I can't sleep, so I'm re-reading Ursula K. Le Guin's "Nine Lives" in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975). For close on to the hundredth time, I think. I love this story.
The first Le Guin I can remember reading is Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, the year it came out (1987; I learned several new words, most of them from Coyote), and my favorite collection of hers is Orsinian Tales (1976), which I discovered early in college, but "Nine Lives" is one of the stories I keep coming back to. I know the general reason. There are books that I haven't read in over ten years and I can still detail the plot; there are books that I read last year and I'd be hard pressed to say much intelligently about them; and then there are books that I re-read, which are not necessarily comfort reading in the traditional sense, because they are familiar or reassuring or attached to good memories, but because they are done so well. Several stories in The Wind's Twelve Quarters—"Semley's Necklace," "April in Paris," "Winter's King," "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"—fall into this category for me, but "Nine Lives" most of all. The specifics, I am considering.
It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extrovert 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.
As science fiction, it's a little dated: computer tape, uranium, the creation of clones as explained by one character to another. But those are all details there to hang the story on—the red-lit, earthquake-blackened, incessantly alien planet; the untidy geologist Owen Pugh and taciturn cartographer Alvaro Martin; and the magnificent, self-sufficient, carelessly competent clone that is ten people who are one, who have never needed to worry about loneliness, or politeness, or strangers. And the story is oddly simple and perfect. We are all aliens; to one another, to ourselves. We all live on the far side of our separate skins. We get used to it. Or we don't.
"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 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.
The conceit of a clone-survivor who must die nine times before he can live as himself may be the centerpiece of the story—it has the resonance of folklore, in the idiom of science fiction—but for me it's always come second to the characters and their inhospitable world and the basic fact of selves and strangers. It all works. So I re-read. There is something in "Nine Lives" that runs deeper than folklore or fiction. And I am very fond of Owen Pugh.
"I don't know," he said, "it's practice, partly. I don't know. We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?"
Goodnight.
The first Le Guin I can remember reading is Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, the year it came out (1987; I learned several new words, most of them from Coyote), and my favorite collection of hers is Orsinian Tales (1976), which I discovered early in college, but "Nine Lives" is one of the stories I keep coming back to. I know the general reason. There are books that I haven't read in over ten years and I can still detail the plot; there are books that I read last year and I'd be hard pressed to say much intelligently about them; and then there are books that I re-read, which are not necessarily comfort reading in the traditional sense, because they are familiar or reassuring or attached to good memories, but because they are done so well. Several stories in The Wind's Twelve Quarters—"Semley's Necklace," "April in Paris," "Winter's King," "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"—fall into this category for me, but "Nine Lives" most of all. The specifics, I am considering.
It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extrovert 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.
As science fiction, it's a little dated: computer tape, uranium, the creation of clones as explained by one character to another. But those are all details there to hang the story on—the red-lit, earthquake-blackened, incessantly alien planet; the untidy geologist Owen Pugh and taciturn cartographer Alvaro Martin; and the magnificent, self-sufficient, carelessly competent clone that is ten people who are one, who have never needed to worry about loneliness, or politeness, or strangers. And the story is oddly simple and perfect. We are all aliens; to one another, to ourselves. We all live on the far side of our separate skins. We get used to it. Or we don't.
"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 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.
The conceit of a clone-survivor who must die nine times before he can live as himself may be the centerpiece of the story—it has the resonance of folklore, in the idiom of science fiction—but for me it's always come second to the characters and their inhospitable world and the basic fact of selves and strangers. It all works. So I re-read. There is something in "Nine Lives" that runs deeper than folklore or fiction. And I am very fond of Owen Pugh.
"I don't know," he said, "it's practice, partly. I don't know. We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?"
Goodnight.
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