The Dispossessed hc-1

by Ursula Le Guin

  The silence, the utter silence of Anarres: he thought of it at night. No birds sang there. There were no voices there but human voices. Silence, and the barren lands.

  On the third day old Atro brought him a pile of newspapers. Pae, who was Shevek’s very frequent companion, said nothing to Atro, but when the old man left he told Shevek, “Awful trash, those papers, sir. Amusing, but don’t believe anything you read in them.”

  Shevek took up the topmost paper. It was badly printed on coarse paper — the first crudely made artifact he had handled on Urras. In fact it looked like the PDC bulletins and regional reports that served as newspapers on Anarres, but its style was very different from those smudgy, practical, factual publications. It was full of exclamation points and pictures. There was a picture of Shevek in front of the spaceship, with Pae holding his arm and scowling. FIRST MAN FROM THE MOON! said the huge print over the picture. Fascinated, Shevek read on.

  His first step on Earth! Urras’ first visitor from the Anarres Settlement in 170 years, Dr. Shevek, was photographed yesterday at his arrival on the regular Moon freighter run at Peier Space Port. The distinguished scientist, winner of the Seo Oen Prize for service to all nations through science, has accepted a professorship at Ieu Eun University, an honor never before accorded to an off-worlder. Asked about his feelings on first viewing Urras, the tall, distinguished physicist replied, “It is a great honor to be invited to your beautiful planet. I hope that a new era of all-Cetian friendship is now beginning, when the Twin Planets will move forward together in brotherhood.”

  “But I never said anything!” Shevek protested to Pae.

  “Of course not. We didn’t let that lot get near you. That doesn’t cramp a birdseed journalist’s imagination! They’ll report you as saying what they want you to say, no matter what you do say, or don’t.”

  Shevek chewed his lip. “Well,” he said at last, “if I had said anything, it would have been like that. But what is, ‘all-Cetian’?”

  “The Terrans call us ‘Cetians.’ From their word for our sun, I believe. The popular press has picked it up lately, there’s a sort of fad for the word.”

  “Then ‘all-Cetian’ means Urras and Anarres together?”

  “I suppose so,” Pae said with marked lack of interest.

  Shevek went on reading the papers. He read that he was a towering giant of a man, that he was unshaven and possessed a ‘mane,’ whatever that was, of greying hair, that he was thirty-seven, forty-three-and fifty-six; that ho had written a great work of physics called (the spelling depended on the paper) Principals of Simultaneity or Principles of Simiultany, that he was a goodwill ambassador from the Odonian government, that he was a vegetarian, and that, like all Anarresti, he did not drink. At this he. broke down and laughed till his ribs hurt. “By damn, they do have imagination! Do they think we live on water vapor, like the rockmoss?”

  “They mean you don’t drink alcoholic liquors,” said Pae, also laughing. “The one thing everybody knows about Odonians, I suppose, is that you don’t drink alcohol. Is it true, by the way?”

  “Some people distill alcohol from fermented holum root, for drinking. They say it gives the unconscious free play, like brainwave training. Most people prefer that, it’s very easy and doesn’t cause a disease. Is that common here?”

  “Drinking is. I don’t know about this disease. What’s it called?”

  “Alcoholism, I think.”

  “Oh, I see… But what do working people do on Anarres for a bit of jollity, to escape the woes of the world together for a night?”

  Shevek looked blank. “Well, we… I don’t know. Perhaps our woes are inescapable?”

  “Quaint,” Pae said, and smiled disarmingly,

  Shevek pursued his reading. One of the journals was in a language he did not know, and one in a different alphabet altogether. The one was from Thu, Pae explained, and the other from Benbili, a nation in the western hemisphere. The paper from Thu was well printed and sober in format; Pae explained that it was a government publication. “Here in A-Io, you see, educated people get their news from the telefax, and radio and television, and the weekly reviews. These papers are read by the lower classes almost exclusively — written by semiliterates for semiliterates, as you can see. We have complete freedom of the press in A-Io, which inevitably means we get a lot of trash. The Thuvian paper is much better written but it reports only those facts which the Thuvian Central Presidium wants reported. Censorship is absolute, in Thu. The state is all, and all for the state. Hardly the place for an Odonian, eh, sir?”

