The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I drove about the city a while, then returned the car to the proper Regional Bureau and went on foot to the residence of the First Commensal District Commissioner of Entry-Roads and Ports. I had never made quite sure whether the invitation was a request or a polite command. Nusuth. I was in Orgoreyn to speak for the Ekumen, and might as well begin here as anywhere.

  My notions of Orgota phlegm and self-control were spoiled by Commissioner Shusgis, who advanced on me smiling and shouting, grabbed both my hands in the gesture which Karhiders reserve for moments of intense personal emotion, pumped my arms up and down as if trying to start a spark in my engine, and bellowed a greeting to the Ambassador of the Ekumen of the Known Worlds to Gethen.

  That was a surprise, for not one of the twelve or fourteen Inspectors who had studied my papers had shown any sign of recognizing my name or the terms Envoy or Ekumen – all of which had been at least vaguely familiar to all Karhiders I had met. I had decided that Karhide had never let any broadcasts concerning me be used on Orgota stations, but had tried to keep me a national secret.

  ‘Not Ambassador, Mr. Shusgis. Only an envoy’.

  ‘Future Ambassador, then. Yes, by Meshe!’ Shusgis, a solid, beaming man, looked me up and down and laughed again. ‘You’re not what I expected, Mr. Ai! Nowhere near it. Tall as a street-lamp, they said, thin as a sledge-runner, soot-black and slant-eyed – an ice-ogre I expected, a monster! Nothing of the kind. Only you’re darker than most of us.’

  ‘Earth-coloured,’ I said.

  ‘And you were in Siuwensin the night of the foray? By the breast of Meshe! what a world we live in. You might have been killed crossing the bridge over the Ey, after crossing all space to get here. Well! Well! You’re here. And a lot of people want to see you, and hear you, and make you welcome to Orgoreyn at last.’

  He installed me at once, no arguments, in an apartment of his house. A high official and wealthy man, he lived in a style that has no equivalent in Karhide, even among lords of great Domains. Shusgis’ house was a whole island, housing over a hundred employees, domestic servants, clerks, technical advisers, and so on, but no relatives, no kinfolk. The system of extended-family clans, of Hearths and Domains, though still vaguely discernible in the Commensal structure, was ‘nationalized’ several hundred years ago in Orgoreyn. No child over a year old lives with its parent or parents; all are brought up in the Commensal Hearths. There is no rank by descent. Private wills are not legal: a man dying leaves his fortune to the state. All start equal. But obviously they don’t go on so. Shusgis was rich, and liberal with his riches. There were luxuries in my rooms that I had not known existed on Winter – for instance, a shower. There was an electric heater as well as a well-stocked fireplace. Shusgis laughed: ‘They told me, keep the Envoy warm, he’s from a hot world, an oven of a world, and can’t stand our cold. Treat him as if he were pregnant, put furs on his bed and heaters in his room, heat his wash-water and keep his windows shut! Will it do? Will you be comfortable? Please tell me what else you’d like to have here.’

  Comfortable! Nobody in Karhide had ever asked me, under any circumstances, if I was comfortable.

  ‘Mr. Shusgis,’ I said with emotion, ‘I feel perfectly at home.’

  He wasn’t satisfied till he had got another pesthry-fur blanket on the bed, and more logs into the fireplace. ‘I know how it is,’ he said, ‘when I was pregnant I couldn’t keep warm – my feet were like ice, I sat over the fire all that winter. Long ago of course, but I remember!’ – Gethenians tend to have their children young; most of them, after the age of twenty-four or so, use contraceptives, and they cease to be fertile in the female phase at about forty. Shusgis was in his fifties, therefore his ‘long ago of course’, and it certainly was difficult to imagine him as a young mother. He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.

  ‘You’re well informed as to my looks and tastes, Mr. Shusgis. I’m flattered; I thought my reputation hadn’t preceded me.’

  ‘No,’ he said, understanding me perfectly, ‘they’d just as soon have kept you buried under a snowdrift, there in Erhenrang, eh? But they let you go, they let you go; and that’s when we realized, here, that you weren’t just another Karhidish lunatic but the real thing.’

  ‘I don’t follow you, I think.’

