The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

  He found that once they had his measure he could order anything else he might need by telephone, and he determined never to go back to the nightmare street.

  The suit of clothes and the shoes were delivered in a week. He put them on and stood before the full-length mirror in his bedroom. The fitted grey coat-gown, white shirt, black breeches, and stockings and polished shoes were becoming to his long, thin figure and narrow feet. He touched the surface of one shoe gingerly. It was made of the same stuff that covered the chairs in the other room, the material that felt like skin; he had asked someone recently what it was, and had been told that it was skin—animal hide, leather, they called it. He scowled at the touch, straightened up, and turned away from the mirror, but not before he had been forced to see that, thus clothed, his resemblance to his mother Rulag was stronger than ever.

  There was a long break between terms in midautumn. Most students went home for the holiday. Shevek went mountain-hiking in the Meiteis for a few days with a group of students and researchers from the Light Research Laboratory, then returned to claim some hours on the big computer, which was kept very busy during term. But, sick of work that got nowhere, he did not work hard. He slept more than usual, walked, read, and told himself that the trouble was he had simply been in too much of a hurry; you couldn’t get hold of a whole new world in a few months. The lawns and groves of the University were beautiful and disheveled, gold leaves flaring and blowing on the rainy wind under a soft grey sky. Shevek looked up the works of the great Ioti poets and read them; he understood them now when they spoke of flowers, and birds flying, and the colors of forests in autumn. That understanding came as a great pleasure to him. It was pleasant to return at dusk to his room, whose calm beauty of proportion never failed to satisfy him. He was used to that grace and comfort now, it had become familiar to him. So had the food, in all its variety and quantity, which at first had staggered him. The men who waited table knew his wants and served him as he would have served himself. He still did not eat meat; he had tried it, out of politeness and to prove to himself that he had no irrational prejudices, but his stomach had its reasons which reason does not know, and rebelled. After a couple of near disasters he had given up the attempt and remained a vegetarian, though a hearty one. He enjoyed dinner very much. He had gained three or four kilos since coming to Urras; he looked very well now, sunburnt from his mountain expedition, rested by the holiday. He was a striking figure as he got up from table in the great dining hall, with its beamed ceiling far overhead in shadow, and its paneled, portrait-hung walls, and its tables bright with candle flames and porcelain and silver. He greeted someone at another table and moved on, with an expression of peaceable detachment. From across the room Chifoilisk saw him, and followed him, catching up at the door.

  “Have you got a few minutes to spare, Shevek?”

  “Yes. My rooms?” He was accustomed to the constant use of the possessive pronoun by now, and spoke it without self-consciousness.

  Chifoilisk seemed to hesitate. “What about the library? It’s on your way, and I want to pick up a book there.”

  They set off across the quadrangle to the Library of the Noble Science—the old term for physics, which even on Anarres was preserved in certain usages—walking side by side in the pattering dark. Chifoilisk put up an umbrella, but Shevek walked in rain as the Ioti walked in sunshine, with enjoyment.

  “You’re getting soaked,” Chifoilisk grumbled. “Got a bad chest, haven’t you? Ought to take care.”

  “I’m very well,” Shevek said, and smiled as he strode through the fresh, fine rain. “That doctor from the Government, you know, he gave me some treatments, inhalations. It works; I don’t cough. I asked the doctor to describe the process and the drugs, on the radio to the Syndicate of Initiative in Abbenay. He did so. He was glad to do so. It is simple enough; it may relieve much suffering from the dust cough. Why, why not earlier? Why do we not work together, Chifoilisk?”

  The Thuvian gave a little sardonic grunt. They came into the reading room of the library. Aisles of old books, under delicate double arches of marble, stood in dim serenity; the lamps on the long reading tables were plain spheres of alabaster. No one else was there, but an attendant hastened in behind them to light the fire laid on the marble hearth and to make sure they wanted nothing before he withdrew again. Chifoilisk stood before the hearth, watching the kindling catch. His brows bristled over his small eyes; his coarse, swarthy, intellectual face looked older than usual.

  “I want to be disagreeable, Shevek,” he said in his hoarse voice. He added, “Nothing unusual in that, I suppose”—a humility Shevek had not looked for in him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I want to know whether you know what you’re doing here.”

  After a pause Shevek said, “I think I do.”

  “You are aware, then, that you’ve been bought?”

  “Bought?”

  “Call it co-opted, if you like. Listen. No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see. How can you understand your situation, here, in a capitalist economy, a plutocratic-oligarchic State? How can you see it, coming from your little commune of starving idealists up there in the sky?”

  “Chifoilisk, there aren’t many idealists left on Anarres, I assure you. The Settlers were idealists, yes, to leave this world for our deserts. But that was seven generations ago! Our society is practical. Maybe too practical, too much concerned with survival only. What is idealistic about social cooperation, mutual aid, when it is the only means of staying alive?”

