The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

URSULA K. LE GUIN Nine Lives

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.”

“Libra here. Beam fixed. Come on down, launch.”

“Expulsion in seven E-seconds. Hold on.” The screen blanked and sparkled.

“Do they all look like that? Martin, you and I are uglier men than I thought.”

“Shut up, Owen….”

For twenty-two minutes Martin followed the landing craft down by signal and then through the cleared dome they saw it, small star in the blood-colored east, sinking. It came down neat and quiet, Libra’s thin atmosphere carrying little sound. Pugh and Martin closed the headpieces of their imsuits, zipped out of the dome airlocks, and ran with soaring strides, Nijinsky and Nureyev,[26] toward the boat. Three equipment modules came floating down at four-minute intervals from each other and hundred-meter intervals east of the boat. “Come on out,” Martin said on his suit radio, “we’re waiting at the door.”

“Come on in, the methane’s fine,” said Pugh.

The hatch opened. The young man they had seen on the screen came out with one athletic twist and leaped down onto the shaky dust and clinkers of Libra. Martin shook his hand, but Pugh was staring at the hatch, from which another young man emerged with the same neat twist and jump, followed by a young woman who emerged with the same neat twist, ornamented by a wriggle, and the jump. They were all tall, with bronze skin, black hair, high-bridged noses, epicanthic fold, the same face. They all had the same face. The fourth was emerging from the hatch with a neat twist and jump. “Martin bach,”[27] said Pugh, “we’ve got a clone.”

“Right,” said one of them, “we’re a tenclone. John Chow’s the name. You’re Lieutenant Martin?”

“I’m Owen Pugh.”

“Alvaro Guillen Martin,” said Martin, formal, bowing slightly. Another girl was out, the same beautiful face; Martin stared at her and his eye rolled like a nervous pony’s. Evidently he had never given any thought to cloning and was suffering technological shock. “Steady,” Pugh said in the Argentine dialect, “it’s only excess twins.” He stood close by Martin’s elbow. He was glad himself of the contact.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert 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.

After two years on a dead planet, and the last half year isolated as a team of two, oneself and one other, after that it’s even harder to meet a stranger, however welcome he may be. You’re out of the habit of difference, you’ve lost the touch; and so the fear revives, the primitive anxiety, the old dread.

The clone, five males and five females, had got done in a couple of minutes what a man might have got done in twenty: greeted Pugh and Martin, had a glance at Libra, unloaded the boat, made ready to go. They went, and the dome filled with them, a hive of golden bees. They hummed and buzzed quietly, filled up all silences, all spaces with a honey-brown swarm of human presence. Martin looked bewildered at the long-limbed girls, and they smiled at him, three at once. Their smile was gentler than that of the boys, but no less radiantly self-possessed.

“Self-possessed,” Owen Pugh murmured to his friend, “that’s it. Think of it, to be oneself ten times over. Nine seconds for every motion, nine ayes on every vote. It would be glorious.” But Martin was asleep. And the John Chows had all gone to sleep at once. The dome was filled with their quiet breathing. They were young, they didn’t snore. Martin sighed and snored, his Hershey-bar-colored face relaxed in the dim afterglow of Libra’s primary, set at last. Pugh had cleared the dome and stars looked in, Sol among them, a great company of lights, a clone of splendors. Pugh slept and dreamed of a one-eyed giant who chased him through the shaking halls of Hell.

From his sleeping bag Pugh watched the clone’s awakening. They all got up within one minute except for one pair, a boy and a girl, who lay snugly tangled and still sleeping in one bag. As Pugh saw this there was a shock like one of Libra’s earthquakes inside him, a very deep tremor. He was not aware of this and in fact thought he was pleased at the sight; there was no other such comfort on this dead hollow world. More power to them, who made love. One of the others stepped on the pair. They woke and the girl sat up flushed and sleepy, with bare golden breasts. One of her sisters murmured something to her; she shot a glance at Pugh and disappeared in the sleeping bag; from another direction came a fierce stare, from still another direction a voice: “Christ, we’re used to having a room to ourselves. Hope you don’t mind, Captain Pugh.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Pugh said half truthfully. He had to stand up then wearing only the shorts he slept in, and he felt like a plucked rooster, all white scrawn and pimples. He had seldom envied Martin’s compact brownness so much. The United Kingdom had come through the Great Famines well, losing less than half its population: a record achieved by rigorous food control. Black marketeers and hoarders had been executed. Crumbs had been shared. Where in richer lands most had died and a few had thriven, in Britain fewer died and none throve. They all got lean. Their sons were lean, their grandsons lean, small, brittle-boned, easily infected. When civilization became a matter of standing in lines, the British had kept queue, and so had replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the fair-minded. Owen Pugh was a scrawny little man. All the same, he was there.

