The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  As I went on along the path I realized that a whole village or town was scattered about in the shadow of that slanting forest, all as random as Rer was, but secretive, peaceful, rural. Over every roof and path hung the boughs of the hemmens, the commonest tree of Winter, a stout conifer with thick pale-scarlet needles. Hemmen-cones littered the branching paths, the wind was scented with hemmen-pollen, and all the houses were built of the dark hemmenwood. I stopped at last wondering which door to knock at, when a person came sauntering out of the trees and greeted me courteously. ‘Will you be looking for a dwellingplace?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve come with a question for the Foretellers.’ I had decided to let them take me, at first anyhow, for a Karhider. Like the Investigators I had never had any trouble passing as a native, if I wanted to; among all the Karhidish dialects my accent went unnoticed, and my sexual anomalies were hidden by the heavy clothing. I lacked the fine thick hair-thatch and the downward eyeslant of the typical Gethenian, and was blacker and taller than most, but not beyond the range of normal variation. My beard had been permanently depilated before I left Ollul (at that time we didn’t yet know about the ‘pelted’ tribes of Perunter, who are not only bearded but hairy all over, like White Terrans). Occasionally I was asked how my nose got broken. I have a flat nose; Gethenian noses are prominent and narrow, with constricted passages, well adapted to breathing subfreezing air. The person on the path at Otherhord looked with mild curiosity at my nose, and answered, ‘Then perhaps you’ll want to speak to the Weaver? He’s down in the glade now, unless he went out with the woodsledge. Or would you rather talk first to one of the Celibates?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m exceedingly ignorant—’

  The young man laughed and bowed. ‘I am honoured!’ he said. ‘I’ve lived here three years, but haven’t yet acquired enough ignorance to be worth mentioning.’ He was highly amused, but his manner was gentle, and I managed to recollect enough scraps of Handdara lore to realize that I had been boasting, very much as if I’d come up to him and said ‘I’m exceedingly handsome …’

  ‘I meant, I don’t know anything about the Foretellers—’

  ‘Enviable!’ said the young Indweller. ‘Behold, we must sully the plain snow with footprints, in order to get anywhere. May I show you the way to the glade? My name is Goss.’

  It was a first name. ‘Genry,’ I said, abandoning my ‘l’. I followed Goss farther into the chill shade of the forest. The narrow path changed direction often, winding up the slope and down again; here and there, near it or away off among the massive trunks of the hemmens, stood the small, forest-coloured houses. Everything was red and brown, dank, still, fragrant, gloomy. From one of the houses drifted the faint whistling sweetness of a Karhidish flute. Goss went light and quick, graceful as a girl, some yards ahead of me. All at once his white shirt blazed out, and I came out after him from shadow into full sunlight on a wide green meadow.

  Twenty feet from us stood a figure, straight, motionless, profiled, the scarlet hieb and white shirt an inlay of bright enamel against the green of the high grass. A hundred yards beyond him stood another statue, in blue and white; this one never moved or glanced our way all the time we talked with the first one. They were practising the Handdara discipline of Presence, which is a kind of trance – the Handdarata, given to negatives, call it an untrance – involving self-loss (self augmentation?) through extreme sensual receptiveness and awareness. Though the technique is the exact opposite of most techniques of mysticism it probably is a mystical discipline, tending towards the experience of Immanence; but I can’t categorize any practice of the Handdarata with certainty. Goss spoke to the person in scarlet. As he broke from his intense movelessness and looked at us and came slowly towards us, I felt an awe of him. In that noon sunlight he shone of his own light.

  He was as tall as I, and slender, with a clear, open, and beautiful face. As his eyes met mine I was suddenly moved to bespeak him, to try to reach him with the mindspeech I had never used since I landed on Winter, and should not use, yet. The impulse was stronger than the restraint. I bespoke him. There was no response. No contact was made. He continued to look straight at me. After a moment he smiled and said in a soft, rather high voice, ‘You’re the Envoy, aren’t you?’

