The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Barry A. Pennywither, I’m a professor of French at Munson College, Indiana, on leave in Paris to pursue my studies of Late Mediaeval Fr—” He stopped. He had just realized what kind of accent Lenoir had. “What year is this? What century? Please, Dr. Lenoir—” The Frenchman looked confused. The meanings of words change, as well as their pronunciations. “Who rules this country?” Barry shouted.

  Lenoir gave a shrug, a French shrug (some things never change). “Louis is king,” he said. “Louis the Eleventh. The dirty old spider.”

  They stood staring at each other like wooden Indians for some time. Lenoir spoke first. “Then you’re a man?”

  “Yes. Look, Lenoir, I think you—your spell—you must have muffed it a bit.”

  “Evidently,” said the alchemist. “Are you French?”

  “No.”

  “Are you English?” Lenoir glared. “Are you a filthy Goddam?”

  “No. No. I’m from America. I’m from the—from your future. From the twentieth century A.D.” Barry blushed. It sounded silly, and he was a modest man. But he knew this was no illusion. The room he stood in, his room, was new. Not five centuries old. Unswept, but new. And the copy of Albertus Magnus by his knee was new, bound in soft supple calfskin, the gold lettering gleaming. And there stood Lenoir in his black gown, not in costume, at home. . . .

  “Please sit down, sir,” Lenoir was saying. And he added, with the fine though absent courtesy of the poor scholar, “Are you tired from the journey? I have bread and cheese, if you’ll honor me by sharing it.”

  They sat at the table munching bread and cheese. At first Lenoir tried to explain why he had tried black magic. “I was fed up,” he said. “Fed up! I’ve slaved in solitude since I was twenty, for what? For knowledge. To learn some of Nature’s secrets. They are not to be learned.” He drove his knife half an inch into the table, and Barry jumped. Lenoir was a thin little fellow, but evidently a passionate one. It was a fine face, though pale and lean: intelligent, alert, vivid. Barry was reminded of the face of a famous atomic physicist, seen in newspaper pictures up until 1953. Somehow this likeness pompted him to say, “Some are, Lenoir; we’ve learned a good bit, here and there. . . .”

  “What?” said the alchemist, skeptical but curious.

  “Well, I’m no scientist—”

  “Can you make gold?” He grinned as he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so, but they do make diamonds.”

  “How?”

  “Carbon—coal, you know—under great heat and pressure, I believe. Coal and diamond are both carbon, you know, the same element.”

  “Element?”

  “Now as I say, I’m no—”

  “Which is the primal element?” Lenoir shouted, his eyes fiery, the knife poised in his hand.

  “There are about a hundred elements,” Barry said coldly, hiding his alarm.

  Two hours later, having squeezed out of Barry every dribble of the remnants of his college chemistry course, Lenoir rushed out into the night and reappeared shortly with a bottle. “O my master,” he cried, “to think I offered you only bread and cheese!” It was a pleasant burgundy, vintage 1477, a good year. After they had drunk a glass together Lenoir said, “If somehow I could repay you . . .”

  “You can. Do you know the name of the poet François Villon?”

  “Yes,” Lenoir said with some surprise, “but he wrote only French trash, you know, not in Latin.”

  “Do you know how or when he died?”

  “Oh, yes; hanged at Montfaucon here in ‘64 or ‘65, with a crew of no-goods like himself. Why?”

  Two hours later the bottle was dry, their throats were dry, and the watchman had called three o’clock of a cold clear morning. “Jehan, I’m worn out,” Barry said, “you’d better send me back.” The alchemist was too polite, too grateful, and perhaps also too tired to argue. Barry stood stiffly inside the pentagram, a tall bony figure muffled in a brown blanket, smoking a Gauloise Bleue. “Adieu,” Lenoir said sadly. “Au revoir,” Barry replied. Lenoir began to read the spell backwards. The candle flickered, his voice softened. “Me audi, haere, haere,” he read, sighed, and looked up. The pentagram was empty. The candle flickered. “But I learned so little!” Lenoir cried out to the empty room. Then he beat the open book with his fists and said, “And a friend like that—a real friend—” He smoked one of the cigarettes Barry had left him—he had taken to tobacco at once. He slept, sitting at his table, for a couple of hours. When he woke he brooded a while, relit his candle, smoked the other cigarette, then opened the Incantatoria and began to read aloud: “Haere, haere . . .”