  “And this paper?”

  “I really have no idea. Benbili’s a backward sort of country. Always having revolutions.”

  “A group of people in Benbili sent us a message on the Syndicate wave length, not long before I left Abbenay. They called themselves Odonians. Are there any such groups here, in A-Io?”

  “Not that I ever heard of, Dr. Shevek.”

  The wall. Shevek knew the wall, by now, when he came up against it. The wall was this young man’s charm, courtesy, indifference.

  “I think you are afraid of me, Pae,” he said, abruptly and genially.

  “Afraid of you, sir?”

  “Because I am, by my existence, disproof of the necessity of the state. But what is to fear? I will not hurt you, Saio Pae, you know. I am personally quite harmless… Listen, I am not a doctor. We do not use titles. I am called Shevek.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, sir. In our terms, you see, it seems disrespectful. It just doesn’t seem right.” He apologized winningly, expecting forgiveness.

  “Can you not recognize me as an equal?” Shevek asked, watching him without either forgiveness or anger.

  Pae was for once nonplused. “But really, sir, you are, you know, a very important man—”

  “There is no reason why you should change your habits for me,” Shevek said. “It does not matter. I thought you might be glad to be free of the unnecessary, that’s all.”

  Three days of confinement indoors left Shevek charged with surplus energy, and when he was released he wore out his escorts in his first eagerness to see everything at once. They took him over the University, which was a city in itself, sixteen thousand students and faculty. With its dormitories, refectories, theaters, meeting rooms, and so on, it was not very different from an Odonian community, except that it was very old, was exclusively male, was incredibly luxurious, and was not organized federatively but hierarchically, from the top down. All the same, Shevek thought, it felt like a community. He had to remind himself of the differences.

  He was driven out into the country in hired cars, splendid machines of bizarre elegance. There were not many of them on the roads: the hire was expensive, and few people owned a car privately, because they were heavily taxed. All such luxuries which if freely allowed to the public would tend to drain irreplaceable natural resources or to foul the environment with waste products Were strictly controlled by regulation and taxation. His guides dwelt on this with some pride. A-Io had led the world for centuries, they said, in ecological control and the husbanding of natural resources. The excesses of the Ninth Millennium were ancient history, their only lasting effect being the shortage of certain metals, which fortunately could be imported from the Moon.

  Traveling by car or train, he saw villages, farms, towns; fortresses from the feudal days; the ruined towers of Ae, ancient capital of an empire, forty-four hundred years old. He saw the farmlands, lakes, and hills of Avan Province, the heartland of A-Io, and on the northern skyline the peaks of the Meitei Range, white, gigantic. The beauty of the land and the well-being of its people remained a perpetual marvel to him. The guides were right: the Urrasti knew how to use their world. He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and, contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do
things. Just like Anarresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work — his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy — and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trams. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.

  He would have liked to talk to some of those sturdy, self-respecting-looking people he saw in the small towns, to ask them for instance if they considered themselves to be poor; for if these were the poor, he had to revise his understanding of the word. But there never seemed to be time, with all his guides wanted him to see.

  The other big cities of A-Io were too distant to be reached in a day’s tour, but he was taken to Nio Esseia, fifty kilometers from the University, frequently. A whole series of receptions in his honor was held there. He did not enjoy these much, they were not at all his idea of a party. Everyone was very polite and talked a great deal, but not about anything interesting; and they smiled so much they looked anxious. But their clothes were gorgeous, indeed they seemed to put all the lightheartedness their manner lacked into the clothes, and their food, and all the different things they drank, and the lavish furnishings and ornaments of the rooms in the palaces where the receptions were held.

