

  “Kaph and Zayin carried out spare cans when they left. Or they’ve got a heap out there.”

  “They did, but they brought the whole lot in to recharge.” Martin stood up, pointing to one of the stacks of stuff that cut the dome into rooms and alleys.

  “There’s an alarm signal on every imsuit.”

  “It’s not automatic.”

  Pugh was tired and still hungry. “Sit down and eat, man. That lot can look after themselves.”

  Martin sat down but did not eat. “There was a big quake, Owen. The first one. Big enough it scared me.”

  After a pause Pugh sighed and said, “All right.”

  Unenthusiastically, they got out the two-man sled that was always left for them and headed it north. The long sunrise covered everything in poisonous red jello. The horizontal light and shadow made it hard to see, raised walls of fake iron ahead of them which they slid through, turned the convex plain beyond Hellmouth into a great dimple full of bloody water. Around the tunnel entrance a wilderness of machinery stood, cranes and cables and servos and wheels and diggers and robocarts and sliders and control huts, all slanting and bulking incoherently in the red light. Martin jumped from the sled, ran into the mine. He came out again, to Pugh. “Oh God, Owen, it’s down,” he said. Pugh went in and saw, five meters from the entrance, the shiny moist, black wall that ended the tunnel. Newly exposed to air, it looked organic, like visceral tissue. The tunnel entrance, enlarged by blasting and double-tracked for robocarts, seemed unchanged until he noticed thousands of tiny spiderweb cracks in the walls. The floor was wet with some sluggish fluid.

  “They were inside,” Martin said.

  “They may be still. They surely had extra air cans—”

  “Look, Owen, look at the basalt flow, at the roof, don’t you see what the quake did, look at it.”

  The low hump of land that roofed the caves still had the unreal look of an optical illusion. It had reversed itself, sunk down, leaving a vast dimple or pit. When Pugh walked on it he saw that it too was cracked with many tiny fissures. From some a whitish gas was seeping, so that the sunlight on the surface of the gas pool was shafted as if by the waters of a dim red lake.

  “The mine’s not on the fault. There’s no fault here!”

  Pugh came back to him quickly. “No, there’s no fault, Martin—Look, they surely weren’t all inside together.”

  Martin followed him and searched among the wrecked machines dully, then actively. He spotted the airsled. It had come down heading south, and stuck at an angle in a pothole of colloidal dust. It had carried two riders. One was half sunk in the dust, but his suit meters registered normal functioning; the other hung strapped onto the tilted sled. Her imsuit had burst open on the broken legs, and the body was frozen hard as any rock. That was all they found. As both regulation and custom demanded, they cremated the dead at once with the laser guns they carried by regulation and had never used before. Pugh, knowing he was going to be sick, wrestled the survivor onto the two-man sled and sent Martin off to the dome with him. Then he vomited and flushed the waste out of his suit, and finding one four-man sled undamaged, followed after Martin, shaking as if the cold of Libra had got through to him.

  The survivor was Kaph. He was in deep shock. They found a swelling on the occiput that might mean concussion, but no fracture was visible.

  Pugh brought two glasses of food concentrate and two chasers of aquavit. “Come on,” he said. Martin obeyed, drinking off the tonic. They sat down on crates near the cot and sipped the aquavit.

  Kaph lay immobile, face like beeswax, hair bright black to the shoulders, lips stiffly parted for faintly gasping breaths.

  “It must have been the first shock, the big one,” Martin said. “It must have slid the whole structure sideways. Till it fell in on itself. There must be gas layers in the lateral rocks, like those formations in the Thirty-first Quadrant. But there wasn’t any sign—” As he spoke the world slid out from under them. Things leaped and clattered, hopped and jigged, shouted Ha! Ha! Ha! “It was like this at fourteen hours,” said Reason shakily in Martin’s voice, amidst the unfastening and ruin of the world. But Unreason sat up, as the tumult lessened and things ceased dancing, and screamed aloud.

  Pugh leaped across his spilt aquavit and held Kaph down. The muscular body flailed him off. Martin pinned the shoulders down. Kaph screamed, struggled, choked; his face blackened. “Oxy,” Pugh said, and his hand found the right needle in the medical kit as if by homing instinct; while Martin held the mask he struck the needle home to the vagus nerve, restoring Kaph to life.

  “Didn’t know you knew that stunt,” Martin said, breathing hard.

  “The Lazarus Jab, my father was a doctor. It doesn’t often work,” Pugh said. “I want that drink I spilled. Is the quake over? I can’t tell.”

  “Aftershocks. It’s not just you shivering.”

  “Why did he suffocate?”

  “I don’t know, Owen. Look in the book.”