  “Oh, thank God,” Barry said, stepping quickly out of the pentagram and grasping Lenoir’s hand. “Listen, I got back there—this room, this same room, Jehan! but old, horribly old, and empty, you weren’t there—I thought, my God, what have I done? I’d sell my soul to get back there, to him—What can I do with what I’ve learned? Who’ll believe it? How can I prove it? And who the devil could I tell it to anyhow? Who cares? I couldn’t sleep, I sat and cried for an hour—”

  “Will you stay?”

  “Yes. Look, I brought these—in case you did invoke me.” Sheepishly he exhibited eight packs of Gauloises, several books, and a gold watch. “It might fetch a price,” he explained. “I knew paper francs wouldn’t do much good.”

  At sight of the printed books Lenoir’s eyes gleamed with curiosity, but he stood still. “My friend,” he said, “you said you’d sell your soul . . . you know . . . so would I. Yet we haven’t. How—after all—how did this happen? That we’re both men. No devils. No pacts in blood. Two men who’ve lived in this room . . .”

  “I don’t know,” said Barry. “We’ll think that out later. Can I stay with you, Jehan?”

  “Consider this your home,” Lenoir said with a gracious gesture around the room, the stacks of books, the alembics, the candle growing pale. Outside the window, grey on grey, rose up the two great towers of Notre Dame. It was the dawn of April 3rd.

  After breakfast (bread crusts and cheese rinds) they went out and climbed the south tower. The cathedral looked the same as always, though cleaner than in 1961, but the view was rather a shock to Barry. He looked down upon a little town. Two small islands covered with houses; on the right bank more houses crowded inside a fortified wall; on the left bank a few streets twisting around the college; and that was all. Pigeons chortled on the sun-warmed stone between gargoyles. Lenoir, who had seen the view before, was carving the date (in Roman numerals) on a parapet. “Let’s celebrate,” he said. “Let’s go out into the country. I haven’t been out of the city for two years. Let’s go clear over there—” he pointed to a misty green hill on which a few huts and a windmill were just visible—“to Montmartre, eh? There are some good bars there, I’m told.”

  Their life soon settled into an easy routine. At first Barry was a little nervous in the crowded streets, but, in a spare black gown of Lenoir’s, he was not noticed as outlandish except for his height. He was probably the tallest man in fifteenth-century France. Living standards were low and lice were unavoidable, but Barry had never valued comfort much; the only thing he really missed was coffee at breakfast. When they had bought a bed and a razor—Barry had forgotten his—and introduced him to the landlord as M. Barrie, a cousin of Lenoir’s from the Auvergne, their housekeeping arrangements were complete. Barry’s watch brought a tremendous price, four gold pieces, enough to live on for a year. They sold it as a wondrous new timepiece from Illyria, and the buyer, a Court chamberlain looking for a nice present to give the king, looked at the inscription—Hamilton Bros., New Haven, 1881—and nodded sagely. Unfortunately he was shut up in one of King Louis’s cages for naughty courtiers at Tours before he had presented his gift, and the watch may still be there behind some brick in the ruins of Plessis; but this did not affect the two scholars. Mornings they wandered about sightseeing the Bastille and the churches, or visiting various minor poets in whom Barry was interested; after lunch they discussed elect
ricity, the atomic theory, physiology, and other matters in which Lenoir was interested, and performed minor chemical and anatomical experiments, usually unsuccessfully; after supper they merely talked. Endless, easy talks that ranged over the centuries but always ended here, in the shadowy room with its window open to the Spring night, in their friendship. After two weeks they might have known each other all their lives. They were perfectly happy. They knew they would do nothing with what they had learned from each other. In 1961 how could Barry ever prove his knowledge of old Paris, in 1482 how could Lenoir ever prove the validity of the scientific method? It did not bother them. They had never really expected to be listened to. They had merely wanted to learn.

  So they were happy for the first time in their lives; so happy, in fact, that certain desires always before subjugated to the desire for knowledge, began to awaken. “I don’t suppose,” Barry said one night across the table, “that you ever thought much about marrying?”

  “Well, no,” his friend answered, doubtfully. “That is, I’m in minor orders . . . and it seemed irrelevant. . . .”

