The Dispossessed

by Ursula Le Guin

  Passing a ground-floor window marked Art Gallery, he turned in, thinking to escape the moral claustrophobia of the streets and find the beauty of Urras again in a museum. But all the pictures in the museum had price tickets attached to their frames. He stared at a skillfully painted nude. Her ticket read 4,000 IMU. “That’s a Fei Feite,” said a dark man appearing noiselessly at his elbow. “We had five a week ago. Biggest thing on the art market before long. A Feite is a sure investment, sir.”

  “Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two families alive for a year in this city,” Shevek said.

  The man inspected him and said drawling, “Yes, well, you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art.”

  “Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?”

  “You’re an artist, I take it,” the man said, now with open insolence.

  “No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!” The dealer shrank back. When he was out of Shevek’s reach, he began to say something about the police. Shevek grimaced and strode out of the shop. Halfway down the block he stopped. He couldn’t go on this way.

  But where could he go?

  To someone…to someone, another person. A human being. Someone who would give help, not sell it. Who? Where?

  He thought of Oiie’s children, the little boys who liked him, and for some time could think of no one else. Then an image rose in his mind, distant, small, and clear: Oiie’s sister. What was her name? Promise you’ll call, she had said, and since then she had twice written him invitations to dinner parties, in a bold childish hand, on thick, sweet-scented paper. He had ignored them, among all the invitations from strangers. Now he remembered them.

  He remembered at the same time the other message, the one that had appeared inexplicably in his coat pocket: Join with us your brothers. But he could not find any brothers, on Urras.

  He went into the nearest shop. It was a sweet shop, all golden scrolls and pink plaster, with rows of glass cases full of boxes and tins and baskets of candies and confections, pink, brown, cream, gold. He asked the woman behind the cases if she would help him find a telephone number. He was now subdued, after his fit of bad temper in the art dealer’s, and so humbly ignorant and foreign that the woman was won over. She not only helped him look up the name in the ponderous directory of telephone numbers, but placed the call for him on the shop phone.

  “Hello?”

  He said, “Shevek.” Then he stopped. The telephone to him was a vehicle of urgent needs, notifications of deaths, births, and earthquakes. He had no idea what to say.

  “Who? Shevek? Is it really? How dear of you to call! I don’t mind waking up at all if it’s you.”

  “You were sleeping?”

  “Sound asleep, and I’m still in bed. It’s lovely and warm. Where on earth are you?”

  “On Kae Sekae Street, I think.”

  “Whatever for? Come on out. What time is it? Good Lord, nearly noon. I know, I’ll meet you halfway. By the boat pool in the Old Palace gardens. Can you find it? Listen, you must stay, I’m having an absolutely paradisial party tonight.” She rattled on awhile; he agreed to all she said. As he came out past the counter the shopwoman smiled at him. “Better take her a box of sweets, hadn’t you, sir?”

  He stopped. “Should I?”

  “Never does any harm, sir.”

  There was something impudent and genial in her voice. The air of the shop was sweet and warm, as if all the perfumes of spring were crowded into it. Shevek stood there amidst the cases of pretty little luxuries, tall, heavy, dreamy, like the heavy animals in their pens, the rams and bulls stupefied by the yearning warmth of spring.

  “I’ll make you up just the thing,” the woman said, and she filled a little metal box, exquisitely enameled, with miniature leaves of chocolate and roses of spun sugar. She wrapped the tin in tissue paper, put the packet in a silver cardboard box, wrapped the box in heavy rose-colored paper, and tied it with green velvet ribbon. In all her deft movements a humorous and sympathetic complicity could be sensed, and when she handed Shevek the completed package, and he took it with muttered thanks and turned to go, there was no sharpness in her voice as she reminded him, “That’s ten sixty, sir.” She might even have let him go, pitying him, as women will pity strength; but he came back obediently and counted out the money.

  He found his way by subway train to the gardens of the Old Palace, and to the boat pool, where charmingly dressed children sailed toy ships, marvelous little craft with silken cordage and brasswork like jewelry. He saw Vea across the broad, bright circle of the water and went around the pool to her, aware of the sunlight, and the spring wind, and the dark trees of the park putting forth their early, pale-green leaves.

  They ate lunch at a restaurant in the park, on a terrace covered with a high glass dome. In the sunlight inside the dome the trees were in full leaf, willows, hanging over a pool where fat white birds paddled, watching the diners with indolent greed, awaiting scraps. Vea did not take charge of the ordering, making it clear that Shevek was in charge of her, but skillful waiters advised him so smoothly that he thought he had managed it all himself; and fortunately he had plenty of money in his pocket. The food was extraordinary. He had never tasted such subtleties of flavor. Used to two meals a day, he usually skipped the lunch the Urrasti ate, but today he ate right through it, while Vea delicately picked and pecked. He had to stop at last, and she laughed at his rueful look.