  “I can’t argue the values of Odonianism with you. Not that I haven’t wanted to! I do know something about it, you know. We’re a lot closer to it, in my country, than these people are. We’re products of the same great revolutionary movement of the eighth century—we’re socialists, like you.”

  “But you are archists. The State of Thu is even more centralized than the State of A-Io. One power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures. And you have the money economy.”

  “A money economy based on the principle that each worker is paid as he deserves, for the value of his labor—not by capitalists whom he’s forced to serve, but by the state of which he’s a member!”

  “Does he establish the value of his own labor?”

  “Why don’t you come to Thu and see how real socialism functions?”

  “I know how real socialism functions,” Shevek said. “I could tell you, but would your government let me explain it, in Thu?”

  Chifoilisk kicked a log that had not yet caught. His expression as he stared down into the fire was bitter, the lines between the nose and the corners of his lips cut deep. He did not answer Shevek’s question. He said at last, “I’m not going to try to play games with you. It’s no good; anyhow I won’t do it. What I have to ask you is this: would you be willing to come to Thu?”

  “Not now, Chifoilisk.”

  “But what can you accomplish—here?”

  “My work. And also, here I am near the seat of the Council of World Governments—”

  “The CWG? They’ve been in A-Io’s pocket for thirty years. Don’t look to them to save you!”

  A pause. “Am I in danger, then?”

  “You didn’t realize even that?”

  Another pause.

  “Against whom do you warn me?” Shevek asked.

  “Against Pae, in the first place.”

  “Oh, yes, Pae
.” Shevek leaned his hands against the ornate, gold-inlaid mantelpiece. “Pae is a pretty good physicist And very obliging. But I don’t trust him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well . . . he evades.”

  “Yes. An acute psychological judgment. But Pae isn’t dangerous to you because he’s personally slippery, Shevek. He’s dangerous to you because he is a loyal, ambitious agent of the Ioti Government. He reports on you, and on me, regularly to the Department of National Security—the secret police. I don’t underestimate you, God knows, but don’t you see, your habit of approaching everybody as a person, an individual, won’t do here, it won’t work. You have got to understand the powers behind the individuals.”

  While Chifoilisk spoke, Shevek’s relaxed posture had stiffened; he now stood straight, like Chifoilisk, looking down at the fire. He said, “How do you know that about Pae?”

  “By the same means I know that your room contains a concealed microphone, just as mine does. Because it’s my business to know it.”

  “Are you also an agent of your government?”

  Chifoilisk’s face closed down; then he turned suddenly to Shevek, speaking softly and with hatred. “Yes,” he said, “of course I am. If I weren’t I wouldn’t be here. Everyone knows that. My government sends abroad only men whom it can trust. And they can trust me! Because I haven’t been bought, like all these damned rich Ioti professors. I believe in my government, in my country. I have faith in them.” He forced his words out in a kind of torment. “You’ve got to look around you, Shevek! You’re a child among thieves. They’re good to you, they give you a nice room, lectures, students, money, tours of castles, tours of model factories, visits to pretty villages. All the best. All lovely, fine! But why? Why do they bring you here from the Moon, praise you, print your books, keep you so safe and snug in the lecture rooms and laboratories and libraries? Do you think they do it out of scientific disinterest, out of brotherly love? This is a profit economy, Shevek!”

  “I know. I came to bargain with it.”

  “Bargain—what? For what?”

  Shevek’s face had taken on the cold, grave look it had worn when he left the Fort in Drio. “You know what I want, Chifoilisk. I want my people to come out of exile. I came here because I don’t think you want that, in Thu. You are afraid of us, there. You fear we might bring back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justice which you began and then stopped halfway. Here in A-Io they fear me less because they have forgotten the revolution. They don’t believe in it any more. They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity. I want free exchange between Urras and Anarres. I worked for it as I could on Anarres, now I work for it as I can on Urras. There, I acted. Here, I bargain.”

  “With what?”

  “Oh, you know, Chifoilisk,” Shevek said in a low voice, with diffidence. “You know what it is they want from me.”

  “Yes, I know, but I didn’t know you did,” the Thuvian said, also speaking low; his harsh voice became a harsher murmur, all breath and fricatives. “You’ve got it, then—the General Temporal Theory?”

  Shevek looked at him, perhaps with a touch of irony.

  Chifoilisk insisted: “Does it exist in writing?”

  Shevek continued to look at him for a minute, and then answered directly, “No.”

  “Good!”

  “Why?”

  “Because if it did, they’d have it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. Listen, wasn’t it Odo who said that where there’s property there’s theft?”

  “To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. The Social Organism.”

  “All right. Where there are papers in locked rooms, there are people with keys to the rooms!”

  Shevek winced. “Yes,” he said presently, “this is very disagreeable.”