  “And expensive. Besides, in my time, no self-respecting woman would want to share my kind of life. American women are so damned poised and efficient and glamorous, terrifying creatures. . . .”

  “And women here are little and dark, like beetles, with bad teeth,” Lenoir said morosely.

  They said no more about women that night. But the next night they did; and the next; and on the next, celebrating the successful dissection of the main nervous system of a pregnant frog, they drank two bottles of Montrachet 74 and got soused. “Let’s invoke a woman, Jehan,” Barry said in a lascivious bass, grinning like a gargoyle.

  “What if I raised a devil this time?”

  “Is there really much difference?”

  They laughed wildly, and drew a pentagram. “Haere, haere,” Lenoir began; when he got the hiccups, Barry took over. He read the last words. There was a rush of cold, marshy-smelling air, and in the pentagram stood a wild-eyed being with long black hair, stark naked, screaming.

  “Woman, by God,” said Barry.

  “Is it?”

  It was. “Here, take my cloak,” Barry said, for the poor thing now stood gawping and shivering. He put the cloak over her shoulders. Mechanically she pulled it round her, muttering, “Gratias ago, domine.”

  “Latin!” Lenoir shouted. “A woman speaking Latin?” It took him longer to get over that shock than it did Bota to get over hers. She was, it seemed, a slave in the household of the Sub-Prefect of North Gaul, who lived on the smaller island of the muddy island town called Lutetia. She spoke Latin with a thick Celtic brogue, and did not even know who was emperor in Rome in her day. A real barbarian, Lenoir said with scorn. So she was, an ignorant, taciturn, humble barbarian with tangled hair, white skin, and clear grey eyes. She had been waked from a sound sleep. When they convinced her that she was not dreaming, she evidently assumed that this was some prank of her foreign and all-powerful master the Sub-Prefect, and accepted the situation without further question. “Am I to serve you, my masters?” she inquired timidly but without sullenness, looking from one to the other.

  “Not me,” Lenoir growled, and added in French to Barry, “Go on; I’ll sleep in the store-room.” He departed.

  Bota looked up at Barry. No Gauls, and few Romans, were so magnificently tall; no Gauls and no Romans ever spoke so kindly. “Your lamp” (it was a candle, but she had never seen a candle) “is nearly burnt out,” she said. “Shall I blow it out?”

  For an additional two sols a year the landlord let them use the store-room as a second bedroom, and Lenoir now slept alone again in the main room of the garret. He observed his friend’s idyll with a brooding, unjealous interest. The professor and the slave-girl loved each other with delight and tenderness. Their pleasure overlapped Lenoir in waves of protective joy. Bota had led a brutal life, treated always as a woman but never as a human. In one short week she bloomed, she came alive, evincing beneath her gentle passiveness a cheerful, clever nature. “You’re turning out a regular Parisienne,” he heard Barry accuse her one night (the attic walls were thin). She replied, “If you knew what it is for me not to be always defending myself, always afraid, always alone . . .”

  Lenoir sat up on his cot and brooded. About midnight, when all was quiet, he rose and noiselessly prepared the pinches of sulfur and silver, drew the pentagram, opened the book. Very softly he read the spell. His face was apprehensive.

  In the pentagram appeared a small white dog. It cowered and hung its tail, then came shyly forward, sniffed Lenoir’s hand, looked up at him with liquid eyes and gave a modest, pleading whine. A lost puppy . . . Lenoir stroked it. It licked his hands and jumped all over him, wild with relief. On its white leather collar was a silver plaque engraved, “Jolie. Dupont, 36 rue de Seine, Paris VIe.”

  Jolie went to sleep, after gnawing a crust, curled up under Lenoir’s chair. And the alchemist opened the book again and read, still softly, but this time without self-consciousness, without fear, knowing what would happen.

  Emerging from his store-room-bedroom-honeymoon in the morning, Barry stopped short in the doorway. Lenoir was sitting up in bed, petting a white puppy, and deep in conversation with the person sitting on the foot of the bed, a tall red-haired woman dressed in silver. The puppy barked. Lenoir said, “Good morning!” The woman smiled wondrously.

  “Jumping Jesus,” Barry muttered (in English). Then he said, “Good morning. When are you from?” The effect was Rita Hayworth, sublimated—Hayworth plus the Mona Lisa, perhaps?

