The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

She had a look then that might have been relief and might have been sadness; but at supper in her lamplit house she was quiet and easy as ever, and they ate their cheese and stale bread with good cheer.

  Next day he went on carrying bricks down load after load, and if the Ragers watched him they thought him busy on their own kind of work. The slope of the beach out to deep water was gradual, so that he could keep building without ever working above water. He had started at low tide so that his work would never be laid bare. At high tide it was hard, dumping the bricks and trying to lay them in rough courses with the whole sea boiling in his face and thundering over his head, but he kept at it. Towards evening he brought down long iron rods and braced what he had built, for a crosscurrent tended to undermine his causeway about eight feet from its beginning. He made sure that even the tips of the rods were under water at low tide, so that no Rager might suspect an affirmation was being made. A couple of elderly men coming down from a Weeping in the Heights-Hall passed him clanging and battering his empty barrow up the stone streets in dusk, and gravely smiled upon him. It is well to be free of Things, said one softly, and the other nodded.

  Next day, though still he had not dreamed of the Islands again, Lif went on building his causeway. The sand began to shelve off more steeply as he went further. His method now was to stand on the last bit he had built and tip the carefully-loaded barrow from there, and then tip himself off and work, floundering and gasping and coming up and pushing down, to get the bricks levelled and fitted between the pre-set rods; then up again, across the grey sand and up the cliff and bang-clatter through the quiet streets for another load.

  Some time that week the widow said, meeting him in his brickyard, Let me throw ’em over the cliff for you, it’ll save you one leg of the trip.

  It’s heavy work loading the barrow, he said.

  Oh, well, said she.

  All right, so long as you want to. But bricks are heavy bastards. Don’t try to carry many. I’ll give you the small barrow. And the little rat here can sit on the load and get a ride.

  So she helped him on and off through days of silvery weather, fog in the morning, clear sea and sky all afternoon, and the weeds in crannies of the cliff flowering; there was nothing else left to flower. The causeway ran out many yards from shore now, and Lif had had to learn a skill which no one else had ever learned that he knew of, except the fish. He could float and move himself about on the water or under it, in the very sea, without touching foot or hand to solid earth.

  He had never heard that a man could do this thing; but he did not think much about it, being so busy with his bricks, in and out of air and in and out of water all day long, with the foam, the bubbles of water-circled air or air-circled water, all about him, and the fog, and the April rain, a confusion of the elements. Sometimes he was happy down in the murky green unbreathable world, wrestling strangely willful and weightless bricks among the staring shoals, and only the need of air drove him gasping up into the spray-laden wind.

  He built all day long, scrambling up on the sand to collect the bricks that his faithful helper dumped over the cliff’s edge for him, load them in his barrow and run them out the causeway that went straight out a foot or two under sea level at low tide and four or five feet under at high, then dump them at the end, dive in, and build; then back ashore for another load. He came up into town only at evening, worn out, salt-bleared and salt-itching, hungry as a shark, to share what food turned up with the widow and her little boy. Lately, though spring was getting on with soft, long, warm evenings, the town was very dark and still.

  One night when he was not too tired to notice this he spoke of it, and the widow said, Oh, they’re all gone now, I think.

  —All? A pause. —Where did they go?

  She shrugged. She raised her dark eyes to his across the table and gazed through lamplit silence at him for a time. Where? she said. Where does your sea-road lead, Lif?

  He stayed still a while. To the Islands, he answered at last, and then laughed and met her look.

  She did not laugh. She only said, Are they there? Is it true, then, there are Islands? Then she looked over at her sleeping baby, and out the open doorway into the darkness of late spring that lay warm in the streets where no one walked and the rooms where no one lived. At last she looked back at Lif, and said to him, Lif, you know, there aren’t many bricks left. A few hundred. You’ll have to make some more. Then she began to cry softly.

  By God! said Lif, thinking of his underwater road across the sea that went for a hundred and twenty feet, and the sea that went on ten thousand miles from the end of it—I’ll swim there! Now then, don’t cry, dear heart. Would I leave you and the little rat here by yourselves? After all the bricks you’ve nearly hit my head with, and all the queer weeds and shellfish you’ve found us to eat lately, after your table and fireside and your bed and your laughter would I leave you when you cry? Now be still, don’t cry. Let me think of a way we can get to the Islands, all of us together.

