the wind's twelve quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

idyll with a brooding, unjealous interest. The professor and the slave-girl loved each other with delight and tenderness. Their pleasure overlapped Lenoir in waves of protective joy. Bota had led a brutal life, treated always as a woman but never as a human. In one short week she bloomed, she came alive, evincing beneath her gentle passiveness a cheerful, clever nature. “You’re turning out a regular Parisienne,” he heard Barry accuse her one night (the attic walls were thin). She replied, “If you knew what it is for me not to be always defending myself, always afraid, always alone...”  
    Lenoir sat up on his cot and brooded. About midnight, when all was quiet, he rose and noiselessly prepared the pinches of sulfur and silver, drew the pentagram, opened the book. Very softly he read the spell. His face was apprehensive.  
    In the pentagram appeared a small white dog. It cowered and hung its tail, then came shyly forward, sniffed Lenoir’s hand, looked up at him with liquid eyes and gave a modest, pleading whine. A lost puppy... Lenoir stroked it. It licked his hands and jumped all over him, wild with relief. On its white leather collar was a silver plaque engraved, “Jolie. Dupont, 36 rue de Seine, Paris VIe.”  
    Jolie went to sleep, after gnawing a crust, curled up under Lenoir’s chair. And the alchemist opened the book again and read, still softly, but this time without self-consciousness, without fear, knowing what would happen.  
    Emerging from his store-room-bedroom-honeymoon in the morning, Barry stopped short in the doorway. Lenoir was sitting up in bed, petting a white puppy, and deep in conversation with the person sitting on the foot of the bed, a tall red-haired woman dressed in silver. The puppy barked. Lenoir said, “Good morning!” The woman smiled wondrously.  
    “Jumping Jesus,” Barry muttered (in English). Then he said, “Good morning. When are you from?” The effect was Rita Hayworth, sublimated—Hayworth plus the Mona Lisa, perhaps?  
    “From Altair, about seven thousand years from now,” she said, smiling still more wondrously. Her French accent was worse than that of a football-scholarship freshman. “I’m an archaeologist. I was excavating the ruins of Paris III. I’m sorry I speak the language so badly; of course we know it only from inscriptions.”  
    “From Altair? The star? But you’re human—I think—”  
    “Our planet was colonized from Earth about four thousand years ago—that is, three thousand years from now.” She laughed, most wondrously, and glanced at Lenoir. “Jehan explained it all to me, but I still get confused.”  
    “It was a dangerous thing to try it again, Jehan!” Barry accused him. “We’ve been awfully lucky, you know.”  
    “No,” said the Frenchman. “Not lucky.”  
    “But after all it’s black magic you’re playing with— Listen—I don’t know your name, madame.”  
    “Kislk,” she said.  
    “Listen, Kislk,” Barry said without even a stumble, “your science must be fantastically advanced—is there any magic? Does it exist? Can the laws of Nature really be broken, as we seem to be doing?”  
    “I’ve never seen nor heard of an authenticated case of magic.”  
    “Then what goes on?” Barry roared. “Why does that stupid old spell work for Jehan, for us, that one spell, and here, nowhere else, for nobody else, in five—no, eight—no, fifteen thousand years of recorded history? Why? Why? And where did that damn puppy come from?”  
    “The puppy was lost,” Lenoir said, his dark face grave. “Somewhere near this house, on the Ile Saint-Louis.”  
    “And I was sorting potsherds,” Kislk said, also gravely, “in a house-site, Island 2, Pit 4, Section D. A lovely Spring day, and I hated it. Loathed it. The day, the work, the people around me.” Again she looked at the gaunt little alchemist, a long, quiet look. “I tried to explain it to Jehan last night. We have improved the race, you see.