The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Isn’t there a roommate?”

  “Sherut, she’s very nice, but she works night shift at the hospital. It was time Sadik went, it’s good for her living with the other children. She was getting shy. She was very good about going there, very stoical. Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don’t whine like so many adults.”

  They walked along side by side. The autumn stars had come out, incredible in number and brilliance, twinkling and almost blinking because of the dust stirred up by the earthquake and the wind, so that the whole sky seemed to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of sunlight on a black sea. Under that uneasy splendor the hills were dark and solid, the roofs, hard-edged, the light of the street lamps mild.

  “Four years ago,” Shevek said. “It was four years ago that I came back to Abbenay, from that place in Southrising—what was it called?—Red Springs. It was a night like this, windy, the stars. I ran, I ran all the way from Plains Street to the domicile. And you weren’t there, you’d gone. Four years!”

  “The moment I left Abbenay I knew I’d been a fool to go. Famine or no famine. I should have refused the posting.”

  “It wouldn’t have made much difference. Sabul was waiting to tell me I was through at the Institute.”

  “If I’d been there, you wouldn’t have gone down to the Dust.”

  “Maybe not, but we mightn’t have kept postings together. For a while it seemed as if nothing could hold together, didn’t it? The towns in Southwest—there weren’t any children left in them. There still aren’t. They sent them north, into regions where there was local food, or a chance of it. And they stayed to keep the mines and mills going. It’s a wonder we pulled through, all of us, isn’t it? . . . But by damn, I will do my own work for a while now!”

  She took his arm. He stopped short, as if her touch had electrocuted him on the spot. She shook him, smiling. “You didn’t eat, did you?”

  “No. Oh Takver, I have been sick for you, sick for you!”

  They came together, holding on to each other fiercely, in the dark street between the lamps, under the stars. They broke apart as suddenly, and Shevek backed up against the nearest wall. “I’d better eat something,” he said, and Takver said, “Yes, or you’ll fall flat on your face! Come on.” They went a block to the commons, the largest building in Chakar. Regular dinner was over, but the cooks were eating, and provided the traveler a bowl of stew and all the bread he wanted. They all sat at the table nearest the kitchen. The other tables had already been cleaned and set for next morning. The big room was cavernous, the ceiling rising into shadow, the far end obscure except where a bowl or cup winked on a dark table, catching the light. The cooks and servers were a quiet crew, tired after the day’s work; they ate fast, not talking much, not paying much attention to Takver and the stranger. One after another they finished and got up to take their dishes to the washers in the kitchen. One old woman said as she got up, “Don’t hurry, ammari, they’ve got an hour’s washing yet to do.” She had a grim face and looked dour, not maternal, not benevolent; but she spoke with compassion, with the charity of equals.

  She could do nothing for them but say, “Don’t hurry,” and look at them for a moment with the look of brotherly love.

  They could do no more for her, and little more for each other.

  They went back to Domicile Eight, Room 3, and there their long desire was fulfilled. They did not even light the lamp; they both liked making love in darkness. The first time they both came as Shevek came into her, the second time they struggled and cried out in a rage of joy, prolonging their climax as if delaying the moment of death, the third time they were both half asleep, and circled about the center of infinite pleasure, about each other’s being, like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly.

  Takver woke at dawn. She leaned on her elbow and looked across Shevek at the grey square of the window, and then at him. He lay on his back, breathing so quietly that his chest scarcely moved, his face thrown back a little, remote and stern in the thin light. We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that’s already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back. . . .

  Takver put in notice of departure at the hospital in Chakar, but stayed till they could replace her in the laboratory. She worked her eight-hour shift—in the third quarter of the year 168 many people were still on the long work shifts of emergency postings, for though the drought had broken in the winter of 167, the economy had by no means returned to normal yet. “Long post and short commons” was still the rule for people in skilled work, but the food was now adequate to the day’s work, which had not been true a year ago and two years ago.