  ‘Why, Argaven and his crew were afraid of you, Mr. Ai – afraid of you and glad to see your back. Afraid if they mishandled you, or silenced you, there might be retribution. A foray from outer space, eh! So they didn’t dare touch you. And they tried to hush you up. Because they’re afraid of you and of what you bring to Gethen!’

  It was exaggerated; I certainly hadn’t been censored out of the Karhidish news, at least so long as Estraven was in power. But I already had the impression that for some reason news hadn’t got around about me much in Orgoreyn, and Shusgis confirmed my suspicions.

  ‘Then you aren’t afraid of what I bring to Gethen?’

  ‘No, we’re not, sir!’

  ‘Sometimes I am.’

  He chose to laugh jovially at that. I did not qualify my words. I’m not a salesman, I’m not selling Progress to the Abos. We have to meet as equals, with some mutual understanding and candour, before my mission can even begin.

  ‘Mr. Ai, there are a lot of people waiting to meet you, bigwigs and little ones, and some of them are the ones you’ll be wanting to talk to here, the people who get things done. I asked for the honour of receiving you because I’ve got a big house and because I’m well known as a neutral sort of fellow, not a Dominator and not an Open-Trader, just a plain Commissioner who does his job and won’t lay you open to any talk about whose house you’re staying in.’ He laughed. ‘But that means you’ll be eating out a good deal, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I’m at your disposal, Mr. Shusgis.’

  ‘Then tonight it’ll be a little supper with Vanake Slose.’

  ‘Commensal from Kuwera – Third District, is it?’ Of course I had done some homework before I came. He fussed over my condescension in deigning to learn anything about his country. Manners here were certainly different from manners in Karhide; there, the fuss he was making would either have degraded his own shifgrethor or insulted mine; I wasn’t sure which, but it would have done one or the other – practically everything did.

  I needed clothes fit for a dinner-party, having lost my good Erhenrang suit in the raid on Siuwensin, so that afternoon I took a Government taxi downtown and bought myself an Orgota rig. Hieb and shirt were much as in Karhide, but instead of summer breeches they wore thigh-high leggings the year round, baggy and cumbrous; the colours were loud blues or reds, and the cloth and cut and make were all a little shoddy. It was standardized work. The clothes showed me what it was that this impressive, massive city lacked: elegance. Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it. I went back to Shusgis’ house and revelled in the hot showerbath, which came at one from all sides in a kind of prickly mist. I thought of the cold tin tubs of East Karhide that I had chattered and shuddered in last summer, the ice-ringed basin in my Erhenrang room. Was that elegance? Long live comfort! I put on my gaudy red finery, and was driven with Shusgis to the supper-party in his chauffeured private car. There are more servants, more services in Orgoreyn than in Karhide. This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so. This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.

  Commensal Slose’s fiercely-lighted, high, white reception room held twenty or thirty guests, three of them Commensals and all of them evidently notables of one kind or another. This was more than a group of Orgota curious to see ‘the alien’. I was not a curiosity, as I had been for a whole year in Karhide; not a freak; not a puzzle. I was, it seemed, a key.

  W
hat door was I to unlock? Some of them had a notion, these statesmen and officials who greeted me effusively, but I had none.

  I wouldn’t find out during supper. All over Winter, even in frozen barbarian Perunter, it is considered execrably vulgar to talk business while eating. As supper was served promptly I postponed my questions and attended to a gummy fish soup and to my host and fellow guests. Slose was a frail, youngish person, with unusually light, bright eyes and a muted, intense voice; he looked like an idealist, a dedicated soul. I liked his manner, but I wondered what it was he was dedicated to. On my left sat another Commensal, a fat-faced fellow named Obsle. He was gross, genial, and inquisitive. By the third sip of soup he was asking me what the devil was I really born on some other world – what was it like there – warmer than Gethen, everybody said – how warm?

  ‘Well, in this same latitude on Terra, it never snows.’

  ‘It never snows. It never snows?’ He laughed with real enjoyment, as a child laughs at a good lie, encouraging further flights. ‘Our sub-arctic regions are rather like your habitable zone; we’re farther out of our last Ice Age than you, but not out, you see. Fundamentally Terra and Gethen are very much alike. All the inhabited worlds are. Men can live only within a narrow range of environments; Gethen’s at one extreme …’

  ‘Then there are worlds hotter than yours?’

