The Left Hand of Darkness hc-4

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  Again he nodded. "I think we might make it," he said, with that complete simplicity I had so long taken for irony.

  "All right."

  He glanced at me, and drank down his cup of tea. Tea it might as well be called; brewed from roasted perm-grain, orsh is a brown, sweetsour drink, strong in vitamins A and C, sugar, and a pleasant stimulant related to lobeline. Where there is no beer on Winter there is orsh; where there is neither beer nor orsh, there are no people.

  "It will be hard," he said, setting down his cup. "Very hard. Without luck, we will not make it."

  "I'd rather die up on the Ice than in that cesspool you got me out of."

  He cut off a chunk of dried breadapple, offered me a slice, and sat meditatively chewing. "We'll need more food," he said.

  "What happens if we do make it to Karhide—to you, I mean? You're still proscribed."

  He turned his dark, otter's glance on me. "Yes. I suppose I'd stay on this side."

  "And when they found you'd helped their prisoner escape—?"

  "They needn't find it." He smiled, bleak, and said, "First we have to cross the Ice."

  I broke out, "Listen, Estraven, will you forgive what I said yesterday—"

  "Nusuth." He stood up, still chewing, put on his hieb, coat, and boots, and slipped otterlike out the self-sealing valved door. From outside he stuck his head back in: "I may be late, or gone overnight. Can you manage here?"

  "Yes."

  "All right." With that he was off. I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was recovering, and willing to go; he was out of thangen; the instant that was all clear, he was off. He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was.

  Yet he considered himself a slow man, poor in emergencies.

  Once he told me that, being so slow-thinking, he had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his "luck" was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him. He said it seriously; it may have been true. The Foretellers of the Fastnesses are not the only people on Winter who can see ahead. They have tamed and trained the hunch, but not increased its certainty. In this matter the Yomeshta also have a point: the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once : seeing whole.

  I kept the little heater-stove at its hottest setting while Estraven was gone, and so got warm clear through for the first time in—how long? I thought it must be Thern by now, the first month of winter and of a new Year One, but I had lost count in Pulefen.

  The stove was one of those excellent and economical devices perfected by the Gethenians in their millennial effort to outwit cold. Only the use of a fusion-pack as power source could improve it. Its bionic-powered battery was good for fourteen months' continuous use, its heat output was intense, it was stove, heater, and lantern all in one, and it weighed about four pounds. We would never have got fifty miles without it. It must have cost a good deal of Estraven's money, that money I had loftily handed over to him in Mishnory. The tent, which was made of plastics developed for weather-resistance and designed to cope with at least some of the inside water-condensation that is the plague of tents in cold weather; the pesthry-fur sleeping-bags; the clothes, skis, sledge, food-supplies, everything was of the finest make and kind, lightweight, durable, expensive. If he had gone to get more food, what was he going to get it with?

  He did not return till nightfall next day. I had gone out several times on snowshoes, gathering strength and getting practice by waddling around the slopes of the snowy vale that hid our tent. I was competent on skis, but not much good on snowshoes. I dared not go far over the hilltops, lest I lose my backtrack; it was wild country, steep, full of creeks and ravines, rising fast to the cloud-haunted mountains eastward. I had time to wonder what I would do in this forsaken place if Estraven did not come back.

  He came swooping over the dusky hill—he was a magnificent skier—and stopped beside me, dirty and tired and heavy-laden. He had on his back a huge sooty sack stuffed full of bundles: Father Christmas, who pops down the chimneys of old Earth. The bundles contained kadik-germ, dried breadapple, tea, and slabs of the hard, red, earthy-tasting sugar that Gethenians refine from one of their tubers.

  "How did you get all this?"

  "Stole it," said the one-time Prime Minister of Karhide, holding his hands over the stove, which he had not yet turned down; he, even he, was cold. "In Turuf. Close thing." That was all I ever learned. He was not proud of his exploit, and not able to laugh at it. Stealing is a vile crime on Winter; indeed the only man more despised than the thief is the suicide.

  "We'll use up this stuff first," he said, as I set a pan of snow on the stove to melt. "It's heavy." Most of the food he had laid in previously was “hyperfood” rations, a fortified, dehydrated, compressed, cubed mixture of high-energy foods—the Orgota name for it is gichy-michy, and that's what we called it, though of course we spoke Karhidish together. We had enough of it to last us sixty days at the minimal standard ration: a pound a day apiece. After he had washed up and eaten, Estraven sat a long time by the stove that night figuring out precisely what we had and how and when we must use it. We had no scales, and he had to estimate, using a pound box of gichy-michy as standard. He knew, as do many Gethenians, the caloric and nutritive value of each food; he knew his own requirements under various conditions, and how to estimate mine pretty closely. Such knowledge has high survival-value, on Winter.