  Shevek did not do much of anything for a while. He did not consider himself ill; after the four years of famine everyone was so used to the effects of hardship and malnutrition that they took them as the norm. He had the dust cough that was endemic in southern desert communities, a chronic irritation of the bronchia similar to silicosis and other miners’ diseases, but this was also something one took for granted where he had been living. He simply enjoyed the fact that if he felt like doing nothing, there was nothing he had to do.

  For a few days he and Sherut shared the room day-times, both of them sleeping till late afternoon; then Sherut, a placid woman of forty, moved in with another woman who worked night shift, and Shevek and Takver had the room to themselves for the four decads they stayed on in Chakar. While Takver was at work he slept, or walked out in the fields or on the dry, bane hills above the town. He went by the learning center late in the afternoon and watched Sadik and the other children on the playgrounds, or got involved, as adults often did, in one of the children’s projects—a group of mad seven-year-old carpenters, or a pair of sober twelve-year-old surveyors having trouble with triangulation. Then he walked with Sadik to the room; they met Takver as she got off work and went to the baths together and to commons. An hour or two after dinner he and Takver took the child back to her dormitory and returned to the room. The days were utterly peaceful, in the autumn sunlight, in the silence of the hills. It was to Shevek a time outside time, beside the flow, unreal, enduring, enchanted. He and Takver sometimes talked very late; other nights they went to bed not long after dark and slept nine hours, ten hours, in the profound, crystalline silence of the mountain night.

  He had come with luggage: a tattered little fiberboard case, his name printed large on it in black ink; all Anarresti carried papers, keepsakes, the spare pair of boots, in the same kind of case when they traveled, orange fiberboard, well scratched and dented. His contained a new shirt he had picked up as he came through Abbenay, a couple of books and some papers, and a curious object, which as it lay in the case appeared to consist of a series of flat loops of wire and a few glass beads. He revealed this, with some mystery, to Sadik, his second evening there.

  “It’s a necklace,” the child said with awe. People in the small towns wore a good deal of jewelry. In sophisticated Abbenay there was more sense of the tension between the principle of nonownership and the impulse to self-adornment, and there a ring or pin was the limit of good taste. But elsewhere the deep connection between the aesthetic and the acquisitive was simply not worried about; people bedecked themselves unabashedly. Most districts had a professional jeweler who did his work for love and fame, as well as the craft shops, where you could make to suit your own taste with the modest materials offered—copper, silver, beads, spinels, and the garnets and yellow
diamonds of Southrising. Sadik had not seen many bright, delicate things, but she knew necklaces, and so identified it.

  “No: look,” her father said, and with solemnity and deftness raised the object by the thread that connected its several loops. Hanging from his hand it came alive, the loops turning freely, describing airy spheres one within the other, the glass beads catching the lamplight.

  “Oh, beauty!” the child said. “What is it?”

  “It hangs from the ceiling; is there a nail? The coat hook will do, till I can get a nail from Supplies. Do you know who made it, Sadik?”

  “No— You did.”

  “She did. The mother. She did.” He turned to Takver. “It’s my favorite, the one that was over the desk. I gave the others to Bedap. I wasn’t going to leave them there for old what’s-her-name, Mother Envy down the corridor.”

  “Oh—Bunub! I hadn’t thought of her in years!” Takver laughed shakily. She looked at the mobile as if she was afraid of it.

  Sadik stood watching it as it turned silently seeking its balance. “I wish,” she said at last, carefully, “that I could share it one night over the bed I sleep in in the dormitory.”

  “I’ll make one for you, dear soul. For every night.”

  “Can you really make them, Takver?”

  “Well, I used to. I think I could make you one.” The tears were now plain in Takver’s eyes. Shevek put his arms around her. They were both still on edge, overstrained. Sadik looked at them holding each other for a moment with a calm, observing eye, then returned to watching the Occupation of Uninhabited Space.

