The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Then the three ice-shapes stooped down and sat with their knees drawn up and let the sun melt them. As milk they melted, and the milk ran into the mouths of the sleepers, and the sleepers woke. That milk is drunk by the children of men alone and without it they will not wake to life.

  The first to wake up was Edondurath. So tall was he that when he stood up his head split the sky, and snow fell down. He saw the others stirring and awakening, and was afraid of them when they moved, so he killed one after another with a blow of his fist. Thirty-six of them he killed. But one of them, the next to last one, ran away. Haharath he was called. Far he ran over the plain of ice and over the lands of earth. Edondurath ran behind him and caught up with him at last and smote him. Haharath died. Then Edondurath returned to the Birthplace on the Gobrin Ice where the bodies of the others lay, but the last one was gone: he had escaped while Edondurath pursued Haharath.

  Edondurath built a house of the frozen bodies of his brothers, and waited there inside that house for that last one to come back. Each day one of the corpses would speak, saying, ‘Does he burn? Does he burn?’ All the other corpses would say with frozen tongues, ‘No, no.’ Then Edondurath entered kemmer as he slept, and moved and spoke aloud in dreams, and when he woke the corpses were all saying, ‘He burns! He burns!’ And the last brother, the youngest one, heard them saying that, and came into the house of bodies and there coupled with Edondurath. Of these two were the nations of men born, out of the flesh of Edondurath, out of Edondurath’s womb. The name of the other, the younger brother, the father, his name is not known.

  Each of the children born to them had a piece of darkness that followed him about wherever he went by daylight. Edondurath said, ‘Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?’ His kemmering said, ‘Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.’

  18: ON THE ICE

  Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sounds of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the centre of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude.

  In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real centre of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the hearth of warmth.

  I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

  I always woke up first, usually before daylight. My metabolic rate is slightly over the Gethenian norm, as are my height and weight; Estraven has figured these differences into the food-ration calculations, in his scrupulous way which one could see as either housewifely or scientific, and from the start I had had a couple of ounces more food per day than he. Protests of injustice fell silent before the self-evident justice of this unequal division. However divided, the share was small. I was hungry, constantly hungry, daily hungrier. I woke up because I was hungry.

  If it was still dark I turned up the light of the Chabe stove, and put a pan of ice brought in the night before, now thawed, on the stove to boil. Estraven meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if he wrestled with an angel. Winning, he sat up, stared at me vaguely, shook his head, and woke. By the time we were dressed and booted and had the bags rolled up, breakfast was ready: a mug of boiling hot orsh, and one cube of gichy-michy expanded by hot water into a sort of small, doughy bun. We chewed slowly, solemnly, retrieving all dropped crumbs. The stove cooled as we ate. We packed it up with the pan and mugs, pulled on our hooded overcoats and our mittens, and crawled out into the open air. The coldness of it was perpetually incredible. Every morning I had to believe it all over again. If one had been outside to relieve oneself already, the second exit was only harder.

  Sometimes it was snowing; sometimes the long light of early day lay wonderfully gold and blue across the miles of ice; most often it was grey.

  We brought the thermometer into the tent with us, nights, and when we took it outside it was interesting to watch the pointer swing to the right (Gethenian dials read counterclockwise) almost too fast to follow, registering a drop of twenty, fifty, eighty degrees, till it stopped somewhere between zero and –60°.

  One of us collapsed the tent and folded it while the other loaded stove, bags, etc., on to the sledge; the tent was strapped over all, and we were ready for skis and harness. Little metal was used in our straps and fittings, but the harnesses had buckles of aluminium alloy, too fine to fasten with mittens on, which burned in that cold exactly as if they were redhot. I had to be careful of my fingers when the temperature was below minus twenty, especially if the wind blew, for I could pick up frostbite amazingly fast. My feet never suffered – and that is a factor of major importance, in a winter-journey where an hour’s exposure can, after all, cripple one for a week or for life. Estraven had had to guess my size and the snowboots he got me were a little large, but extra socks filled the discrepancy. We put on our skis, got into harness as quick as possible, bucked and pried and jolted the sledge free if its runners were frozen in, and set off.

