The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The very high places are terrible, alone at dusk.

  The light no longer stayed for him. There was no longer plenty of time. He had run out of time. Stars came out and looked at him eye to eye out of the gulfs of darkness whenever he glanced aside from the huge white uptilted plain, the higher plane he climbed. On either side of him there was a gap, with a few stars in it. But the snow kept its own cold light, and he kept climbing. He remembered the path when he came across it. God or the state or he himself had put a path there on the mountain after all. He turned right, and it was wrong. He turned left, and stood still. He did not know which way to go, and shaking with cold and fear he cried out aloud to the death-white summit above him and to the black places in between the stars his wife’s name, “Isobel!”

  She came along the path out of the darkness. “I began to get worried about you, Lewis.”

  “I went farther than I meant to,” Lewis said.

  “It stays light so long up here you sort of think it’ll go on forever. . . .”

  “Right. I’m sorry I worried you.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t worried. You know. Lonesome. I thought maybe your leg had slowed you down. Is it a good hike?”

  “Spectacular.”

  “Take me along tomorrow.”

  “Didn’t you enjoy skiing?”

  She shook her head. “Not without you,” she muttered, shamefaced. They went leftward down the path, not very fast. Lewis was still slightly hobbled by the pulled muscle that had kept him off skis the last two days, and it was dark, and there wasn’t any hurry. They held hands. Snow, starlight, stillness. Fire underfoot, darkness around; ahead of them, firelight, beer, bed. All things in their due time. Some, born gamblers, will always choose to live on the side of a volcano.

  “When I was in the sanitarium,” Isobel said, pausing so that he too stopped and there was no longer even the noise of their boots on the dry snow, no sound at all but the soft sound of her voice, “I had a dream like this. Awfully like this. It was the . . . most important dream I had. Yet I can’t recall it clearly—I never could, even in therapy. But it was like this. This silence. Being up high. The silence above all . . . above all. It was so silent that if I said something, you would be able to hear it. I knew that. I was sure of it. And in the dream I think I said your name, and you could hear me—you answered me—”

  “Say my name,” he whispered.

  She turned and looked at him. There was no sound on the mountain or among the stars. She said his name.

  He answered saying hers, and then took hold of her; both of them were shaking.

  “It’s cold, it’s cold, we’ve got to go down.”

  They went on, on their tightrope between the outer and the inner fires.

  “Look at that enormous star.”

  “Planet. Saturn—Father Time.”

  “Ate his children, didn’t he,” she murmured, holding hard to his arm.

  “All but one of them,” Lewis answered. Down a long clear slope before them now they saw in grey starlight the bulk of the upper hut, the towers of the ski-lift vague and gaunt, and the vast down-sweep of the lines.

  His hands were cold and he slipped off his gloves a minute to beat them together, but this was hard to do because of the glass of water he was holding. He finished pouring the water in little dribbles around the roots of the olive tree and set down the glass beside the mended flowerpot. But something still remained in his hand, folded into the palm like a crib for a high-school French final, que je fusse, que tu fusses, qu’il fût, small and sweat-stuck. He opened his hand and studied the item for some while. A message. From whom, to whom? From grave, to womb. A little packet, sealed, containing 100 mg of LSD/a in sugar.

  Sealed?

  He remembered, with precision and in order, opening it, swallowing the stuff, the taste of it. He also remembered with equal order and precision where he had been since then and knew that he had not been there yet.

  He went over to Jim who was just exhaling the breath he had been inhaling as Lewis began to water the olive tree. Deftly and gently Lewis tucked the packet into Jim’s coat pocket.

  “Aren’t you coming along?” Jim asked, smiling a mild smile.

  Lewis shook his head. “Chicken,” he murmured. It was hard to explain that he had already come back from the trip he had not made. Besides, Jim wouldn’t hear him. He was off where people don’t hear and can’t answer, walled in.

  “Have a good trip,” Lewis said.

