The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The blank walls were full of surprises, all ready to reveal themselves at a touch on the panel: washstand, shitstool, mirror, desk, chair, closet, shelves. There were several completely mysterious electrical devices connected with the washstand, and the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off—a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water. Assuming the latter, he washed all over, and finding no towel, dried himself with one of the mysterious devices, which emitted a pleasant tickling blast of warm air. Not finding his own clothes, he put back on those he had found himself wearing when he woke up: loose tied trousers and a shapeless tunic, both bright yellow with small blue spots. He looked at himself in the mirror. He thought the effect unfortunate. Was this how they dressed on Urras? He searched in vain for a comb, made do by braiding back his hair, and so groomed made to leave the room.

  He could not. The door was locked.

  Shevek’s first incredulity turned to rage, a kind of rage, a blind will to violence, which he had never felt before in his life. He wrenched at the immovable door handle, slammed his hands against the slick metal of the door, then turned and jabbed the call button, which the doctor had told him to use at need. Nothing happened. There were a lot of other little numbered buttons of different colors on the intercom panel; he hit his hand across the whole lot of them. The wall speaker began to babble, “Who the hell yes coming right away out clear what from twenty-two—”

  Shevek drowned them all out: “Unlock the door!”

  The door slid open, the doctor looked in. At the sight of his bald, anxious, yellowish face Shevek’s wrath cooled and retreated into an inward darkness. He said, “The door was locked.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Shevek—a precaution—contagion—keeping the others out—”

  “To lock out, to lock in, the same act,” Shevek said, looking down at the doctor with light, remote eyes.

  “Safety—”

  “Safety? Must I be kept in a box?”

  “The officers’ lounge,” the doctor offered hurriedly, appeasingly. “Are you hungry, sir? Perhaps you’d like to get dressed and we’ll go to the lounge.”

  Shevek looked at the doctor’s clothing: tight blue trousers tucked into boots that looked as smooth and fine as doth themselves; a violet tunic opened down the front and reclosed with silver frogs; and under that, showing only at neck and wrists, a knit shirt of dazzling white.

  “I am not dressed?” Shevek inquired at last.

  “Oh, pajamas will do, by all means. No formalities on a freighter!”

  “Pajamas?”

  “What you’re wearing. Sleeping clothes.”

  “Clothes to wear while sleeping?”

  “Yes.”

  Shevek blinked. He made no comment. He asked, “Where are the clothes I wore?”

  “Your clothes? I had them cleaned—sterilized. I hope you don’t mind, sir—” He investigated a wall panel Shevek had not discovered and brought out a packet wrapped in pale-green paper. He unwrapped Shevek’s old suit, which looked very clean and somewhat reduced in size, wadded up the green paper, activated another panel, tossed the paper into the bin that opened, and smiled uncertainly. “There you are, Dr. Shevek.”

  “What happens to the paper?”

  “The paper?”

  “The green paper.”

  “Oh, I put it in the trash.”

  “Trash?”

  “Disposal. It gets burned up.”

  “You burn paper?”

  “Perhaps it just gets dropped out into space, I don’t know. I’m no space medic, Dr. Shevek. I was given the honor of attending you because of my experience with other visitors from offworld, the ambassadors from Terra and from Hain. I run the decontamination and habituation procedure for all aliens arriving in A-Io. Not that you’re exactly an alien in the same sense, of course.” He looked timidly at Shevek, who could not follow all he said, but did discern the anxious, diffident, well-meaning nature beneath the words.

  “No,” Shevek assured him, “maybe I have the same grandmother as you, two hundred years ago, on Urras.” He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow “sleeping clothes” into the “trash” bin. Shevek paused, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty.

  “The clothes are burned?”

  “Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue—wear ’em and throw ’em away, it costs less than cleaning.”

  “It costs less,” Shevek repeated meditatively. He said the words the way a paleontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that dates a whole stratum.

  “I’m afraid your luggage must have got lost in that final rush for the ship. I hope there was nothing important in it.”

  “I brought nothing,” Shevek said. Though his suit had been bleached almost to white and had shrunk a bit, it still fit, and the harsh familiar touch of holum-fiber cloth was pleasant. He felt like himself again. He sat down on the bed facing the doctor and said, “You see, I know you don’t take things, as we do. In your world, in Urras, one must buy things. I come to your world, I have no money, I cannot buy, therefore I should bring. But how much can I bring? Clothing, yes, I might bring two suits. But food? How can I bring food enough? I cannot bring, I cannot buy. If I am to be kept alive, you must give it to me. I am an Anarresti, I make the Urrasti behave like Anarressti: to give, not to sell. If you like. Of course, it is not necessary to keep me alive! I am the Beggarman, you see.”