  Mornings after heavy snowfall we might have to spend some while digging out the tent and sledge before we could set off. The new snow was not hard to shovel away, though it made great impressive drifts around us, who were, after all, the only impediment for hundreds of miles, the only thing sticking out above the ice.

  We pulled eastward by the compass. The usual direction of the wind was north to south, off the glacier. Day after day it blew from our left as we went. The hood did not suffice against that wind, and I wore a facial mask to protect my nose and left cheek. Even so my left eye froze shut one day, and I thought I had lost the use of it: even when Estraven thawed it open with breath and tongue, I could not see with it for some while, so probably more had been frozen than the lashes. In sunlight both of us wore the Gethenian slit-screen eyeshields, and neither of us suffered any snow-blindness. We had small opportunity. The Ice, as Estraven had said, tends to hold a high-pressure zone above its central area, where thousands of square miles of white reflect the sunlight. We were not in this central zone, however, but at best on the edge of it, between it and the zone of turbulent, deflected, precipitation-laden storms that it sends continually to torment the subglacial lands. Wind from due north brought bare, bright weather, but from northeast or northwest it brought snow, or harrowed up dry fallen snow into blinding, biting clouds like sand or duststorms, or else, sinking almost to nothing, crept in sinuous trails along the surface, leaving the sky white, the air white, no visible sun, no shadow: and the snow itself, the Ice, disappeared from under our feet.

  Around midday we would halt, and cut and set up a few blocks of ice for a protective wall if the wind was strong. We heated water to soak a cube of gichy-michy in, and drank the water hot sometimes with a bit of sugar melted in it; harnessed up again and went on.

  We seldom talked while on the march or at lunch, for our lips were sore, and when one’s mouth was open the cold got inside, hurting teeth and throat and lungs; it was necessary to keep the mouth closed and brea
the through the nose, at least when the air was forty or fifty degrees below freezing. When it went on lower than that, the whole breathing process was further complicated by the rapid freezing of one’s exhaled breath; if you didn’t look out your nostrils might freeze shut, and then to keep from suffocating you would gasp in a lungful of razors.

  Under certain conditions our exhalations freezing instantly made a tiny crackling noise, like distant firecrackers, and a shower of crystals: each breath a snowstorm.

  We pulled till we tired out or till it began to grow dark, halted, set up the tent, pegged down the sledge if there was threat of high wind, and settled in for the night. On a usual day we would have pulled for eleven or twelve hours, and made between twelve and eighteen miles.

  It does not seem a very good rate, but then conditions were a bit adverse. The crust of the snow was seldom right for both skis and sledge-runners. When it was light and new the sledge ran through rather than over it; when it was partly hardened, the sledge would stick but we on skis would not, which meant that we were perpetually being pulled up backward with a jolt; and when it was hard it was often heaped up in long wind-waves, sastrugi, that in some places ran up to four feet high. We had to haul the sledge up and over each knife-edged or fantastically corniced top, then slide her down, and up over the next one: for they never seemed to run parallel to our course. I had imagined the Gobrin Ice Plateau to be all one sheet like a frozen pond, but there were hundreds of miles of it that were rather like an abruptly frozen, storm-raised sea.

  The business of setting up camp, making everything secure, getting all the clinging snow off one’s outer clothing, and so on, was trying. Sometimes it did not seem worthwhile. It was so late, so cold, one was so tired, that it would be much easier to lie down in a sleeping-bag in the lee of the sledge and not bother with the tent. I remember how clear this was to me on certain evenings, and how bitterly I resented my companion’s methodical, tyrannical insistence that we do everything and do it correctly and thoroughly. I hated him at such times, with a hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.

  When all was done we could enter the tent, and almost at once the heat of the Chabe stove could be felt as an enveloping, protecting ambience. A marvellous thing surrounded us: warmth. Death and cold were elsewhere, outside.