  “To you. Not to me. I haven’t your individualistic moral scruples, you know. I knew you didn’t have the theory down in writing. If I’d thought you had, I would have made every effort to get it from you, by persuasion, by theft, by force if I thought we could abduct you without bringing on a war with A-Io. Anything, so that I could get it away from these fat Ioti capitalists and into the hands of the Central Presidium of my country. Because the highest cause I can ever serve is the strength and welfare of my country.”

  “You are lying,” Shevek said peaceably. “I think you are a patriot, yes. But you set above patriotism your respect for the truth, scientific truth, and perhaps also your loyalty to individual persons. You would not betray me.”

  “I would if I could,” Chifoilisk said savagely. He started to go on, stopped, and finally said with angry resignation, “Think as you please. I can’t open your eyes for you. But remember, we want you. If you finally see what’s going on here, then come to Thu. You picked the wrong people to try to make brothers of! And if—I have no business saying this. But it doesn’t matter. If you won’t come to us in Thu, at least don’t give your Theory to the Ioti. Don’t give the usurers anything! Get out. Go home. Give your own people what you have to give!”

  “They don’t want it,” Shevek said, expressionless. “Do you think I did not try?”

  Four or five days later Shevek, asking after Chifoilisk, was informed that he had gone back to Thu.

  “To stay? He didn’t tell me he was leaving.”

  “A Thuvian never knows when he’s going to get an order from his Presidium,” Pae said, for of course it was Pae who told Shevek. “He just knows that when it comes he’d better hop. And not stop for any leavetakings on the way. Poor old Chif! I wonder what he did wrong?”

  Shevek went once or twice a week to see Atro in the pleasant little house on the edge of the campus where he lived with a couple of servants, as old as himself, to look after him. At nearly eighty he was, as he put it himself, a monument to a first-class physicist. Though he had not seen his life work go unrecognized as Gvarab had, through sheer age he had attained something of her disinterestedness. His interest in Shevek, at least, appeared to be entirely personal—a comradeship. He had been the first Sequency physicist to be converted to Shevek’s approach to the understanding of time. He had fought, with Shevek’s weapons, for Shevek’s theories, against the whole establishment of scientific respectability, and the battle had gone on for several years before the publication of the uncut Principles of Simultaneity and the promptly ensuing victory of the Simultaneists. That battle had been the high point of Atro’s life. He would not have fought for less than the truth, but it was the fighting he had loved, better than the truth.

  Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The family still owned an estate of seven thousand acres and fourteen villages in Sie Province, the most rural region of A-Io. He had provincial turns of speech, archaisms to which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at all, and he referred to the entire government of his country as “demagogues and crawling politicians.” His respect was not to be bought. Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool with what he called “the right name.” In some ways he was totally incomprehensible to Shevek—an enigma: the aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to anyone else he had met on Urras.

  Once, as they sat together on the glassed-in porch where he raised all kinds of rare and out-of-season flowers, he chanced to used the phrase, “we Cetians.” Shevek caught him up on it: “ ‘Cetians’—isn’t that a birdseed word?” “Birdseed” was slang for the popular press, the newspapers, broadcasts, and fiction manufactured for the urban working people.

  “Birdseed!” Atro repeated. “My dear fellow, where the devil do you pick up these vulgarisms? I mean by ‘Cetians’ precisely what the daily-paper writers and their lip-moving readers understand by the term. Urras and Anarres!”

  “I was surprised that
you used a foreign word—a non-Cetian word, in fact.”

  “Definition by exclusion,” the old man parried gleefully. “A hundred years ago we didn’t need the word. ‘Mankind’ would do. But sixty-some years ago that changed. I was seventeen, it was a nice sunny day in early summer, I remember it quite vividly. I was exercising my horse, and my elder sister called out the window, ‘They’re talking to somebody from Outer Space on the radio!’ My poor dear mother thought we were all doomed; foreign devils, you know. But it was only the Hainish, quacking about peace and brotherhood. Well, nowadays ‘mankind’ is a bit overinclusive. What defines brotherhood but nonbrotherhood? Definition by exclusion, my dear! You and I are kinsmen. Your people were probably herding goats in the mountains while mine were oppressing serfs in Sie, a few centuries ago; but we’re members of the same family. To know it, one only has to meet—to hear of—an alien. A being from another solar system. A man, so-called, who has nothing in common with us except the practical arrangement of two legs, two arms, and a head with some kind of brain in it!”

  “But haven’t the Hainish proved that we are—”

  “All of alien origin, offspring of Hainish interstellar colonists, half a million years ago, or a million, or two or three million, yes, I know. Proved! By the Primal Number, Shevek, you sound like a first-year seminarian! How can you speak seriously of historical proof, over such a span of time? Those Hainish toss millennia about like handballs, but it’s all juggling. Proof, indeed! The religion of my fathers informs me, with equal authority, that I’m a descendant of Pinra Od, whom God exiled from the Garden because he had the audacity to count his fingers and toes, add them up to twenty, and thus let time loose upon the universe. I prefer that story to the aliens’, if I must choose!”