At the moment he wished he wasn’t.

At breakfast a John said, “Now if you’ll brief us, Captain Pugh—”

“Owen, then.”

“Owen, we can work out our schedule. Anything new on the mine since your last report to your Mission? We saw your reports when Passerine was orbiting Planet V, where they are now.”

Martin did not answer, though the mine was his discovery and project, and Pugh had to do his best. It was hard to talk to them. The same faces, each with the same expression of intelligent interest, all leaned toward him across the table at almost the same angle. They all nodded together.

Over the Exploitation Corps insigne on their tunics each had a nameband, first name John and last name Chow of course, but the middle names different. The men were Aleph, Kaph, Yod, Gimel, and Samedh; the women Sadhe, Daleth, Zayin, Beth, and Resh. Pugh tried to use the names but gave it up at once; he could not even tell sometimes which one had spoken, for all the voices were alike.

Martin buttered and chewed his toast, and finally interrupted: “You’re a team. Is that it?”

“Right,” said two Johns.

“God, what a team! I hadn’t seen the point. How much do you each know what the others are thinking?”

“Not at all, properly speaking,” replied one of the girls, Zayin. The others watched her with the proprietary, approving look they had. “No ESP, nothing fancy. But we think alike. We have exactly the same equipment. Given the same stimulus, the same problem, we’re likely to be coming up with the same reactions and solutions at the same time. Explanations are easy—don’t even have to make them, usually. We seldom misunderstand each other. It does facilitate our working as a team.”

“Christ yes,” said Martin. “Pugh and I have spent seven hours out of ten for six months misunderstanding each other. Like most people. What about emergencies, are you as good at meeting the unexpected problem as a nor… an unrelated team?”

“Statistics so far indicate that we are,” Zayin answered readily. Clones must be trained, Pugh thought, to meet questions, to reassure and reason. All they said had the slightly bland and stilted quality of answers furnished to the Public. “We can’t brainstorm as singletons can, we as a team don’t profit from the interplay of varied minds; but we have a compensatory advantage. Clones are drawn from the best human material, individuals of IIQ ninety-ninth percentile, Genetic Constitution alpha double A, and so on. We have more to draw on than most individuals do.”

“And it’s multiplied by a factor of ten. Who is—who was John Chow?”

“A genius surely,” Pugh said politely. His interest in cloning was not so new and avid as Martin’s.

“Leonardo Complex type,” said Yod. “Biomath, also a cellist and an undersea hunter, and interested in structural engineering problems and so on. Died before he’d worked out his major theories.”

“Then you each represent a different facet of his mind, his talents?”

“No,” said Zayin, shaking her head in time with several others. “We share the basic equipment and tendencies, of course, but we’re all engineers in Planetary Exploitation. A later clone can be trained to develop other aspects of the basic equipment. It’s all training; the genetic substance is identical. We are John Chow. But we are differently trained.”

Martin looked shell-shocked. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“You say he died young—had they taken germ cells from him beforehand or something?”

Gimel took over: “He died at twenty-four in an air car crash. They couldn’t save the brain, so they took some intestinal cells and cultured them for cloning. Reproductive cells aren’t used for cloning, since they have only half the chromosomes. Intestinal cells happen to be easy to despecialize and reprogram for total growth.”

“All chips off the old block,” Martin said valiantly. “But how can… some of you be women…?”

Beth took over: “It’s easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It’s trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually.”

Gimel again: “They’ve worked these matters of technique and function out carefully. The taxpayer wants the best for his money, and of course clones are expensive. With the cell manipulations, and the incubation in Ngama Placentae, and the maintenance and training of the foster-parent groups, we end up costing about three million apiece.”

“For your next generation,” Martin said, still struggling, “I suppose you… you breed?”

