The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The luck that had turned in Ethwen now turned the world with it under my hand. I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bob-sled down the steep, dangerous hour.

  Since I still went roaming and prying about, in my part as a restless curious dimwitted fellow, they wrote me on to the late watch-shift; by midnight all but I and one other late watcher within doors slept. I kept up my shiftless poking about the place, wandering up and down from time to time by the longbeds. I settled my plans, and began to ready my will and body to enter dothe, for my own strength would never suffice unaided by the strength out of the Dark. A while before dawn I went into the sleeping-room once more and with the cook’s gun gave Genly Ai a hundredth-second of stun to the brain, then hoisted him up bag and all and carried him out over my shoulder to the guardroom. ‘What’s doing?’ says the other guard half asleep, ‘let him be!’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Another one dead? By Meshe’s guts, and not hardly winter yet.’ He turned his head sideways to look into the Envoy’s face as it hung down on my back. ‘That one, the Pervert, is it. By the Eye, I didn’t believe all they say about Karhiders, till I took a look at him, the ugly freak he is. He spent all week on the longbed moaning and sighing, but I didn’t think he’d die right off like that. Well, go dump him outside where he’ll keep till daylight, don’t stand there like a carry-loader with a sack of turds …’

  I stopped by the Inspection Office on my way down the corridor, and I being the guard none stopped me from entering and looking till I found the wall-panel that contained the alarms and switches. None was labelled, but guards had scratched letters beside the switches to jog their memory when haste was needed; taking F.f. for ‘fences’ I turned that switch to cut the current to the outermost defences of the Farm, and then went on, pulling Ai along now by the shoulders. I came by the guard on duty in the watchroom by the door. I made a show of labouring to haul the dead load, for the dothe-strength was full within me and I did not want it seen how easily, in fact, I could pull or carry the weight of a man heavier than myself. I said, ‘A dead prisoner, they said get him out of the sleeping-room. Where do I stow him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Get him outside. Under a roof, so he won’t get snow-buried and float up stinking next spring in the thaws. It’s snowing peditia.’ He meant what we call sove-snow, a thick, wet fall, the best of news to me. ‘All right, all right,’ I said, and lugged my load outside and around the corner of the barracks, out of his sight. I got Ai up over my shoulders again, went northeast a few hundred yards, clambered up over the dead fence and slung my burden down, jumped down free, took up Ai once more and made off as fast as I could towards the river. I was not far from the fence when a whistle began to shriek and the floodlights went on. It snowed hard enough to hide me, but not hard enough to hide my tracks within minutes. Yet when I got down to the river they were not on my trail. I went north on clear ground under the trees, or through the water when there was no clear ground; the river, a hasty little tributary of the Esagel, was still unfrozen. Things were growing plain now in the dawn and I went fast. In full dothe I found the Envoy, though a long awkward load, no heavy one. Following the stream into the forest I came to the ravine where my sledge was, and on to the sledge I strapped the Envoy, loading my stuff around and over him till he was well hidden, and a weather-sheet over all; then I changed clothes and ate some food from my pack, for the great hunger one feels in long-sustained dothe was already gnawing at me. Then I set off north on the main Forest Road. Before long a pair of skiers came up with me.

  I was now dressed and equipped as a trapper, and told them that I was trying to catch up with Mavriva’s outfit, which had gone north in the last days of Grende. They knew Marvriva, and accepted my story after a glance at my trapper’s licence. They were not expecting to find the escaped men heading north, for nothing lies north of Pulefen but the forest and the Ice; they were perhaps not very interested in finding the escaped men at all. Why should they be? They went on, and only an hour later passed me again on their way back to the Farm. One of them was the fellow I had stood late watch with. He had never seen my face, though he had had it before his eyes half the night.