  “I ate too much.”

  “A little walk might help.”

  It was a very little walk: a slow ten-minute stroll over the grass, and then Vea collapsed gracefully in the shade of a high bank of shrubs, all bright with golden flowers. He sat down by her. A phrase Takver used came into his mind as he looked at Vea’s slender feet, decorated with little white shoes on very high heels. “A body profiteer,” Takver called women who used their sexuality as a weapon in a power struggle with men. To look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being. She incarnated all the sexuality the Ioti repressed into their dreams, their novels and poetry, their endless paintings of female nudes, their music, their architecture with its curves and domes, their candies, their baths, their mattresses. She was the woman in the table.

  Her head, entirely shaven, had been dusted with a talc containing tiny flecks of mica dust, so that a faint glitter obscured the nakedness of the contours. She wore a flimsy shawl or stole, under which the forms and texture of her bare arms showed softened and sheltered. Her breasts were covered: Ioti women did not go outside with naked breasts, reserving their nudity for its owners. Her wrists were laden with gold bracelets, and in the hollow of her throat a single jewel shone blue against the soft skin.

  “How does that stay there?”

  “What?” Since she could not see the jewel herself she could pretend to be unaware of it, obliging him to point, perhaps to bring his hand up over her breasts to touch the jewel. Shevek smiled, and touched it. “It is glued on?”

  “Oh, that. No, I’ve got a tiny little magnet set in there, and it’s got a tiny little bit of metal on the back, or is it the other way round? Anyhow, we stick together.”

  “You have a magnet under your skin?” Shevek inquired with unsophisticated distaste.

  Vea smiled and removed the sapphire so he could see that there was nothing but the tiniest silver dimple of a scar. “You do disapprove of me so totally—it’s refreshing. I feel that whatever I say or do, I can’t possibly lower myself in your opinion, because I’ve already reached bottom!”

  “That is not so,” he protested. He knew she was playing, but knew few of the rules of the game.

  “No, no; I know moral horror when I see it. Like this.” She put on a dismal scowl; they both laughed. “Am I so different from Anarresti women, really?”

  “Oh, yes, really.”

&nb
sp; “Are they all terribly strong, with muscles? Do they wear boots, and have big flat feet, and sensible clothing, and shave once a month?”

  “They don’t shave at all.”

  “Never? Not anywhere? Oh, Lord! Let’s talk about something else.”

  “About you.” He leaned on the grassy bank, near enough to Vea that he was surrounded by the natural and artificial perfumes of her body. “I want to know, is an Urrasti woman content to be always inferior?”

  “Inferior to whom?”

  “To men.”

  “Oh—that! What makes you think I am?”

  “It seems that everything your society does is done by men. The industry, arts, management, government, decisions. And all your life you bear your father’s name and the husband’s name. The men go to school and you don’t go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and police, and government, aren’t they? Why do you let them control everything? Why don’t you do what you like?”

  “But we do. Women do exactly as they like. And they don’t have to get their hands dirty, or wear brass helmets, or stand about shouting in the Directorate, to do it.”

  “But what is it that you do?”

  “Why, run the men, of course! And you know, it’s perfectly safe to tell them that, because they never believe it. They say, ‘Haw haw, funny little woman!’ and pat your head and stalk off with their medals jangling, perfectly self-content.”

  “And you too are self-content?”

  “Indeed I am.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Because it doesn’t fit your principles. Men always have theories, and things always have to fit them.”

  “No, not because of theories, because I can see that you are not content. That you are restless, unsatisfied, dangerous.”

  “Dangerous!” Vea laughed radiantly. “What an utterly marvelous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek?”

  “Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge—”

  She put her small hand deliberately on his mouth. “Hush,” she said. “I know you don’t intend to be vulgar. I forgive you. But that’s quite enough.”

  He scowled savagely at the hypocrisy, and at the realization that he might really have hurt her. He could still feel the brief touch of her hands on his lips. “I am sorry!” he said.

  “No, no. How can you understand, coming from the Moon? And you’re only a man, anyway…I’ll tell you something, though. If you took one of your ‘sisters’ up there on the Moon, and gave her a chance to take off her boots, and have an oil bath and a depilation, and put on a pair of pretty sandals, and a belly jewel, and perfume, she’d love it. And you’d love it too! Oh, you would! But you won’t, you poor things with your theories. All brothers and sisters and no fun!”

  “You are right,” Shevek said. “No fun. Never. All day long on Anarres we dig lead in the bowels of the mines, and when night comes, after our meal of the three holum grains cooked in one spoonful of brackish water, we antiphonally recite the Sayings of Odo, until it is time to go to bed. Which we all do separately, and wearing boots.”