“We females are sterile,” said Beth with perfect equanimity. “You remember that the Y chromosome was deleted from our original cell. The males can interbreed with approved singletons, if they want to. But to get John Chow again as often as they want, they just reclone a cell from this clone.”

Martin gave up the struggle. He nodded and chewed cold toast. “Well,” said one of the Johns, and all changed mood, like a flock of starlings that change course in one wingflick, following a leader so fast that no eye can see which leads. They were ready to go. “How about a look at the mine? Then we’ll unload the equipment. Some nice new models in the roboats; you’ll want to see them. Right?” Had Pugh or Martin not agreed they might have found it hard to say so. The Johns were polite but unanimous; their decisions carried. Pugh, Commander of Libra Base 2, felt a qualm. Could he boss around this superman/woman-entity-of-ten? and a genius at that? He stuck close to Martin as they suited for outside. Neither said anything.

Four apiece in the three large airjets, they slipped off north from the dome, over Libra’s dun rugose skin, in starlight.

“Desolate,” one said.

It was a boy and girl with Pugh and Martin. Pugh wondered if these were the two that had shared a sleeping bag last night. No doubt they wouldn’t mind if he asked them. Sex must be as handy as breathing to them. Did you two breathe last night?

“Yes,” he said, “it is desolate.”

“This is our first time off, except training on Luna.” The girl’s voice was definitely a bit higher and softer.

“How did you take the big hop?”

“They doped us. I wanted to experience it.” That was the boy; he sounded wistful. They seemed to have more personality, only two at a time. Did repetition of the individual negate individuality?

“Don’t worry,” said Martin, steering the sled, “you can’t experience no-time because it isn’t there.”

“I’d just like to once,” one of them said. “So we’d know.”

The Mountains of Merioneth showed leprotic in starlight to the east, a plume of freezing gas trailed silvery from a vent-hole to the west, and the sled tilted groundward. The twins braced for the stop at one moment, each with a slight protective gesture to the other. Your skin is my skin, Pugh thought, but literally, no metaphor. What would it be like, then, to have someone as close to you as that? Always to be answered when you spoke; never to be in pain alone. Love your neighbor as you love yourself…. That hard old problem was solved. The neighbor was the self: the love was perfect.

And here was Hellmouth, the mine.

Pugh was the Exploratory Mission’s E.T. geologist, and Martin his technician and cartographer; but when in the course of a local survey Martin had discovered the U-mine, Pugh had given him full credit, as well as the onus of prospecting the lode and planning the Exploitation Team’s job. These kids had been sent out from Earth years before Martin’s reports got there and had not known what their job would be until they got here. The Exploitation Corps simply sent out teams regularly and blindly as a dandelion sends out its seed, knowing there would be a job for them on Libra or the next planet out or one they hadn’t even heard about yet. The government wanted uranium too urgently to wait while reports drifted home across the lightyears. The stuff was like gold, old-fashioned but essential, worth mining extraterrestrially and shipping interstellar. Worth its weight in people, Pugh thought sourly, watching the tall young men and women go one by one, glimmering in starlight, into the black hole Martin had named Hellmouth.

As they went in their homeostatic forehead-lamps brightened. Twelve nodding gleams ran along the moist, wrinkled walls. Pugh heard Martin’s radiation counter peeping twenty to the dozen up ahead. “Here’s the drop-off,” said Martin’s voice in the suit intercom, drowning out the peeping and the dead silence that was around them. “We’re in a side-fissure, this is the main vertical vent in front of us.” The black void gaped, its far side not visible in the headlamp beams. “Last vulcanism seems to have been a couple of thousand years ago. Nearest fault is twenty-eight kilos east, in the Trench. This area seems to be as safe seismically as anything in the area. The big basalt-flow overhead stabilizes all these substructures, so long as it remains stable itself. Your central lode is thirty-six meters down and runs in a series of five bubble caverns northeast. It is a lode, a pipe of very high-grade ore. You saw the percentage figures, right? Extraction’s going to be no problem. All you’ve got to do is get the bubbles topside.”