  When they were surely gone I turned off the road and all that day followed a long halfcircle back through the forest and the foothills east of the Farm, coming in at last from the east, from the wilderness, to the hidden dell above Turuf where I had cached all my spare equipment. It was hard sledging in that much-folded land, with more than my weight to pull, but the snow was thick and already growing firm, and I was in dothe. I had to maintain the condition, for once one lets the dothe-strength lapse one is good for nothing at all. I had never maintained dothe before for over an hour or so, but I knew that some of the Old Men can keep in the full strength for a day and a night or even longer, and my present need proved a good supplement to my training. In dothe one does not worry much, and what anxiety I had was for the Envoy, who should have waked long ago from the light dose of sonic I had given him. He never stirred, and I had no time to tend to him. Was his body so alien that what to us is mere paralysis was death to him? When the wheel turns under your hand, you must watch your words: and I had twice called him dead, and carried him as the dead are carried. The thought would come that this was then a dead man that I hauled across the hills, and that my luck and his life had gone to waste after all. At that I would sweat and swear, and the dothe-strength would seem to run out of me like water out of a broken jar. But I went on, and the strength did not fail me till I had reached the cache in the foothills, and set up the tent, and done what I could for Ai. I opened a box of hyperfood cubes, most of which I devoured, but some of which I got into him as a broth, for he looked near to starving. There were ulcers on his arms and breast, kept raw by the filthy sleeping-bag he lay in. When these sores were cleaned and he lay warm in the fur bag, as well hidden as winter and wilderness could hide him, there was no more I could do. Night had fallen and the greater darkness, the payment for the voluntary summoning of the body’s full strength, was coming hard upon me; to darkness I must entrust myself, and him.

  We slept. Snow fell. All the night and day and night of my thangen-sleep it must have snowed, no blizzard, but the first great snowfall of winter. When at last I roused and pulled myself up to look out, the tent was half buried. Sunlight and blue shadows lay vivid on the snow. Far and high in the east one drift of grey dimmed the sky’s brightness: the smoke of Udenushreke, nearest to us of the Fire-Hills. Around the little peak of the tent lay the snow, mounds, hillocks, swells, slopes, all white, untrodden.

  Being still in the recovery-period I was very weak and sleepy, but whenever I could rouse myself I gave Ai broth, a little at a time and in the evening of that day he came to life, if not to his wits. He sat up crying out as if in great terror. When I knelt by him he struggled to get away from me, and the effort being too much for him, fainted. That night he talked much, in no tongue I knew. It was strange, in that dark stillness of the wild, to hear him mutter words of a language he had learned on another world than this. The next day was hard, for whenever I tried to look after him he took me, I think, for one of the guards at the Farm, and was in terror that I would give him some drug. He would break out into Orgota and Karhidish all babbled pitifully together, begging me ‘not to’, and he fought me with a panic strength. This happened again and again, and as I was still in thangen and weak of limb and will, it seemed I could not care for him at all. That day I thought that they had not only drugged but mindchanged him, leaving him insane or imbecile. Then I wished that he had died on the sledge in the thore-forest, or that I had never had any luck at all, but had been arrested as I left Mishnory and sent to some Farm to work out my own damnation.

  I woke from sleep and he was watching
me.

  ‘Estraven?’ he said in a weak amazed whisper.

  Then my heart lifted up. I could reassure him, and see to his needs; and that night we both slept well.

  The next day he was much improved, and sat up to eat. The sores on his body were healing. I asked him what they were.

  ‘I don’t know. I think the drugs caused them; they kept giving me injections …’

  ‘To prevent kemmer?’ That was one report I had heard from men escaped or released from Voluntary Farms.

  ‘Yes. And others, I don’t know what they were, veridicals of some kind. They made me ill, and they kept giving them to me. What were they trying to find out, what could I tell them?’

  ‘They may have not so much been questioning as domesticating you.’

  ‘Domesticating?’

  ‘Rendering you docile by a forced addiction to one of the orgrevy derivatives. That practice is not unknown in Karhide. Or they may have been carrying out an experiment on you and the others. I have been told they test mindchanging drugs and techniques on prisoners in the Farms, I doubted that, when I heard it; not now.’

