The Dispossessed hc-1

by Ursula Le Guin

  They had picked up the idea of “prisons” from episodes in the Life of Odo, which all of them who had elected to work on History were reading. There were many obscurities in the book, and Wide Plains had nobody who knew enough history to explain them; but by the time they got to Odo’s years in the Fort in Drio, the concept “prison” had become self-explanatory. And when a circuit history teacher came through the town he expounded the subject, with the reluctance of a decent adult forced to explain an obscenity to children. Yes, he said, a prison was a place where a State put people who disobeyed its Laws.

  But why didn’t they just leave the place? They couldn’t leave, the doors were locked. Locked? Like the doors on a moving truck, so you don’t fall out, stupid! But what did they do inside one room all the time? Nothing. There was nothing to do. You’ve seen pictures of Odo in the prison cell in Drio, haven’t you? Image of defiant patience, bowed grey head, clenched hands, motionless in encroaching shadows. Sometimes prisoners were sentenced to work. Sentenced? Well, that means a judge, a person given power by the Law, ordered them to do some kind of physical labor. Ordered them? What if they didn’t want to do it? Well, they were forced to do it; if they didn’t work, they were beaten. A thrill of tension went through the children listening, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, none of whom had ever been struck, or seen any person struck, except in immediate personal anger.

  Tirin asked the question that was in all their minds: “You mean, a lot of people would beat up one person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t the others stop them?”

  “The guards had weapons. The prisoners did not,” the teacher said. He spoke with the violence of one forced to say the detestable, and embarrassed by it.

  The simple lure of perversity brought Tirin, Shevek, and three other boys together. Girls were eliminated from their company, they could not have said why. Tirin had found an ideal prison, under the west wing of the learning center. It was a space just big enough to hold one person sitting or lying down, formed by three concrete foundation walls and the underside of the floor above; the foundations being part of a concrete form, the floor of it was continuous with the walls, and a heavy slab of foamstone siding would close it off completely. But the door had to be locked. Experimenting, they found that two props wedged between a facing wall and the slab shut it with awesome finality. Nobody inside could get that door open.

  “What about light?”

  “No light,” Tirin said. He spoke with authority about things like this, because his imagination put him straight into them. What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact that lent him his certainty. “They let prisoners sit in the dark, in the Fort in Drio. For years.”

  “Air, though,” Shevek said. “That door fits like a vacuum coupling. It’s got to have a hole in it.”

  “It’ll take hours to bore through foamstone. Anyhow, who’s going to stay in that box long enough to run out of air!”

  Chorus of volunteers and claimants.

  Tirin looked at them, derisive. “You’re all crazy. Who wants to actually get locked into a place like that? What for?” Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the cell, they must try to open the unopenable door.

  “I want to see what it’s like,” said Kadagv, a broad-chested, serious, domineering twelve-year-old.

  “Use your head!” Tirin jeered, but the others backed Kadagv. Shevek got a drill from the workshop, and they bored a two-centimeter hole through the “door” at nose height. It took nearly an hour, as Tirin had predicted.

  “How long you want to stay in, Kad? An hour?”

  “Look,” Kadagv said, “if I’m the prisoner, I can’t decide. I’m not free. You have to decide when to let me out.”

  “That’s right,” said Shevek, unnerved by this logic.

  “You can’t stay in too long, Kad. I want a turn!” said the youngest of them, Gibesh. The prisoner deigned no reply. He entered the cell. The door was raised and set in place with a bang, and the props wedged against it, all four jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm. They all crowded to the air hole to see their prisoner, but since there was no light inside the prison except from the air hole, they saw nothing.

  “Don’t suck all the poor fart’s air out!”

  “Blow him in some.”

  “Fart him in some!”

  “How long’ll we give him?”

  “An hour.”

  “Three minutes.”

  “Five years!”

  “It’s four hours till lights-out. That ought to do it”

  “But I want a turn!”

  “All right, we’ll leave you in all night.”

  “Well, I meant tomorrow.”

  Four hours later they knocked the props away and released Kadagv. He emerged as a dominant of the situation as when he had entered, and said he was hungry, and it was nothing; he’d just slept mostly.

  “Would you do it again?” Tirin challenged him.

  “Sure.”

  “No, I want second turn—”

  “Shut up, Gib. Now, Kad? Would you walk right back in there now, without knowing when we’ll let you out?”

  “Sure.”

  “Without food?”

  “They fed prisoners,” Shevek said. “That’s what’s so weird about the whole thing.”