“Take off the lid and let ’em float up.” A chuckle. Voices began to talk, but they were all the same voice and the suit radio gave them no location in space. “Open the thing right up. —Safer that way. —But it’s a solid basalt roof, how thick, ten meters here? —Three to twenty, the report said. —Blow good ore all over the lot. —Use this access we’re in, straighten it a bit and run slider rails for the robos. —Import burros. —Have we got enough propping material? —What’s your estimate of total payload mass, Martin?”

“Say over five million kilos and under eight.”

“Transport will be here in ten E-months. —It’ll have to go pure. —No, they’ll have the mass problem in NAFAL shipping licked by now, remember it’s been sixteen years since we left Earth last Tuesday. —Right, they’ll send the whole lot back and purify it in Earth orbit. —Shall we go down, Martin?”

“Go on. I’ve been down.”

The first one—Aleph? (Heb.,[28] the ox, the leader)—swung onto the ladder and down; the rest followed. Pugh and Martin stood at the chasm’s edge. Pugh set his intercom to exchange only with Martin’s suit, and noticed Martin doing the same. It was a bit wearing, this listening to one person think aloud in ten voices, or was it one voice speaking the thoughts of ten minds?

“A great gut,” Pugh said, looking down into the black pit, its veined and warted walls catching stray gleams of headlamps far below. “A cow’s bowel. A bloody great constipated intestine.”

Martin’s counter peeped like a lost chicken. They stood inside the dead but epileptic planet, breathing oxygen from tanks, wearing suits impermeable to corrosives and harmful radiations, resistant to a 200-degree range of temperatures, tear-proof, and as shock-resistant as possible given the soft vulnerable stuff inside.

“Next hop,” Martin said, “I’d like to find a planet that has nothing whatever to exploit.”

“You found this.”

“Keep me home next time.”

Pugh was pleased. He had hoped Martin would want to go on working with him, but neither of them was used to talking much about their feelings, and he had hesitated to ask. “I’ll try that,” he said.

“I hate this place. I like caves, you know. It’s why I came in here. Just spelunking. But this one’s a bitch. Mean. You can’t ever let down in here. I guess this lot can handle it, though. They know their stuff.”

“Wave of the future, whatever,” said Pugh.

The wave of the future came swarming up the ladder, swept Martin to the entrance, gabbled at and around him: “Have we got enough material for supports? —If we convert one of the extractor servos to anneal, yes. —Sufficient if we miniblast? —Kaph can calculate stress.” Pugh had switched his intercom back to receive them; he looked at them, so many thoughts jabbering in an eager mind, and at Martin standing silent among them, and at Hellmouth and the wrinkled plain. “Settled! How does that strike you as a preliminary schedule, Martin?”

“It’s your baby,” Martin said.

Within five E-days the Johns had all their material and equipment unloaded and operating and were starting to open up the mine. They worked with total efficiency. Pugh was fascinated and frightened by their effectiveness, their confidence, their independence. He was no use to them at all. A clone, he thought, might indeed be the first truly stable, self-reliant human being. Once adult it would need nobody’s help. It would be sufficient to itself physically, sexually, emotionally, intellectually. Whatever he did, any member of it would always receive the support and approval of his peers, his other selves. Nobody else was needed.

Two of the clone stayed in the dome doing calculations and paperwork, with frequent sled trips to the mine for measurements and tests. They were the mathematicians of the clone, Zayin and Kaph. That is, as Zayin explained, all ten had had thorough mathematical training from age three to twenty-one, but from twenty-one to twenty-three she and Kaph had gone on with math while the others intensified study in other specialties, geology, mining, engineering, electronic engineering, equipment robotics, applied atomics, and so on. “Kaph and I feel,” she said, “that we’re the element of the clone closest to what John Chow was in his singleton lifetime. But of course he was principally in biomath, and they didn’t take us far in that.”

“They needed us most in this field,” Kaph said, with the patriotic priggishness they sometimes evinced.

Pugh and Martin soon could distinguish this pair from the others, Zayin by gestalt, Kaph only by a discolored left fourth fingernail, got from an ill-aimed hammer at the age of six. No doubt there were many such differences, physical and psychological, among them; nature might be identical, nurture could not be. But the differences were hard to find. 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 of 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 the 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.

That night he used the Argentine dialect for private communication. “Do they pair off in the same couples or change every night?”