  His fluency in Iotic was not sufficient to permit him the word flight this might have been in his own language, one of his sudden fantasies which only Takver and Sadik had heard often enough to get used to; but, lame as it was, it startled Vea. Her dark laugh broke out, heavy and spontaneous. “Good Lord, you’re funny, too! Is there anything you aren’t?”

  “A salesman,” he said.

  She studied him, smiling. There was something professional, actress-like, in her pose. People do not usually gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or lovers.

  He sat up. “I want to walk more,” he said.

  She reached up her hand for him to take and help her rise. The gesture was indolent and inviting, but she said with an uncertain tenderness in her voice, “You really are like a brother…Take my hand. I’ll let you go again!”

  They wandered along the paths of the great garden. They went into the palace, preserved as a museum of the ancient times of royalty, as Vea said she loved to look at the jewelry there. Portraits of arrogant lords and princes stared at them from the brocade-covered walls and the carven chimneypieces. The rooms were full of silver, gold, crystal, rare woods, tapestries, and jewels. Guards stood behind the velvet ropes. The guards’ black and scarlet uniforms consorted well with the splendors, the hangings of spun gold, the counterpanes of woven feathers, but their faces did not match; they were bored faces, tired, tired of standing all day among strangers doing a useless task. Shevek and Vea came to a glass case in which lay the cloak of Queen Teaea, made of the tanned skins of rebels flayed alive, which that terrible and defiant woman had worn when she went among her plague-stricken people to pray God to end the pestilence, fourteen hundred years ago. “It looks awfully like goatskin to me,” Vea said, examining the discolored, time-tattered rag in the glass case. She glanced up at Shevek “Are you all right?”

  “I think I would like to go outside this place.”

  Once outside in the garden his face became less white, but he looked back at the palace walls with hatred. “Why do you people cling to your shame?” he said.

  “But it’s all just history. Things like that couldn’t happen now!”

  She took him to a matinee at the theater, a comedy about young married people and their mothers-in-law, full of jokes about copulation which never mentioned copulation. Shevek attempted to laugh when Vea did. After that they went to a downtown restaurant, a place of incredible opulence. The dinner cost a hundred units. Shevek ate very little of it, having eaten at noon, but he gave in to Vea’s urging and drank two or three glasses of wine, which was pleasanter than he had expected it to be, and seemed to have no deleterious effect on his thinking. He had not enough money to pay for the dinner, but Vea made no offer to share the cost, merely suggesting that he write a check, which he did. They then took a hired car to Vea’s apartment; she also let him pay the driver. Could it be, he wondered, that Vea was actually a prostitute, that mysterious entity? But prostitutes as Odo wrote of them were poor women, and surely Vea was not poor: “her” party, she had told him, was being got ready by “her” cook, “her” maid, and “her” caterer.

  Moreover men at the University spoke of prostitutes contemptuously as dirty creatures, while Vea, despite her continual allurements, displayed such sensitivity to open talk about anything sexual that Shevek watched his language with her as he might have done, at home, with a shy child of ten. All together, he did not know what exactly Vea was.

  Vea’s rooms were large and luxurious, with glittering views of the lights of Nio, and furnished entirely in white, even the carpeting. But Shevek was getting callous to luxury, and besides was extremely sleepy. The guests were not due to arrive for an hour. While Vea was changing her clothes, he fell asleep in a huge white armchair in the living room. The maid rattling something on the table woke him in time to see Vea come back in, dressed now in Ioti formal evening wear for women, a full-length pleated skirt draped from the hips, leaving the whole torso naked. In her navel a little jewel glittered, just as in the pictures he had seen with Tirin and Bedap a quarter-century ago at the Northsetting Regional Institute of Science, just so…Half awake and wholly roused, he stared at her.

  She gazed back at him, smiling a little.

  She sat down on a low, cushioned stool near him, so she could look up into his face. She arranged her white skirt over her ankles, and said, “Now, tell me how it really is between men and women on Anarres.”

  It was unbelievable. The maid and the caterer’s man were both in the room; she knew he had a partner, and he knew she did; and not a word about copulating had passed between them. Yet her dress, movements, tone—what were they but the most open invitation?

  “Between a man and a woman there is what they want there to be between
them,” he said, rather roughly. “Each, and both.”

  “Then it’s true, you really have no morality?” she asked, as if shocked but delighted.

  “I don’t know what you mean. To hurt a person there is the same as to hurt a person here.”

  “You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I believe that morality is just another superstition, like religion. It’s got to be thrown out.”

  “But my society,” he said, completely puzzled, “is an attempt to reach it. To throw out the moralizing, yes—the rules, the laws, the punishments—so that men can see good and evil and choose between them.”

  “So you threw out all the do’s and don’ts. But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there. You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.”

  “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.”