  But he knew there was no way. Not for a brickmaker. He had done what he could do. What he could do went one hundred and twenty feet from shore.

  Do you think, he asked after a long time, during which she had cleared the table and rinsed the plates in wellwater that was coming clear again now that the Ragers had been gone many days—Do you think that maybe . . . this . . . He found it hard to say but she stood quiet, waiting, and he had to say it: That this is the end?

  Stillness. In the one lamplit room and all the dark rooms and streets and the burnt fields and wasted lands, stillness. In the black Hall above them on the hill’s height, stillness. A silent air, a silent sky, silence in all places unbroken, unreplying. Except for the far sound of the sea, and, very soft though nearer, the breathing of a sleeping child.

  No, the woman said. She sat down across from him and put her hands upon the table, fine hands as dark as earth, the palms like ivory. No, she said, the end will be the end. This is still just the waiting for it.

  Then why are we still here—just us?

  Oh, well, she said, you had your things—your bricks—and I had the baby. . . .

  Tomorrow we must go, he said after a time. She nodded.

  Before sunrise they were up. There was nothing at all left to eat, and so when she had put a few clothes for the baby in a bag and had on her warm leather mantle, and he had stuck his knife and trowel in his belt and put on a warm cloak that had been her husband’s, they left the little house, going out into the cold wan light in the deserted streets.

  They went downhill, he leading, she following with the sleepy child in a fold of her cloak. He turned neither to the road that led north up the coast nor to the southern road, but went on past the market place and out on the cliff and down the rocky path to the beach. All the way she followed and neither of them spoke. At the edge of the sea he turned.

  I’ll keep you up in the water as long as we can manage, he said.

  She nodded, and said softly, We’ll use the road you built, as far as it goes.

  He took her free hand and led her into the water. It was cold. It was bitter cold, and the cold light from the east behind them shone on the foam-lines hissing on the sand. When they stepped on the beginning of the causeway the bricks were firm under their feet, and the child had gone back to sleep on her shoulder in a fold of her cloak.

  As they went on the buffeting of the waves got stronger. The tide was coming in. The outer breakers wet their clothes, chilled their flesh, drenched their hair and faces. They reached the end of his long work. There lay the beach a little way behind them, the sand dark under the cliff over which stood the silent, paling sky. Around them was wild water and foam. Ahead of them was the unresting water, the great abyss, the gap.

  A breaker hit them on its way in to shore and they staggered; the baby, waked by the sea’s hard slap, cried, a little wail in the long, cold, hissing mutter of the sea always saying the same thing.

  Oh, I can’t! cried the mother, but she gripped the man’s han
d more firmly and came on at his side.

  Lifting his head to take the last step from what he had done towards no shore, he saw the shape riding the western water, the leaping light, the white flicker like a swallow’s breast catching the break of day. It seemed as if voices rang over the sea’s voice. What is it? he said, but her head was bowed to her baby, trying to soothe the little wail that challenged the vast babbling of the sea. He stood still and saw the whiteness of the sail, the dancing light above the waves, dancing on towards them and towards the greater light that grew behind them.

  Wait, the call came from the form that rode the grey waves and danced on the foam, Wait! The voices rang very sweet, and as the sail leaned white above him he saw the faces and the reaching arms, and heard them say to him, Come, come on the ship, come with us to the Islands.

  Hold on, he said softly to the woman, and they took the last step.

  A TRIP TO THE HEAD

  Most people “lead lives of quiet desperation,” and some stories start there, too. We were in England and it was November and dark at two in the afternoon and raining and the suitcase containing all my manuscripts had been stolen at the dock in Southampton and I hadn’t written anything for months and I couldn’t understand the greengrocer and he couldn’t understand me and it was desperation—but quiet—stiff upper lip, don’t you know. So I sat down and started scribbling words, perfectly hopelessly. Words, words, words. They went on about as far as “‘Try being Amanda,’ the other said sourly,” and stopped. A year or so later (British Rails, all honor to them, had found my stolen suitcase, we were back home in Oregon, it was raining) I found the scribble, and went on scribbling, and came to the end. I never did find out what the title ought to be—my agent, Virginia Kidd, did that, to my delight.