  He got his raincoat (dirty poplin, no fleece lining, hold on, wait) and went down the stairs and out into the streets. The summer was ending, the season changing. It was raining but not dark yet, and the city wind blew in great cool gusts that smelled of wet earth and forests and the night.

  NINE LIVES

  The biologist Gordon Rattray Taylor is innocently responsible for this story. He has a chapter on cloning in his fine book The Biological Time Bomb. I read that, and then I wrote this.

  It is as near “hard-core” or wiring-diagram science fiction as I ever get; that is, it’s a working out of a theme directly extrapolated from contemporary work in one of the quantitative sciences—a what-if story. The theme, however, is developed qualitatively, psychologically. Essentially I am using the scientific element, not as an end in itself, but as a metaphor or symbol, a means of saying something not otherwise expressible.

  “Nine Lives” appeared in Playboy in 1968, under the only pen name I have ever used: U. K. Le Guin. The editors politely asked if they could use the first initial only, and I agreed. It’s not surprising that Playboy hadn’t had its consciousness raised back then, but it is surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them. It was the first (and is the only) time I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer, from any editor or publisher; and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important.

  Playboy made a good many minor changes in the story, and these have been kept in reprintings of it under their imprint. I prefer my version of it, and whenever I have had control of reprintings it has appeared in the version given here, and under my unabridged name.

  She was alive inside but dead outside, her face a black and dun net of wrinkles, tumors, cracks. She was bald and blind. The tremors that crossed Libra’s face were mere quiverings of corruption. Underneath, in the black corridors, the halls beneath the skin, there were crepitations in darkness, ferments, chemical nightmares that went on for centuries. “O the damned flatulent planet,” Pugh murmured as the dome shook and a boil burst a kilometer to the southwest, spraying silver pus across the sunset. The sun had been setting for the last two days. “I’ll be glad to see a human face.”

  “Thanks,” said Martin.

  “Yours is human to be sure,” said Pugh, “but I’ve seen it so long I can’t see it.”

  Radvid signals cluttered the communicator which Martin was operating, faded, returned as face and voice. The face filled the screen, the nose of an Assyrian king, the eyes of a samurai, skin bronze, eyes the color of iron: young, magnificent. “Is that what human beings look like?” said Pugh with awe. “I’d forgotten.”

  “Shut up, Owen, we’re on.”

  “Libra Exploratory Mission Base, come in please, this is Passerine launch.”

  “Libra here. Beam fixed. Come on down, launch.”

  “Expulsion in seven E-seconds. Hold on.” The screen blanked and sparkled.

  “Do they all look like that? Martin, you and I are uglier men than I thought.”

  “Shut up, Owen. . . .”

  For twenty-two minutes Martin followed the landing craft down by signal and then through the cleared dome they saw it, small star in the blood-colored east, sinking. It came down neat and quiet, Libra’s thin atmosphere carrying little sound. Pugh and Martin closed the headpieces of their imsuits, zipped out of the dome airlocks, and ran with soaring strides, Nijinsky and Nureyev, toward the boat. Three equipment modules came floating down at
four-minute intervals from each other and hundred-meter intervals east of the boat. “Come on out,” Martin said on his suit radio, “we’re waiting at the door.”

  “Come on in, the methane’s fine,” said Pugh.

  The hatch opened. The young man they had seen on the screen came out with one athletic twist and leaped down onto the shaky dust and clinkers of Libra. Martin shook his hand, but Pugh was staring at the hatch, from which another young man emerged with the same neat twist and jump, followed by a young woman who emerged with the same neat twist, ornamented by a wriggle, and the jump. They were all tall, with bronze skin, black hair, high-bridged noses, epicanthic fold, the same face. They all had the same face. The fourth was emerging from the hatch with a neat twist and jump. “Martin bach,” said Pugh, “we’ve got a clone.”

  “Right,” said one of them, “we’re a tenclone. John Chow’s the name. You’re Lieutenant Martin?”

  “I’m Owen Pugh.”

