The Dispossessed

by Ursula Le Guin

  Takver wrote to him:

  I am worried by a rather queer thing. The lectures for 3d Quarter were posted three days ago and I went to find out what schedule you would have at the Inst. but no class or room was listed for you. I thought they had left you off by mistake so went to the Members Synd. and they said yes they wanted you to give the Geom. class. So I went to the Inst Coord. office that old woman with the nose and she knew nothing, no no I don’t know anything, go to Central Posting! That is nonsense I said and went to Sabul. But he was not in the Phys. offices and I have not seen him yet though I have been back twice. With Sadik who wears a wonderful white hat Terrus knitted her out of unraveled yarn and looks tremendously fetching. I refuse to go hunt out Sabul in the room or worm-tunnel or wherever he lives. Maybe he is off doing volunteer work ha! ha! Perhaps you should telephone the Institute and find out what sort of mistake they have made? In fact I did go down and check at Divlab Central Posting but there wasn’t any new listing for you. People there were all right but that old woman with the nose is inefficient and not helpful, and nobody takes an interest. Bedap is right we have let bureaucracy creep up on us. Please come back (with mathematical genius girl if necessary), separation is educational all right but your presence is the education I want. I am getting a half liter fruit juice plus calcium allotment a day because my milk was running short and S. yelled a lot. Good old doctors!! All, always, T.

  Shevek never got this letter. He had left Southrising before it got to the mail depot in Red Springs.

  It was about twenty-five hundred miles from Red Springs to Abbenay. An individual on the move would have simply hitch-hiked, all transport vehicles being available as passenger vehicles for as many people as they would hold; but since four hundred and fifty people were being redistributed to their regular postings in Northwest, a train was provided for them. It was made up of passenger cars, or at least of cars being used at the moment for passengers. The least popular was the boxcar that had recently carried a shipment of smoked fish.

  After a year of the drought the normal transport lines were insufficient, despite the fierce efforts of the transport workers to meet demands. They were the largest federative in the Odonian society: self-organized, of course, in regional syndicates coordinated by representatives who met and worked with the local and central PDC. The network maintained by the transport federative was effective in normal times and in limited emergencies; it was flexible, adaptable to circumstance, and the Syndics of Transport had great team and professional pride. They called their engines and dirigibles names like Indomitable, Endurance, Eat-the-Wind; they had mottoes—We Always Get There.—Nothing Is Too Much!—But now, when whole regions of the planet were threatened with immediate famine if food was not brought in from other regions, and when large emergency drafts of workers must be shifted, the demands laid on transport were too much. There were not enough vehicles; there were not enough people to run them. Everything the federative had on wings or wheels was pressed into service, and apprentices, retired workers, volunteers, and emergency draftees were helping man the trucks, the trains, the ships, the ports, the yards.

  The train Shevek was on went along in short, rushes and long waits, since all provision trains took precedence over it. Then it stopped altogether for twenty hours. An overworked or underschooled dispatcher had made an error, and there had been a wreck up the line.

  The little town where the train stopped had no extra food in its commons or warehouses. It was not a farm community, but a mill town, manufacturing concrete and foamstone, built on the fortunate congruence of lime deposits and a navigable river. There were truck gardens, but it was a town dependent upon transport for food. If the four hundred and fifty people on the train ate, the one hundred and sixty local people would not. Ideally, they would all share, all half-eat or half-starve together. If there had been fifty, or even a hundred, people on the train, the community probably would have spared them at least a baking of bread. But four hundred and fifty? If they gave that many anything, they would be wiped out for days. And would the next provisions train come, after those days? And how much grain would be on it? They gave nothing.

  The travelers, having had nothing in the way of breakfast that day, thus fasted for sixty hours. They did not get a meal until the line had been cleared and their train had run on a hundred and fifty miles to a station with a refectory stocked for passengers.

  It was Shevek’s first experience of hunger. He had fasted sometimes when he was working because he did not want to be bothered with eating, but two full meals a day had always been available: constant as sunrise and sunset. He had never even thought what it might be like to have to go without them. Nobody in his society, nobody in the world, had to go without them.

  While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

  The passengers’ resentment of the townsfolk got bitter, but it was less ominous than the behavior of the townsfolk—the way they hid behind “their” walls with “their” property, and ignored the train, never looked at it. Shevek was not the only gloomy passenger; a long conversation meandered up and down beside the stopped cars, people dropping in and out of it, arguing and agreeing, all on the same general theme that his thoughts followed. A raid on the truck gardens was seriously proposed, and bitterly debated, and might have been carried out, if the train had not hooted at last for departure.

  But when at last it crawled into the station down the line, and they got a meal—a half loaf of holum bread and a bowl of soup—their gloom gave place to elation. By the time you got to the bottom of the bowl you noticed that the soup was pretty thin, but the first taste of it, the first taste had been wonderful, worth fasting for. They all agreed on that. They got back into the train laughing and joking together. They had seen each other through.