  There is a kind of story which I would describe as a Bung Puller. The writer for one reason or another has been stuck, can’t work; and gets started again suddenly, with a pop, and a lot of beer comes leaping out of the keg and foaming all over the floor. This story was definitely a Bung Puller.

  “Is this Earth?” he cried, for things had changed abruptly.

  “Yes, this is Earth,” said the one beside him, “nor are you out of it. In Zambia men are rolling down hills inside barrels as training for space flight. Israel and Egypt have defoliated each other’s deserts. The Reader’s Digest has bought a controlling interest in the United States of America/General Mills combine. The population of the Earth is increasing by thirty billion every Thursday. Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will marry Mao Tse-Tung on Saturday, in search of security; and Russia has contaminated Mars with bread mold.”

  “Why then,” said he, “nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing much,” said the one beside him. “As Jean-Paul Sartre has said in his lovable way, ‘Hell is other people.’”

  “To Hell with Jean-Paul Sartre. I want to know where I am.”

  “Well then,” said the other, “tell me who you are.”

  “I’m.”

  “Well?”

  “My name is.”

  “What?”

  He stood, his eyes filling with tears and his knees with palsy, and knew he did not know his name. He was a blank, a cipher, an x. He had a body and all that, but he had no who.

  They stood at the edge of a forest, he and the other one. It was a recognizable forest, though rather dingy in the leaf, and damaged at the fringes by weedkiller. A fawn was walking away from them into the forest and as it went its name fell away from it. Something looked back at them with mild eyes from the darkness of the trees before it vanished. “This is England!” cried blank, grasping the floating straw, but the other said, “England sank years ago.”

  “Sank?”

  “Yes. Foundered. Nothing is left now but the topmost fourteen feet of Mt Snowdon, known as the New Welsh Reef.”

  At this blank also sank. He was crushed. “Oh,” he cried on his knees, intending to ask somebody’s help, but he could not remember whose help it was one asked. It began with a T, he was almost certain. He began to weep.

  The other sat down on the grass beside him and presently put a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Come on now, don’t take it so hard.”

  The kindly voice gave blank some courage. He controlled himself, dried his face on his sleeve, and looked at the other. It was like him, roughly. It was another. However, it had no name either. What good was it?

  Shadow came into the eyes as Earth went round on its axis. Shadow slipped eastward and upward into the other’s eyes.

  “I think,” blank said carefully, “that we should move out from the shadow of the, this, here.” He gestured to the objects near them, large things, dark below and multitudinously green above, the names of which he could no longer remember. He wondered if each one had a name, or if they were all called by the same name. What about himself and the other, did they share a name in common, or did each have one of his own? “I have a feeling I’ll remember better farther away from it, from them,” he said.

  “Certainly,” said the other. “But it won’t make as much difference as it used to.”

  When they came clear away from it into the sunlight, he at once remembered that it was called a forest and that they were called trees. However, he could not recall whether or not each tree had a name of its own. If they did, he did not remember any of them. Perhaps he did not know these trees personally.

  “What shall I do,” he said, “what shall I do?”

  “Well, look here, you can call yourself whatever you please, you know. Why not?”

  “But I want to know my real name.”

  “That isn’t always easy. But meanwhile you could just take a label, as it were, for ease of reference and conversational purposes. Pick a name, any name!” said the other, and held out a blue box named DISPOSABLE.

  “No,” said blank proudly, “I’ll choose my own.”

  “Right. But don’t you want a kleenex?”

  Blank took a kleenex, blew his nose, and said, “I shall call myself . . .” He halted in terror.

  The other watched him, mild-eyed.

  “How can I say who I am when I can’t say what I am?”

  “How would you find out what you are?”

  “If I had anything— If I did something—”

  “That would make you be?”

  “Of course it would.”

  “I never thought of that. Well, then, it doesn’t matter what name you’re called by; any one will do; it’s what you do that counts.”