  “Alvaro Guillen Martin,” said Martin, formal, bowing slightly. Another girl was out, the same beautiful face; Martin stared at her and his eye rolled like a nervous pony’s. Evidently he had never given any thought to cloning and was suffering technological shock. “Steady,” Pugh said in the Argentine dialect, “it’s only excess twins.” He stood close by Martin’s elbow. He was glad himself of the contact.

  It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

  After two years on a dead planet, and the last half year isolated as a team of two, oneself and one other, after that it’s even harder to meet a stranger, however welcome he may be. You’re out of the habit of difference, you’ve lost the touch; and so the fear revives, the primitive anxiety, the old dread.

  The clone, five males and five females, had got done in a couple of minutes what a man might have got done in twenty: greeted Pugh and Martin, had a glance at Libra, unloaded the boat, made ready to go. They went, and the dome filled with them, a hive of golden bees. They hummed and buzzed quietly, filled up all silences, all spaces with a honey-brown swarm of human presence. Martin looked bewildered at the long-limbed girls, and they smiled at him, three at once. Their smile was gentler than that of the boys, but no less radiantly self-possessed.

  “Self-possessed,” Owen Pugh murmured to his friend, “that’s it. Think of it, to be oneself ten times over. Nine seconds for every motion, nine ayes on every vote. It would be glorious.” But Martin was asleep. And the John Chows had all gone to sleep at once. The dome was filled with their quiet breathing. They were young, they didn’t snore. Martin sighed and snored, his Hershey-bar-colored face relaxed in the dim afterglow of Libra’s primary, set at last. Pugh had cleared the dome and stars looked in, Sol among them, a great company of lights, a clone of splendors. Pugh slept and dreamed of a one-eyed giant who chased him through the shaking halls of Hell.

  From his sleeping bag Pugh watched the clone’s awakening. They all got up within one minute except for one pair, a boy and a girl, who lay snugly tangled and still sleeping in one bag. As Pugh saw this there was a shock like one of Libra’s earthquakes inside him, a very deep tremor. He was not aware of this and in fact thought he was pleased at the sight; there was no other such comfort on this dead hollow world. More power to them, who made love. One of the others stepped on the pair. They woke and the girl sat up flushed and sleepy, with bare golden breasts. One of her sisters murmured something to her; she shot a glance at Pugh and disappeared in the sleeping bag; from another direction came a fierce stare, from still another direction a voice: “Christ, we’re used to having a room to ourselves. Hope you don’t mind, Captain Pugh.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” Pugh said half truthfully. He had to stand up then wearing only the shorts he slept in, and he felt like a plucked rooster, all white scrawn and pimples. He had seldom envied Martin’s compact brownness so much. The United Kingdom had come through the Great Famines well, losing less than half its population: a record achieved by rigorous food control. Black marketeers and hoarders had been executed. Crumbs had been shared. Where in richer lands most had died and a few had thriven, in Britain fewer died and none throve. They all got lean. Their sons were lean, their grandsons lean, small, brittle-boned, easily infected. When civilization became a matter of standing in lines, the British had kept queue, and so had replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the fair-minded. Owen Pugh was a scrawny little man. All the same, he was there.

  At the moment he wished he wasn’t.

  At breakfast a John said, “Now if you’ll brief us, Captain Pugh—”

  “Owen, then.”

  “Owen, we can work out our schedule. Anything new on the mine since your last report to your Mission? We saw your reports when Passerine was orbiting Planet V, where they are now.”

  Martin did not answer, though the mine was his discovery and project, and Pugh had to do his best. It was hard to talk to them. The same faces, each with the same expression of intelligent interest, all leaned toward him across the table at almost the same angle. They all nodded together.

  Over the Exploitation Corps insigne on their tunics each had a nameband, first name John and last name Chow of course, but the middle names different. The men were Aleph, Kaph, Yod, Gimel, and Samedh; the women Sadhe, Daleth, Zayin, Beth, and Resh. Pugh tried to use the names but gave it up at once; he could not even tell sometimes which one had spoken, for all the voices were alike.

