The Dispossessed hc-1

by Ursula Le Guin

Shevek leaned his hands on the window sill, looking through the dim reflections on the pane into the darkness outside. He said at last, “Crazy talk, Dap.”

  “No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain — you said that! But it’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It’s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.”

  Shevek turned around to face him. “But you can’t seriously talk of a government, here!”

  “Tomar’s Definitions: ‘Government: The legal use of power to maintain and extend power.’ Replace ‘legal’ with ‘customary,’ and you’ve got Sabul, and the Syndicate of Instruction, and the PDC.”

  “The PDC!”

  “The PDC is, by now, basically an archistic bureaucracy.”

  After a moment Shevek laughed, not quite naturally, and said, “Well, come on, Dap, this is amusing, but it’s a bit diseased, isn’t it?”

  “Shev, did you ever think that what the analogic mode calls ‘disease,’ social disaffection, discontent, alienation, that this might analogically also be called pain — what you meant when you talked about pain, suffering? And that, like pain, it serves a function in the organism?”

  “No!” Shevek said, violently. “I was talking in personal, in spiritual terms.”

  “But you spoke of physical suffering, of a man dying of burns. And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life — is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! Our society is sick. You know it. You’re suffering its sickness. Its suicidal sickness!”

  “That’s enough, Dap. Drop it.”

  Bedap said no more. He began to bite his thumbnail, methodically and thoughtfully.

  Shevek sat down again on the bed platform and put his head in his hands. There was a long silence. The snow had ceased. A dry, dark wind pushed at the windowpane. The room was cold; neither of the young men had taken off his coat.

  “Look, brother,” Shevek said at last. “It’s not our society that frustrates individual creativity. It’s the poverty of Anarres. This planet wasn’t meant to support civilization. If we let one another down, if we don’t give up our personal desires to the common good, nothing, nothing on this barren world can save us. Human solidarity is our only resource.”

  “Solidarity, yes! Even on Urras, where food falls out of the trees, even there Odo said that human solidarity is our one hope. But we’ve betrayed that hope. We’ve let cooperation become obedience. On Urras they have government by the minority. Here we have government by the majority. But it is government! The social conscience isn’t a living thing any more, but a machine, a power machine, controlled by bureaucrats!”

  “You or I could volunteer and be lottery-posted to PDC within a few decads. Would that turn us into bureaucrats, bosses?”

  “It’s not the individuals posted to PDC, Shev. Most of them are like us. All too much like us. Well-meaning, naive. And it’s not just PDC. It’s anywhere on Anarres. Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities — anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that. We don’t educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids learn to parrot Odo’s words as if they were laws — the ultimate blasphemy!”

  Shevek hesitated. He had experienced too much of the kind of teaching Bedap was talking about, as a child, and even here at the Institute, to be able to deny Bedap’s accusation,

  Bedap seized his advantage relentlessly. “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”

  “But it’s not government, Dap! The experts and the old hands are going to manage any crew or syndicate; they know the work best. The work has to get done, after all! As for PDC, yes, it might become a hierarchy, a power structure, if it weren’t organized to prevent exactly that. Look how it’s set up! Volunteers, selected by lot; a year of training; then four years as a Listing; then out. Nobody could gain power, in the archist sense, in a system like that, with only four years to do it in.”

  “Some stay on longer than four years.”

  “Advisers? They don’t keep the vote.”

  “Votes aren’t important. There are people behind the scenes—”

  “Come on! That’s sheer paranoia! Behind the scenes — how? What scenes? Anybody can attend any PDC meeting, and if he’s an interested syndic, he can debate and vote! Are you trying to pretend that we have politicians here?” Shevek was furious with Bedap; his prominent ears were scarlet, his voice had got loud. It was late, not a light showing across the quadrangle. Desar, in Room 45, knocked on the wall for quiet.

  “I’m saying what you know,” Bedap replied in a much lowered voice. “That it’s people like Sabul who really run PDC, and run it year after year.”

  “If you know that,” Shevek accused in a harsh whisper, “then why haven’t you made it public? Why haven’t you called a criticism session in your syndicate, if you have facts? If your ideas won’t stand public examination, I don’t want them as midnight whispers.”

  Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

  “Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

  “In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

  “In the Asylum?”

  Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

  “Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny — crazy — you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down, to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much — bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one.

  To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went.”

  “Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

  Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. H
e wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

  “You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

  “Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

  “I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is — a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about — ‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us — the social organism?”

  “If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.

  Neither spoke for a while.

  “I’d better go home,” Bedap said, unfolding stiffly and standing up.

  “It’s an hour’s walk from here. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Well, I thought… since…”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “All right. Where’s the shittery?”

  “Left, third door.”

  When he came back Bedap proposed to sleep on the floor, but as there was no rug and only one warm blanket, this idea was, as Shevek monotonously remarked, stupid. They were both glum and cross; sore, as if they had fist-fought but not fought all their anger out. Shevek unrolled the bedding and they lay down. At the turning out of the lamp a silvery darkness came into the room, the half darkness of a city night when there is snow on the ground and light reflects faintly upward from the earth. It was cold. Each felt the warmth of the other’s body as very welcome,

  “I take it back about the blanket.”

  “Listen, Dap. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Oh, let’s talk about it in the morning.”

  “Right.”