  Blank stood up. “I will exist,” he stated firmly. “I will call myself Ralph.”

  Whipcord breeches fitted close on his powerful thighs, the stock rose high on his neck, sweat clung in his thick, curly hair. He tapped his boots with his riding-crop, his back to Amanda, who sat in her old grey dress in the deep shade of the pecan tree. He stood in full sunlight, hot with anger. “You’re a fool,” he said.

  “Why Mr Ralph,” came the soft lilting Southern voice, “Ah’m just a little bit stubborn.”

  “You realize, don’t you, that Yankee as I am, I own all the land from here to Weevilville? I own this county! Your farm wouldn’t make a peanut-patch for one of my darkies’ kitchen gardens!”

  “Indeed not. Won’t you come sit down in the shade, Mr Ralph? Youah gettin’ so hot out theah.”

  “You proud vixen,” he murmured, turning. He saw her, white as a lily in her worn old dress, in the shade of the great old trees: the white lily of the garden. Suddenly he was at her feet, clasping her hands. She fluttered in his powerful grasp. “Oh Mr Ralph,” she cried faintly, “what does this mean?”

  “I am a man, Amanda, and you are a woman. I never wanted your land. I never wanted anything but you, my white lily, my little rebel! I want you, I want you! Amanda! Say you will be my wife!”

  “Ah will,” she breathed faintly, bending towards him as a white flower stoops; and their lips met in a long, long kiss. But it did not seem to help at all.

  Perhaps it ought to be moved up twenty
or thirty years.

  “You sick bitch,” he muttered, turning. He saw her, stark naked there in the shade, her back against the pecan tree, her knees up. He strode towards her unbuttoning his fly. They coupled in the centipede-infested crabgrass. He bucked like a bronco, she cried ululatingly, Oooh! Aaah! Coming coming coming COME WOW wow wow CLIMAX!

  Now what?

  Blank stood at a little distance from the forest and stared disconsolately at the other.

  “Am I a man?” he inquired. “Are you a woman?”

  “Don’t ask me,” the other said, morose.

  “I thought surely that was the most important thing to establish!”

  “Not so damned important.”

  “You mean it doesn’t matter if I am a man or a woman?”

  “Of course it matters. It matters to me too. It also matters which man and which woman we are or, as the case may be, are not. For instance, what if Amanda was black?”

  “But sex.”

  “Oh, Hell,” said the other with a flare of temper, “bristleworms have sex, tree-sloths have sex, Jean-Paul Sartre has sex—what does it prove?”

  “Why, sex is real, I mean really real—it’s having and acting in its intensest form. When a man takes a woman he proves his being!”

  “I see. But what if he’s a woman?”

  “I was Ralph.”

  “Try being Amanda,” the other said sourly.

  There was a pause. Shadows were coming on eastward and upward from the forest over the grass. Small birds cried jug jug, tereu. Blank sat hunched over his knees. The other lay stretched out, making patterns with fallen pine needles, shadowed, sorrowful.

  “I’m sorry,” blank said.

  “No harm done,” the other said. “After all, it wasn’t real.”

  “Listen,” blank said, leaping up, “I know what’s happened! I’m on some kind of trip. I took something, and I’m on a trip, that’s it!”

  It was. He was on a trip. A canoe trip. He was paddling a small canoe along a long, narrow, dark, shining stretch of water. The roof and walls were of concrete. It was pretty dark. The long lake, or stream, or sewer, slanted upward visibly. He was paddling against the current, uphill. It was hard work, but the canoe kept sliding forward upriver as silently as the black shining water moved back down. He kept his strokes quiet, the paddle entering the water silent as a knife in butter. His large black-and-pearl electric guitar lay on the forward seat. He knew there was somebody behind him, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t allowed to say anything or even look around, so if they didn’t keep up that was their lookout, he couldn’t be called responsible. He certainly couldn’t slow down, the current might get hold of his canoe and pull it right out from under him and then where’d he be? He shut his eyes and kept paddling, silent entry, strong stroke. There was no sound behind him. The water made no sound. The cement made no sound. He wondered if he was actually going forward or only hanging still while the black water ran hellbent beneath. He would never get out to daylight. Out, out—