  ‘Most of them are warmer. Some are hot; Gde, for instance. It’s mostly sand and rock desert. It was warm to start with, and an exploitive civilization wrecked its natural balances fifty or sixty thousand years ago, burned up the forests for kindling, as it were. There are still people there, but it resembles – if I understand the Text – the Yomesh idea of where thieves go after death.’

  That drew a grin from Obsle, a quiet, approving grin which made me suddenly revise my estimation of the man.

  ‘Some subcultists hold that those Afterlife Interims are actually, physically situated on other worlds, other planets of the real universe. Have you met with that idea, Mr. Ai?’

  ‘No; I’ve been variously described, but nobody’s yet explained me away as a ghost.’ As I spoke I chanced to look to my right, and saying ‘ghost’ saw one. Dark, in dark clothing, still and shadowy, he sat at my elbow, the spectre at the feast.

  Obsle’s attention had been taken up by his other neighbour, and most people were listening to Slose at the head of the table. I said in a low voice, ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Lord Estraven.’

  ‘The unexpected is what makes life possible,’ he said.

  ‘I was entrusted with a message for you.’

  He looked inquiring.

  ‘It takes the form of money – some of your own – Foreth rem ir Osboth sends it. I have it with me, at Mr. Shusgis’ house. I’ll see that it comes to you.’

  ‘It’s kind of you, Mr. Ai.’ He was quiet, subdued, reduced – a banished man living off his wits in a foreign land. He seemed disinclined to talk with me, and I was glad not to talk with him. Yet now and then during that long, heavy, talkative supperparty, though all my attention was given to those complex and powerful Orgota who meant to befriend or use me, I was sharply aware of him: of his silence: of his dark averted face. And it crossed my mind, though I dismissed the idea as baseless, that I had not come to Mishnory to eat roast blackfish with the Commensals of my own free will; nor had they brought me here. He had.

  9: ESTRAVEN THE TRAITOR

  An East Karhidish tale, as told in Gorinhering by Tobord Chorhawa and recorded by G. A. The story is well known in various versions, and a ‘habben’ play based on it is in the repertory of travelling players east of the Kargav.

  Long ago, before the days of King Argaven I who made Karhide one kingdom, there was a blood feud between the Domain of Stok and the Domain of Estre in Kerm Land. The feud had been fought in forays and ambushes for three generations, and there was no settling it, for it was a dispute over land. Rich land is scarce in Kerm, and a Domain’s pride is the length of its borders, and the lords of Kerm Land are proud men and umbrageous men, casting black shadows.

  It chanced that the heir of the flesh of the Lord of Estre, a young man, skiing across Icefoot Lake in the month of Irrem hunting pesthry, came on to rotten ice and fell into the lake. Though by using one ski as a lever on a firmer ice-edge he pulled himself up out of the water at last, he was in almost as bad case out of the water as in it, for he was drenched, the air was kurem,* and night was coming on. He saw no hope of reaching Estre eight miles away uphill, and so set off towards the village of Ebos on the north shore of the lake. As night fell the fog flowed down off the glacier and spread out all across the lake, so that he could not see his way, nor where to set his skis. Slowly he went for fear of rotten ice, yet in haste, because the cold was at his bones and before long he would not be able to move. He saw at last a light before him in the night and fog. He cast off his skis, for the lakeshore was rough going and bare of snow in places. His legs would not well hold him up any more, and he struggled as best he could to the light. He was far astray from the way to Ebos. This was a small house set by itself in a forest of the thore-trees that are all the woods of Kerm Land, and they grew close all about the house and no taller than its roof. He beat at the door with his hands and called aloud, and one opened the door and brought him into firelight.

  There was no one else there, only this one person alone. He took Estraven’s clothes off him that were like clothes of iron with the ice, and put him naked between furs, and with the warmth of his own body drove out the frost from Estraven’s feet and hands and face, and gave him hot ale to drink. At last the young man was recovered, and looked on the one who cared for him.