  Hatred was also left outside. We ate and drank. After we ate, we talked. When the cold was extreme, even the excellent insulation of the tent could not keep it out, and we lay in our bags as close to the stove as possible. A little fur of frost gathered on the inner surface of the tent. To open the valve was to let in a draught of cold that instantly condensed, filling the tent with a swirling mist of fine snow. When there was a blizzard, needles of icy air blew in through the vents, elaborately protected as they were, and an impalpable dust of snow-motes fogged the air. On those nights the storm made an incredible noise, and we could not converse by voice, unless we shouted with our heads together. On other nights it was still, with such a stillness as one imagines as existing before the stars began to form, or after everything has perished.

  Within an hour after our evening meal Estraven turned the stove down, if it was feasible to do so, and turned the light-emission off. As he did so he muttered a short and charming grace of invocation, the only ritual words I had ever learned of the Handdara: ‘Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,’ he said, and there was darkness. We slept. In the morning it was all to do over.

  We did it over for fifty days.

  Estraven kept up his journal, though during the weeks on the Ice he seldom wrote more than a note of the weather and the distance we had come that day. Among these notes there is occasional mention of his own thoughts or of some of our conversation, but not a word concerning the profounder conversation between us which occupied our rest between dinner and sleep on many nights of the first month on the Ice, while we still had enough energy to talk, and on certain days that we spent storm-bound in the tent. I told him that I was not forbidden, but not expected, to use paraverbal speech on a non-Ally planet, and asked him to keep what he learned from his own people, at least until I could discuss what I had done with my colleagues on the ship. He assented, and kept his word. He never said or wrote anything concerning our silent conversations.

  Mindspeech was the only thing I had to give Estraven, out of all my civilization, my alien reality in which he was so profoundly interested. I could talk and describe endlessly; but that was all I had to give. Indeed it may be the only important thing we have to give to Winter. But I can’t say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing.

  I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. The nearest to crisis that our sexual desires brought us was on a night early in the journey, our second night up on the Ice. We had spent all day struggling and back-tracking in the cut-up, crevassed area east of the Fire-Hills. We were tired that evening but elated, sure that a clear course would soon open out ahead. But after dinner Estraven grew taciturn, and cut my talk off short. I said at last after a direct rebuff, ‘Harth, I’ve said something wrong again, please tell me what it is.’

  He was silent.

  ‘I’ve made some mistake in shifgrethor. I’m sorry; I can’t learn. I’ve never even really understood the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow.’

  We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.

  And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted him, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

  He explained, stiffly and simply, that he was in kemmer and had been trying to avoid me, insofar as one of us could avoid the other. ‘I must not touch you,’ he said, with extreme constraint; saying that he looked away.

  I said, ‘I understand. I agree completely.’

  For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.

  We talked some more that night, and I recall being very hard put to it to answer coherently when he asked me what women were like. We were both rather stiff and cautious with each other for the next couple of days. A profound love between two people involves,
after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. It would never have occurred to me before that night that I could hurt Estraven.

  Now that the barriers were down, the limitation, in my terms, of our converse and understanding seemed intolerable to me. Quite soon, two or three nights later, I said to my companion as we finished our dinner – a special treat, sugared kadik-porridge, to celebrate a twenty-mile run – ‘Last spring, that night in the Corner Red Dwelling, you said you wished I’d tell you more about paraverbal speech.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Do you want to see if I can teach you how to speak it?’

  He laughed. ‘You want to catch me lying.’

  ‘If you ever lied to me, it was long ago, and in another country.’

  He was an honest person, but rarely a direct one. That tickled him, and he said, ‘In another country I may tell you other lies. But I thought you were forbidden to teach your mind-science to … the natives, until we join the Ekumen.’

  ‘Not forbidden. It’s not done. I’ll do it, though, if you like. And if I can. I’m no Educer.’

  ‘There are special teachers of the skill?’

  ‘Yes. Not on Alterra, where there’s a high occurrence of natural sensitivity, and – they say – mothers mindspeak to their unborn babies. I don’t know what the babies answer. But most of us have to be taught, as if it were a foreign language. Or rather as if it were our native language, but learned very late.’