The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula Le Guin

  Like all the King’s House this room was high, red, old, bare, with a musty chill on the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries. A fire roared in the fireplace, but did no good. Fires in Karhide are to warm the spirit not the flesh. The mechanical-industrial Age of Invention in Karhide is at least three thousand years old, and during those thirty centuries they have developed excellent and economical central-heating devices using steam, electricity, and other principles; but they do not install them in their houses. Perhaps if they did they would lose their physiological weatherproofing, like Arctic birds kept in warm tents, who being released get frostbitten feet. I, however, a tropical bird, was cold; cold one way outdoors and cold another way indoors, ceaselessly and more or less thoroughly cold. I walked up and down to warm myself. There was little besides myself and the fire in the long anteroom: a stool and a table on which stood a bowl of fingerstones and an ancient radio of carved wood inlaid with silver and bone, a noble piece of workmanship. It was playing at a whisper, and I turned it a touch louder, hearing the Palace Bulletin replace the droning Chant or Lay that was being broadcast. Karhiders do not read much as a rule, and prefer their news and literature heard not seen; books and televising devices are less common than radios, and newspapers don’t exist. I had missed the morning Bulletin on my set at home, and half-listened now, my mind elsewhere, until the repetition of the name several times caught my ear at last and stopped my pacing. What was it about Estraven? A proclamation was being reread.

  “Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, Lord of Estre in Kerm, by this order forfeits title of the Kingdom and seat in the Assemblies of the Kingdom, and is commanded to quit the Kingdom and all Domains of Karhide. If he be not gone out of the Kingdom and all Domains in three days’ time, or if in his life he return into the Kingdom, he shall be put to death by any man without further judgment. No countryman of Karhide shall suffer Harth rem ir Estraven to speak to him or stay within his house or on his lands, on pain of imprisonment, nor shall any countryman of Karhide give or lend Harth rem ir Estraven money or goods, nor repay any debt owing him, on pain of imprisonment and fine. Let all countrymen of Karhide know and say that the crime for which Harth rem ir Estraven is exiled is the crime of Treason: he having urged privily and openly in Assembly and Palace, under pretense of loyal service to the King, that the Nation-Dominion of Karhide cast away its sovereignty and surrender up its power in order to become an inferior and subject nation in a certain Union of Peoples, concerning which let all men know and say that no such Union does exist, being a device and baseless fiction of certain conspiring traitors who seek to weaken the Authority of Karhide in the King, to the profit of the real and present enemies of the land. Odguyrny Tuwa, Eighth Hour, in the Palace in Erhenrang: ARGAVEN HARGE.”

  The order was printed and posted on several gates and road-posts about the city, and the above is verbatim from one such copy.

  My first impulse was simple. I cut off the radio as if to stop it from giving evidence against me, and scuttled to the door. There of course I stopped. I went back to the table by the fireplace, and stood. I was no longer calm or resolute. I wanted to open my case, get out the ansible, and send an Advise/Urgent! through to Hain. I suppressed this impulse also, as it was even sillier than the first. Fortunately I had no time for more impulses. The double door at the far end of the anteroom was opened and the aide stood aside for me to pass, announcing me, “Genry Ai”—my name is Genly, but Karhiders can’t say l—and left me in the Red Hall with King Argaven XV.

  An immense, high, long room, that Red Hall of the King’s House. Half a mile down to the fireplaces. Half a mile up to the raftered ceiling hung with red, dusty drapes or banners all ragged with the years. The windows are only slits or slots in the thick walls, the lights few, high, and dim. My new boots go eck, eck, eck, eck as I walk down the hall towards the king, a six months’ journey.

  Argaven was standing in front of the central and largest fireplace of three, on a low, large dais or platform: a short figure in the reddish gloom, rather potbellied, very erect, dark and featureless in silhouette except for the glint of the big seal-ring on his thumb.

  I stopped at the edge of the dais and, as I had been instructed, did and said nothing.

  “Come up, Mr. Ai. Sit down.”