  Kadagv shrugged. His attitude of lofty endurance was intolerable.

  “Look,” Shevek said to the two youngest boys, “go ask at the kitchen for leftovers, and pick up a bottle or something full of water, too.” He turned to Kadagv. “We’ll give you a whole sack of stuff, so you can. stay in that hole as long as you like.”

  “As long as you like,” Kadagv corrected.

  “All right. Get in there!” Kadagv’s self-assurance brought out Tirin’s satirical, play-acting vein. “You’re a prisoner. You don’t talk back. Understand? Turn around. Put your hands on your head.”

  “What for?”

  “You want to quit?”

  Kadagv faced him sullenly.

  “You can’t ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you have to just take it, and nobody will help you. Because we can kick you in the balls and you can’t kick back. Because you are not free. Now, do you want to go through with it?”

  “Sure. Hit me.”

  Tirin, Shevek, and the prisoner stood facing one another in a strange, stiff group around the lantern, in the darkness, among the heavy foundation walls of the building.

  Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. “Don’t tell me what to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that cell!” And as Kadagv turned to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-arm in the back so that he fell sprawling. He gave a sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing a finger that had been scraped or sprained against the back wall of the cell. Shevek and Tirin did not speak. They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the role now, it was playing them. The younger boys returned with some holum bread, a melon, and a bottle of water. They were talking as they came, but the curious silence at the cell got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in, the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the dark. The others gathered around the lantern. Gibesh whispered, “Where’ll he piss?”

  “In his bed,” Tirin replied with sardonic clarity.

  “What if he has to crap?” Gibesh asked, and suddenly went off into a peal of high laughter.

  “What’s so funny about crapping?”

  “I thought — what if he can’t see — in the dark—” Gibesh could not explain his humorous fancy fully. They all began to laugh without explanation, whooping till they were breathless. All were aware that the boy locked inside the cell could hear them laughing.

  It was past lights-out in the children’s dormitory, and many adults were already in bed, though lights were on here and there in the domiciles. The street was empty. The boys careened down it l
aughing and calling to one another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of disturbing others, of compounding wickednesses. They woke up half the children in the dormitory with games of tag down the halls and among the beds. No adult interfered; the tumult died down presently.

  Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for a long time on Tirin’s bed. They decided that Kadagv had asked for it, and would get two full nights in prison.

  Their group met in the afternoon at the lumber recycling workshop, and the foreman asked where Kadagv was. Shevek exchanged a glance with Tirin. He felt clever, he felt a sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin replied coolly that he must have joined another group for the day, Shevek was shocked by the lie. His sense of secret power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched, his ears felt hot. When the foreman spoke to him he jumped with alarm, or fear, or some such feeling, a feeling he had never had before, something like embarrassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept thinking about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail holes in three-ply holum boards and sanded the boards back to silky smoothness. Every time he looked into his mind there was Kadagv in it. It was disgusting.

  Gibesh, who had been standing guard duty, came to Tirin and Shevek after dinner, looking uneasy. “I thought I heard Kad saying something in there. In a sort of funny voice.”

  There was a pause. “We’ll let him out,” Shevek said.

  Tirin turned on him. “Come on, Shev, don’t go mushy on us. Don’t get altruistic! Let him finish it out and respect himself at the end of it.”

  “Altruistic, hell. I want to respect myself,” Shevek said, and set off for the learning center. Tirin knew him; he wasted no more time arguing with him, but followed. The eleven-year-olds trailed along behind. They crawled under the building to the cell. Shevek knocked one wedge free, Tirin the other. The door of the prison fell outward with a flat thump.

  Kadagv was lying on the ground, curled up on his side. He sat up, then got up very slowly and came out. He stooped more than necessary under the low roof, and blinked a lot in the light of the lantern, but looked no different from usual. The smell that came out with him was unbelievable. He had suffered, from whatever cause, from diarrhea. There was a mess in the cell, and smears of yellow fecal stuff on his shirt. When he saw this in the lantern light he made an effort to hide it with his hand. Nobody said anything much.

  When they had crawled out from under the building and were heading around to the dormitory, Kadagv asked, “How long was it?”

  “About thirty hours, counting the first four.”

  “Pretty long,” Kadagv said without conviction.

  After getting him to the baths to clean up, Shevek went off at a run to the latrine. There he leaned over a bowl and vomited. The spasms did not leave him for a quarter of an hour. He was shaky and exhausted when they passed. He went to the dormitory common room, read some physics, and went to bed early. None of the five boys ever went back to the prison under the learning center. None of them ever mentioned the episode, except Gibesh, who boasted about it once to some older boys and girls; but they did not understand, and he dropped the subject.

