the wind's twelve quarters (17 page)

That was why he lived in this dump. Because when you looked out the window of it, you saw the higher reality. Eleven thousand feet higher.
 

“I’ll be damned,” Lewis said aloud, feeling that he was on the edge and verge of perceiving something really important. But he had that feeling fairly often, without chemical assistance. Meanwhile there was the mountain.
 

A lot of muck, freeways and disposable office buildings and highrises and urban renewal bombsites and neon elephants washing neon cars with dotted showers of neon, lay in between him and the mountain, and the base of it was hidden along with its foothills in a pale smog, so that the peak floated.
 

Lewis felt a strong impulse to cry and to say his wife’s name aloud. He repressed this impulse, as he had been doing for three months, ever since May when he had taken her to the sanitarium, after the silent months. In January, before the silence began, she had cried a great deal, all day long some days, and he had become frightened of tears. First tears, then silence. No good. O God get me out of this! Lewis let go, quit fighting the impalpable enemy, and begged for release. He implored the drug in his bloodstream to work, to do something, to let him cry, or see colors, or go off his rocker, anything.
 

Nothing happened.
 

He finished pouring the water in little dribbles around the roots of the olive tree, and looked up, at the room. It was a dump, but big, and it had a good view of Mount Hood, and the wisdom-tooth crest of Mount Adams on clear days too. But nothing would happen here. This was the waiting room. He picked up his coat off a broken chair and went out.
 

It was a good coat, lambswool lining and a hood and all that; his sister and mother had clubbed to get it for him for Christmas, making him feel like R. R. Raskolnikov. But he was not going to murder any old pawn-brokers today. Not even a pseudocide. On the stairs he passed the painters and plasterers with their ladders and buckets, three of them, going up to do his room over, peaceful-looking, fresh-faced men in their forties and fifties. Poor bastards, what would they do with the sink? with the three alphies, Rich and Jim and Alex, who on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise? with his notes on LeNotre, Olmsted and McLaren, with his fourteen pounds of photographs of Japanese domestic architecture, with his drawing board and fishing tackle, his Collected Works of Theodore Sturgeon bound in sensational cardboard, the 8' x 10' unfinished oil of an ataxic nude by a painter friend whose auto loan co. had attached his paintings, Alex’s guitar, the olive tree, the dust and eyeballs under the bed? That was their problem. He went on down the rooming-house stairs that smelled of old tomcat, and heard his hiking boots clomping heartily. He felt that all this had happened once before.
 

It took him a long time to get out of the city. Since public transportation was forbidden to people in his condition, of course, he couldn’t get on the Gresham bus which would have saved a lot of time, taking him through the suburbs and halfway there. But there was plenty of time. The summer evening would stay light; he could count on it. Lenient and sweet in their length are the twilights of a latitude halfway between equator and pole: no tropic monotonies, no arctic absolutes, but a winter of long shadows and a summer of long dusks: gradations and accommodations of brightness, attenuations of clarity, subtleties and leisures of the light. Children scuttered in the green parks of Portland and down long side streets, all at one great game over all the city, the game of Young. Only here and there a kid went alone,
playing Solitude, for higher stakes. Some kids are gamblers born. Bits of trash scraped along the gutters moved by a warm wind now and then. There was a great, sad sound far off over the city as if lions were roaring in cages, walking and lashing their gold sides with gold-tasselled tails and roaring, roaring. Sun set, somewhere
west over roofs, but not for the mountain that still burned with a white fire away up high. As Lewis left the last of the city and went through a pleasant land, hilly and well farmed, the wind began to smell of wet earth, cool, complex, as it will as night comes on; and past Sandy there was darkness under great increasing forests on the rising slopes. But there was plenty of time. Above and ahead the peak stood white, faintly tinged with apricot, in sunlight. As he climbed the long, steep road he came out again and then again from the dark forests into gulfs of yellow clarity. He went on until he was up above the forests and up above the darkness, on heights where there was only snow and stone and air and the vast, clear, enduring light.
 

But he was alone.
 

That wasn’t right. He hadn’t been alone when this had happened. He had to meet with— He had been with— Where?
 

No skis no sled no snowshoes not even an inner tube. If I had got the commission for this landscape, God, I would have put a path along here. Sacrificing grandeur for convenience? But only a little path. No harm. Only a little crack in the Liberty Bell. Only a little leak in the dike, fuse on the bomb, maggot in the brain. O my mad girl, my silent love, my wife whom I sold into bedlam because you would not hear me speak, Isobel, come save me from yourself! I’ve climbed after you up above all the paths and now I stand here alone: there isn’t any way to go.
 

Daylight died away and the white of the snow went somber. In the east, above endless darkening ranges and forests and pale, hill-enfolded lakes, Saturn shone, bright and saturnine.
 

Lewis did not know where the lodge was; somewhere on the timberline, but he was above timberline. He would not go down. To the heights, to the heights. Excelsior! A youth who bore mid snow and ice a banner with this strange device Help Help I AM a Prisoner of the Higher Reality. He climbed. He climbed unclomben slopes, unkempt, and as he climbed he wept. His tears crawled down over his face and he crawled up over the mountain’s face.
 

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 downsweep 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 fut, 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.
 

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.”