  When at last he had got our rations planned out, he rolled over onto his bag and went to sleep. During the night I heard him talking numbers out of his dreams: weights, days, distances…

  We had, very roughly, eight hundred miles to go. The first hundred would be north or northeast, going through the forest and across the northernmost spurs of the Sembensyen range to the great glacier, the ice-sheet that covers the double-lobed Great Continent everywhere north of the 45th parallel, and in places dips down almost to the 35th. One of these southward extensions is in the region of the Fire-Hills, the last peaks of the Sembensyens, and that region was our first goal. There among the mountains, Estraven reasoned, we should be able to get onto the surface of the ice-sheet, either descending onto it from a mountain-slope or climbing up to it on the slope of one of its effluent glaciers. Thereafter we would travel on the Ice itself, eastward, for some six hundred miles. Where its edge trends north again near the Bay of Guthen we would come down off it and cut southeast a last fifty or a hundred miles across the Shenshey Bogs, which by then should be ten or twenty feet deep in snow, to the Karhidish border.

  This route kept us clear from start to finish of inhabited, or inhabitable, country. We would not be meeting any Inspectors. This was indubitably of the first importance. I had no papers, and Estraven said that his wouldn't hold up under any further forgeries. In any case, though I could pass for a Gethenian when no one expected anything else, I was not disguisable to an eye looking for me. In this respect, then, the way Estraven proposed for us was highly practical.

  In all other respects it seemed perfectly insane.

  I kept my opinion to myself, for I fully meant what I'd said about preferring to die escaping, if it came down to a choice of deaths. Estraven, however, was still exploring alternatives. Next day, which we spent in loading and packing the sledge very carefully, he said, "If you raised the Star Ship, when might it come?"

  "Anywhere between eight days and a halfmonth, depending on where it is in its solar orbit relative to Gethen. It might be on the other side of the sun."

  "No sooner?"

  "No sooner. The NAFAL motive can't be used within a solar system. The ship can come in only on rocket drive, which puts her at least eight days away. Why?"

  He tugged a cord tight and knotted it before he answer
ed. "I was considering the wisdom of trying to ask aid from your world, as mine seems unhelpful. There's a radio beacon in Turuf."

  "How powerful?"

  "Not very. The nearest big transmitter would be in Kuhumey, about four hundred miles south of here."

  "Kuhumey's a big town, isn't it?"

  "A quarter of a million souls."

  "We'd have to get the use of the radio transmitter somehow; then hide out for at least eight days, with the Sarf alerted… Not much chance."

  He nodded.

  I lugged the last sack.of kadik-germ out of the tent, fitted it into its niche in the sledge-load, and said, "If I had called the ship that night in Mishnory—the night you told me to—the night I was arrested… But Obsle had my ansible; still has it, I suppose."

  "Can he use it?"

  "No. Not even by chance, fiddling about. The coordinate-settings are extremely complex. But if only I'd used it!"

  "If only I'd known the game was already over, that day," he said, and smiled. He was not one for regrets.

  "You did, I think. But I didn't believe you."

  When the sledge was loaded, he insisted that we spend the rest of the day doing nothing, storing energy. He lay in the tent writing, in a little notebook, in his small, rapid, vertical-cursive Karhidish hand, the account that appears as the previous chapter. He hadn't been able to keep up his journal during the past month, and that annoyed him; he was pretty methodical about that journal. Its writing was, I think, both an obligation to and a link with his family, the Hearth of Estre. I learned that later, however; at the time I didn't know what he was writing, and I sat waxing skis, or doing nothing. I whistled a dance-tune, and stopped myself in the middle. We only had one tent, and if we were going to share it without driving each other mad, a certain amount of self-restraint, of manners, was evidently required… Estraven had looked up at my whistling, all right, but not with irritation. He looked at me rather dreamily, and said, "I wish I'd known about your Ship last year… Why did they send you onto this world alone?"

  "The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion."

  "The First Envoy's life is held cheap."

  "No; the Ekumen really doesn't hold anybody's life cheap. So it follows, better to put one life in danger than two, or twenty. It's also very expensive and time-consuming, you know, shipping people over the big jumps. Anyhow, I asked for the job."

  "In danger, honor," he said, evidently a proverb, for he added mildly, "We'll be full of honor when we reach Karhide…"

  When he spoke, I found myself believing that we would in fact reach Karhide, across eight hundred miles of mountain, ravine, crevasse, volcano, glacier, ice-sheet, frozen bog or frozen bay, all desolate, shelterless, and lifeless, in the storms of midwinter in the middle of an Ice Age. He sat writing up his records with the same obdurate patient thoroughness I had seen in a mad king up on a scaffolding mortaring a joint, and said, "When we reach Karhide…"

  His when was no mere dateless hope, either. He intended to reach Karhide by the fourth day of the fourth month of winter, Arhad Anner. We were to start tomorrow, the thirteenth of the first month, Tormenbod Thern. Our rations, as well as he could calculate, might be stretched at farthest to three Gethenian months, 78 days; so we would go twelve miles a day for seventy days, and get to Karhide on Arhad Anner. That was all settled. No more to do now but get a good sleep.

