The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I think he understood my motive of offering to teach him the skill, and he wanted very much to learn it. We had a go at it. I recalled what I could of how I had been educed, at age twelve. I told him to clear his mind, let it be dark. This he did, no doubt, more promptly and thoroughly than I ever had done: he was an adept of the Handdara, after all. Then I mindspoke to him as clearly as I could. No result. We tried it again. Since one cannot bespeak until one has been bespoken, until the telepathic potentiality has been sensitized by one clear reception, I had to get through to him first. I tried for half an hour, till I felt hoarse of brain. He looked crestfallen. ‘I thought it would be easy for me,’ he confessed. We were both tired out, and called the attempt off for the night.

  Our next efforts were no more successful. I tried sending to Estraven while he slept, recalling what my Educer had told me about the occurrence of ‘dream-messages’ among pre-telepathic peoples, but it did not work.

  ‘Perhaps my species lacks the capacity,’ he said. ‘We have enough rumours and hints to have made up a word for the power, but I don’t know of any proven instances of telepathy among us.’

  ‘So it was with my people for thousands of years. A few natural Sensitives, not comprehending their gift, and lacking anyone to receive from or send to. All the rest latent, if that. You know I told you that except in the case of the born Sensitive, the capacity, though it has a physiological basis, is a psychological one, a product of culture, a side-effect of the use of the mind. Young children, and defectives, and members of unevolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction, intricate cultural adjustments, aesthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to reach a certain level before the connections can be made – before the potentiality can be touched at all.’

  ‘Perhaps we Gethenians haven’t attained that level.’

  ‘You’re far beyond it. But luck is involved. As in the creation of amino acids … Or to take analogies on the cultural plane – only analogies, but they illuminate – the scientific method, for instance, the use of concrete, experimental techniques in science. There are peoples of the Ekumen who possess a high culture, a complex society, philosophies, arts, ethics, a high style and a great achievement in all those fields; and yet they have never learned to weigh a stone accurately. They can learn how, of course. Only for half a million years they never did … There are peoples who have no higher mathematics at all, nothing beyond the simplest applied arithmetic. Every one of them is capable of understanding the calculus, but not one of them does or ever has. As a matter of fact, my own people, the Terrans, were ignorant until about three thousand years ago of the uses of zero.’ That made Estraven blink. ‘As for Gethen, what I’m curious about is whether the rest of us may find ourselves to have the capacity for Foretelling – whether this too is a part of the evolution of the mind – if you’ll teach us the techniques.’

  ‘You think it a useful accomplishment?’

  ‘Accurate prophecy? Well, of course!—’

  ‘You might have to come to believe that it’s a useless one, in order to practice it.’

  ‘Your Handdara fascinates me, Harth, but now and then I wonder if it isn’t simply paradox developed into a way of life …’

  We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying. Presently Estraven yawned and said, ‘I am deaf, deaf as a rock. We’d better sleep.’ I assented. He turned out the light, murmuring his brief praise of darkness; we burrowed down into our bags, and within a minute or two he was sliding into sleep as a swimmer slides into the dark water. I felt his sleep as if it were my own: the empathic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him, sleepily, by his name – ‘Therem!’

  He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud, ‘Arek! is that you?’

  ‘No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you.’

  His breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light, stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. ‘I dreamed,’ he said, ‘I thought I was at home—’

  ‘You heard me mindspeak.’

  ‘You called me – It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He’s dead. You called me – you called me Therem? I … This is more terrible than I thought.’ He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off his nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.

  ‘Harth, I’m very sorry—’

  ‘No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man’s voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me “Harth”? Oh, I see why there’s no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing … All right. All right, speak to me again.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘No. Go on.’

  With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: ‘Therem, my friend, there’s nothing to fear between us.’

  He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had. ‘Ah, but there is,’ he said.

  After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, ‘You spoke in my language.’

  ‘Well, you don’t know mine.’

  ‘You said there would be words, I know … Yet I imagined it as – an understanding—’

  ‘Empathy’s another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centres of the brain are activated, as well as—’

  ‘No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?’ His voice was strained.

  ‘That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.’

  ‘Nusuth … My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Estraven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We … I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.’

  We were both silent for some time. I could not know, or ask, what lay behind his words: it had cost him too much to say the little he had said.