  The Moon stood high over the Northsetting Regional Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences. Four boys of fifteen or sixteen sat on a hilltop between patches of scratchy ground-holum and looked down at the Regional Institute and up at the Moon.

  “Peculiar,” said Tirin. “I never thought before…”

  Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark.

  “I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.”

  “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned.

  “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.

  They all went on staring up at the brilliant, blurry turquoise, which was not quite round, a day past its full. The northern ice cap was dazzling. “It’s clear in the north,” Shevek said. “Sunny. That’s A-Io, that brownish bulge there.”

  “They’re all lying around naked in the sun,” said Kvetur, “with jewels in their navels, and no hair.”

  There was a silence.

  They had come up to the hilltop for masculine company. The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw girls. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.

  Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson, and the image of iridescent jewels in the smooth hollow of women’s oiled, brown bellies had since recurred to all of them, privately.

  They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. “A famine in Bachifoil Province in the Nation of Thu,” the commenter’s voice had said. “Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels), women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the Iotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class.” A close-up of dinnertime: soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands teaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. “Side by side,” the quiet voice had said.

  But the image that had risen like an oily iridescent bubble in the boys’ minds was all the same.

  “How old are those films?” said Tirin. “Are they from before the Settlement, or are they contemporary? They never say.”

  “What does it matter?” Kvetur said. “They were living like that on Urras before the Odonian Revolution. The Odonians all got out and came here to Anarres. So probably nothing’s changed — they’re still at it, there.” He pointed to the great blue-green Moon.

  “How do we know they are?”

  “What do you mean, Tir?” asked Shevek.

  “If those pictures are a hundred and fifty years old, things could be entirely different now on Urras. I don’t say they are, but if they were, how would we know it? We don’t go there, we don’t talk, there’s no communication. We really have no idea what life’s like on Urras now.”

  “People in PDC do. They talk to the Urrasti that man the freighters that come in at Port of Anarres. They keep informed. They have to, so we can keep up trade with Urras, and know how much of a threat they pose to us, too.” Bedap spoke reasonably, but Tirin’s reply was sharp: “Then PDC may be informed, but we’re not.”

  “Informed!” Kverui said. “I’ve heard about Urras ever since nursery! I don’t care if I never see another picture of foul Urrasti cities and greasy Urrasti bodies!”

  “That’s just it,” said Tirin with the glee of one following logic. “All the material on Urras available to students is the same. Disgusting, immoral, excremental. But look, If it was that bad when the Settlers left, how has it kept on going for a hundred and fifty years? If they were so sick, why aren’t they dead? Why haven’t their propertarian societies collapsed? What are we so afraid of?”

  “Infection,” said Bedap.

  “Are we so feeble we can’t withstand a little exposure? Anyhow, they can’t all be sick. No matter what their society’s like, some of them must be decent. People vary here, don’t they? Are we all perfect Odonians? Look at that snotball Pesus!”

  “But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed,” said Bedap.

  “Oh, you can prove anything using the Analogy, and you know it. Anyhow, how do we actually know their society is sick?�
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  Bedap gnawed on his thumbnail. “You’re saying that PDC and the educational supplies syndicate are lying to us about Urras.”

  “No; I said we only know what we’re told. And do you know what we’re told?” Tirin’s dark, snub-nosed face, clear in the bright bluish moonlight, turned to them. “Kvet said it, a minute ago. He’s got the message. You heard it: detest Urras, hate Urras, fear Urras.”

  “Why not?” Kvetur demanded. “Look how they treated us Odonians!”

  “They gave us their Moon, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, to keep us from wrecking their profiteering states and setting up the just society there. And as soon as they got rid of us, I’ll bet they started building up governments and armies faster than ever, because nobody was left to stop them. If we opened the Port to them, you think they’d come like friends and brothers? A thousand million of them, and twenty million of us? They’d wipe us out, or make us all what do you call it, what’s the word, slaves, to work the mines for them!”

  “All right. I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? Could it be that if we knew what Urras was really like, we’d like it — some of it — some of us? That what PDC wants to prevent is not just some of them coming here, but some of us wanting to go there?”

  “Go to Urras?” Shevek said, startled.

  They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed. “Who’d ever want to go to Urras?” he demanded. “What for?”

  “To find out what another world’s like. To see what a ‘horse’ is!”