  I stammered and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Faxe. We’re honoured to receive you. Will you stay with us in Otherhord a while?’

  ‘Willingly. I am seeking to learn about your practice of Foretelling. And if there’s anything I can tell you in return about what I am, where I come from—’

  ‘Whatever you like,’ said Faxe with a serene smile. ‘This is a pleasant thing, that you should cross the Ocean of Space, and then add another thousand miles and a crossing of the Kargav to your journey to come to us here.’

  ‘I wanted to come to Otherhord because of the fame of its predictions.’

  ‘You want to watch us foretelling, then, perhaps. Or have you a question of your own?’

  His clear eyes compelled truth. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Nusuth,’ said he, ‘it doesn’t matter. Perhaps if you stay a while you’ll find if you have a question, or no question … There are only certain times, you know, when the Foretellers are able to meet together, so in any case you’d dwell with us some days.’

  I did, and they were pleasant days. Time was unorganized except for the communal work, field labour, gardening, wood-cutting, maintenance, for which transients such as myself were called on by whatever group most needed a hand. Aside from the work, a day might pass without a word spoken; those I talked with most often were young Goss, and Faxe the Weaver, whose extraordinary character, as limpid and unfathomable as a well of very clear water, was a quintessence of the character of the place. In the evenings there might be a gathering in the hearth-room of one or another of the low, tree-surrounded houses; there was conversation, and beer, and there might be music, the vigorous music of Karhide, melodically simple but rhythmically complex, always played extempore. One night two Indwellers danced, men so old that their hair had whitened, and their limbs were skinny, and the downward folds at the outer eye-corners half hid their dark eyes. Their dancing was slow, precise, controlled; it fascinated eye and mind. They began dancing during Third Hour after dinner. Musicians joined in and dropped out at will, all but the drummer who never stopped his subtle changing beat. The two old dancers were still dancing at Sixth Hour, midnight, after five Terran hours. This was the first time I had seen the phenomenon of dothe – the voluntary, controlled use of what we call ‘hysterical strength’ – and thereafter I was readier to believe tales concerning the Old Men of the Handdara.

  It was an introverted life, self-sufficient, stagnant, steeped in that singular ‘ignorance’ prized by the Handdarata and obedient to their rule of inactivity or non-interference. That rule (expressed in the word nusuth, which I have to translate as ‘no matter’) is the heart of the cult, and I don’t pretend to understand it. But I began to understand Karhide better, after a half-month in Otherhord. Under that nation’s politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara.

  And out of that silence inexplicably rises the Foreteller’s voice.

  Young Goss, who enjoyed acting as my guide, told me that my question to the Foretellers could concern anything and be phrased as I liked. ‘The more qualified and limited the question, the more exact the answer,’ he said. ‘Vagueness breeds vagueness. And some questions of course are not answerable.’

  ‘What if I ask one of those?’ I inquired. This hedging seemed sophisticated, but not unfamiliar. But I did not expect his answer: ‘The Weaver will refuse it. Unanswerable questions have wrecked Foretelling groups.’

  ‘Wrecked them?’

  ‘Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of Asen Fastness to answer the question What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness
for six days and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver … He was a man named Meshe.’

  ‘The founder of the Yomesh cult?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Goss, and laughed as if the story was very funny, but I didn’t know whether the joke was on the Yomeshta or on me.

  I had decided to ask a yes-or-no question, which might at least make plain the extent and kind of obscurity or ambiguity in the answer. Faxe confirmed what Goss had said, that the matter of the question could be one of which the Foretellers were perfectly ignorant. I could ask if the hoolm crops would be good this year in the northern hemisphere of S, and they would answer, having no previous knowledge even of the existence of a planet called S. This seemed to put the business on the plane of pure chance divination, along with yarrow stalks and flipped coins. No, said Faxe, not at all, chance was not involved. The whole process was in fact precisely the reverse of chance.

  ‘Then you mindread.’