Martin looked surprised. A prudish expression, unsuited to his features, appeared for a moment. It faded. He too was curious. “I think it’s random.”

“Don’t whisper, man, it sounds dirty. I think they rotate.”

“On a schedule?”

“So nobody gets omitted.”

Martin gave a vulgar laugh and smothered it. “What about us? Aren’t we omitted?”

“That doesn’t occur to them.”

“What if I proposition one of the girls?”

“She’d tell the others and they’d decide as a group.”

“I am not a bull,” Martin said, his dark, heavy face heating up. “I will not be judged—”

“Down, down, machismo,” said Pugh. “Do you mean to proposition one?”

Martin shrugged, sullen. “Let ’em have their incest.”

“Incest is it, or masturbation?”

“I don’t care, if they’d do it out of earshot!”

The clone’s early attempts at modesty had soon worn off, unmotivated by any deep defensiveness of self or awareness of others. Pugh and Martin were daily deeper swamped under the intimacies of its constant emotional-sexual-mental interchange: swamped yet excluded.

“Two months to go,” Martin said one evening.

“To what?” snapped Pugh. He was edgy lately, and Martin’s sullenness got on his nerves.

“To relief.”

In sixty days the full crew of their Exploratory Mission were due back from their survey of the other planets of the system. Pugh was aware of this.

“Crossing off the days on your calendar?” he jeered.

“Pull yourself together, Owen.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say.”

They parted in contempt and resentment.

Pugh came in after a day alone on the Pampas, a vast lava plain the nearest edge of which was two hours south by jet. He was tired but refreshed by solitude. They were not supposed to take long trips alone but lately had often done so. Martin stooped under bright lights, drawing one of his elegant masterly charts. This one was of the whole face of Libra, the cancerous face. The dome was otherwise empty, seeming dim and large as it had before the clone came. “Where’s the golden horde?”[29]

Martin grunted ignorance, cross-hatching. He straightened his back to glance round at the sun, which squatted feebly like a great red toad on the eastern plain, and at the clock, which said 18:45. “Some big quakes today,” he said, returning to his map. “Feel them down there? Lots of crates were falling around. Take a look at the seismo.”

The needle jigged and wavered on the roll. It never stopped dancing here. The roll had recorded five quakes of major intensity back in midafternoon; twice the needle had hopped off the roll. The attached computer had been activated to emit a slip reading, “Epicenter 61′ N by 42′ 4″ E.”

“Not in the Trench this time.”

“I thought it felt a bit different from usual. Sharper.”

“In Base One I used to lie awake all night feeling the ground jump. Queer how you get used to things.”

“Go spla[30] if you didn’t. What’s for dinner?”

“I thought you’d have cooked it.”

“Waiting for the clone.”

Feeling put upon, Pugh got out a dozen dinnerboxes, stuck two in the Instobake, pulled them out. “All right, here’s dinner.”

“Been thinking,” Martin said, coming to table. “What if some clone cloned itself? Illegally. Made a thousand duplicates—ten thousand. Whole army. They could make a tidy power grab, couldn’t they?”

“But how many millions did this lot cost to rear? Artificial placentae and all that. It would be hard to keep secret, unless they had a planet to themselves…. Back before the Famines when Earth had national governments, they talked about that: clone your best soldiers, have whole regiments of them. But the food ran out before they could play that game.”

They talked amicably, as they used to do.

“Funny,” Martin said, chewing. “They left early this morning, didn’t they?”

“All but Kaph and Zayin. They thought they’d get the first payload above ground today. What’s up?”

“They weren’t back for lunch.”

“They won’t starve, to be sure.”

“They left at seven.”

“So they did.” Then Pugh saw it. The air tanks held eight hours’ supply.

“Kaph and Zayin carried out spare cans when they left. Or they’ve got a heap out there.”

“They did, but they brought the whole lot in to recharge.” Martin stood up, pointing to one of the stacks of stuff that cut the dome into rooms and alleys.

“There’s an alarm signal on every imsuit.”

“It’s not automatic.”

Pugh was tired and still hungry. “Sit down and eat, man. That lot can look after themselves.”

Martin sat down but did not eat. “There was a big quake, Owen. The first one. Big enough it scared me.”

After a pause Pugh sighed and said, “All right.”