  Martin buttered and chewed his toast, and finally interrupted: “You’re a team. Is that it?”

  “Right,” said two Johns.

  “God, what a team! I hadn’t seen the point. How much do you each know what the others are thinking?”

  “Not at all, properly speaking,” replied one of the girls, Zayin. The others watched her with the proprietary, approving look they had. “No ESP, nothing fancy. But we think alike. We have exactly the same equipment. Given the same stimulus, the same problem, we’re likely to be coming up with the same reactions and solutions at the same time. Explanations are easy—don’t even have to make them, usually. We seldom misunderstand each other. It does facilitate our working as a team.”

  “Christ yes,” said Martin. “Pugh and I have spent seven hours out of ten for six months misunderstanding each other. Like most people. What about emergencies, are you as good at meeting the unexpected problem as a nor . . . an unrelated team?”

  “Statistics so far indicate that we are,” Zayin answered readily. Clones must be trained, Pugh thought, to meet questions, to reassure and reason. All they said had the slightly bland and stilted quality of answers furnished to the Public. “We can’t brainstorm as singletons can, we as a team don’t profit from the interplay of varied minds; but we have a compensatory advantage. Clones are drawn from the best human material, individuals of IIQ ninety-ninth percentile, Genetic Constitution alpha double A, and so on. We have more to draw on than most individuals do.”

  “And it’s multiplied by a factor of ten. Who is—who was John Chow?”

  “A genius surely,” Pugh said politely. His interest in cloning was not so new and avid as Martin’s.

  “Leonardo Complex type,” said Yod. “Biomath, also a cellist and an undersea hunter, and interested in structural engineering problems and so on. Died before he’d worked out his major theories.”

  “Then you each represent a different facet of his mind, his talents?”

  “No,” said Zayin, shaking her head in time with several others. “We share the basic equipment and tendencies, of course, but we’re all engineers in Planetary Exploitation. A later clone can be trained to develop other aspects of the basic equipment. It’s all training; the genetic substance is identical. We are John Chow. But we are differently trained.”

  Martin look
ed shell-shocked. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “You say he died young—had they taken germ cells from him beforehand or something?”

  Gimel took over: “He died at twenty-four in an air car crash. They couldn’t save the brain, so they took some intestinal cells and cultured them for cloning. Reproductive cells aren’t used for cloning, since they have only half the chromosomes. Intestinal cells happen to be easy to despecialize and reprogram for total growth.”

  “All chips off the old block,” Martin said valiantly. “But how can . . . some of you be women. . . ?”

  Beth took over: “It’s easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It’s trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually.”

  Gimel again: “They’ve worked these matters of technique and function out carefully. The taxpayer wants the best for his money, and of course clones are expensive. With the cell manipulations, and the incubation in Ngama Placentae, and the maintenance and training of the foster-parent groups, we end up costing about three million apiece.”

  “For your next generation,” Martin said, still struggling, “I suppose you . . . you breed?”

  “We females are sterile,” said Beth with perfect equanimity. “You remember that the Y chromosome was deleted from our original cell. The males can interbreed with approved singletons, if they want to. But to get John Chow again as often as they want, they just reclone a cell from this clone.”

  Martin gave up the struggle. He nodded and chewed cold toast. “Well,” said one of the Johns, and all changed mood, like a flock of starlings that change course in one wingflick, following a leader so fast that no eye can see which leads. They were ready to go. “How about a look at the mine? Then we’ll unload the equipment. Some nice new models in the roboats; you’ll want to see them. Right?” Had Pugh or Martin not agreed they might have found it hard to say so. The Johns were polite but unanimous; their decisions carried. Pugh, Commander of Libra Base 2, felt a qualm. Could he boss around this superman/woman-entity-of-ten? and a genius at that? He stuck close to Martin as they suited for outside. Neither said anything.