The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Four apiece in the three large airjets, they slipped off north from the dome, over Libra’s dun rugose skin, in starlight.

  “Desolate,” one said.

  It was a boy and girl with Pugh and Martin. Pugh wondered if these were the two that had shared a sleeping bag last night. No doubt they wouldn’t mind if he asked them. Sex must be as handy as breathing to them. Did you two breathe last night?

  “Yes,” he said, “it is desolate.”

  “This is our first time off, except training on Luna.” The girl’s voice was definitely a bit higher and softer.

  “How did you take the big hop?”

  “They doped us. I wanted to experience it.” That was the boy; he sounded wistful. They seemed to have more personality, only two at a time. Did repetition of the individual negate individuality?

  “Don’t worry,” said Martin, steering the sled, “you can’t experience no-time because it isn’t there.”

  “I’d just like to once,” one of them said. “So we’d know.”

  The Mountains of Merioneth showed leprotic in starlight to the east, a plume of freezing gas trailed silvery from a vent-hole to the west, and the sled tilted groundward. The twins braced for the stop at one moment, each with a slight protective gesture to the other. Your skin is my skin, Pugh thought, but literally, no metaphor. What would it be like, then, to have someone as close to you as that? Always to be answered when you spoke; never to be in pain alone. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. . . . That hard old problem was solved. The neighbor was the self: the love was perfect.

  And here was Hellmouth, the mine.

  Pugh was the Exploratory Mission’s E.T. geologist, and Martin his technician and cartographer; but when in the course of a local survey Martin had discovered the U-mine, Pugh had given him full credit, as well as the onus of prospecting the lode and planning the Exploitation Team’s job. These kids had been sent out from Earth years before Martin’s reports got there and had not known what their job would be until they got here. The Exploitation Corps simply sent out teams regularly and blindly as a dandelion sends out its seed, knowing there would be a job for them on Libra or the next planet out or one they hadn’t even heard about yet. The government wanted uranium too urgently to wait while reports drifted home across the lightyears. The stuff was like gold, old-fashioned but essential, worth mining extraterrestrially and shipping interstellar. Worth its weight in people, Pugh thought sourly, watching the tall young men and women go one by one, glimmering in starlight, into the black hole Martin had named Hellmouth.

  As they went in their homeostatic forehead-lamps brightened. Twelve nodding gleams ran along the moist, wrinkled walls. Pugh heard Martin’s radiation counter peeping twenty to the dozen up ahead. “Here’s the drop-off,” said Martin’s voice in the suit intercom, drowning out the peeping and the dead silence that was around them. “We’re in a side-fissure, this is the main vertical vent in front of us.” The black void gaped, its far side not visible in the headlamp beams. “Last vulcanism seems to have been a couple of thousand years ago. Nearest fault is twenty-eight kilos east, in the Trench. This area seems to be as safe seismically as anything in the area. The big basalt-flow overhead stabilizes all these substructures, so long as it remains stable itself. Your central lode is thirty-six meters down and runs in a series of five bubble caverns northeast. It is a lode, a pipe of very high-grade ore. You saw the percentage figures, right? Extraction’s going to be no problem. All you’ve got to do is get the bubbles topside.”

  “Take off the lid and let ’em float up.” A chuckle. Voices began to talk, but they were all the same voice and the suit radio gave them no location in space. “Open the thing right up. —Safer that way. —But it’s a solid basalt roof, how thick, ten meters here? —Three to twenty, the report said. —Blow good ore all over the lot. —Use this access we’re in, straighten it a bit and run slider rails for the robos. —Import burros. —Have we got enough propping material? —What’s your estimate of total payload mass, Martin?”

  “Say over five million kilos and under eight.”

  “Transport will be here in ten E-months. —It’ll have to go pure. —No, they’ll have the mass problem in NAFAL shipping licked by now, remember it’s been sixteen years since we left Earth last Tuesday. —Right, they’ll send the whole lot back and purify it in Earth orbit. —Shall we go down, Martin?”

  “Go on. I’ve been down.”

  The first one—Aleph? (Heb, the ox, the leader)—swung onto the ladder and down; the rest followed. Pugh and Martin stood at the chasm’s edge. Pugh set his intercom to exchange only with Martin’s suit, and noticed Martin doing the same. It was a bit wearing, this listening to one person think aloud in ten voices, or was it one voice speaking the thoughts of ten minds?

  “A great gut,” Pugh said, looking down into the black pit, its veined and warted walls catching stray gleams of headlamps far below. “A cow’s bowel. A bloody great constipated intestine.”

  Martin’s counter peeped like a lost chicken. They stood inside the dead but epileptic planet, breathing oxygen from tanks, wearing suits impermeable to corrosives and harmful radiations, resistant to a 200-degree range of temperatures, tear-proof, and as shock-resistant as possible given the soft vulnerable stuff inside.

  “Next hop,” Martin said, “I’d like to find a planet that has nothing whatever to exploit.”

  “You found this.”

  “Keep me home next time.”

  Pugh was pleased. He had hoped Martin would want to go on working with him, but neither of them was used to talking much about their feelings, and he had hesitated to ask. “I’ll try that,” he said.

  “I hate this place. I like caves, you know. It’s why I came in here. Just spelunking. But this one’s a bitch. Mean. You can’t ever let down in here. I guess this lot can handle it, though. They know their stuff.”

  “Wave of the future, whatever,” said Pugh.