  A truck-train convoy picked up the Abbenay passengers at Equator Hill and brought them the last five hundred miles. They came into the city late on a windy night of early autumn. It was getting on for midnight; the streets were empty. Wind flowed through them like a turbulent dry river. Over dim street lamps the stars flared with a bright shaken light. The dry storm of autumn and passion carried Shevek through the streets, half running, three miles to the northern quarter, alone in the dark city. He took the three steps of the porchway in one, ran down the hall, came to the door, opened it. The room was dark. Stars burned in the dark windows. “Takver!” he said, and heard the silence. Before he turned on the lamp, there in the dark, in the silence, all at once, he learned what separation was.

  Nothing was gone. There was nothing to be gone. Only Sadik and Takver were gone. The Occupations of Uninhabited Space turned softly, gleaming a little, in the draft from the open door.

  There was a letter on the table. Two letters. One from Takver. It was brief: she had received an emergency posting to the Comestible Algae Experimental Development Laboratories in Northeast, for an indeterminate period. She wrote:

  I could not in conscience refuse now. I went and talked to them at Divlab and also read their project sent in to Ecology at PDC, and it is true they need me because I have worked exactly on this algae-ciliate-shrimp-kukuri cycle. I requested at Divlab that you be posted to Rolny but of course they won’t act on that until you also request it, and if this is not possible because of work at the Inst. then you won’t. After all if it goes on too long I will tell them get another geneticist, and come back! Sadik is very well and can say yite for light. It will not be very long. All, for life, your sister, Takver. Oh please come if you can.

  The other note was scribbled on a tiny bit of
paper: “Shevek Physics off. on yr return. Sabul.”

  Shevek roamed around the room. The storm, the impetus that had hurled him through the streets, was still in him. It had come up against the wall. He could go no farther, yet he must move. He looked in the closet. Nothing was in it but his winter coat and a shirt which Takver, who liked fine handwork, had embroidered for him; her few clothes were gone. The screen was folded back, showing the empty crib. The sleeping platform was not made up, but the orange blanket covered the rolled-up bedding neatly. Shevek came up against the table again, read Takver’s letter again. His eyes filled with tears of anger. A rage of disappointment shook him, a wrath, a foreboding.

  No one was to blame. That was the worst of it. Takver was needed, needed to work against hunger—hers, his, Sadik’s hunger. Society was not against them. It was for them; with them; it was them.

  But he had given up his book, and his love, and his child. How much can a man be asked to give up?

  “Hell!” he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. “Oh, hell!” he repeated. He crumpled up Sabul’s grubby little note vindictively, and then brought his hands down clenched against the edge of the table, twice, three times, in his passion seeking pain. But there was nothing. There was nothing to be done and nowhere to be gone. He was left at last with the bedding to unroll, with lying down alone and getting to sleep, with evil dreams and without comfort.

  First thing in the morning, Bunub knocked. He met her at the door and did not stand aside to let her in. She was their neighbor down the hail, a woman of fifty, a machinist in the Air Vehicle Engine factory. Takver had always been entertained by her, but she infuriated Shevek. For one thing, she wanted their room. She had claimed it when it first came vacant, she said, but the enmity of the block housing registrar had prevented her getting it. Her room did not have the corner window, the object of her undying envy. It was a double, though, and she lived alone in it, which given the housing shortage, was egoistic of her; but Shevek would never have wasted time on disapproving her if she had not forced him to by making excuses. She explained, explained. She had a partner, a lifelong partner, “just like you two,” simper. Only where was the partner? Somehow he was always spoken of in the past tense. Meanwhile the double room was pretty well justified by the succession of men that passed through Bunub’s door, a different man every night, as if Bunub were a roaring girl of seventeen. Takver observed the procession with admiration. Bunub came and told her all about the men, and complained, complained. Her not having the corner room was only one among unnumbered grievances. She had a mind both insidious and invidious, which could find the bad in anything and take it straight to her bosom. The factory where she worked was a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage. Meetings of her syndicate were bedlams of unrighteous innuendo all directed at her. The entire social organism was dedicated to the persecution of Bunub. All this made Takver laugh, sometimes wildly, right in Bunub’s face. “Oh, Bunub, you are so funny!” she would gasp, and the woman, with greying hair and a thin mouth and downcast eyes, would smile thinly, not offended, not at all, and continue her monstrous recitations. Shevek knew that Takver was right to laugh at her, but he could not do it.

  “It’s terrible,” she said, slithering in past him and going straight to the table to read Takver’s letter. She picked it up; Shevek plucked it out of her hand with a calm rapidity she had not prepared for. “Perfectly terrible. Not even a decad’s notice. Just, ‘Come here! Right now!’ And they say we’re free people, we’re supposed to be free people. What a joke! Breaking up a happy partnership that way. That’s why they did it, you know. They’re against partnerships, you can see it all the time, they intentionally post partners apart. That’s what happened with me and Labeks, exactly the same thing. We’ll never get back together. Not with the whole of Divlab lined up against us. There’s the little empty crib. Poor little thing! She never ceased crying for these four decads, day and night. Kept me awake for hours. It’s the shortages, of course; Takver just didn’t have enough milk. And then to send a nursing mother off to a posting hundreds of miles away like that, imagine! I don’t suppose you’ll be able to join her there, where is it they sent her to?”

