The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “How do you know?”

  “I read an article in a magazine about Odonianism,” she said. “And we’ve been together all day. I don’t know you, but I know some things about you. I know that you’ve got a—a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that hairy head of yours. And she orders you around just like the old tyrant did her serfs. She says, ‘Do this!’ and you do, and ‘Don’t!’ and you don’t.”

  “That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.”

  “No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her. You would have! Your great-great-grandfather did; at least he ran off to the Moon to get away. But he took Queen Teaea with him, and you’ve still got her!”

  “Maybe. But she has learned, on Anarres, that if she tells me to hurt another person, I hurt myself.”

  “The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!”

  “Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all plain. Queen Teaea wears her own skin, there. We follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution.”

  “The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!”

  “Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”

  “I don’t care about hurting and not hurting. I don’t care about other people, and nobody else does, either. They pretend to. I don’t want to pretend. I want to be free!”

  “But Vea,” he began, with tenderness, for the plea for freedom moved him very much, but the doorbell rang. Vea stood up, smoothed her skirt, and advanced smiling to welcome her guests.

  During the next hour thirty or forty people came. At first Shevek felt cross, dissatisfied, and bored. It was just another of the parties where everybody stood about with glasses in their hands smiling and talking loudly. But presently it became more entertaining. Discussions and arguments got going, people sat down to talk, it began to be like a party at home. Delicate little pastries and bits of meat and fish were passed around, glasses were constantly refilled by the attentive waiter. Shevek accepted a drink. He had watched Urrasti guzzling alcohol for months now, and none of them had seemed to fall ill from it. The stuff tasted like medicine, but somebody explained that it was mostly carbonated water, which he liked. He was thirsty, so he drank it right off.

  A couple of men were determined to talk physics with him. One of them was well mannered, and Shevek managed to evade him for a while, for he found it hard to talk physics with nonphysicists. The other was overbearing, and no escape was possible from him; but irritation, Shevek found, made it much easier to talk. The man knew everything, apparently because he had a lot of money. “As I see it,” he informed Shevek, “your Simultaneity Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes.”

  “Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls ‘facts.’ It is different from business,” Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. “Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one.”

  “Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk,” Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.

  “Well, we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.”

  “But the fact is,” said Dearri, “that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what’s the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!” he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.

  “But we don’t experience the universe only successively,” Shevek said. “Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?” He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone “Mr.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says ‘Once upon a time’? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.”

  “Yes, the mystics,” the shyer man said, eagerly. “Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”

  “But we’re not babies,” Dean cut in, “we’re rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?”

  There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.

  “Maybe you could see it,” he said, “as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time—never of the circle of time.”

  “The circle?” asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. “Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn’t it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly—an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the timeteller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”

  “You can’t assert two contradictory statements about the same thing,” said Dearri, with the calmness of superior knowledge. “In other words, one of these ‘aspects’ is real, the other’s simply an illusion.”

  “Many physicists have said that,” Shevek assented.

  “But what do you say?” asked the one who wanted to know.


  “Well, I think it’s an easy way out of the difficulty. . . . Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. . . . If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.”

  “But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’ ” Dearri said, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it.”

  “You ask questions like a true profiteer,” Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dean with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.

  Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, “I don’t really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book—that everything really all exists now—then couldn’t we foretell the future? If it’s already there?”

  “No, no,” the shyer man said, not at all shyly. “It’s not there like a couch or a house. Time isn’t space. You can’t walk around in it!” Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dean and said, “It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?”

  “Ethics? Well, I don’t know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior.”

  “Why not?” said Dearri.

  Shevek ignored him. “But it’s true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.”

  “But look here,” said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, “you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that’s already written? All you can do is read it. There’s no choice, no freedom of action left.”

  “That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture—you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both.”

  “How—how do you reconcile them?” the shy man asked earnestly.

  Shevek nearly laughed in despair. “I don’t know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don’t want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. . . .”

  “All very well, but what industry needs is answers,” said Dean.

  Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.

  There was a heavy silence, into which Vea leapt, graceful and inconsequential, returning to her theme of foreseeing the future. Others were drawn in by this topic, and they all began telling their experiences with fortunetellers and clairvoyants.

  Shevek resolved to say nothing more, no matter what he was asked. He was thirstier than ever; he let the waiter refill his glass, and drank the pleasant, fizzy stuff. He looked around the room, trying to dissipate his anger and tension in watching other people. But they were also behaving very emotionally, for Ioti—shouting, laughing loudly, interrupting each other. One pair was indulging in sexual foreplay in a corner. Shevek looked away, disgusted. Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front of hungry people. He returned his attention to the group around him. They were off predictions, now, and onto politics. They were all disputing about the war, about what Thu would do next, what A-Io would do next, what the CWG would do next.