  ‘No,’ said Faxe, with his serene and candid smile.

  ‘You mindread without knowing you’re doing it, perhaps?’

  ‘What good would that be? If the asker knew the answer he wouldn’t pay our price for it.’

  I chose a question to which I certainly lacked the answer. Only time could prove the Foretelling right or wrong, unless it was, as I expected, one of those admirable professional prophecies applicable to any outcome. It was not a trivial question; I had given up the notion of asking when it would stop raining, or some such trifle, when I learned that the undertaking was a hard and dangerous one for the nine Foretellers of Otherhord. The cost was high for the asker – two of my rubies went to the coffers of the Fastness – but higher for the answerers. And as I got to know Faxe, if it became difficult to believe that he was a professional faker it became still more difficult to believe that he was an honest, self-deluded faker; his intelligence was as hard, clear, and polished as my rubies. I dared set no trap for him. I asked what I most wanted to know.

  On Onnertherhad, the 18th of the month, the nine met together in a big building usually kept locked: one high hall, stone-floored and cold, dimly lighted by a couple of slit-windows and a fire in the deep hearth at one end. They sat on the bare stone in a circle, all of them cloaked and hooded, rough still shapes like a circle of dolmens in the faint glow of the fire yards away. Goss, and a couple of other young Indwellers, and a physician from the nearest Domain, watched in silence from seats by the hearth while I crossed the hall and entered the circle. It was all very informal, and very tense. One of the hooded figures looked up as I came amongst them, and I saw a strange face, coarse-featured, heavy, with insolent eyes watching me.

  Faxe sat cross-legged, not moving, but charged, full of a gathering force that made his light, soft voice crack like an electric bolt. ‘Ask,’ he said.

  I stood within the circle and asked my question. ‘Will this world Gethen be a member of the Ekumen of Known Worlds, five years from now?’

  Silence. I stood there, I hung in the centre of a spider-web woven of silence.

  ‘It is answerable,’ the Weaver said quietly.

  There was a relaxation. The hooded stones seemed to soften into movement; the one who had looked so strangely at me began to whisper to his neighbour. I left the circle and joined the watchers by the hearth.

  Two of the Foretellers remained withdrawn, unspeaking. One of them lifted his left hand from time to time and patted the floor lightly and swiftly ten or twenty times, then sat motionless again. I had seen neither of them before; they were the Zanies, Goss said. They were insane. Goss called them ‘time-dividers,’ which may mean schizophrenics. Karhidish psychologists, though lacking mindspeech and thus like blind surgeons, were ingenious with drugs, hypnosis, spotshock, cryonic touch, and various mental therapies: I asked if these two psychopaths could not be cured. ‘Cured?’ Goss said. ‘Would you cure a singer of his voice?’

  Five others of the circle were Indwellers of Otherhord, adepts in the Handdara disciplines of Presence and also, said Goss, so long as they remained Foretellers, celibate, taking no mate during their periods of sexual potency. One of these Celibates must be in kemmer during the Foretelling. I could pick him out, having learned to notice the subtle physical intensification, a kind of brightness, that signalizes the first phase of kemmer.

  Beside the kemmerer sat the Pervert.

  ‘He came up from Spreve with the physician,’ Goss told me. ‘Some Foretelling groups artificially arouse perversion in a normal person – injecting female or male hormones during the days before a session. It’s better to have a natural one. He’s willing to come; likes the notoriety.’

  Gross used the pronoun that designates a male animal, not the pronoun for a human being in the masculine role of kemmer. He looked a little embarrassed. Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversions – at least, they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four per cent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormals – normals, by our standard. They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies. The Karhidish slang for them is half-deads. They are sterile.