  “Northeast. I want to get over to breakfast, Bunub. I’m hungry.”

  “Isn’t it typical how they did it while you were away.”

  “Did what while I was away?”

  “Sent her away—broke up the partnership.” She was reading Sabul’s note, which she had uncrumpled with care. “They know when to move in! I suppose you’ll be leaving this room now, won’t you? They won’t let you keep a double. Takver talked about coming back soon, but I could see she was just trying to keep her spirits up. Freedom, we’re supposed to be free, big joke! Pushed around from here to there—”

  “Oh, by damn, Bunub, if Takver hadn’t wanted the posting she’d have refused it. You know we’re facing a famine.”

  “Well. I wondered if she hadn’t been looking for a move. It often happens after a baby comes. I thought long ago you should have given that baby to a nursery. The amount it cried. Children come between partners. Tie them down. It’s only natural, as you say, that she should have been looking for a change, and jumped at it when she got it.”

  “I did not say that. I’m going to breakfast.” He strode out, quivering at five or six sensitive spots which Bunub had accurately wounded. The horror of the woman was that she voiced all his own most despicable fears. She now stayed behind in the room, probably to plan her move into it.

  He had overslept, and got to commons just before they closed the doors. Ravenous still from the journey, he took a double helping of both porridge and bread. The boy behind the serving tables looked at him frowning. These days nobody took double helpings. Shevek stared frowning back and said nothing. He had gone eighty-odd hours now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he had a right to make up for what he had missed, but he was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own justification, need is right. He was an Odonian, he left guilt to profiteers.

  He sat down by himself, but Desar joined him immediately, smiling, staring at or beside him with disconcerting wall eyes. “Been gone while,” Desar said.

  “Farm draft. Six decads. How have things been here?”

  “Lean.”

  “They’ll get leaner,” Shevek said, but without real conviction, for he was eating, and the porridge tasted exceedingly good. Frustration, anxiety, famine! said his forebrain, seat of intellect; but his hindbrain, squatting in unrepentant savagery back in the deep skull’s darkness, said Food now! Food now! Good, good!

  “Seen Sabul?”

  “No. I got in late last night.” He glanced up at Desar and said with attempted indifference, “Takver got a famine posting; she had to leave four days ago.”

  Desar nodded with genuine indifference. “Heard that. You hear about Institute reorganizing?”

  “No. What’s up?”

  The mathematician spread out his long, slender hands on the table and looked down at them. He was always tongue-tied and telegraphic; in fact, he stammered; but whether it was a verbal or a moral stammer Shevek had never decided. As he had always liked Desar without knowing why, so there were moments when he disliked Desar intensely, again without knowing why. This was one of the moments. There was a slyness in the expression of Desar’s mouth, his downcast eyes, like Bunub’s downcast eyes.

  “Shakedown. Cutting back to functional staff. Shipeg’s out.” Shipeg was a notoriously stupid mathematician who had always managed, by assiduous flattery of students, to get himself one student-requisition course each term. “Sent him off. Some regional institute.”

  “He’d do less harm hoeing ground-holum,” Shevek said. Now that he was fed, it appeared to him that the drought might after all be of service to the social organism. The priorities were becoming clear again. Weaknesses, soft spots, sick spots would be scoured out, sluggish o
rgans restored to full function, the fat would be trimmed off the body politic.

  “Put in word for you, Institute meeting,” Desar said, looking up but not meeting, because he could not meet, Shevek’s eyes. As he spoke, though Shevek did not yet understand what he meant, he knew that Desar was lying. He knew it positively. Desar had not put in a word for him, but a word against him.

  The reason for his moments of detesting Desar was clear to him now: a recognition, heretofore unadmitted, of the element of pure malice in Desar’s personality. That Desar also loved him and was trying to gain power over him was equally clear, and, to Shevek, equally detestable. The devious ways of possessiveness, the labyrinths of love/hate, were meaningless to him. Arrogant, intolerant, he walked right through their walls. He did not speak again to the mathematician, but finished his breakfast and went off across the quadrangle, through the bright morning of early autumn, to the physics office.

  He went to the back room which everybody called “Sabul’s office,” the room where they had first met, where Sabul had given him the grammar and dictionary of Iotic. Sabul looked up warily across the desk, looked down again, busy with papers, the hardworking, abstracted scientist; then allowed awareness of Shevek’s presence to seep into his overloaded brain; then became, for him, effusive. He looked thin and aged, and when he got up he stooped more than he had used to do, a placating kind of stoop. “Bad times,” he said. “Eh? Bad times!”

  “They’ll get worse,” Shevek said lightly. “How’s everything here?”

  “Bad, bad.” Sabul shook his grizzled head. “This is a bad time for pure science, for the intellectual.”