  We set off at dawn, on snowshoes, in a thin, windless snowfall. The surface over the hills was bessa, soft and still unpacked, what Terran skiers I think call "wild" snow. The sledge was heavy loaded; Estraven guessed the total weight to pull at something over 300 pounds. It was hard to pull in the fluffy snow, though it was as handy as a well-designed little boat; the runners were marvels, coated with a polymer that cut resistance almost to nothing, but of course that was no good when the whole thing was stuck in a drift. On such a surface, and going up and down slopes and gullies, we found it best to go one in harness pulling and one behind pushing. The snow fell, fine and mild, all day long. We stopped twice for a bite of food. In all the vast hilly country there was no sound. We went on, and all of a sudden it was twilight. We halted in a valley very like the one we had left that morning, a dell among white-humped hills. I was so tired I staggered, yet I could not believe the day was over. We had covered, by the sledge-meter, almost fifteen miles.

  If we could go that well in soft snow, fully loaded, through a steep country whose hills and valleys all ran athwart our way, then surely we could do better up on the Ice, with hard snow, a level way, and a load always lighter. My trust in Estraven had been more willed than spontaneous; now I believed him completely. We would be in Karhide in seventy days.

  "You've traveled like this before?" I asked him.

  "Sledged? Often."

  "Long hauls?"

  "I went a couple of hundred miles on the Kerm Ice one autumn, years ago."

  The lower end of Kerm Land, the mountainous southernmost peninsula of the Karhide semi-continent, is, like the north, glaciated. Humanity on the Great Continent of Gethen lives in a strip of land between two white walls. A further decrease of 8% in solar radiation, they calculate, would bring the walls creeping together; there would be no men, no land; only ice.

  "What for?"

  "Curiosity, adventure." He hesitated and smiled slightly. "The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life," he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations.

  "Ah: you were consciously extending the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being; one manifestation of which is exploration." We were both well pleased with ourselves, sitting in the warm tent, drinking hot tea and waiting for the kadik-germ porridge to boil.

  "That's it," he said. "Six of us. All very young. My brother and I from Estre, four of our friends from Stok. There was no purpose for the journey. We wanted to see Teremander, a mountain that stands up out of the Ice, down there. Not many people have seen it from the land."

  The porridge was ready, a different matter from the stiff bran mush of Pulefen Farm; it tasted like the roast chestnuts of Terra, and burned the mouth splendidly. Warm through, benevolent, I said, "The best food I've eaten on Gethen has always been in your company, Estraven."

  "Not at that banquet in Mishnory."

  "No, that's true… . You hate Orgoreyn, don't you?"

  "Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."

  Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me.

  Yet he added, scrupulous, "A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it."

  There we understood each other. "I know something of that joy," I said.

  "Yes; so I judged."

  I rinsed our bowls with hot water and dumped the rinsings out the. valve-door of the tent. It was blind dark outside; snow fell fine and thin, just visible in the oval dim shaft of light from the valve. Sealed again in the dry warmth of the tent, we laid out our bags. He said something, "Give the bowls to me, Mr. Ai," or some such remark, and I said, "Is it going to be 'Mr.' clear across the Gobrin Ice?"

 
He looked up and laughed. "I don't know what to call you."

  "My name is Genly Ai."

  "I know. You use my landname."

  "I don't know what to call you either."

  "Harth."

  "Then I'm Ai.—Who uses first names?"

  "Hearth-brothers, or friends," he said, and saying it was remote, out of reach, two feet from me in a tent eight feet across. No answer to that. What is more arrogant than honesty? Cooled, I climbed into my fur bag. "Good night, Ai," said the alien, and the other alien said, "Good night, Harth."

  A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Therem Harth, or any other of his race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand's touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us.

  We slept. I woke once and heard the snow ticking thick and soft on the tent.

  Estraven was up at dawn getting breakfast. The day broke bright. We loaded up and were off as the sun gilded the tops of the scrubby bushes rimming the dell, Estraven pulling in harness and I as pusher and rudder at the stern. The snow was beginning to get a crust on it; on clear downslopes we went like a dog-team, at a run. That day we skirted and then entered the forest that borders Pulefen Farm, the forest of dwarfs, thick-set, gnurl-limbed, ice-bearded thore-trees. We dared not use the main road north, but logging-roads lent their direction to us sometimes for a while, and as the forest was kept clear of fallen trees and undergrowth we got on well. Once we were in Tarrenpeth there were fewer ravines or steep ridges. The sledge-meter at evening said twenty miles for the day's run, and we were less tired than the night before.

  One palliative of winter on Winter is that the days stay light. The planet has a few degrees of tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, not enough to make an appreciable seasonal difference in low latitudes. Season is not a hemispheric effect but a global one, a result of the elliptoid orbit. At the far and slow-moving end of the orbit, approaching and departing from aphelion, there is just enough loss of solar radiation to disturb the already uneasy weather patterns, to chill down what is cold already, and turn the wet gray summer into white violent winter. Dryer than the rest of the year, winter might be pleasanter, if it were not for the cold. The sun, when you see it, shines high; there is no slow bleeding away of light into the darkness, as on the polar slopes of Earth where cold and night come on together.