  I said at last, ‘Bespeak me, Therem. Call me by my name.’ I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily. Had I been a Listener, I could have heard him think.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never. Not yet …’

  But no amount of shock, awe, terror could restrain that insatiable, outreaching mind for long. After he had cut out the light again I suddenly heard his stammer in my inward hearing – ‘Genry’ – Even mindspeaking he never could say ‘l’ properly.

  I replied at once. In the dark he made an inarticulate sound of fear that had in it a slight edge of satisfaction. ‘No more, no more,’ he said aloud. After a while we got to sleep at last.

  It never came easy to him. Not that he lacked the gift or could not develop the skill, but it disturbed him profoundly, and he could not take it for granted. He quickly learned to set up the barriers, but I’m not sure he felt he could count on them. Perhaps all of us were so, when the first Educers came back centuries ago from Rokanon’s World teaching the ‘Last Art’ to us. Perhaps a Gethenian, being singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness, a breach of integrity hard for him to tolerate. Perhaps it was Estraven’s own character, in which candour and reserve were both strong: every word he said rose out of a deeper silence. He heard my voice bespeaking him as a dead man’s, his brother’s voice. I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between him and that brother, but I knew that whenever I bespoke him something in him winced away as if I touched a wound. So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.

  And day after day we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The m
idpoint in time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Thanern, found us far short of our halfway point in space. By the sledge-meter we had indeed travelled about four hundred miles, but probably only three-quarters of that was real forward gain, and we could estimate only very roughly how far still remained to go. We had spent days, miles, rations in our long struggle to get up on to the Ice. Estraven was not so worried as I by the hundreds of miles that still lay ahead of us. ‘The sledge is lighter,’ he said. ‘Towards the end it will be still lighter; and we can cut rations, if necessary. We have been eating very well, you know.’

  I thought he was being ironic, but I should have known better.

  On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he drank orsh or sugar-water at mealtimes. He insisted that I eat, though only half-rations. ‘You have no experience in starvation,’ he said.

  I was humiliated. ‘How much have you – Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister—?’

  ‘Genry, we practice privation until we’re experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child at home in Estre, and by the Handdarata in Rotherer Fastness. I got out of practice in Erhenrang, true enough, but I began to make up for it in Mishnory … Please do as I say, my friend; I know what I’m doing.’

  He did, and I did.

  We went on for four more days of very bitter cold, never above –25°, and then came another blizzard whooping up in our faces from the east on a gale wind. Within two minutes of the first strong gusts the snow blew so thick that I could not see Estraven six feet away. I had turned my back on him and the sledge and the plastering, blinding, suffocating snow in order to get my breath, and when a minute later I turned around he was gone. The sledge was gone. Nothing was there. I took a few steps to where they had been and felt about. I shouted, and could not hear my own voice. I was deaf and alone in a universe filled solid with small stinging grey streaks. I panicked and began to blunder forward, mindcalling frantically, ‘Therem!’

  Right under my hand, kneeling, he said, ‘Come on, give me a hand with the tent.’

  I did so, and never mentioned my minute of panic. No need to.

  This blizzard lasted two days; there were five days lost, and there would be more. Nimmer and Anner are the months of the great storms.

  ‘We’re beginning to cut it rather fine, aren’t we?’ I said one night as I measured out our gichy-michy ration and put it to soak in hot water.

  He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like when he looked like that. He smiled. ‘With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.’

  It was what he had said from the start. With all my anxieties, my sense of taking a last desperate gamble, and so on, I had not been realistic enough to believe him. Even now I thought, Surely when we’ve worked so hard—

  But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.

  ‘How is your luck running, Therem?’ I said at last.