  They moved closer together. Shevek turned over onto his face and fell asleep within two minutes. Bedap struggled to hold on to consciousness, slipped into the warmth, deeper, into the defenselessness, the trustfulness of sleep, and slept. In the night one of them cried out aloud, dreaming. The other one reached his arm out sleepily, muttering reassurance, and the blind warm weight of his touch outweighed all fear.

  They met again the next evening and discussed whether or not they should pair for a while, as they had when they were adolescent. It had to be discussed, because Shevek was pretty definitely heterosexual and Bedap pretty definitely homosexual; the pleasure of it would be mostly for Bedap. Shevek was perfectly willing, however, to reconfirm the old friendship; and when he saw that the sexual element of it meant a great deal to Bedap, was, to him, a true consummation, then he took the lead, and with considerable tenderness and obstinacy made sure that Bedap spent the night with him again. They took a free single in a domicile downtown, and both lived there for about a decad; then they separated again, Bedap to his dormitory and Shevek to Room 46. There was no strong sexual desire on either side to make the connection last. They had simply reasserted trust.

  Yet Shevek sometimes wondered, as he went on seeing Bedap almost daily, what it was he liked and trusted in his friend. He found Bedap’s present opinions detestable and his insistence on talking about them tiresome. They argued fiercely almost every time they met. They caused each other a good deal of pain. Leaving Bedap, Shevek frequently accused himself of merely clinging to an outgrown loyalty, and swore angrily not to see Bedap again.

  But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic, destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated its expression. He had changed Shevek’s life, and Shevek knew it, knew that he was going on at last, and that it was Bedap who had enabled him to go on. He fought Bedap every step of the way, but he kept coming, to argue, to do hurt and get hurt, to find — under anger, denial, and rejection — what he sought. He did not know what he sought. But he knew where to look for it.

  It was, consciously, as unhappy a time for him as the year that had preceded it. He was still getting no further with his work; in fact he had abandoned temporal physics altogether and backtracked into humble lab work, setting up various experiments in the radiation laboratory with a deft, silent technician as partner, studying subatomic velocities. It was a well-trodden field, and his belated entry into it was taken by his colleagues as an admission that he had finally stopped trying to be original. The Syndicate of Members of the Institute gave him a course to teach, mathematical physics for entering students. He got no sense of triumph from finally having been given a course, for it was just that: he had been given it, been permitted it. He got little comfort from anything. That the walls of his hard puritanical conscience were widening out immensely was anything but a comfort. He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to, no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold, getting farther lost.

  Bedap had made many friends, an erratic and disaffected lot, and some of them took a liking to the shy man. He felt no closer to them than to the more conventional people he knew at the Institute, but he found their independence of mind more interesting. They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric. Some of them were intellectual nuchnibi who had not worked on a regular posting for years. Shevek disapproved of them severely, when he was not with them.

  One of them was a composer named Salas. Salas and Shevek wanted to learn from each other. Salas had little math, but as long as Shevek could explain physics in the analogic or experiential modes, he was an eager and intelligent listener. In the same way Shevek would listen to anything Salas could tell him about musical theory, and anything Salas would play him on tape or on his instrument, the portative. But some of what Salas told him he found extremely troubling. Salas had taken a posting to a canal-digging crew on the Plains of the Temae, east of Abbenay. He came into the city on his three days off each decad, and stayed with one girl or another. Shevek assumed that he had taken the posting because he wanted a bit of outdoor work for a change; but then he found that Salas had never had a posting in music, or in anything but unskilled labor.

  “What’s your listing at Divlab?” he asked, puzzled.

  “General labor pool.”

  “But you’re skilled! You put in six or eight years at the Music Syndicate conservatory, didn’t you? Why don’t they post you to music teaching?”

  “They did. I refused. I won’t be ready to teach for another ten years. I’m a composer, remember, not a performer.”

  “But there must be postings for composers.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Music Syndicate, I suppose.”

  “But the Music syndics don’t like my compositions. And nobody much else does, yet I can’t be a syndicate all by myself, can I?”

  Salas was a bony little man, already bald on the upper face and cranium; he wore what was left of his hair short, in a silky beige fringe around the back of his neck and chin. His smile was sweet, wrinkling his expressive face. “You see, I don’t write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.” He smiled more sweetly than ever. “They want chorales. I hate chorales. They want wide-harmony pieces like Sessur wrote. I hate Sessur’s music. I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent cycl
ic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony. But they don’t hear it. They won’t hear it. They can’t!”

  Shevek brooded a while. “If you called it The Joys of Solidarity,” he said, “would they hear it?”

  “By damn!” said Bedap, who was listening in. “That’s the first cynical thing you ever said in your life, Shev. Welcome to the work crew!”

  Salas laughed. “They’d give it a hearing, but they’d turn it down for taping or regional performance. It’s not in the Organic Style.”

  “No wonder I never heard any professional music while I lived in Northsetting. But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we’re capable of. It’s certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act. No matter what your syndics say, how can Divlab justify not giving you a posting in your own field?”

  “They don’t want to share it,” Salas said gleefully. “It scares ’em.”

  Bedap spoke more gravely: “They can justify it because music isn’t useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music’s mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we’ve thrown it all away. We’ve gone right back to barbarism. If it’s new, run away from it; if you can’t eat it, throw it away!”

  Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to say. Yet he could not join in Bedap’s criticism. Bedap had forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul.