The Dispossessed hc-1

by Ursula Le Guin

  Most Anarresti worked five to seven hours a day, with two to four days off each decad. Details of regularity, punctuality, which days off, and so on were worked out between the individual and his work crew or gang or syndicate or coordinating federative, on whichever level cooperation and efficiency could best be achieved. Takver ran her own research projects, but the work and the fish had their own imperative demands; she spent from two to ten hours a day at the laboratory, no days off. Shevek had two teaching posts now, an advanced math course in a learning center and another at the Institute. Both courses were in the morning, and he got back to the room by noon. Usually Takver was not back yet. The building was quite silent. The sunlight had not yet worked round to the double window that looked south and west over the city and the plains; the room was cool and shadowed. The delicate concentric mobiles hanging at different levels overhead moved with the introverted precision, silence, mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the reasoning mind. Shevek would sit down at the table under the windows and begin to work, reading or making notes or calculating. Gradually the sunlight entered, shifted across the papers on the table, across his hands on the papers, and filled the room with radiance. And he worked. The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity.

  Takver, like any man or woman who undertakes companionship of the creator spirit, did not always have an easy time of it. Although her existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could be a distraction. She didn’t like to get home too early, because he often quit working when she got home, and she felt this to be wrong. Later on, when they were middle-aged and stodgy, he could ignore her, but at twenty-four he couldn’t. Therefore she arranged her tasks in the laboratory so that she did not get home till midafternoon. This was not a perfect arrangement either, for he needed looking after. On days when he had no classes, when she came in he might have been sitting at the table for six or eight hours straight. When he got up he would lurch with fatigue, his hands would shake, and he was scarcely coherent. The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model. For Takver there were no replacements, and when she saw how hard Shevek was used she protested. She would have cried out as Odo’s husband, Asieo, did once, “For God’s sake, girl, can’t you serve Truth a little at a time?” — except that she was the girl, and was unacquainted with God.

  They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute commons. After dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the Institute, Takver’s colleagues and friends. But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact. It did not seem to offend the others. Rather the reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents — the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters’ Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorniba Sea. They gave the present to Takver, saying, “Here, Shev might like this for a paperweight,” or to Shevek, saying, “Here, Tak might like this color.” In giving they sought to share in what Shevek and Takver shared, and to celebrate, and to praise.

  It was a long summer, warm and bright, the summer of the 160th year of the Settlement of Anarres. Plentiful rains in the spring had greened the Plains of Abbenay and laid the dust so that the air was unusually clear; the sun was warm by day and at night the stars shone thick. When the Moon was in the sky one could make out the coastlines of its continents clearly, under the dazzling white whorls of its clouds.

  “Why does it look so beautiful?” Takver said, lying beside Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out. Over them the Occupations of Uninhabited Space hung, dim; out the window the full Moon hung, brilliant. “When we know that it’s a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people — when we know they’re all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people here… when we know all that, why does it still look so happy — as if life there must be so happy? I can’t look at that radiance and imagine a horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied mind like Sabul living on it; I just can’t.”

  Their naked arms and breasts were moonlit. The fine, faint down on Takver’s face made a blurring aureole over her features; her hair and the shadows were black. Shevek touched her silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light.

  “If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

  “That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon — I don’t want it! But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.”

  “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”

  “Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!”

  “Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light—”

  “Don’t be propertarian,” Takver muttered.

  “Dear heart, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying. You are. Those are your tears.”

  “I’m cold. The moonlight’s cold.”

  “Lie down.”

  A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms.

  “I am afraid, Takver,” he whispered.

  “Brother, dear soul, hush.”

  They slept in each other’s arms that night, many nights.

  Chapter 7

  Shevek found a letter in a pocket of the new, fleece-lined coat he had ordered for winter from the shop in the nightmare street. He had no idea how the letter had got there. It certainly had not been in the mail delivered to him thrice daily, which consisted entirely of manuscripts and reprints from physicists all over Urras, invitations to receptions, and artless messages from schoolchildren. This was a flimsy piece of paper stuck down to itself without envelope; it bore no stamp or frank from any of the three competing mail companies.