  He was shown the sights of Nio Esseia: a city of five million — a quarter the population of his whole planet. They took him to Capitol Square and showed him the high bronze doors of the Directorate, the seat of the Government of A-Io; he was permitted to witness a debate in the Senate and a committee meeting of the Directors. They took him to the Zoo, the National Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry. They took him to a school, where charming children in blue and white uniforms sang the national anthem of A-Io for him. They took him through an electronic parts factory, a fully automated steel mill, and a nuclear fusion plant, so that he could see how efficiently a propertarian economy ran its manufacturing and power supply. They took him through a new housing development put up by the government so that he could see how the state looked after its people. They took him on a boat tour down the Sua Estuary, crowded with shipping from all over the planet, to the sea. They took him to the High Courts of Law, and he spent a whole day listening to civil and criminal cases being tried, an experience that left him bewildered and appalled; but they insisted that he should see what there was to be seen, and be taken wherever he wanted to go. When he asked, with some diffidence, if he might see the place where Odo was buried, they whisked him straight to the old cemetery in the Trans-Sua district. They even allowed newsmen from the disreputable papers to photograph him standing there in the shade of the great old willows, looking at the plain, well-kept tombstone:

  Laia Asieo Odo

  698–769

  To be whole is to be part;

  true voyage is return.

  He was taken to Rodarred, the seat of the Council of World Governments, to address the plenary council of that body. He had hoped to meet or at least see aliens there, the ambassadors from Terra or from Hain, but the schedule of events was too tightly planned to permit this. He had worked hard on his speech, a plea for free communication and mutual recognition between the New World and the Old. It was received with a ten-minute standing ovation. The respectable weeklies commented on it with approval, calling it a “disinterested moral gesture of human brotherhood by a great scientist,” but they did not quote from it, not did the popular papers. In fact, despite the ovation, Shevek had the curious feeling that nobody had heard it.

  He was given many privileges and entrees: to the Light Research Laboratories, the National Archives, the Nuclear Technology Laboratories, the National Library in Nio, the Accelerator in Meafed, the Space Research Foundation in Drio, Though everything he saw on Urras made him want to see more, still several weeks of the tourist life was enough: it was all so fascinating, startling, and marvelous that at last it became quite overwhelming. He wanted to settle down at the University and work and think it all over for a while. But for a last day’s sightseeing he asked to be shown around the Space Research Foundation. Pae looked very pleased when he made this request.

  Much that he had seen recently was awesome to him because it was so old, centuries old, even millennia. The Foundation, on the contrary, was new: built within the last ten years, in the lavish, elegant style of the times. The architecture was dramatic. Great masses of color were used. Heights and distances were exaggerated. The laboratories were spacious and airy, the attached factories and machine shops were housed behind splendid Neo-Saetan porticos of arches and columns. The hangars were huge multicolored domes, translucent and fantastic. The men who worked there were, in contrast, very quiet and solid. They took Shevek away from his usual escorts and showed him through the whole Foundation, including every stage of the experimental interstellar propulsion system they were working on, from the computers and the drawing boards to a half-finished ship, enormous and surreal in the orange, violet, and yellow light within the vast geodesic hangar.

  “You have so much,” Shevek said to the engineer who had taken charge of him, a man named Oegeo. “You have so much to work with, and you work with it so well. This is magnificent — the coordination, the cooperation, the greatness of the enterprise.”

  “Couldn’t swing anything on this scale where you come from, eh?” the engineer said, grinning.

  “Spaceships? Our space fleet is the ships the Settlers came in from Urras — built here on Urras — nearly two centuries ago. To build just a ship to carry grain across the sea, a barge, it takes a year’s planning, a big effort of our economy.”

  Oegeo nodded. “Well, we’ve got the goods, all right. But you know, you’re the man who can tell us when to scrap this whole job — throw it all away.”

  “Throw it away? What do you mean?”