  He did not smile at that. Nor did he answer. Only after a while he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about them all, down there.’ Down there, for us, had come to mean the south, the world below the plateau of ice, the region of earth, men, roads, cities, all of which had become hard to imagine as really existing. ‘You know that I sent word to the king concerning you, the day I left Mishnory. I told him what Shusgis told me, that you were going to be sent to Pulefen Farm. At the time I wasn’t clear as to my intent, but merely followed my impulse. I have thought the impulse through, since. Something like this may happen: The king will see a chance to play shifgrethor. Tibe will advise against it, but Argaven should be growing a little tired of Tibe by now, and may ignore his counsel. He will inquire. Where is the Envoy, the guest of Karhide? – Mishnory will lie. He died of horm-fever this autumn, most lamentable. – Then how does it happen that we are informed by our own Embassy that he’s in Pulefen Farm? – He’s not there, look for yourselves. – No, no, of course not, we accept the word of the Commensals of Orgoreyn … But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance you get. Bring your people to Karhide and accomplish your mission, at once, before Argaven has had time to see the possible enemy in you, before Tibe or some other councillor frightens him once more, playing on his madness. If he makes the bargain with you, he will keep it. To break it would be to break his own shifgrethor. The Harge kings keep their promises. But you must act fast, and bring the Ship down soon.’

  ‘I will, if I receive the slightest sign of welcome.’

  ‘No: forgive my advising you, but you must not wait for welcome. You will be welcomed. I think. So will the Ship. Karhide has been sorely humbled this past half-year. You will give Argaven the chance to turn the tables. I think he will take the chance.’

  ‘Very well. But you, meanwhile—’

  ‘I am Estraven the Traitor. I have nothing whatever to do with you.’

  ‘At first.’

  ‘At first,’ he agreed.

  ‘You’ll be able to hide out, if there is danger at first?’

  ‘Oh yes, certainly.’

  Our food was ready, and we fell to. Eating was so important and engrossing a business that we never talked any more while we ate; the taboo was now in its complete, perhaps its original form, not a word said till the last crumb was gone. When it was, he said, ‘Well, I hope I’ve guessed well. You will … you do forgive …’

  ‘Your giving me direct advice?’ I said, for there were certain things I had finally come to understand. ‘Of course I do, Therem. Really, how can you doubt it? You know I have no shifgrethor to waive.’ That amused him, but he was still brooding.

  ‘Why,’ he said at last, ‘why did you come alone – why were you sent alone? Everything, still, will depend upon that ship coming. Why was it made so difficult for you, and for us?’

  ‘It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model … So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don’t know. Yes, it has made things difficult. But I might ask you as profitably why you’ve never seen fit to invent airborne vehicles? One small stolen airplane would have spared you and me a great deal of difficulty!’

  ‘How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?’ Estraven said sternly. It was a fair response, on a world where no living thing is winged, and the very angels of the Yomesh Hierarchy of the Holy do not fly but only drift, wingless, down to earth like a soft snow falling, like the windborne seeds of that flowerless world.

  Towards the middle of Nimmer, after much wind and bitter cold, we came into a quiet weather for many days. If there was storm it was far south of us, down there
, and we inside the blizzard had only an all but windless overcast. At first the overcast was thin, so that the air was vaguely radiant with an even, sourceless sunlight reflected from both clouds and snow, from above and below. Overnight the weather thickened somewhat. All brightness was gone leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent on to nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When he walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-grey void, in which we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my balance. My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I stood; they got none; I might as well be blind. It was all right while we loaded up, but hauling, with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to touch, as it were, it was at first disagreeable and then exhausting. We were on skis, on a good surface of firn, without sastrugi, and solid – that was certain – for five or six thousand feet down. We should have been making good time. But we kept slowing down, groping our way across the totally unobstructed plain, and it took a strong effort of will to speed up to normal pace. Every slight variation in the surface came as a jolt – as in climbing stairs, the unexpected stair or the expected but absent stair – for we could not see it ahead: there was no shadow to show it. We skied blind with our eyes open. Day after day was like this, and we began to shorten our hauls, for by mid-afternoon both of us would be sweating and shaking with strain and fatigue. I came to long for snow, for blizzard, for anything; but morning after morning we came out of the tent into the void, the white weather, what Estraven called the Unshadow.

  One day about noon, Odorny Nimmer, the sixty-first day of the journey, that bland blind nothingness about us began to flow and writhe. I thought my eyes were fooling me, as they had been doing often, and paid scant attention to the dim meaningless commotion of the air until suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a small, wan, dead sun overhead. And looking down from the sun, straight ahead, I saw a huge black shape come hulking out of the void towards us. Black tentacles writhed upwards, groping out. I stopped dead in my tracks, slewing Estraven around on his skis, for we were both in harness hauling. ‘What is it?’