  “Oh, not at all, sir, no, no. You’re a very honored guest. Please don’t judge us by the crew of this ship, they’re very ignorant, limited men—you have no idea of the welcome you’ll get on Urras. After all you’re a world-famous—a galactically famous scientist! And our first visitor from Anarres! I assure you, things will be very different when we come into Peier Field.”

  “I do not doubt they will be different,” Shevek said.

  • • •

  The Moon Run normally took four and a half days each way, but this time five days of habituation time for the passenger were added to the return trip. Shevek and Dr. Kimoe spent them in vaccinations and conversations. The captain of the Mindful spent them in maintaining orbit around Urras, and swearing. When he had to speak to Shevek, he did so with uneasy disrespect. The doctor, who was ready to explain everything, had his analysis ready: “He’s used to looking on all foreigners as inferior, as less than fully human.”

  “The creation of pseudo-species, Odo called it. Yes. I thought that perhaps on Urras people no longer thought that way, since you have there so many languages and nations, and even visitors from the other solar systems.”

  “Very few of those, since interstellar travel is so costly and so slow. Perhaps it won’t always be so,” Dr. Kimoe added, evidently with an intent to flatter Shevek or to draw him out, which Shevek ignored.

  “The Second Officer,” he said, “seems to be afraid of me.”

  “Oh, with him it’s religious bigotry. He’s a strict-interpretation Epiphanist. Recites the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind.”

  “So he sees me—how?”

  “As a dangerous atheist.”

  “An atheist! Why?”

  “Why, because you’re an Odonian from Anarres—there’s no religion on Anarres.”

  “No religion? Are we stones, on Anarres?”

  “I mean established religion—churches, creeds—” Kimoe flustered easily. He had the physician’s brisk self-assurance, but Shevek continually upset it. All his explanations ended up, after two or three of Shevek’s questions, in floundering. Each took for granted certain relationships that the other could not even see. For instance, this curious matter of superiority, of relative height, was important to the Urrasti; they often used the word “higher” as a synonym for “better” in their writings, where an Anarresti would use “more central.” But what did being higher have to do with being fore
ign? It was one puzzle among hundreds.

  “I see,” he said now, another puzzle coming clear. “You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws. You know, I had not ever understood that, in all my reading of Urrasti books.”

  “Well, these days any enlightened person would admit—”

  “The vocabulary makes it difficult,” Shevek said, pursuing his discovery. “In Pravic the word religion is seldom. No, what do you say—rare. Not often used. Of course, it is one of the Categories: the Fourth Mode. Few people learn to practice all the Modes. But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind, you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? That we could do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship man has with the cosmos?”

  “Oh, no, not at all—”

  “That would be to make a pseudo-species of us indeed!”

  “Educated men certainly would understand that, these officers are ignorant.”

  “But is it only bigots, then, who are allowed to go out into the cosmos?”

  All their conversations were like this, exhausting to the doctor and unsatisfying to Shevek, yet intensely interesting to both. They were Shevek’s only means of exploring the new world that awaited him. The ship itself, and Kimoe’s mind, were his microcosm. There were no books aboard the Mindful, the officers avoided Shevek, and the crewmen were kept strictly out of his way. As for the doctor’s mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning, it was a jumble of intellectual artifacts even more confusing than all the gadgets, appliances, and conveniences that filled the ship. These latter Shevek found entertaining; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but the furniture of Kimoe’s intellect he did not find so comfortable. Kimoe’s ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them. Only once did Shevek see them breached, in all their days of conversation between the worlds.

  He had asked why there were no women on the ship, and Kimoe had replied that running a space freighter was not women’s work. History courses and his knowledge of Odo’s writings gave Shevek a context in which to understand this tautological answer, and he said no more. But the doctor asked a question in return, a question about Anarres. “Is it true, Dr. Shevek, that women in your society are treated exactly like men?”

  “That would be a waste of good equipment,” said Shevek with a laugh, and then a second laugh as the full ridiculousness of the idea grew upon him.

  The doctor hesitated, evidently picking his way around one of the obstacles in his mind, then looked flustered, and said, “Oh, no, I didn’t mean sexually—obviously you—they. . . I meant in the matter of their social status.”

  “Status is the same as class?”

  Kimoe tried to explain status, failed, and went back to the first topic. “Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?”

  “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?”

  “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality.

  “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones— but the women work longer. . . . Often I have wished I was as tough as a woman.”

  Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. “But the loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine self-respect— You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?”

  Shevek sat in the cushioned, comfortable chair and looked around the officers’ lounge. On the viewscreen the brilliant curve of Urras hung still against black space, like a blue-green opal. That lovely sight, and the lounge, had become familiar to Shevek these last days, but now the bright colors, the curvilinear chairs, the hidden lighting, the game tables and television screens and soft carpeting, all of it seemed as alien as it had the first time he saw it.

  “I don’t think I pretend very much, Kimoe,” he said.