Unenthusiastically, they got out the two-man sled that was always left for them and headed it north. The long sunrise covered everything in poisonous red jello. The horizontal light and shadow made it hard to see, raised walls of fake iron ahead of them which they slid through, turned the convex plain beyond Hellmouth into a great dimple full of bloody water. Around the tunnel entrance a wilderness of machinery stood, cranes and cables and servos and wheels and diggers and robocarts and sliders and control huts, all slanting and bulking incoherently in the red light. Martin jumped from the sled, ran into the mine. He came out again, to Pugh. “Oh God, Owen, it’s down,” he said. Pugh went in and saw, five meters from the entrance, the shiny moist, black wall that ended the tunnel. Newly exposed to air, it looked organic, like visceral tissue. The tunnel entrance, enlarged by blasting and double-tracked for robocarts, seemed unchanged until he noticed thousands of tiny spiderweb cracks in the walls. The floor was wet with some sluggish fluid.

“They were inside,” Martin said.

“They may be still. They surely had extra air cans—”

“Look, Owen, look at the basalt flow, at the roof, don’t you see what the quake did, look at it.”

The low hump of land that roofed the caves still had the unreal look of an optical illusion. It had reversed itself, sunk down, leaving a vast dimple or pit. When Pugh walked on it he saw that it too was cracked with many tiny fissures. From some a whitish gas was seeping, so that the sunlight on the surface of the gas pool was shafted as if by the waters of a dim red lake.

“The mine’s not on the fault. There’s no fault here!”

Pugh came back to him quickly. “No, there’s no fault, Martin—Look, they surely weren’t all inside together.”

Martin followed him and searched among the wrecked machines dully, then actively. He spotted the airsled. It had come down heading south, and stuck at an angle in a pothole of colloidal dust. It had carried two riders. One was half sunk in the dust, but his suit meters registered normal functioning; the other hung strapped onto the tilted sled. Her imsuit had burst open on the broken legs, and the body was frozen hard as any rock. That was all they found. As both regulation and custom demanded, they cremated the dead at once with the laser guns they carried by regulation and had never used before. Pugh, knowing he was going to be sick, wrestled the survivor onto the two-man sled and sent Martin off to the dome with him. Then he vomited and flushed the waste out of his suit, and finding one four-man sled undamaged, followed after Martin, shaking as if the cold of Libra had got through to him.

The survivor was Kaph. He was in deep shock. They found a swelling on the occiput that might mean concussion, but no fracture was visible.

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! Ha! 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.[31] 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 was 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.

“Where are you going?”

“After him.”

“Martin took the jet. Sleds aren’t safe to use during quakes. They go out of control.”

“For God’s sake man, shut up.”

Kaph stood up, speaking in a flat voice as usual. “It’s unnecessary to go out after him now. It’s taking an unnecessary risk.”

“If his alarm goes off, radio me,” Pugh said, shut the head-piece of his suit, and ran to the lock. As he went out Libra picked up her ragged skirts and danced a belly dance from under his feet clear to the red horizon.

Inside the dome, Kaph saw the sled go up, tremble like a meteor in the dull red daylight, and vanish to the northeast. The hide of the dome quivered, the earth coughed. A vent south of the dome belched up a slow-flowing bile of black gas.

A bell shrilled and a red light flashed on the central control board. The sign under the light read Suit 2 and scribbled under that, A. G. M. Kaph did not turn the signal off. He tried to radio Martin, then Pugh, but got no reply from either.

When the aftershocks decreased he went back to work and finished up Pugh’s job. It took him about two hours. Every half hour he tried to contact Suit 1 and got no reply, then Suit 2 and got no reply. The red light had stopped flashing after an hour.

It was dinnertime. Kaph cooked dinner for one and ate it. He lay down on his cot.

The aftershocks had ceased except for faint rolling tremors at long intervals. The sun hung in the west, oblate, pale red, immense. It did not sink visibly. There was no sound at all.

Kaph got up and began to walk about the messy, half-packed-up, overcrowded, empty dome. The silence continued. He went to the player and put on the first tape that came to hand. It was pure music, electronic, without harmonies, without voices. It ended. The silence continued.

Pugh’s uniform tunic, one button missing, hung over a stack of rock samples. Kaph stared at it a while.

The silence continued.

