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The world's in love and I loved it all
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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At an oblique angle, much of what is said about the clone, about how that degree of self-sufficiency makes it difficult to perceive other people, now strikes me as applicable to a certain current of thought in the US: we are so huge, so rich, so powerful - oh, are you still there?
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There's a collection entitled Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader in which "Nine Lives" is reprinted along with an essay by Le Guin about how she came to write the story. I don't have the book here, but there's a section where she discusses the character of Owen Pugh, who snuck up on her—she sat down to write about clones, and what she got was a middle-aged Welsh geologist, nearsighted and not very neat (although definitive about his place in the story), and where did he come from? Only when she'd finished the story did she realize that he had to be all of these things, because the clone was not; and among other things, the clone is American.
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 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 those 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.
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Where in richer lands most had died and a few had thriven, in Britain fewer died and none throve. They all got lean...
did us too much credit. I suspect we are no longer that people - if we ever were.
But Owen Pugh is an entirely convincing Welshman, and I can hear his voice.
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I'm fascinated by, among other things, this:
They had no experience of either bigotry or irony.
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It is. I was copying it out of The Wind's Twelve Quarters, which I had on hand.