The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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! Hal 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 wa
s 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.”

  “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.

  In the next days he took over several routine jobs, unasked. He undertook nothing that wanted initiative, and if asked to do anything he made no response at all.

  “He’s doing well,” Pugh said in the dialect of Argentina.

  “He’s not. He’s turning himself into a machine. Does what he’s programmed to do, no reaction to anything else. He’s worse off than when he didn’t function at all. He’s not human any more.”

  Pugh sighed. “Well, good night,” he said in English. “Good night, Kaph.”

  “Good night,” Martin said; Kaph did not.

  Next morning at breakfast Kaph reached across Martin’s plate for the toast. “Why don’t you ask for it?” Martin said with the geniality of repressed exasperation. “I can pass it.”

  “I can reach it,” Kaph said in his flat voice.

  “Yes, but look. Asking to pass things, saying good night or hello, they’re not important, but all the same when somebody says something a person ought to answer. . . .”

  The young man looked indifferently in Martin’s direction; his eyes still did not seem to see clear through to the person he looked toward. “Why should I answer?”

  “Because somebody has said something to you.”

  “Why?”

  Martin shrugged and laughed. Pugh jumped up and turned on the rock-cutter.

  Later on he said, “Lay off that, please, Martin.”

  “Manners are essential in small isolated crews, some kind of manners, whatever you work out together. He’s been taught that, everybody in Far Out knows it. Why does he deliberately flout it?”

  “Do you tell yourself good night?”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you see Kaph’s never known anyone but himself?”

  Martin brooded and then broke out. “Then by God this cloning business is all wrong. It won’t do. What are a lot of duplicate geniuses going to do for us when they don’t even know we exist?”

  Pugh nodded. “It might be wiser to separate the clones and bring them up with others. But they make such a grand team this way.”

  “Do they? I don’t know. If this lot had been ten average inefficient E.T. engineers, would they all have got killed? What if, when the quake came and things started caving in, what if all those kids ran the same way, farther into the mine, maybe, to save the one who was farthest in? Even Kaph was outside and went in. . . . It’s hypothetical. But I keep thinking, out of ten ordinary confused guys, more might have got out.”

  “I don’t know. It’s true that identical twins tend to die at about the same time, even when they have never seen each other. Identity and death, it is very strange. . . .”

  The days went on, the red sun crawled across the dark sky, Kaph did not speak when spoken to, Pugh and Martin snapped at each other more frequently each day. Pugh complained of Martin’s snoring. Offended, Martin moved his cot clear across the dome and also ceased speaking to Pugh for some while. Pugh whistled Welsh dirges until Martin complained, and then Pugh stopped speaking for a while.

  The day before the Mission ship was due, Martin announced he was going over to Merioneth.

  “I thought at least you’d be giving me a hand with the computer to finish the rock analyses,” Pugh said, aggrieved.

  “Kaph can do that. I want one more look at the Trench. Have fun,” Martin added in dialect,
and laughed, and left.

  “What is that language?”

  “Argentinean. I told you that once, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t know.” After a while the young man added, “I have forgotten a lot of things, I think.”

  “It wasn’t important, to be sure,” Pugh said gently, realizing all at once how important this conversation was. “Will you give me a hand running the computer, Kaph?”

  He nodded.

  Pugh had left a lot of loose ends, and the job took them all day. Kaph was a good co-worker, quick and systematic, much more so than Pugh himself. His flat voice, now that he was talking again, got on the nerves; but it didn’t matter, there was only this one day left to get through and then the ship would come, the old crew, comrades and friends.

  During tea break Kaph said, “What will happen if the Explore ship crashes?”

  “They’d be killed.”

  “To you, I mean.”

  “To us? We’d radio SOS signals and live on half rations till the rescue cruiser from Area Three Base came. Four and a half E-years away it is. We have life support here for three men for, let’s see, maybe between four and five years. A bit tight, it would be.”

  “Would they send a cruiser for three men?”

  “They would.”

  Kaph said no more.

  “Enough cheerful speculations,” Pugh said cheerfully, rising to get back to work. He slipped sideways and the chair avoided his hand; he did a sort of half-pirouette and fetched up hard against the dome hide. “My goodness,” he said, reverting to his native idiom, “what is it?”

  “Quake,” said Kaph.

  The teacups bounced on the table with a plastic cackle, a litter of papers slid off a box, the skin of the dome swelled and sagged. Underfoot there was a huge noise, half sound, half shaking, a subsonic boom.

  Kaph sat unmoved. An earthquake does not frighten a man who died in an earthquake.

  Pugh, white-faced, wiry black hair sticking out, a frightened man, said, “Martin is in the Trench.”

  “What trench?”

  “The big fault line. The epicenter for the local quakes. Look at the seismograph.” Pugh struggled with the stuck door of a still-jittering locker.