  He opened it, vaguely apprehensive, and read: “If you are an Anarchist why do you work with the power system betraying your World and the Odonian Hope or are you here to bring us that Hope. Suffering from injustice and repression we look to the Sister World the light of freedom in the dark night. Join with us your brothers!” There was no signature, no address.

  It shook Shevek both morally and intellectually, jolted him, not with surprise but with a kind of panic. He knew they were here:
but where? He had not met one, not seen one, he had not met a poor man yet. He had let a wall be built around him and had never noticed. He had accepted shelter, like a propertarian. He had been co-opted — just as Chifoilisk had said.

  But he did not know how to break down the wall. And if he did, where could he go? The panic closed in on him tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich.

  “I’d like to talk with you, Efor.”

  “Yes sir. Excuse me, sir, I make room set this down here.”

  The servant handled the heavy tray deftly, flicked off dish covers, poured out the bitter chocolate so it rose frothing to the cup’s rim without spill or splatter. He clearly enjoyed the breakfast ritual and his adeptness at it, and as clearly wanted no unusual interruptions in it. He often spoke quite clear Iotic, but now as soon as Shevek said he wanted a talk Efor had slid into the staccato of the city dialect. Shevek had learned to follow it a little; the shift of sound values was consistent once you caught it, but the apocopations left him groping. Half the words were left out. It was like a code, he thought: as if the “Nioti,” as they called themselves, did not want to be understood by outsiders.

  The manservant stood awaiting Shevek’s pleasure. He knew — he had learned Shevek’s idiosyncrasies within the first week — that Shevek did not want him to hold a chair, or to wait on him while he ate. His erect attentive pose was enough to wither any hope of informality.

  “Will you sit down, Efor?”

  “If you please sir,” the man replied. He moved a chair half an inch, but did not sit down in it.

  “This is what I want to talk about. You know I don’t like to give you orders.”

  “Try manage things like you want sir without troubling for orders.”

  “You do — I don’t mean that. You know, in my country nobody gives any orders.”

  “So I hear sir.”

  “Well, I want to know you as my equal, my brother. You are the only one I know here who is not rich — not one of the owners. I want very much to talk with you, I want to know about your life—”

  He stopped in despair, seeing the contempt on Efor’s lined face. He had made all the mistakes possible. Efor took him for a patronizing, prying fool.

  He dropped his hands to the table in a gesture of hopelessness and said, “Oh, hell, I am sorry, Efor!” I cannot say what I mean. Please ignore it”

  “Just as you say sir.” Efor withdrew.

  That was the end of that. The “unpropertied classes” remained as remote from him as when he had read about them in history at Northsetting Regional Institute.

  Meanwhile, he had promised to spend a week with the Oiies, between winter and spring terms.

  Oiie had invited him to dinner several times since his first visit, always rather stiffly, as if he were carrying out a duty of hospitality, or perhaps a governmental order. In his own house, however, though never wholly off his guard with Shevek, he was genuinely friendly. By the second visit his two sons had decided that Shevek was an old friend, and their confidence in Shevek’s response obviously puzzled their father. It made him uneasy; he could not really approve of it; but he could not say it was unjustified. Shevek behaved to them like an old friend, like an elder brother. They admired him, and the younger, Ini, came to love him passionately, Shevek was kind, serious honest, and told very good stories about the Moon; but there was more to it than that. He represented something to the child that Ini could not describe. Even much later in his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word exile.

  The only heavy snow of the winter fell that week. Shevek had never seen a snowfall of more than an inch or so. The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhilarated him. He reveled in its excess. It was too white, too cold, silent, and indifferent to be called excremental by the sincerest Odonian; to see it as other than an innocent magnificence would be pettiness of soul. As soon as the sky cleared he went out in it with the boys, who appreciated it just as he did. They ran around in the big back garden of the Oiie house, threw snowballs, built tunnels, castles, and fortresses of snow.

  Sewa Oiie stood with her sister-in-law Vea at the window, watching the children, the man, and the little otter playing. The otter had made himself a snowslide down one wall of the snow castle and was excitedly tobogganing down it on his belly over and over again. The boys’ cheeks were fiery. The man, his long, rough, dun-grey hair tied back with a piece of string and his ears red with cold, executed tunneling operations with energy. “Not here! — Dig there! — Where’s the shovel? — Ice in my pocket!” — the boys’ high voices rang out continually.