  “Why do you talk only in abstractions?” he inquired suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking, when he had resolved not to. “It is not names of countries, it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why does a man go kill strangers?”

  “But that’s what soldiers are for,” said a little fair woman with an opal in her navel. Several men began to explain the principle of national sovereignty to Shevek. Vea interrupted, “But let him talk. How would you solve the mess, Shevek?”

  “Solution’s in plain sight.”

  “Where?”

  “Anarres!”

  “But what you people do on the Moon doesn’t solve our problems here.”

  “Man’s problem is all the same. Survival. Species, group, individual.”

  “National self-defense—” somebody shouted.

  They argued, he argued. He knew what he wanted to say, and knew it must convince everyone because it was clear and true, but somehow he could not get it said properly. Everybody shouted. The little fair woman patted the broad arm of the chair she was sitting in, and he sat down on it. Her shaven, silken head came peering up under his arm. “Hello, Moon Man!” she said. Vea had joined another group for a time, but now was back near him. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked large and liquid. He thought he saw Pae across the room, but there were so many faces that they blurred together. Things happened in fits and starts, with blanks in between, as if he were being allowed to witness the operation of the Cyclic Cosmos of old Gvarab’s hypothesis from behind the scenes. “The principle of legal authority must be upheld, or we’ll degenerate into mere anarchy!” thundered a fat, frowning man. Shevek said, “Yes, yes, degenerate! We have enjoyed it for one hundred and fifty years now.” The little fair woman’s toes, in silver sandals, peeped out from under her skirt, which was sewn all over with hundreds and hundreds of tiny pearls. Vea said, “But tell us about Anarres—what’s it really like? Is it so wonderful there really?”

  He was sitting on the arm of the chair, and Vea was curled up on the hassock at his knees, erect and supple, her soft breasts staring at him with their blind eyes, her face smiling, complacent, flushed.

  Something dark turned over in Shevek’s mind, darkening everything. His mouth was dry. He finished the glassful the waiter had just poured him. “I don’t know,” he said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. “No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have noth
ing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!”

  They were all looking at him.

  He heard the loudness of his voice still ringing in the silence, felt his ears burning. The darkness, the blankness, turned over once more in his mind. “I feel dizzy,” he said, and stood up.

  Vea was at his arm. “Come along this way,” she said, laughing a little and breathless. He followed her as she threaded her way through the people. He now felt his face was very pale, and the dizziness did not pass; he hoped she was talking him to the washroom, or to a window where he could breathe fresh air. But the room they came into was large and dimly lit by reflection. A high, white bed bulked against the wall; a looking-glass covered half another wall. There was a close, sweet fragrance of draperies, linens, the perfume Vea used.

  “You are too much,” Vea said, bringing herself directly before him and looking up into his face, in the dimness, with that breathless laugh. “Really too much—you are impossible—magnificent!” She put her hands on his shoulders. “Oh, the looks on their faces! I’ve got to kiss you for that!” And she lifted herself on tiptoe, presenting him her mouth, and her white throat, and her naked breasts.

  He took hold of her and kissed her mouth, forcing her head backward, and then her throat and breasts. She yielded at first as if she had no bones, then she writhed a little, laughing and pushing weakly at him, and began to talk. “Oh, no, no, now behave,” she said. “Now, come on, we do have to go back to the party. No, Shevek, now calm down, this won’t do at all!” He paid no attention. He pulled her with him toward the bed, and she came, though she kept talking. He fumbled with one hand at the complicated clothes he was wearing and managed to get his trousers unfastened. Then there was Vea’s clothing, the low-slung but tight-fitted skirt band, which he could not loosen. “Now, stop,” she said. “No, now listen, Shevek, it won’t do, not now. I haven’t taken a contraceptive, if I get stuffed I’d be in a pretty mess, my husband’s coming back in two weeks! No, let me be,” but he could not let her be; his face was pressed against her soft, sweaty, scented flesh. “Listen, don’t mess up my clothes, people will notice, for heaven’s sake. Wait—just wait, we can arrange it, we can fix up a place to meet, I do have to be careful of my reputation, I can’t trust the maid, just wait, not now— Not now! Not now!” Frightened at last by his blind urgency, his force, she pushed at him as hard as she could, her hands against his chest. He took a step backward, confused by her sudden high tone of fear and her struggle; but he could not stop, her resistance excited him further. He gripped her to him, and his semen spurted out against the white silk of her dress.