The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Then there was the private room, another moral thorn. As a child, if you slept alone in a single it meant you had bothered the others in the dormitory until they wouldn’t tolerate you; you had egoized. Solitude equated with disgrace. In adult terms, the principal referent for single rooms was a sexual one. Every domicile had a number of singles, and a couple that wanted to copulate used one of these free singles for a night, or a decad, or as long as they liked. A couple undertaking partnership took a double room; in a small town where no double was available, they often built one on to the end of a domicile, and long, low, straggling buildings might thus be created room by room, called “partners’ truck trains.” Aside from sexual pairing there was no reason for not sleeping in a dormitory. You could choose a small one or a large one, and if you didn’t like your roommates, you could move to another dormitory. Everybody had the workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature was genuinely unsociable had to get away from society and look after himself. He was completely free to do so. He could build himself a house wherever he liked (though if it spoiled a good view or a fertile bit of land he might find himself under heavy pressure from his neighbors to move elsewhere). There were a good many solitaries and hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti communities, pretending that they were not members of a social species. But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function.

  Shevek’s first reaction to being put in a private room, then, was half disapproval and half shame. Why had they stuck him in here? He soon found out why. It was the right kind of place for his kind of work. If ideas arrived at midnight, he could turn on the light and write them down; if they came at dawn, they weren’t jostled out of his head by the conversation and commotion of four or five roommates getting up; if they didn’t come at all and he had to spend whole days sitting at his desk staring out the window, there was nobody behind his back to wonder why he was slacking. Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex. But all the same, was it necessary?

  There was always a dessert at the Institute refectory at dinner. Shevek enjoyed it very much, and when there were extras he took them. And his conscience, his organic-societal conscience, got indigestion. Didn’t everybody at every refectory, from Abbenay to Uttermost, get the same, share and share alike? He had always been told so and had always found it so. Of course there were local variations: regional specialities, shortages, surpluses, makeshifts in situations such as Project Camps, poor cooks, good cooks, in fact an endless variety within the unchanging framework. But no cook was so talented that he could make a dessert without the makings. Most refectories served dessert once or twice a decad. Here it was served nightly. Why? Were the members of the Central Institute of the Sciences better than other people?

  Shevek did not ask these questions of anyone else. The social conscience, the opinion of others, was the most powerful moral force motivating the behavior of most Anarresti, but it was a little less powerful in him than in most of them. So many of his problems were of a kind other people did not understand that he had got used to working them out for himself, in silence. So he did with these problems, which were much harder for him, in some ways, than those of temporal physics. He asked no one’s opinion. He stopped taking dessert at the refectory.

  He did not, however, move to a dormitory. He weighed the moral discomfort against the practical advantage, and found the latter heavier. He worked better in the private room. The job was worth doing and he was doing it well. It was centrally functional to his society. The responsibility justified the privilege.

  So he worked.

  He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labor, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom. He was the free man: he could do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it for as long as he wanted to do it. And he did. He worked. He work/played.

  He was sketching out notes for a series of hypotheses which led to a coherent theory of Simultaneity. But that began to seem a petty goal; there was a much greater one, a unified theory of Time, to be reached, if he could just get to it. He felt that he was in a locked room in the middle of a great open country: it was all around him, if he could find the way out, the way clear. The intuition became an obsession. During that autumn and winter he got more and more out of the habit of sleeping. A couple of hours at night and a couple more sometime during the day were enough for him, and such naps were not the kind of profound sleep he had always had before, but almost a waking on another level, they were so full of dreams. He dreamed vividly, and the dreams were part of his work. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles. He got up and scribbled down, without really waking, the mathematical formula that had been eluding him for days. He saw space shrink in upon him like the walls of a collapsing sphere driving in and in towards a central void, closing, closing, and he woke with a scream for help locked in his throat, struggling in silence to escape from the knowledge of his own external emptiness.

  On a cold afternoon late in winter he stopped in at the physics office on his way home from the library to see if there were any letters for him in the pickup box. He had no reason to expect any, since he had never written any of his friends at Northsetting Regional; but he hadn’t been feeling very well for a couple of days; he had disproved some of his own most beautiful hypotheses and brought himself after half a year’s hard work right around to where he had started from, the phasic model was simply too vague to be useful, his throat felt sore, he wished there was a letter from somebody he knew, or maybe somebody in the physics office to say hello to, at least. But nobody was there except Sabul.

  “Look here, Shevek.”