  I obeyed, taking the right-hand chair by the central hearth. In all this I had been drilled. Argaven did not sit down; he stood ten feet from me with the roaring bright flames behind him, and presently said, “Tell me what you have to tell me, Mr. Ai. You bear a message, they say.”

  The face that turned towards me, reddened and cratered by firelight and shadow, was as flat and cruel as the moon, Winter’s dull rufous moon. Argaven was less kingly, less manly, than he looked at a distance among his courtiers. His voice was thin, and he held his fierce lunatic head at an angle of bizarre arrogance.

  “My lord, what I have to say is gone out of my head. I only just now learned of Lord Estraven’s disgrace.”

  Argaven smiled at that, a stretched, staring grin. He laughed shrilly like an angry woman pretending to be amused. “Damn him,” he said, “the proud, posturing, perjuring traitor! You dined with him last night, eh? And he told you what a powerful fellow he is, and how he runs the king, and how easy you’ll find me to deal with since he’s been talking to me about you—eh? Is that what he told you, Mr. Ai?”

  I hesitated.

  “I’ll tell you what he’s been saying to me about you, if you’ve an interest in knowing. He’s been advising me to refuse you audience, keep you hanging about waiting, maybe pack you off to Orgoreyn or the Islands. All this halfmonth he’s been telling me, damn his insolence! It’s he that got packed off to Orgoreyn, ha ha ha—!” Again the shrill false laugh, and he clapped his hands together as he laughed. A silent immediate guard appeared between curtains at the end of the dais. Argaven snarled at him and he vanished. Still laughing and still snarling Argaven came up close and stared straight at me. The dark irises of his eyes glowed slightly orange. I was a good deal more afraid of him than I had expected to be.

  I could see no course to follow among these incoherencies but that of candor. I said, “I can only ask you, sir, whether I’m considered to be implicated in Estraven’s crime.”

  “You? No.” He stared even more closely at me. “I don’t know what the devil you are, Mr. Ai, a sexual freak or an artificial monster or a visitor from the Domains of the Void, but you’re not a traitor, you’ve merely been the tool of one. I don’t punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman. Let me give you some advice.” Argaven said this with curious emphasis and satisfaction, and even then it occurred to me that nobody else, in two years, had ever given me advice. They answered questions, but they never openly gave advice, not even Estraven at his most helpful. It must have to do with shifgrethor. “Let no one else use you, Mr. Ai,” the king was saying. “Keep clear of factions. Tell your own lies, do your own deeds. And trust no one. D’you know that? Trust no one. Damn that lying coldblooded traitor, I trusted him. I put the silver chain around his damned neck. I wish I’d hanged him with it. I never trusted him. Never. Don’t trust anybody. Let him starve in the cesspits of Mishnory hunting garbage, let his bowels rot, never—” King Argaven shook, choked, caught his breath with a retching sound, and turned his back on me. He kicked at the logs of the great fire till sparks whirled up thick in his face and fell on his hair and his black tunic, and he caught at them with open hands.

  Not turning around he spoke in a shrill painful voice: “Say what you’ve got to say, Mr. Ai.”

  “May I ask you a question, sir?”

  “Yes.” He swayed from foot to foot as he stood facing the fire. I had to address his back.

  “Do you believe that I am what I say I am?”

  “Estraven had the physicians send me endless tapes about you, and more from the engineers at the Workshops who have your vehicle, and so on. They can’t all be liars, and they all say you’re not human. What then?
”

  “Then, sir, there are others like me. That is, I’m a representative…”

  “Of this union, this Authority, yes, very well. What did they send you here for, is that what you want me to ask?”

  Though Argaven might be neither sane nor shrewd, he had had long practice in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation by those whose main aim in life was the achievement and maintenance of the shifgrethor relationship on a high level. Whole areas of that relationship were still blank to me, but I knew something about the competitive, prestige-seeking aspect of it, and about the perpetual conversational duel which can result from it. That I was not dueling with Argaven, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.

  “I’ve made no secret of it, sir. The Ekumen wants an alliance, with the nations of Gethen.”