  The wave of the future came swarming up the ladder, swept Martin to the entrance, gabbled at and around him: “Have we got enough material for supports? —If we convert one of the extractor servos to anneal, yes. —Sufficient if we miniblast? —Kaph can calculate stress.” Pugh had switched his intercom back to receive them; he looked at them, so many thoughts jabbering in an eager mind, and at Martin standing silent among them, and at Hellmouth and the wrinkled plain. “Settled! How does that strike you as a preliminary schedule, Martin?”

  “It’s your baby,” Martin said.

  Within five E-days the Johns had all their material and equipment unloaded and operating and were starting to open up the mine. They worked with total efficiency. Pugh was fascinated and frightened by their effectiveness, their confidence, their independence. He was no use to them at all. A clone, he thought, might indeed be the first truly stable, self-reliant human being. Once adult it would need nobody’s help. It would be sufficient to itself physically, sexually, emotionally, intellectually. Whatever he did, any member of it would always receive the support and approval of his peers, his other selves. Nobody else was needed.

  Two of the clone stayed in the dome doing calculations and paperwork, with frequent sled trips to the mine for measurements and tests. They were the mathematicians of the clone, Zayin and Kaph. That is, as Zayin explained, all ten had had thorough mathematical training from age three to twenty-one, but from twenty-one to twenty-three she and Kaph had gone on with math while the others intensified study in other specialties, geology, mining, engineering, electronic engineering, equipment robotics, applied atomics, and so on. “Kaph and I feel,” she said, “that we’re the element of the clone closest to what John Chow was in his singleton lifetime. But of course he was principally in biomath, and they didn’t take us far in that.”

  “They needed us most in this field,” Kaph said, with the patriotic priggishness they sometimes evinced.

  Pugh and Martin soon could distinguish this pair from the others, Zayin by gestalt, Kaph only by a discolored left f
ourth fingernail, got from an ill-aimed hammer at the age of six. No doubt there were many such differences, physical and psychological, among them; nature might be identical, nurture could not be. But the differences were hard to find. And part of the difficulty was that they never really talked to Pugh and Martin. They joked with them, were polite, got along fine. They gave nothing. It was nothing one could complain about; they were very pleasant, they had the standardized American friendliness. “Do you come from Ireland, Owen?”

  “Nobody comes from Ireland, Zayin.”

  “There are lots of Irish-Americans.”

  “To be sure, but no more Irish. A couple of thousand in all the island, the last I knew. They didn’t go in for birth control, you know, so the food ran out. By the Third Famine there were no Irish left at all but the priesthood, and they all celibate, or nearly all.”

  Zayin and Kaph smiled stiffly. They had no experience of either bigotry or irony. “What are you then, ethnically?” Kaph asked, and Pugh replied, “A Welshman.”

  “Is it Welsh that you and Martin speak together?”

  None of your business, Pugh thought, but said, “No, it’s his dialect, not mine: Argentinean. A descendant of Spanish.”

  “You learned it for private communication ?”

  “Whom had we here to be private from? It’s just that sometimes a man likes to speak his native language.”

  “Ours is English,” Kaph said unsympathetically. Why should they have sympathy? That’s one of the things you give because you need it back.

  “Is Wells quaint?” asked Zayin.

  “Wells? Oh, Wales, it’s called. Yes, Wales is quaint.” Pugh switched on his rock-cutter, which prevented further conversation by a synapse-destroying whine, and while it whined he turned his back and said a profane word in Welsh.

  That night he used the Argentine dialect for private communication. “Do they pair off in the same couples or change every night?”

  Martin looked surprised. A prudish expression, unsuited to his features, appeared for a moment. It faded. He too was curious. “I think it’s random.”

  “Don’t whisper, man, it sounds dirty. I think they rotate.”

  “On a schedule?”

  “So nobody gets omitted.”

  Martin gave a vulgar laugh and smothered it. “What about us? Aren’t we omitted?”

  “That doesn’t occur to them.”

  “What if I proposition one of the girls?”

  “She’d tell the others and they’d decide as a group.”

  “I am not a bull,” Martin said, his dark, heavy face heating up. “I will not be judged—”

  “Down, down, machismo,” said Pugh. “Do you mean to proposition one?”

  Martin shrugged, sullen. “Let ’em have their incest.”

  “Incest is it, or masturbation?”

  “I don’t care, if they’d do it out of earshot!”

  The clone’s early attempts at modesty had soon worn off, unmotivated by any deep defensiveness of self or awareness of others. Pugh and Martin were daily deeper swamped under the intimacies of its constant emotional-sexual-mental interchange: swamped yet excluded.

  “Two months to go,” Martin said one evening.

  “To what?” snapped Pugh. He was edgy lately, and Martin’s sullenness got on his nerves.

  “To relief.”

  In sixty days the full crew of their Exploratory Mission were due back from their survey of the other planets of the system. Pugh was aware of this.

  “Crossing off the days on your calendar?” he jeered.

  “Pull yourself together, Owen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I say.”

  They parted in contempt and resentment.

  Pugh came in after a day alone on the Pampas, a vast lava plain the nearest edge of which was two hours south by jet. He was tired but refreshed by solitude. They were not supposed to take long trips alone but lately had often done so. Martin stooped under bright lights, drawing one of his elegant masterly charts. This one was of the whole face of Libra, the cancerous face. The dome was otherwise empty, seeming dim and large as it had before the clone came. “Where’s the golden horde?”

  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 midafternoon; 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.