  This was a stranger, young as himself. They looked at each other. Each of them was comely, strong of frame and fine of feature, straight and dark. Estraven saw that the fire of kemmer was in the face of the other.

  He said, ‘I am Arek of Estre.’

  The other said, ‘I am Therem of Stok.’

  Then Estraven laughed, for he was still weak, and said, ‘Did you warm me back to life in order to kill me, Stokven?’

  The other said, ‘No.’

  He put out his hand and touched Estraven’s hand, as if he were making certain that the frost was driven out. At the touch, though Estraven was a day or two from his kemmer, he felt the fire waken in himself. So for a while both held still, their hands touching.

  ‘They are the same,’ said Stokven, and laying his palm against Estraven’s showed it was so: their hands were the same in length and form, finger by finger, matching like the two hands of one man laid palm to palm.

  ‘I have never seen you before,’ Stokven said. ‘We are mortal enemies.’ He rose, and built up the fire in the hearth, and returned to sit by Estraven.

  ‘We are mortal enemies,’ said Estraven. ‘I would swear kemmering with you.’

  ‘And I with you,’ said the other. Then they vowed kemmering to each other, and in Kerm Land then as now that vow of faithfulness is not to be broken, not to be replaced. That night, and the day that followed, and the night that followed, they spent in the hut in the forest by the frozen lake. On the next morning a party of men from Stok came to the hut. One of them knew young Estraven by sight. He said no word and gave no warning but drew his knife, and there in Stokven’s sight stabbed Estraven in the throat and chest, and the young man fell across the cold hearth in his blood, dead.

  ‘He was the heir of Estre,’ the murderer said.

  Stokven said, ‘Put him on your sledge, and take him to Estre for burial.’

  He went back to Stok. The men set off with Estraven’s body on the sledge, but they left it far in the thorn-forest for wild beasts to eat, and returned that night to Stok. Therem stood up before his parent in the flesh, Lord Harish rem ir Stokven, and said to the men, ‘Did you do as I bid you?’ They answered, ‘Yes.’ Therem said, ‘You lie, for you would never have come back alive from Estre. These men have disobeyed my command and lied to hide their disobedience: I ask their banishment.�
� Lord Harish granted it, and they were driven out of hearth and law.

  Soon after this Therem left his domain, saying that he wished to indwell at Rotherer Fastness for a time, and he did not return to Stok until a year had passed.

  Now in the Domain of Estre they sought for Arek in mountain and plain, and then mourned for him: bitter the mourning through summer and autumn, for he had been the lord’s one child of the flesh. But in the end of the month Thern when winter lay heavy on the land a man came up the mountainside on skis, and gave to the warder at Estre Gate a bundle wrapped in furs, saying, ‘This is Therem, the son’s son of Estre.’ Then he was down the mountain on his skis like a rock skipping over water, gone before any thought to hold him.

  In the bundle of furs lay a newborn child, weeping. They brought the child in to Lord Sorve and told him the stranger’s words; and the old lord full of grief saw in the baby his lost son Arek. He ordered that the child be reared as the son of the Inner Hearth, and that he be called Therem, though that was not a name ever used by the clan of Estre.

  The child grew comely, fine and strong; he was dark of nature and silent, yet all saw in him some likeness to the lost Arek. When he was grown Lord Sorve in the willfulness of old age named him heir of Estre. Then there were swollen hearts among Sorve’s kemmering-sons, all strong men in their prime, who had waited long for lordship. They laid ambush against young Therem when he went out alone hunting pesthry in the month of Irrem. But he was armed, and not taken unawares. Two of his hearth-brothers he shot, in the fog that lay thick on Icefoot Lake in the thaw-weather, and a third he fought with, knife to knife, and killed at last, though he himself was wounded on the chest and neck with deep cuts. Then he stood above his brother’s body in the mist over the ice, and saw that night was falling. He grew sick and weak as the blood ran from his wounds, and he thought to go to Ebos village for help; but in the gathering dark he went astray, and came to the thore-forest on the east shore of the lake. There seeing an abandoned hut he entered it, and too faint to light a fire he fell down on the cold stones of the hearth, and lay so with his wounds unstaunched.