The child’s dream: There is no one else alive in the world but me. In all the world.

Low, north of the dome, a meteor flickered.

Kaph’s mouth opened as if he were trying to say something, but no sound came. He went hastily to the north wall and peered out into the gelatinous red light.

The little star came in and sank. Two figures blurred the airlock. Kaph stood close beside the lock as they came in. Martin’s imsuit was covered with some kind of dust so that he looked raddled and warty like the surface of Libra. Pugh had him by the arm.

“Is he hurt?”

Pugh shucked his suit, helped Martin peel off his. “Shaken up,” he said, curt.

“A piece of cliff fell onto the jet,” Martin said, sitting down at the table and waving his arms. “Not while I was in it though. I was parked, see, and poking about that carbon-dust area when I felt things humping. So I went out onto a nice bit of early igneous I’d noticed from above, good footing and out from under the cliffs. Then I saw this bit of the planet fall off onto the flyer, quite a sight it was, and after a while it occurred to me the spare aircans were in the flyer, so I leaned on the panic button. But I didn’t get any radio reception, that’s always happening here during quakes, so I didn’t know if the signal was getting through either. And things went on jumping around and pieces of the cliff coming off. Little rocks flying around, and so dusty you couldn’t see a meter ahead. I was really beginning to wonder what I’d do for breathing in the small hours, you know, when I saw old Owen buzzing up the Trench in all that dust and junk like a big ugly bat—”

“Want to eat?” said Pugh.

“Of course I want to eat. How’d you come through the quake here, Kaph? No damage? It wasn’t a big one actually, was it, what’s the seismo say? My trouble was I was in the middle of it. Old Epicenter Alvaro. Felt like Richter fifteen there—total destruction of planet—”

“Sit down,” Pugh said. “Eat.”

After Martin had eaten a little his spate of talk ran dry. He very soon went off to his cot, still in the remote angle where he had removed it when Pugh complained of his snoring. “Good night, you one-lunged Welshman,” he said across the dome.

“Good night.”

There was no more out of Martin. Pugh opaqued the dome, turned the lamp down to a yellow glow less than a candle’s light, and sat doing nothing, saying nothing, withdrawn.

The silence continued.

“I finished the computations.”

Pugh nodded thanks.

“The signal from Martin came through, but I couldn’t contact you or him.”

Pugh said with effort, “I should not have gone. He had two hours of air left even with only one can. He might have been heading home when I left. This way we were all out of touch with one another. I was scared.”

The silence came back, punctuated now by Martin’s long, soft snores.

“Do you love Martin?”

Pugh looked up with angry eyes: “Martin is my friend. We’ve worked together, he’s a good man.” He stopped. After a while he said, “Yes, I love him. Why did you ask that?”

Kaph said nothing, but he looked at the other man. His face was changed, as if he were glimpsing something he had not seen before; his voice too was changed. “How can you… How do you…”

But Pugh could not tell him. “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?”

Kaph’s strange gaze dropped, burned out by its own intensity.

“I’m tired,” Pugh said. “That was ugly, looking for him in all that black dust and muck, and mouths opening and shutting in the ground…. I’m going to bed. The ship will be transmitting to us by six or so.” He stood up and stretched.

“It’s a clone,” Kaph said. “The other Exploit Team they’re bringing with them.”

“Is it then?”

“A twelveclone. They came out with us on the Passerine.”

Kaph sat in the small yellow aura of the lamp seeming to look past it at what he feared: the new clone, the multiple self of which he was not part. A lost piece of a broken set, a fragment, inexpert at solitude, not knowing even how you go about giving love to another individual, now he must face the absolute, closed self-sufficiency of the clone of twelve; that was a lot to ask of the poor fellow, to be sure. Pugh put a hand on his shoulder in passing. “The chief won’t ask you to stay here with a clone. You can go home. Or since you’re Far Out maybe you’ll come on farther out with us. We could use you. No hurry deciding. You’ll make out all right.”

Pugh’s quiet voice trailed off. He stood unbuttoning his coat, stooped a little with fatigue. Kaph looked at him and saw the thing he had never seen before, saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.

“Good night,” Pugh mumbled, crawling into his sleeping bag and half asleep already, so that he did not hear Kaph reply after a pause, repeating, across darkness, benediction.