  He looked at the book the older man held out: a thin book, bound in green, the Circle of Life on the cover. He took it and looked at the title page: “A Critique of Atro’s Infinite Sequency Hypothesis.” It was his essay, Atro’s acknowledgment and defense, and his reply. It had all been translated or retranslated into Pravic, and printed by the PDC presses in Abbenay. There were two authors’ names: Sabul, Shevek.

  Sabul craned his neck over the copy Shevek held, and gloated. His growl became throaty and chuckling. “We’ve finished Atro. Finished him, the damned profiteer! Now let them try to talk about ‘puerile imprecision’!” Sabul had nursed ten years’ resentment against the Physics Review of Ieu Eun University, which had referred to his theoretical work as “crippled by provincialism and the puerile imprecision with which Odonian dogma infects every area of thought.” “They’ll see who’s provincial now!” he said, grinning. In nearly a year’s acquaintance Shevek could not recall having seen him smile.

  Shevek sat down across the room, clearing a pile of papers off a bench to do so; the physics office was of course communal, but Sabul kept this back room of the two littered with materials he was using, so that there never seemed to be quite room for anyone else. Shevek looked down at the book he still held, then out the window. He felt, and looked, rather ill. He also looked tense; but with Sabul he had never been shy or awkward, as he often was with people whom he would have liked to know. “I didn’t know you were translating it,” he said.

  “Translated it, edited it. Polished some of the rougher spots, filled in transitions you’d left out, and so forth. Couple of decads’ work. You should be proud of it, your ideas to a large extent form the groundwork of the finished book.”

  It consisted entirely o
f Shevek’s and Atro’s ideas.

  “Yes,” Shevek said. He looked down at his hands. Presently he said, “I’d like to publish the paper I wrote this quarter on Reversibility. It ought to go to Atro. It would interest him. He’s still hung up on causation.”

  “Publish it? Where?”

  “In Iotic, I meant—on Urras. Send it to Atro, like this last one, and he’ll put it in one of the journals there.”

  “You can’t give them a work to publish that hasn’t been printed here.”

  “But that’s what we did with this one. All this, except my rebuttal, came out in the Ieu Eun Review—before this came out here.”

  “I couldn’t prevent that, but why do you think I hurried this into print? You don’t think everybody in PDC approves of our trading ideas with Urras like this, do you? Defense insists that every word that leaves here on those freighters be passed by a PDC-approved expert. And on top of that, do you think all the provincial physicists who don’t get in on this pipeline to Urras don’t begrudge our using it? Think they aren’t envious? There are people lying in wait, lying in wait for us to make a false step. If we’re ever caught doing it, we’ll lose that mail slot on the Urrasti freighters. You see the picture now?”

  “How did the Institute get that mail slot in the first place?”

  “Pegvur’s election to the PDC, ten years ago.” Pegvur had been a physicist of moderate distinction. “I’ve trod damned carefully to keep it, ever since. See?”

  Shevek nodded.

  “In any case, Atro doesn’t want to read that stuff of yours. I looked that paper over and gave it back to you decads ago. When are you going to stop wasting time on these reactionary theories Gvarab clings to? Can’t you see she’s wasted her whole life on ’em? If you keep at it, you’re going to make a fool of yourself. Which, of course, is your inalienable right. But you’re not going to make a fool of me.”

  “What if I submit the paper for publication here, in Pravic, then?”

  “Waste of time.”

  Shevek absorbed this with a slight nod. He got up, lanky and angular, and stood a moment, remote among his thoughts. The winter light lay harsh on his hair, which he now wore pulled back in a queue, and his still face. He came to the desk and took a copy off the little stock of new books. “I’d like to send one of these to Mitis,” he said.

  “Take all you want. Listen. If you think you know what you’re doing better than I do, then submit that paper to the Press. You don’t need permission! This isn’t some kind of hierarchy, you know! I can’t stop you. All I can do is give you my advice.”

  “You’re the Press Syndicate’s consultant on manuscripts in physics,” Shevek said. “I thought I’d save time for everyone by asking you now.”

  His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.

  “Save time, what do you mean?” Sabul growled, but Sabul was also an Odonian: he writhed as if physically tormented by his own hypocrisy, turned away from Shevek, turned back to him, and said spitefully, his voice thick with anger. “Go ahead! Submit the damned thing! I’ll declare myself incompetent to give counsel on it. I’ll tell them to consult Gvarab. She’s the Simultaneity expert, not I. The mystical gagaist! The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I suppose? The fact is that I am incompetent—in other words, unwilling—to counsel PDC or the Press on intellectual excrement!”

