The Dispossessed

by Ursula Le Guin

  Bedap and some of his friends were taking off a decad together, going on a hiking tour in the Ne Theras. He had persuaded Shevek to come. Shevek liked the prospect of ten days in the mountains, but not the prospect of ten days of Bedap’s opinions. Bedap’s conversation was all too much like a Criticism Session, the communal activity he had always like least, when everybody stood up and complained about defects in the functioning of the community and, usually, defects in the characters of the neighbors. The nearer the vacation came the less he looked forward to it. but he stuck a notebook in his pocket, so he could get away and pretend to be working, and went.

  They met behind the Eastern Points trucking depot early in the morning, three women and three men. Shevek did not know any of the women, and Bedap introduced him to only two of them. As they set off on the road toward the mountains he fell in beside the third one. “Shevek,” he said.

  She said, “I know.”

  He realized that he must have met her somewhere before and should know her name. His ears got red.

  “Are you being funny?” Bedap asked, moving in on the left. “Takver was at Northsetting Institute with us. She’s been living in Abbenay for two years. Haven’t you two seen each other here till now?”

  “I’ve seen him a couple of times,” the girl said, and laughed at him. She had the laugh of a person who likes to eat well, a big, childish gape. She was tall and rather thin, with round arms and broad hips. She was not very pretty; her face was swarthy, intelligent, and cheerful. In her eyes there was a darkness, not the opacity of bright dark eyes but a quality of depth, almost like deep, black, fine ash, very soft. Shevek, meeting her eyes, knew that he had committed an unforgivable fault in forgetting her and, in the instant of knowing it, knew also that he had been forgiven. That he was in luck. That his luck had changed.

  They started up into the mountains.

  In the cold evening of the fourth day of their excursion he and Takver sat on the bare steep slope above a gorge. Forty meters below them a mountain torrent rattled down the ravine among spraywet rocks. There was little running water on Anarres; the water table was low in most places, rivers were short. Only in the mountains were there quick-running streams. The sound of water shouting and clattering and singing was new to them.

  They had been scrambling up and down such gorges all day in the high country and were leg-weary. The rest of their party were in the Wayshelter, a stone lodge built by and for vacationers, and well kept up; the Ne Theras Federative was the most active of the volunteer groups that managed and protected the rather limited “scenic” areas of Anarres. A firewarden who lived there in summer was helping Bedap and the others put together a dinner from the well-stocked pantries. Takver and Shevek had gone out, in that order, separately, without announcing their destination or, in fact, knowing it.

  He found her on the steep slope, sitting among the delicate bushes of moonthorn that grew like knots of lace over the mountainsides, its stiff, fragile branches silvery in the twilight. In a gap between eastern peaks a colorless luminosity of the sky heralded moonrise. The stream was noisy in the silence of the high, bare hills. There was no wind, no cloud. The air above the mountains was like amethyst, hard, clear, profound.

  They had been sitting there some while without speaking.

  “I’ve never been drawn to a woman in my life as I have been to you. Ever since we started this hike.” Shevek’s tone was cold, almost resentful.

  “I didn’t mean to spoil your vacation,” she said, with her large childish laugh, too loud for the twilight.

  “It doesn’t spoil it!”

  “That’s good. I thought you meant it distracted you.”

  “Distracted! It’s like an earthquake.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s not you,” he said harshly. “It’s me.”

  “That’s what you think,” she said.

  There was a longish pause.

  “If you want to copulate,” she said, “why haven’t you asked me?”

  “Because I’m not sure that’s what I do want.”

  “Neither am I.” Her smile was gone. “Listen,” she said. Her voice was soft, and had not much timbre; it had the same furry quality as her eyes. “I ought to tell you.” But what she ought to tell him remained unsaid for quite a while. He looked at her at last with such pleading apprehension that she hastened to speak, and said in a rush, “Well, all I mean is, I don’t want to copulate with you now. Or anybody.”

  “You’ve sworn off sex?”

  “No!” she said with indignation, but no explanation.

  “I might as well have,” he said, flinging a pebble down into the stream. “Or else I’m impotent. It’s been half a year, and that was just with Dap. Nearly a year, actually. It kept getting more unsatisfying each time, till I quit trying. It wasn’t worth it. Not worth the trouble. And yet I—I remember—I know what it ought to be.”

  “Well, that’s it,” said Takver. “I used to have an awful lot of fun copulating, until I was eighteen or nineteen. It was exciting, and interesting, and pleasure. But then…I don’t know. Like you said, it got unsatisfying. I didn’t want pleasure. Not just pleasure, I mean.”