  ‘You have these Farms in Karhide?’

  ‘In Karhide?’ I said. ‘No.’

  He rubbed his forehead fretfully. ‘They’d say in Mishnory that there are no such places in Orgoreyn, I suppose.’

  ‘On the contrary. They’d boast of them, and show you tapes and pictures of the Voluntary Farms, where deviates are rehabilitated and vestigial tribal groups are given refuge. They might show you around the First District Voluntary Farm just outside Mishnory, a fine showplace from all accounts. If you believe that we have Farms in Karhide, Mr. Ai, you overestimate us seriously. We are not a sophisticated people.’

  He lay a long time staring at the glowing Chabe stove, which I had turned up till it gave out suffocating heat. Then he looked at me.

  ‘You told me this morning, I know, but my mind wasn’t clear, I think. Where are we, how did we get here?’

  I told him again.

  ‘You simply … walked out with me?’

  ‘Mr. Ai, any one of you prisoners, or all of you together, could have walked out of that place, any night. If you weren’t starved, exhausted, demoralized, and drugged; and if you had winter clothing; and if you had somewhere to go … There’s the catch. Where would you go? To a town? No papers; you’re done for. Into the wilderness? No shelter; you’re done for. In summer, I expect they bring more guards to Pulefen Farm. In winter, they use winter itself to guard it.’

  He was scarcely listening. ‘You couldn’t carry me a hundred feet, Estraven. Let alone run, carrying me, a couple of miles cross-country in the dark—’

  ‘I was in dothe.’

  He hesitated. ‘Voluntarily induced?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are … one of the Handdarata?’

  ‘I was brought up in the Handdara, and indwelt two years at Rotherer Fastness. In Kerm Land most people of the Inner Hearths are Handdarata.’

  ‘I thought that after the dothe period, the extreme drain on one’s energy necessitated a sort of collapse—’

  ‘Yes; thangen, it’s called, the dark sleep. It lasts much longer than the dothe period, and once you enter the recovery period it’s very dangerous to try to resist it. I slept straight through two nights. I’m still in thangen now; I couldn’t walk over the hill. And hunger’s part of it, I’ve eaten up most of the rations I’d planned to last me the week.’

  ‘All right,’ he said with peevish haste. ‘I see, I believe you – what can I do but believe you. Here I am, here you are … But I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you did all this for.’

  At that my temper broke, and I must stare at the ice-knife which lay close by my hand, not looking at him and not replying until I had controlled my anger. Fortunately there was not yet much heat or quickness in my heart, and I said to myself that he was an ignorant man, a foreigner, ill-used and frightened. So I arrived at justice, and said finally, ‘I feel that it is in part my fault that you came to Orgoreyn and so to Pulefen Farm. I am trying to amend my fault.’

  ‘You had nothing to do with my coming to Orgoreyn.’

  ‘Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us. Let me go back to last spring. I began to encourage King Argaven to wait, to make no decision concerning you or your mission, about a halfmonth before the day of the Ceremony of the Keystone. The audience was already planned, and it seemed best to go through with it, though without looking for any results from it. All this I thought you understood, and in that I erred. I took too much for granted; I didn’t wish to offend you, to advise you; I thought you understood the danger of Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe’s sudden ascendancy in the kyorremy. If Tibe had known any good reason to fear you, he would have accused you of serving a faction, and Argaven, who is very easily moved by fear, would likely have had you murdered. I wanted you down, and safe, while Tibe was up and powerful. As it chanced, I went down with you. I was bound to fall, though I didn’t know it would be that very night we talked together; but no one is Argaven’s prime minister for long. After I received the Order of Exile I could not communicate with you lest I contaminate you with my disgrace, and so increase your peril. I came here to Orgoreyn. I tried to suggest to you that you should also come to Orgoreyn. I urged the men I distrusted least among the Thirty-Three Commensals to grant you entry; you would not have got it without their favour. They saw, and I encouraged them to see, in you a way towards power, a way out of the increasing rivalry with Karhide and back towards the restoration of open trade, a chance perhaps to break the grip of the Sarf. But they are over-cautious men, afraid to act. Instead of proclaiming you, they hid you, and so lost their chance, and sold you to the Sarf to save their own pelts. I counted too much on them, and therefore the fault is mine.’