  The Pervert of the group, after that first long strange stare at me, paid no heed to anyone but the one next to him, the kemmerer, whose increasingly active sexuality would be further roused and finally stimulated into full, female sexual capacity by the insistent, exaggerated maleness of the Pervert. The Pervert kept talking softly, leaning towards the kemmerer, who answered little and seemed to recoil. None of the others had spoken for a long time now, there was no sound but the whisper, whisper of the Pervert’s voice. Faxe was steadily watching one of the Zanies. The Pervert laid his hand quickly and softly on the kemmerer’s hand. The kemmerer avoided the touch hastily, with fear or disgust, and looked across at Faxe as if for help. Faxe did not move. The kemmerer kept his place, and kept still when the Pervert touched him again. One of the Zanies lifted up his face and laughed a long false crooning laugh, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah …’

  Faxe raised his hand. At once each face in the circle turned to him as if he had gathered up their gazes into a sheaf, a skein.

  It had been afternoon and raining when we entered the hall. The grey light had soon died out of the slit-windows under the eaves. Now whitish strips of light stretched like slanting phantasmal sails, long triangles and oblongs, from wall to floor, over the faces of the nine; dull scraps and shreds of light from the moon rising over the forest, outside. The fire had burned down long since and there was no light but those strips and slants of dimness creeping across the circle, sketching out a face, a hand, a moveless back. For a while I saw Faxe’s profile rigid as pale stone in a diffuse dust of light. The diagonal of moonlight crept on and came to a black hump, the kemmerer, head bowed on his knees, hands clenched on the floor, body shaken by a regular tremor repeated by the slutter-pat-pat of the Zany’s hands on stone in darkness across the circle. They were all connected, all of them, as if they were the suspension-points of a spiderweb. I felt, whether I wished or not, the connection, the communication that ran, wordless, inarticulate, through Faxe, and which Faxe was trying to pattern and control, for he was the centre, the Weaver. The dim light fragmented and died away creeping up the eastern wall. The web of force, of tension, of silence, grew.

  I tried to keep out of contact with the minds of the Foretellers. I was made very uneasy by that silent electric tension, by the sense of being drawn in, of becoming a point or figure in the pattern, in the web. But when I set up a barrier, it was worse: I felt cut off and cowered inside my own mind obsessed by hallucinations of sight and touch, a stew of wild images and notions, abrupt visions and sensations all sexually charged and grotesquely violent, a red-
and-black seething of erotic rage. I was surrounded by great gaping pits with ragged lips, vaginas, wounds, hellmouths, I lost my balance, I was falling … If I could not shut out this chaos I would fall indeed, I would go mad, and there was no shutting it out. The emphatic and paraverbal forces at work, immensely powerful and confused, rising out of the perversion and frustration of sex, out of an insanity that distorts time, and out of an appalling discipline of total concentration and apprehension of immediate reality, were far beyond my restraint or control. And yet they were controlled: the centre was still Faxe. Hours and seconds passed, the moonlight shone on the wrong wall, there was no moonlight only darkness, and in the centre of all darkness Faxe: the Weaver: a woman, a woman dressed in light. The light was silver, the silver was armour, an amoured woman with a sword. The light burned sudden and intolerable, the light along her limbs, the fire, and she screamed aloud in terror and pain, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

  The crooning laugh of the Zany began, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah,’ and rose higher and higher into a wavering yell that went on and on, much longer than any voice could go on yelling, right across time. There was movement in the darkness, scuffling and shuffling, a redistribution of ancient centuries, an evasion of foreshadows. ‘Light, light,’ said an immense voice in vast syllables once or innumerable times. ‘Light. Log on the fire, there. Some light.’ It was the physician from Spreve. He had entered the circle. It was all broken. He was kneeling by the Zanies, the frailest ones, the fuse-points; both of them lay huddled up on the floor. The kemmerer lay with his head on Faxe’s knees, breathing in gasps, still trembling; Faxe’s hand, with absent gentleness, stroked his hair. The Pervert was off by himself in a corner, sullen and dejected. The session was over, time passed as usual, the web of power had fallen apart into indignity and weariness. Where was my answer, the riddle of the oracle, the ambiguous utterance of prophecy?