  “The work I’ve done for you,” Shevek said, “is part of the work I’ve done following Gvarab’s ideas in Simultaneity. If you want one, you’ll have to stand the other. Grain grows best in shit, as we say in Northsetting.”

  He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from Sabul, said goodbye and left.

  He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without apparent violence. But violence had been done.

  As Mitis had predicted, he was “Sabul’s man.” Sabul had ceased to be a functioning physicist years ago; his high reputation was built on expropriations from other minds. Shevek was to do the thinking, and Sabul would take the credit.

  Obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which Shevek would denounce and relinquish. Only he would not. He needed Sabul. He wanted to publish what he wrote and to send it to the men, who could understand it, the Urrasti physicists; he needed their ideas, their criticism, their collaboration.

  So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I’ll give you that. Refuse me and I’ll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?

  But all I want to do is get the job done, Shevek pleaded in his mind, as he walked across the mall towards the domicile quadrangle in the grey, windy afternoon. It’s my duty, it’s my joy, it’s the purpose of my whole life. The man I have to work with is competitive, a dominance-seeker, a profiteer, but I can’t change that; if I want to work, I have to work with him.

  He thought about Mitis and her warning. He thought about the Northsetting Institute and the party the night before he left. It seemed very long ago now, and so childishly peaceful and secure that he could have wept in nostalgia. As he passed under the porch of the Life Sciences Building a girl passing looked sidelong at him, and he thought that she looked like that girl—what was her name?—the one with short hair, who had eaten so many fried cakes the night of the party. He stopped and turned, but the girl was gone around the corner. Anyhow she had had long hair. Gone, gone, everything gone. He came out from the shelter of the porch into the wind. There was a fine rain on the wind, sparse. Rain was sparse when it fell at all. This was a dry world. Dry, pale, inimical. “Inimical!” Shevek said out loud in Iotic. He had never heard the language spoken; it sounded very strange. The rain stung his face like thrown gravel. It was an inimical rain. His sore throat had been joined by a terrific headache, of which he had only just become aware. He got to Room 46 and lay down on the bed platform, which seemed to be much farther down than usual. He shook, and could not stop shaking. He pulled the orange blanket up around him and huddled up, trying to sleep, but he could not stop shaking, because he was under constant atomic bombardment from all sides, increasing as the temperature increased.

  He had never been ill, and never known any physical discomfort worse than tiredness. Having no idea what a high fever was like, he thought, during the lucid intervals of that long night, that he was going insane. Fear of madness drove him to seek help when day came. He was too frightened of himself to ask help from his neighbors on the corridor: he had heard himself raving in the night. He dragged himself to the local clinic, eight blocks away, the cold streets bright with sunrise spinning solemnly about him. At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light pneumonia and told him to go to bed in Ward Two. He protested. The aide accused him of egoizing and explained that if he went home a physician would have to go to the trouble of calling on him there and arranging private care for him. He went to bed in Ward Two. All the other people in the ward were old. An aide came and offered him a glass of water and a pill. “What is it?” Shevek asked suspiciously. His teeth were chattering again.

  “Antipyretic.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bring down the fever.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  The aide shrugged. “All right,” she said, and went on.

  Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ill: a result of their society’s very successful prophylaxy, and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use of the words “healthy” and “sick.” They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was immoral. They fought shy of pills and shots. As middle
age and old age came on, most of them changed their view. The pain got worse than the shame. The aide gave the old men in Ward Two their medicine, and they joked with her. Shevek watched with dull incomprehension.

  Later on there was a doctor with an injection needle. “I don’t want it,” Shevek said. “Stop egoizing,” the doctor said. “Roll over.” Shevek obeyed.

  Later on there was a woman who held a cup of water for him, but he shook so much that the water was spilt, wetting the blanket. “Let me alone,” he said. “Who are you?” She told him, but he did not understand. He told her to go away, he felt very well. Then he explained to her why the cyclic hypothesis, though unproductive in itself, was essential to his approach to a possible theory of Simultaneity, a cornerstone. He spoke partly in his own language and partly in Iotic, and wrote the formulas and equations on a slate with a piece of chalk so that she and the rest of the group would understand, as he was afraid they would misunderstand about the cornerstone. She touched his face and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She was not there, she had gone.

  A long time later, he was awake. He could breathe. He was perfectly well. Everything was all right. He felt disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect, stable moment, the balance of the world. The winter light along the ceiling was beautiful beyond expression. He lay and watched it. The old men down the ward were laughing together, old husky cackling laughs, a beautiful sound. The woman came in and sat down by his cot. He looked at her and smiled.