  “What for?”

  “Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.”

  I was not speaking the tongue spoken by those who rule men, the kings, conquerors, dictators, generals; in that language there was no answer to his question. Sullen and unheeding, Argaven stared at the fire, shifting from foot to foot.

  “How big is this kingdom out in Nowhere, this Ekumen?”

  “There are eighty-three habitable planets in the Ekumenical Scope, and on them about three thousand nations or anthrotypic groups—”

  “Three thousand? I see. Now tell me why we, one against three thousand, should have anything to do with all these nations of monsters living out in the Void?” He turned around now to look at me, for he was still dueling, posing a rhetorical question, almost a joke. But the joke did not go deep. He was—as Estraven had warned me—uneasy, alarmed.

  “Three thousand nations on eighty-three worlds, sir; but the nearest to Gethen is seventeen years’ journey in ships that go at near lightspeed. If you’ve thought that Gethen might be involved in forays and harassments from such neighbors, consider the distance at which they live. Forays are worth no one’s trouble, across space.” I did not speak of war, for a good reason; there’s no word for it in Karhidish. “Trade, however, is worthwhile. In ideas and techniques, communicated by ansible; in goods and artifacts, sent by manned or unmanned ships. Ambassadors, scholars, and merchants, some of them might come here; some of yours might go offworld. The Ekumen is not a kingdom, but a co-ordinator, a clearinghouse for trade and knowledge; without it communication between the worlds of men would be haphazard, and trade very risky, as you can see. Men’s lives are too short to cope with the time-jumps between worlds, if there’s no network and centrality, no control, no continuity to work through; therefore they become members of the Ekumen…We are all men, you know, sir. All of us. All the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world, Hain. We vary, but we’re all sons of the same Hearth…”

  None of this caught the king’s curiosity or gave him any reassurance. I went on a bit, trying to suggest that his shifgrethor, or Karhide’s, would be enhanced, not threatened by the presence of the Ekumen, but it was no good. Argaven stood there sullen as an old she-otter in a cage, swinging back and forth, from foot to foot, back and forth, baring his teeth in a grin of pain. I stopped talking.

  “Are they all as black as you?”

  Gethenians are yellow-brown or red-brown, generally, but I had seen a good many as dark as myself. “Some are blacker,” I said; “we come all colors,” and I opened the case (politely examined by the guards of the Palace at four stages of my approach to the Red Hall) that held my ansible and some pictures. The pictures—films, photos, paintings, actives, and some cubes—were a little gallery of Man: people of Hain, Chiffewar, and the Cetians, of S and Terra and Alterra, of the Uttermosts, Kapetyn, Ollul, Four-Taurus, Rokanan, Ensbo, Cime, Gde and Sheashel Haven…The king glanced at a couple without interest. “What’s this?”

  “A person from Cime, a female.” I had to use the word that Gethenians would apply only to a person in the culminant phase of kemmer, the alternative being their word for a female animal.

  “Permanently?”

  “Yes.”

  He dropped the cube and stood swinging from foot to foot, staring at me or a little past me, the firelight shifting on his face. “They’re all like that—like you?”

  This was the hurdle I could not lower for them. They must, in the end, learn to take it in their stride.

  “Yes. Gethenian sexual physiology, so far as we yet know, is unique among human beings.”

  “So all of them, out on these other planets, are in permanent kemmer? A society of perverts? So Lord Tibe put it; I thought he was joking. Well, it may be the fact, but it’s a disgusting idea, Mr. Ai, and I don’t see why human beings here on earth should want or tolerate any dealings with creatures so monstrously different. But then, perhaps you’re here to tell me I have no choice in the matter.”

  “The choice, for Karhide, is yours, sir.”

  “And if I send you packing, too?”

  “Why, I’ll go. I might try again, with another generation…”

  That hit him. He snapped, “Are you immortal?”