  When they were alone, evenings, Sadik was often the subject of their talk. Takver was somewhat overabsorbed in the child, for want of other intimacies, and her strong common sense was obscured by maternal ambitions and anxieties. This was not natural to her; neither competitiveness nor protectiveness was a strong motive in Anarresti life. She was glad to talk her worries out and get rid of them, which Shevek’s presence enabled her to do. The first nights, she did most of the talking, and he listened as he might have listened to music or to running water, without trying to reply. He had not talked very much, for four years now; he was out of the habit of conversation. She released him from that silence, as she had always done. Later, it was he who talked the most, though always dependent on her response.

  “Do you remember Tirin?” he asked one night. It was cold; winter had arrived, and the room, the farthest from the domicile furnace, never got very warm, even with the register wide open. They had taken the bedding from both platforms and were well cocooned together on the platform nearer the register. Shevek was wearing a very old, much-washed shirt to keep his chest warm, as he liked to sit up in bed. Takver, wearing nothing, was under the blankets from the ears down. “What became of the orange blanket?” she said.

  “What a propertarian! I left it.”

  “To Mother Envy? How sad. I’m not a propertarian. I’m just sentimental. It was the first blanket we slept under.”

  “No, it wasn’t. We must have used a blanket up in the Ne Theras.”

  “If we did, I don’t remember it.” Takver laughed. “Who did you ask about?”

  “Tirin.”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—”

  “Oh, Tirin! Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay.”

  “I saw him, in Southwest.”

  “You saw Tirin? How was he?”

  Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave of the blanket with one finger. “Remember what Bedap told us about him?”

  “That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn’t he? And then Dap lost track of him.”

  “Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

  “At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

  “He played the Urrasti?”

  “Yes. He was marvelous.”

  “He showed me the play. Several times.”

  “Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?”

  “No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.”

  “Had he chosen that?”

  “I don’t think Tir was able to choose at all, by then. . . . Bedap always thought that he was forced to go to Segvina, that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don’t know. When I saw him, several years after therapy, he was a destroyed person.”

  “You think they did something at Segvina—?”

  “I don’t know; I think the Asylum does try to offer shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical publications, they’re at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir over the edge.”

  “But what did break him, then? Just not finding a posting he wanted?”

  “The play broke him.”

  “The play? The Tuss those old turds made about it? Oh, but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of moralistic scolding you’d have to be crazy already. All he had to do was ignore it!”

  “Tir was crazy already. By our society’s standards.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I think Tir’s a born artist. Not a craftsman—a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage.”

  “Was the play that good?” Takver asked naïvely, coming out an inch or two from the blankets and studying Shevek’s profile.

  “No, I don’t think so. It must have been funny on stage. He was only twenty when he wrote it, after all. He keeps writing it over. He’s never written anything else.”

  “He keeps writing the same play?”

  “He keeps writing the same play.”

  “Ugh,” Takver said with pity and disgust.

  “Every couple of decads he’d come and show it to me. And I’d read it or make a show of reading it and try to talk with him about it. He wanted desperately to talk about it, but he couldn’t. He was too frightened.”

  “Of what? I don’t understand.”

  “Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.”

  “You mean, just because some people called his play immoral and said he shouldn’t get a teaching posting, he decided everybody was against him? That’s a bit silly!”

  “But who was for him?”

  “Dap was—all his friends.”

  “But he lost them. He got posted away.”

  “Why didn’t he refuse the posting, then?”

  “Listen, Takver. I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it—you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I’m a free man, I didn’t have to come here! . . . We always think it, and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, ‘I don’t have to do anything, I make my own choices, I’m free.’ And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go wh
ere PDC posts us, and stay till we’re reposted.”

  “Oh, Shev, that’s not true. Only since the drought. Before that there wasn’t half so much posting. People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Divlab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Pool. It’s going to go back to that again, now.”

  “I don’t know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasn’t going in that direction, but away from it. Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this is the way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the way it has to be done. . . . There was a lot of that, before the drought. Five years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don’t look so skeptical! Listen, you tell me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting—even before the famine?”