  “There is our alien,” Sewa said, smiling.

  “The greatest physicist alive,” said the sister-in-law. “How funny!”

  When he came in, puffing and stamping off snow and exhaling that fresh, cold vigor and well-being which only people just in out of the snow possess, he was introduced to the sister-in-law. He put out his big, hard, cold hand and looked down at Vea with friendly eyes. “You are Demaere’s sister?” he said. “Yes, you look like him.” And this remark, which from anyone else would have struck Vea as insipid, pleased her immensely. “He is a man,” she kept thinking that afternoon, “a real man. What is it about him?”

  Vea Doem Oiie was her name, in the Ioti mode; her husband Doem was the head of a large industrial combine and traveled a good deal, spending half of each year abroad as a business representative of the government. This was explained to Shevek, while he watched her. In her, Demaere Oiie’s slightness, pale coloring, and oval black eyes had been transmuted into beauty. Her breasts, shoulders, and arms were round, soft, and very white. Shevek sat beside her at the dinner table. He kept looking at her bare breasts, pushed upward by the stiff bodice. The notion of going thus half naked in freezing weather was extravagant, as extravagant as the snow, and the small breasts had also an innocent whiteness, like the snow. The curve of her neck went up smoothly into the curve of the proud, shaven, delicate head.

  She really is quite attractive, Shevek informed himself. She’s like the beds here: soft. Affected, though. Why does she mince out her words like that?

  He clung to her rather thin voice and mincing manner as to a raft on deep water, and never knew it, never knew he was drowning. She was going back to Nio Esseia on the train after dinner, she had merely come out for the day and he would never see her again.

  Oiie had a cold, Sewa was busy with the children. “Shevek, do you think you might walk Vea to the station?”

  “Good Lord, Demaere! Don’t make the poor man protect me! You don’t think there’ll be wolves, do you? Will savage Mingrads come sweeping into town and abduct me to their harems? Will I be found on the stationmaster’s doorstep tomorrow morning, a tear frozen in my eye and my tiny, rigid hands clasping a bunch of withered posies? Oh, I do rather like that!” Over Vea’s rattling, tinkling talk her laugh broke like a wave, a dark, smooth, powerful wave that washed out everything and left the sand empty. She did not laugh with herself but at herself, the body’s dark laughter, wiping out words.

  Shevek put on his coat in the hall and was waiting for her at the door.

  They walked in silence for a half a block. Snow crunched and squeaked under their feet.

  “You’re really much too polite for…”

  “For what?”

  “For an anarchist,” she said, in her thin and affectedly drawling voice (it was the same intonation Pae used, and Oiie when he was at the University). “I’m disappointed. I thought you’d be dangerous and uncouth.”

  “I am.”

  She glanced up at him sidelong. She wore a scarlet shawl tied over her head; her eyes looked black and bright against the vivid color and the whiteness of snow all around.

  “But here you are tamely walking me to the station, Dr. Shevek.”

  “Shevek,” he said mildly. “No’doctor.�
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  “Is that your whole name — first and last?”

  He nodded, smiling. He felt well and vigorous, pleased by the bright air, the warmth of the well-made coat he wore, the prettiness of the woman beside him. No worries or heavy thoughts had hold on him today.

  “Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “How dreary, to be named by a machine!”

  “Why dreary?”

  “It’s so mechanical, so impersonal.”

  “But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”

  “No one else? You’re the only Shevek?”

  “While I live. There were others, before me.”

  “Relatives, you mean?”

  “We don’t count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don’t know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement. She designed a kind of bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a ‘shevek.’ ” He smiled again, more broadly. “There is a good immortality!”

  Vea shook her head. “Good Lord!” she said. “How do you tell men from women?”

  “Well, we have discovered methods…”

  After a moment her soft, heavy laugh broke out. She wiped her eyes, which watered in the cold air. “Yes, perhaps you are uncouth!… Did they all take made-up names, then, and learn a made-up language — everything new?”

  “The Settlers of Anarres? Yes. They were romantic people, I suppose.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “No. We are very pragmatic.”

  “You can be both,” she said.

  He had not expected any subtlety of mind from her. “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

  “What’s more romantic than your coming here, all alone, without a coin in your pocket, to plead for your people?”

  “And to be spoiled with luxuries while I am here.”