  ‘But for what purpose – all this intriguing, this hiding and power-seeking and plotting – what was it all for, Estraven? What were you after?’

  ‘I was after what you’re after: the alliance of my world with your worlds. What did you think?’

  We were staring at each other across the glowing stove like a pair of wooden dolls.

  ‘You mean, even if it was Orgoreyn that made the alliance—?’

  ‘Even if it was Orgoreyn. Karhide would soon have followed. Do you think I would play shifgrethor when so much is at stake for all of us, all my fellow men? What does it matter which country wakens first, so long as we waken?’

  ‘How the devil can I believe anything you say!’ he burst out. Bodily weakness made his indignation sound aggrieved and whining. ‘If all this is true, you might have explained some of it earlier, last spring, and spared us both a trip to Pulefen. Your efforts on my behalf—’

  ‘Have failed. And have put you in pain, and shame, and danger. I know it. But if I had tried to fight Tibe for your sake, you would not be here now, you’d be in a grave in Erhenrang. And there are now a few people in Karhide, and a few in Orgoreyn, who believe your story, because they listened to me. They may yet serve you. My greatest error was, as you say, in not making myself clear to you. I am not used to doing so. I am not used to giving, or accepting, either advice or blame.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be unjust, Estraven—’

  ‘Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.’

  He put his head in his hands. He said at last, ‘I’m sorry, Estraven.’ It was both apology and admission.

  ‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘that you’re unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.’ I stood up, for my legs were cramped, and found I was trembling with anger and weariness. ‘Teach me your mindspeech,’ I said, trying to speak easily and with no rancour, ‘your language that has no lies in it. Teach me that, and then ask me why I did what I’ve done.’

  ‘I should like to do that, Estraven.’

  1
5: TO THE ICE

  I woke. Until now it had been strange, unbelievable, to wake up inside a dim cone of warmth, and to hear my reason tell me that it was a tent, that I lay in it, alive, that I was not still in Pulefen Farm. This time there was no strangeness in my waking, but a grateful sense of peace. Sitting up I yawned and tried to comb back my matted hair with my fingers. I looked at Estraven, stretched out sound asleep on his sleeping-bag a couple of feet from me. He wore nothing but his breeches; he was hot. The dark secret face was laid bare to the light, to my gaze. Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep: a round, strong face, relaxed and remote, small drops of sweat on the upper lip and over the heavy eyebrows. I remembered how he had stood sweating on the parade-stand in Erhenrang in panoply of rank and sunlight. I saw him now defenceless and half-naked in a colder light, and for the first time saw him as he was.

  He woke late, and was slow in waking. At last he staggered up yawning, pulled on his shirt, stuck his head out to judge the weather, and then asked me if I wanted a cup of orsh. When he found that I had crawled about and brewed up a pot of the stuff with the water he had left in a pan as ice on the stove last night, he accepted a cup, thanked me stiffly, and sat down to drink it.

  ‘Where do we go from here, Estraven?’

  ‘It depends on where you want to go, Mr. Ai. And on what kind of travel you can manage.’

  ‘What’s the quickest way out of Orgoreyn?’

  ‘West. To the coast. Thirty miles or so.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘The harbours will be freezing or already frozen, here. In any case no ships go out far in winter. It would be a matter of waiting in hiding somewhere until next spring, when the great traders go out to Sith and Perunter. None will be going to Karhide, if the trade-embargoes continue. We might work our passage on a trader. I am out of money, unfortunately.’