  “You want kids?”

  “Yes, when the time comes.”

  He pitched another rock down into the stream, which was fading into the shadows of the ravine leaving only its noise behind, a ceaseless harmony composed of disharmonies.

  “I want to get a job done,” he said.

  “Does being celibate help?”

  “There’s a connection. But I don’t know what it is, it’s not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers…”

  Takver did not laugh; she gave a whimper of laughter, as though it hurt. He tried to make out her face clearly. Behind her dark head the sky was hard and clear.

  “What’s wrong with pleasure, Takver? Why don’t you want it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don’t need it. And if I take what I don’t need, I’ll never get to what I do need.”

  “What is it you need?”

  She looked down at the ground. scratching the surface of a rock outcrop with her fingernail. She said nothing. She leaned forward to pick a sprig of moonthorn, but did not take it, merely touched it, felt the furred stem and fragile leaf. Shevek saw in the tension of her movements that she was trying with all her strength to contain or restrain a storm of emotion, so that she could speak. When she did, it was in a low voice and a little roughly. “I need the bond,” she said. “The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less.”

  She glanced up at him with defiance, it might have been hatred.

  Joy was rising mysteriously in him, like the sound and smell of the running water rising through the darkness. He had a feeling of unlimitedness, of clarity, total clarity, as if he had been set free. Behind Takver’s head the sky was brightening with moonrise; the far peaks floated clear and silver. “Yes, that’s it,” he said, without self-consciousness, without any sense of talking to someone else; he said what came into his head, meditatively. “I never saw it.”

  There was a little resentment still in Takver’s voice. “You never had to see it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I suppose because you never saw the possibility of it.”

  “What do you mean, the possibility?”

  “The person!”

  He considered this. They sat about a meter apart, hugging their knees because it was getting cold. Breath came to the throat like ice water. They could see each other’s breath, faint vapor in the steadily growing moonlight.

  “The night I saw it,” Takver said, “was the night before you left Northsetting Institute. There was a part
y, you remember. Some of us sat and talked all night. But that was four years ago. And you didn’t even know my name.” The rancor was gone from her voice; she seemed to want to excuse him.

  “You saw in me, then, what I’ve seen in you this last four days?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell. It wasn’t just sexual. I’d noticed you before, that way. This was different; I saw you. But I don’t know what you see now. And I didn’t really know what I saw them. I didn’t know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center. But you might have been quite different from what I thought you were. That wouldn’t be your fault, after all,” she added. “It’s just that I knew what I saw in you was what I needed. Not just wanted!”

  “And you’ve been in Abbenay for two years, and didn’t—”

  “Didn’t what? It was all on my side, in my head, you didn’t even know my name. One person can’t make a bond, after all!”

  “And you were afraid that if you came to me I might not want the bond.”

  “Not afraid. I knew you were a person who…wouldn’t be forced…Well, yes, I was afraid. I was afraid of you. Not of making a mistake. I knew it wasn’t a mistake. But you were—yourself. You aren’t like most people, you know. I was afraid of you because I knew you were my equal!” Her tone as she ended was fierce, but in a moment she said very gently, with kindness, “It doesn’t really matter, you know, Shevek.”

  It was the first time he had heard her say his name. He turned to her and said stammering, almost choking, “Doesn’t matter? First you show me—you show me what matters, what really matters, what I’ve needed all my life—and then you say it doesn’t matter!”

  They were face to face now, but they had not touched.

  “Is it what you need, then?”

  “Yes. The bond. The chance.”

  “Now—for life?”

  “Now and for life.”

  Life, said the stream of quick water down on the rocks in the cold dark.

  When Shevek and Takver came down from the mountains, they moved into a double room. None was free in the blocks near the Institute, but Takver knew of one not far away in an old domicile in the north end of town. In order to get the room they went to the block housing manager—Abbenay was divided into about two hundred local administrative regions, called blocks—a lens grinder who worked at home and kept her three young children at home with her. She therefore kept the housing files in a shelf on top of a closet so the children wouldn’t get at them. She checked that the room was registered as vacant; Shevek and Takver registered it as occupied by signing their names.