  Kaph was breathing normally and his color was restored; only the lips were still darkened. They poured a new shot of courage and sat down by him again with their medical guide. “Nothing about cyanosis or asphyxiation under ‘Shock’ or ‘Concussion.’ He can’t have breathed in anything with his suit on. I don’t know. We’d get as much good out of Mother Mog’s Home Herbalist…‘Anal Hemorrhoids,’ fy!” Pugh pitched the book to a crate table. It fell short, because either Pugh or the table was still unsteady.

  “Why didn’t he signal?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The eight inside the mine never had time. But he and the girl must have been outside. Maybe she was in the entrance and got hit by the first slide. He must have been outside, in the control hut maybe. He ran in, pulled her out, strapped her onto the sled, started for the dome. And all that time never pushed the panic button in his
imsuit. Why not?”

  “Well, he’d had that whack on his head. I doubt he ever realized the girl was dead. He wasn’t in his senses. But if he had been I don’t know if he’d have thought to signal us. They looked to one another for help.”

  Martin’s face was like an Indian mask, grooves at the mouth corners, eyes of dull coal. “That’s so. What must he have felt, then, when the quake came and he was outside, alone—”

  In answer Kaph screamed.

  He came off the cot in the heaving convulsions of one suffocating, knocked Pugh right down with his flailing arm, staggered into a stack of crates and fell to the floor, lips blue, eyes white. Martin dragged him back onto the cot and gave him a whiff of oxygen, then knelt by Pugh, who was sitting up, and wiped at his cut cheekbone. “Owen, are you all right, are you going to be all right, Owen?”

  “I think I am,” Pugh said. “Why are you rubbing that on my face?”

  It was a short length of computer tape, now spotted with Pugh’s blood. Martin dropped it. “Thought it was a towel. You clipped your cheek on that box there.”

  “Is he out of it?”

  “Seems to be.”

  They stared down at Kaph lying stiff, his teeth a white line inside dark parted lips.

  “Like epilepsy. Brain damage maybe?”

  “What about shooting him full of meprobamate?”

  Pugh shook his head. “I don’t know what’s in that shot I already gave him for shock. Don’t want to overdose him.”

  “Maybe he’ll sleep it off now.”

  “I’d like to myself. Between him and the earthquake I can’t seem to keep on my feet.”

  “You got a nasty crack there. Go on, I’ll sit up a while.”

  Pugh cleaned his cut cheek and pulled off his shirt, then paused.

  “Is there anything we ought to have done—have tried to do—”

  “They’re all dead,” Martin said heavily, gently.

  Pugh lay down on top of his sleeping bag and one instant later was wakened by a hideous, sucking, struggling noise. He staggered up, found the needle, tried three times to jab it in correctly and failed, began to massage over Kaph’s heart. “Mouth-to-mouth,” he said, and Martin obeyed. Presently Kaph drew a harsh breath, his heartbeat steadied, his rigid muscles began to relax.

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “Half an hour.”

  They stood up sweating. The ground shuddered, the fabric of the dome sagged and swayed. Libra was dancing her awful polka again, her Totentanz. The sun, though rising, seemed to have grown larger and redder; gas and dust must have been stirred up in the feeble atmosphere.

  “What’s wrong with him, Owen?”

  “I think he’s dying with them.”

  “Them—But they’re all dead, I tell you.”

  “Nine of them. They’re all dead, they were crushed or suffocated. They were all him, he is all of them. They died, and now he’s dying their deaths one by one.”

  “Oh, pity of God,” said Martin.

  The next time was much the same. The fifth time was worse, for Kaph fought and raved, trying to speak but getting no words out, as if his mouth were stopped with rocks or clay. After that the attacks grew weaker, but so did he. The eighth seizure came at about four-thirty; Pugh and Martin worked till five-thirty doing all they could to keep life in the body that slid without protest into death. They kept him, but Martin said, “The next will finish him.” And it did; but Pugh breathed his own breath into the inert lungs, until he himself passed out.

  He woke. The dome was opaqued and no light on. He listened and heard the breathing of two sleeping men. He slept, and nothing woke him till hunger did.

  The sun was well up over the dark plains, and the planet had stopped dancing. Kaph lay asleep. Pugh and Martin drank tea and looked at him with proprietary triumph.

  When he woke Martin went to him: “How do you feel, old man?” There was no answer. Pugh took Martin’s place and looked into the brown, dull eyes that gazed toward but not into his own. Like Martin he quickly turned away. He heated food concentrate and brought it to Kaph. “Come on, drink.”

  He could see the muscles in Kaph’s throat tighten. “Let me die,” the young man said.

  “You’re not dying.”

  Kaph spoke with clarity and precision: “I am nine-tenths dead. There is not enough of me left alive.”

  That precision convinced Pugh, and he fought the conviction. “No,” he said, peremptory. “They are dead. The others. Your brothers and sisters. You’re not them, you’re alive. You are John Chow. Your life is in your own hands.”

  The young man lay still, looking into a darkness that was not there.