  “From Altair, about seven thousand years from now,” she said, smiling still more wondrously. Her French accent was worse than that of a football-scholarship freshman. “I’m an archaeologist. I was excavating the ruins of Paris III. I’m sorry I speak the language so badly; of course we know it only from inscriptions.”

  “From Altair? The star? But you’re human—I think—”

  “Our planet was colonized from Earth about four thousand years ago—that is, three thousand years from now.” She laughed, most wondrously, and glanced at Lenoir. “Jehan explained it all to me, but I still get confused.”

  “It was a dangerous thing to try it again, Jehan!” Barry accused him. “We’ve been awfully lucky, you know.”

  “No,” said the Frenchman. “Not lucky.”

  “But after all it’s black magic you’re playing with—Listen—I don’t know your name, madame.”

  “Kislk,” she said.

  “Listen, Kislk,” Barry said without even a stumble, “your science must be fantastically advanced—is there any magic? Does it exist? Can the laws of Nature really be broken, as we seem to be doing?”

  “I’ve never seen nor heard of an authenticated case of magic.”

  “Then what goes on?” Barry roared. “Why does that stupid old spell work for Jehan, for us, that one spell, and here, nowhere else, for nobody else, in five—no, eight—no, fifteen thousand years of recorded history? Why? Why? And where did that damn puppy come from?”

  “The puppy was lost,” Lenoir said, his dark face grave. “Somewhere near this house, on the Ile Saint-Louis.”

  “And I was sorting potsherds,” Kislk said, also gravely, “in a house-site, Island 2, Pit 4, Section D. A lovely Spring day, and I hated it. Loathed it. The day, the work, the people around me.” Again she looked at the gaunt little alchemist, a long, quiet look. “I tried to explain it to Jehan last night. We have improved the race, you see. We’re all very tall, healthy, and beautiful. No fillings in our teeth. All skulls from Early America have fillings in the teeth. . . . Some of us are brown, some white, some gold-skinned. But all beautiful, and healthy, and well-adjusted, and aggressive, and successful. Our professions and degree of success are preplanned for us in the State Pre-School Homes. But there’s an occasional genetic flaw. Me, for instance. I was trained as an archaeologist because the Teachers saw that I really didn’t like people, live people. People bored me. All like me on the outs
ide, all alien to me on the inside. When everything’s alike, which place is home? . . . But now I’ve seen an unhygienic room with insufficient heating. Now I’ve seen a cathedral not in ruins. Now I’ve met a living man who’s shorter than me, with bad teeth and a short temper. Now I’m home, I’m where I can be myself, I’m no longer alone!”

  “Alone,” Lenoir said gently to Barry. “Loneliness, eh? Loneliness is the spell, loneliness is stronger. . . . Really it doesn’t seem unnatural.”

  Bota was peering round the doorway, her face flushed between the black tangles of her hair. She smiled shyly and said a polite Latin good-morning to the newcomer.

  “Kislk doesn’t know Latin,” Lenoir said with immense satisfaction. “We must teach Bota some French. French is the language of love, anyway, eh ? Come along, let’s go out and buy some bread. I’m hungry.”

  Kislk hid her silver tunic under the useful and anonymous cloak, while Lenoir pulled on his moth-eaten black gown. Bota combed her hair, while Barry thoughtfully scratched a louse-bite on his neck. Then they set forth to get breakfast. The alchemist and the interstellar archaeologist went first, speaking French; the Gaulish slave and the professor from Indiana followed, speaking Latin, and holding hands. The narrow streets were crowded, bright with sunshine. Above them Notre Dame reared its two square towers against the sky. Beside them the Seine rippled softly. It was April in Paris, and on the banks of the river the chestnuts were in bloom.

  THE MASTERS

  “The Masters” was my first published genuine authentic real virgin-wool science fiction story, by which I mean a story in which or to which the existence and the accomplishments of science are, in some way, essential. At least that is what I mean by science fiction on Mondays. On Tuesdays sometimes I mean something else.

  Some science-fiction writers detest science, its spirit, method, and works; others like it. Some are anti-technology, others are technology-worshippers. I seem to be rather bored by complex technology, but fascinated by biology, psychology, and the speculative ends of astronomy and physics, insofar as I can follow them. The figure of the scientist is a quite common one in my stories, and most often a rather lonely one, isolated, an adventurer, out on the edge of things.