  “Faster than light travel,” Oegeo said. “Transilience. The old physics says it isn’t possible. The Terrans say it isn’t possible. But the Hainish, who after all invented the drive we use now, say that it is possible, only they don’t know how to do it, because they’re just learning temporal physics from us. Evidently if it’s in anybody’s pocket, anybody in the known worlds, Dr. Shevek, it’s in yours.”

  Shevek looked at him with a distancing stare, his light eyes hard and clear. “I am a theoretician, Oegeo. Not a designer.”

  “If you provide the theory, the unification of Sequency and Simultaneity in a general field theory of time, then we’ll design the ships. And arrive on Terra, or Hain, or the next galaxy, in the instant we leave Urras! This tub,” and he looked down the hangar at the looming framework of the half-built ship swimming in shafts of violet and orange light, “will be as outdated as an oxcart”

  “You dream as you build, superbly,” Shevek said, still withdrawn and stern. There was much more that Oegeo and the others wanted to show him and discuss with him, but before long he said, with a simplicity that precluded any ironic intention, “I think you had better take me back to the keepers.”

  They did so; they bade farewell with mutual warmth. Shevek got into the car, and then got out again. “I was forgetting,” he said, “is there time to see one other thing in Drio?”

  “There isn’t anything else in Drio,” Pae said, polite as ever and trying hard to hide his annoyance over Shevek’s five-hour escapade among the engineers.

  “I should like to see the fort.”

  “What fort, sir?”

  “An old castle, from the times of the kings. It was used later as a prison.”

  “Anything like that would have been torn down. The Foundation rebuilt the town entirely.”

  When they were in the car and the chauffeur was closing the doors, Chifoilisk (another probable source of Pae’s ill humor) asked, “What did you want to see another castle for, Shevek? Should have thought you’d had enough
old ruins to hold you for a while.”

  “The Fort in Drio was where Odo spent nine years,” Shevek replied. His face was set, as it had been since he talked with Oegeo. “After the Insurrection of 747. She wrote the Prison Letters there, and the Analogy.”

  “Afraid it’s been pulled down,” Pae said sympathetically. “Drio was a moribund sort of town, and the Foundation just wiped out and started fresh.”

  Shevek nodded. But as the car followed a riverside highway toward the turnoff to Ieu Eun it passed a bluff on the curve of the river Seisse, and up on the bluff there was a building, heavy, ruinous, implacable, with broken towers of black stone. Nothing could have been less like the gorgeous lighthearted buildings of the Space Research Foundation, the showy domes, the bright factories, the tidy lawns and paths. Nothing could have made them look so much like bits of colored paper.

  “That, I believe, is the Fort,” Cbifoilisk remarked with his usual satisfaction at placing the tactless remark where it was least wanted.

  “Gone all to ruins,” Pae said. “Must be empty.”

  “Want to stop and have a look at it, Shevek?” Chifoilisk asked, ready to tap on the chauffeur’s screen.

  “No,” Shevek said.

  He had seen what he wanted to see. There was still a Fort in Drio. He did not need to enter it and seek down ruined halls for the cell in which Odo had spent nine years. He knew what a prison cell was like.

  He looked up, his face still set and cold, at the ponderous dark walls that now loomed almost above the car. I have been here for a long time, the fort said, and I am still here.

  When he was back in his rooms, after dinner in the Senior Faculty Refectory, he sat down alone by the unlighted fire. It was summer in A-Io, getting on towards the longest day of the year, and though it was past eight it was not yet dark. The sky outside the arched windows still showed a tinge of the daylight color of the sky, a pure tender blue. The air was mild, fragrant of cut grass and wet earth. There was a light in the chapel, across the grove, and a faint undertone of music on that lightly stirring air. Not the birds singing, but a human music. Shevek listened. Somebody was practicing the Numerical Harmonies on the chapel harmonium. They were as familiar to Shevek as to any Urrasti. Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.