  Martin and Pugh took turns taking the Exploitation hauler and a spare set of robos over to Hellmouth to salvage equipment and protect it from Libra’s sinister atmosphere, for the value of the stuff was, literally, astronomical. It was slow work for one man at a time, but they were unwilling to leave Kaph by himself. The one left in the dome did paperwork, while Kaph sat or lay and stared into his darkness and never spoke. The days went by, silent.

  The radio spat and spoke: the Mission calling from the ship. “We’ll be down on Libra in five weeks, Owen. Thirty-four E-days nine hours I make it as of now. How’s tricks in the old dome?”

  “Not good, chief. The Exploit team were killed, all but one of them, in the mine. Earthquake. Six days ago.”

  The radio crackled and sang starsong. Sixteen seconds’ lag each way; the ship was out around Planet II now. “Killed, all but one? You and Martin were unhurt?”

  “We’re all right, chief.”

  Thirty-two seconds.

  “Passerine left an Exploit team out here with us. I may put them on the Hellmouth project then, instead of the Quadrant Seven project. We’ll settle that when we come down. In any case you and Martin will be relieved at Dome Two. Hold tight. Anything else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  Thirty-two seconds.

  “Right then. So long, Owen.”

  Kaph had heard all this, and later on Pugh said to him, “The chief may ask you to stay here with the other Exploit team. You know the ropes here.” Knowing the exigencies of Far Out life, he wanted to warn the young man. Kaph made no answer. Since he had said, “There is not enough of me left alive,” he had not spoken a word.

  “Owen,” Martin said on suit intercom, “he’s spla. Insane. Psycho.”

  “He’s doing very well for a man who’s died nine times.”

  “Well? Like a turned-off android is well? The only emotion he has left is hate. Look at his eyes.”

  “That’s not hate, Martin. Listen, it’s true that he has, in a sense, been dead. I cannot imagine what he feels. But it’s not hatred. He can’t even see us. It’s too dark.”

  “Throats have been cut in the dark. He hates us because we’re not Aleph and Yod and Zayin.”

  “Maybe. But I think he’s alone. He doesn’t see us or hear us, that’s the truth. He never had to see anyone else before. He never was alone before. He had himself to see, talk with, live with, nine other selves all his life. He doesn’t know how you go it alone. He must learn. Give him time.”

  Martin shook his heavy head. “Spla,” he said. “Just remember when you’re alone with him that he could break your neck one-handed.”

  “He could do that,” said Pugh, a short, soft-voiced man with a scarred cheekbone; he smiled. They were just outside the dome airlock, programming one of the servos to repair a damaged hauler. They could see Kaph sitting inside the great half-egg of the dome like a fly in amber.

  “Hand me the insert pack there. What makes you think he’ll get any better?”

  “He has a strong personality, to be sure.”

  “Strong? Crippled. Nine-tenths dead, as he put it.”

  “But he’s not dead. He’s a live man: John Kaph Chow. He had a jolly queer upbringing, but after all every boy has got to break free of his family. He will do it.”

  “I can’t see it.”
r />   “Think a bit, Martin bach. What’s this cloning for? To repair the human race. We’re in a bad way. Look at me. My IIQ and GC are half this John Chow’s. Yet they wanted me so badly for the Far Out Service that when I volunteered they took me and fitted me out with an artificial lung and corrected my myopia. Now if there were enough good sound lads about would they be taking one-lunged short-sighted Welshmen?”

  “Didn’t know you had an artificial lung.”

  “I do then. Not tin, you know. Human, grown in a tank from a bit of somebody, cloned, if you like. That’s how they make replacement organs, the same general idea as cloning, but bits and pieces instead of whole people. It’s my own lung now, whatever. But what I am saying is this, there are too many like me these days and not enough like John Chow. They’re trying to raise the level of the human genetic pool, which is a mucky little puddle since the population crash. So then if a man is cloned, he’s a strong and clever man. It’s only logic, to be sure.”

  Martin grunted; the servo began to hum.

  Kaph had been eating little; he had trouble swallowing his food, choking on it, so that he would give up trying after a few bites. He had lost eight or ten kilos. After three weeks or so, however, his appetite began to pick up, and one day he began to look through the clone’s possessions, the sleeping bags, kits, papers which Pugh had stacked neatly in a far angle of a packing-crate alley. He sorted, destroyed a heap of papers and oddments, made a small packet of what remained, then relapsed into his walking coma.

  Two days later he spoke. Pugh was trying to correct a flutter in the tape-player and failing; Martin had the jet out, checking their maps of the Pampas. “Hell and damnation!” Pugh said, and Kaph said in a toneless voice, “Do you want me to do that?”

  Pugh jumped, controlled himself, and gave the machine to Kaph. The young man took it apart, put it back together, and left it on the table.

  “Put on a tape,” Pugh said with careful casualness, busy at another table.

  Kaph put on the topmost tape, a chorale. He lay down on his cot. The sound of a hundred human voices singing together filled the dome. He lay still, his face blank.