  The move was not complicated, either. Shevek brought a box of papers, his winter boots, and the orange blanket. Takver had to make three trips. One was to the district clothing depository to get them both a new suit, an act which she felt obscurely but strongly was essential to beginning their partnership. Then she went to her old dormitory, once for her clothes and papers, and again, with Shevek, to bring a number of curious objects: complex concentric shapes made of wire, which moved and changed slowly and inwardly when suspended from the ceiling. She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft-supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space. One of the room’s two chairs was decrepit, so they took it by a repair shop, where they picked up a sound one. They were then furnished. The new room had a high ceiling, which made it airy and gave plenty of space for the Occupations. The domicile was built on one of Abbenay’s low hills, and the room had a corner window that caught the afternoon sunlight and gave a view of the city, the streets and squares, the roofs, the green of parks, the plains beyond.

  Intimacy after long solitude, the abruptness of joy, tried both Shevek’s stability and Takver’s. In the first few decads he had wild swings of elation and anxiety; she had fits of temper. Both were oversensitive and inexperienced. The strain did not last, as they became experts in each other. Their sexual hunger persisted as passionate delight, their desire for communion was daily renewed because it was daily fulfilled.

  It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this city had all been part of his present great happiness, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now. Takver saw no such obscure concatenations of effect/cause/effect, but then she was not a temporal physicist. She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.

  But when Shevek took her metaphor and recast it in his terms, explaining that, unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go, she nodded before he was half done. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s what I was doing these last four years. It isn’t all luck. Just partly.”

  She was twenty-three, a half year younger than Shevek. She had grown up in a farming community, Round Valley, in Northeast. It was an isolated place and before Takver had come to the Institute in Northsetting she had worked harder than most young Anarresti. There had been scarcely enough people in Round Valley to do the jobs that had to be done, but they were not a large enough community, or productive enough in the general economy, to get high priority from the Divlab computers. They had to look after themselves. Takver at eight had picked straw and rocks out of holum grain at the mill for three hours a day after three hours of school. Little of her practical training as a child had been towards personal enrichment: it had been part of the community’s effort to survive. At harvest and planting seasons everyone over ten and under sixty had worked in the fields, all day. At fifteen she had been in charge of coordinating the work schedules on the four hundred farm plots worked by the community of Round Valley, and had assisted the planning dietician in the town refectory. There was nothing unusual in all this, and Takver thought little of it, but it had of course formed certain elements in her character and opinions. Shevek was glad he had done his share of Kleggich, for Takver was contemptuous of people who evaded physical labor. “Look at Tinan,” she would say, “whining and howling because he got a draft posting for four decads to a root-holum harvest. He’s so delicate you’d think he was a fish egg! Has he ever touched dirt?” Takver was not particularly charitable, and she had a hot temper.

  She had studied biology at Northsetting Regional Institute, with sufficient distinction that she had decided to come to the Central Institute for further study. After a year she had been asked to join in a new syndicate that was setting up a laboratory to study techniques of increasing and improving the edible fish stocks in the three oceans of Anarres. When people asked her what she did she said, “I’m a fish geneticist.” She liked the work; it combined two things she valued: accurate, factual research and a specific goal of increase or betterment. Without such work she would not have been satisfied. But it by no means sufficed her. Most of what went on in Takver’s mind and spirit had little to do with fish genetics.

  Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called “love of nature,” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

  She showed Shevek the sea-water tanks at the research laboratory, fifty or more species of fish, large and small, drab and gaudy, elegant and grotesque. He was fascinated and a little awed.

  The three oceans of Anarres were as full of animal life as the land was empty of it. The seas had not been connected for several million years, so their life forms had followed insular courses of evolution. Their variety was bewildering. It had never occurred to Shevek that life could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exuberance was p
erhaps the essential quality of life.

  On land, the plants got on well enough, in their sparse and spiny fashion, but those animals that had tried air-breathing had mostly given up the project as the planet’s climate entered a millennial era of dust and dryness. Bacteria survived, many of them lithophagous, and a few hundred species of worm and crustacean.

  Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate balance of life. Only the Settlers came, and so well scrubbed internally and externally that they brought a minimum of their personal fauna and flora with them. Not even the flea had made it to Anarres.

  “I like marine biology,” Takver said to Shevek in front of the fish tanks, “because it’s so complex, a real web. This fish eats that fish eats small fry eat ciliates eat bacteria and round you go. On land, there’s only three phyla, all nonchordates—if you don’t count man. It’s a queer situation, biologically speaking. We Anarresti are unnaturally isolated. On the Old World there are eighteen phyla of land animal; there are classes, like the insects, that have so many species they’ve never been able to count them, and some of those species have populations of billions. Think of it: everywhere you looked animals, other creatures, sharing the earth and air with you. You’d feel so much more a part.” Her gaze followed the curve of a small blue fish’s flight through the dim tank. Shevek, intent, followed the fish’s track and her thought’s track. He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist’s arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.