  “Of course, I have known highly intelligent women, women who could think just like a man,” the doctor said, hurriedly, aware that he had been almost shouting—that he had, Shevek thought, been pounding his hands against the locked door and shouting. . . .

  Shevek turned the conversation, but he went on thinking about it. This matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect their sex lives? He knew from Odo’s writings that two hundred years ago the main Urrasti sexual institutions had been “marriage,” a partnership authorized and enforced by legal and economic sanctions, and “prostitution,” which seemed merely to be a wider term, copulation in the economic mode. Odo had condemned them both, and yet Odo had been “married.” And anyhow the institutions might have changed greatly in two hundred years. If he was going to live on Urras and with the Urrasti, he had better find out.

  It was strange that even sex, the source of so much solace, delight, and joy for so many years, could overnight become an unknown territory where he must tread carefully and know his ignorance; yet it was so. He was warned not only by Kimoe’s queer burst of scorn and anger, but by a previously vague impression which that episode brought into focus. When first aboard the ship, in those long hours of fever and despair, he had been distracted, sometimes pleased and sometimes irritated, by a grossly simple sensation: the softness of the bed. Though only a bunk, its mattress gave under his weight with caressing suppleness. It yielded to him, yielded so insistently that he was, still, always conscious of it while falling asleep. Both the pleasure and the irritation it produced in him were decidedly erotic. There was also the hot-air-nozzle-towel device: the same kind of effect. A tickling. And the design of the furniture in the officers’ lounge, the smooth plastic curves into which stubborn wood and steel had been forced, the smoothness and delicacy of surfaces and textures: were these not also faintly, pervasively erotic? He knew himself well enough to be sure that a few days without Takver, even under great stress, should not get him so worked up that he felt a woman in every table top. Not unless the woman was really there.

  Were Urrasti cabinetmakers all celibateHe gave it up; he would find out, soon enough, on Urras.

  Just before they strapped in for descent the doctor came to his cabin to check the progress of the various immunizations, the last of which, a plague inoculation, had made Shevek sick and groggy. Kimoe gave him a new pill. “That’ll pep you up for the landing,” he said. Stoic, Shevek swallowed the thing. The doctor fussed with his medical kit and suddenly began to speak very fast “Dr. Shevek, I don’t expect I’ll be allowed to attend you again, though perhaps, but if not I wanted to tell you that it, that I, that it has been a great privilege to me. Not because—but because I have come to respect—to appreciate-that simply as a human being, your kindness, real kindness—”

  No more adequate response occurring to Shevek through his headache, he reached out and took Kimoe’s hand, saying, “Then let’s meet again, brother!” Kimoe gave his hand a nervous shake, Urrasti style, and hurried out. After he was gone Shevek realized he had spoken to him in Pravic, called him ammar, brother, in a language Kimoe did not understand.

  The wall speaker was blatting orders. Trapped into the bunk, Shevek listened, feeling hazy and detached. The sensations of entry thickened the haze; he was conscious of little but a profound hope he would not have to vomit. He did
not know they had landed till Kimoe came hurrying in again and rushed him out to the officers’ lounge. The viewscreen where Urras had hung cloud-coiled and luminous so long was blank. The room was full of people. Where had they all come from? He was surprised and pleased by his ability to stand up, walk, and shake hands. He concentrated on that much, and let meaning pass him by. Voices, smiles, hands, words, names. His name again and again: Dr. Shevek, Dr. Shevek. . . . Now he and all the strangers around him were going down a covered ramp, all the voices very loud, words echoing off the walls. The clatter of voices thinned. A strange air touched his face.

  He looked up, and as he stepped off the ramp onto the level ground he stumbled and nearly fell. He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth.

  A broad, grey evening was around him. Blue lights, mist-blurred, burned far away across a foggy field. The air on his face and hands, in his nostrils and throat and lungs, was cool, damp, many-scented, mild. It was not strange. It was the air of the world from which his race had come, it was the air of home.

  Someone had taken his arm when he stumbled. Lights flashed on him. Photographers were filming the scene for the news: The First Man from the Moon: a tall, frail figure in a crowd of dignitaries and professors and security agents, the fine shaggy head held very erect (so that the photographers could catch every feature) as if he were trying to look above the floodlights into the sky, the broad sky of fog that hid the stars, the Moon, all other worlds. Journalists tried to crowd through the rings of policemen: “Will you give us a statement, Dr. Shevek, in this historic moment?” They were forced back again at once. The men around him urged him forward. He was borne off to the waiting limousine, eminently photographic to the last because of his height, his long hair, and the strange look of grief and recognition on his face.

  The towers of the city went up into mist, great ladders of blurred light. Trains passed overhead, bright shrieking streaks. Massive walls of stone and glass fronted the streets above the race of cars and trolleys. Stone, steel, glass, electric light. No faces.