  “No, not at all, sir. But the time-jumps have their uses. If I left Gethen now for the nearest world, Ollul, I’d spend seventeen years of planetary time getting there. Timejumping is a function of traveling nearly as fast as light. If I simply turned around and came back, my few hours spent on the ship would, here, amount to thirty-four years; and I could start all over.” But the idea of timejumping, which with its false hint of immortality had fascinated everyone who listened to me, from the Horden Island fisherman on up to the Prime Minister, left him cold. He said in his shrill harsh voice, “What’s that?”—pointing to the ansible.

  “The ansible communicator, sir.”

  “A radio?”

  “It doesn’t involve radio waves, or any form of energy. The principle it works on, the constant of simultaneity, is analogous in some ways to gravity—” I had forgotten again that I wasn’t talking to Estraven, who had read every report on me and who listened intently and intelligently to all my explanations, but instead to a bored king. “What it does, sir, is produce a message at any two points simultaneously. Anywhere. One point has to be fixed, on a planet of a certain mass, but the other end is portable. That’s this end. I’ve set the coordinates for the Prime World, Hain. A NAFAL ship takes 67 years to go between Gethen and Hain, but if I write a message on that keyboard it will be received on Hain at the same moment as I write it. Is there any communication you’d care to make with the Stabiles on Hain, sir?”

  “I don’t speak Voidish,” said the king with his dull, malign grin.

  “They’ll have an aide standing ready—I alerted them—who can handle Karhidish.”

  “What d’you mean? How?”

  “Well, as you know, sir, I’m not the first alien to come to Gethen. I was preceded by a team of Investigators, who didn’t announce their presence, but passed as well as they could for Gethenians, and traveled about in Karhide and Orgoreyn and the Archipelago for a year. They left, and reported to the Councils of the Ekumen, over forty years ago, during your grandfather’s reign. Their report was extremely favorable. And so I studied the information they’d gathered, and the languages they’d recorded, and came. Would you like to see the device working, sir?”

  “I don’t like tricks, Mr. Ai.”

  “It’s not a trick, sir. Some of your own scientists have examined—”

  “I’m not a scientist.”

  “You’re a sovereign, my lord. Your peers on the Prime World of the Ekumen wait for a word from you.”

  He looked at me savagely. In trying to flatter and interest him I had cornered him in a prestige-trap. It was all going wrong.

  “Very well. Ask your machine there what makes a man a traitor.”

  I typed out slowly on the keys, which were set to Karhidish char
acters, “King Argaven of Karhide asks the Stabiles on Hain what makes a man a traitor.” The letters burned across the small screen and faded. Argaven watched, his restless shifting stilled for a minute.

  There was a pause, a long pause. Somebody seventy-two light-years away was no doubt feverishly punching demands on the language computer for Karhidish, if not on a philosophy-storage computer. At last the bright letters burned up out of the screen, hung a while, and faded slowly away: “To King Argaven of Karhide on Gethen, greetings. I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out. Respectfully, Spimolle G. F., for the Stabiles, in Saire on Hain, 93/1491/45.”

  When the tape was recorded I pulled it out and gave it to Argaven. He dropped it on the table, walked again to the central fireplace, almost into it, and kicked the flaming logs and beat down the sparks with his hands. “As useful an answer as I might get from any Foreteller. Answers aren’t enough, Mr. Ai. Nor is your box, your machine there. Nor your vehicle, your ship. A bag of tricks and a trickster. You want me to believe you, your tales and messages. But why need I believe, or listen? If there are eighty thousand worlds full of monsters out there among the stars, what of it? We want nothing from them. We’ve chosen our way of life and have followed it for a long time. Karhide’s on the brink of a new epoch, a great new age. We’ll go our own way.” He hesitated as if he had lost the thread of his argument—not his own argument, perhaps, in the first place. If Estraven was no longer the King’s Ear, somebody else was. “And if there were anything these Ekumens wanted from us, they wouldn’t have sent you alone. It’s a joke, a hoax. Aliens would be here by the thousand.”

  “But it doesn’t take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.”

  “It might to keep it open.”

  “The Ekumen will wait till you open it, sir. It will force nothing on you. I was sent alone, and remain here alone, in order to make it impossible for you to fear me.”