The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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.”

  “Is there ever a good one?”

  Sabul produced an unnatural chuckle.

  “Did anything come in for us on the summer shipments from Urras?” Shevek inquired, clearing off sitting room on the bench. He sat down and crossed his legs. His light skin had tanned and the fine down that covered his face had bleached to silver while he worked in the fields in Southrising. He looked spare, and sound, and young, compared to Sabul. Both men were aware of the contrast.

  “Nothing of interest.”

  “No reviews of the Principles?”

  “No.” Sabul’s tone was surly, more like himself.

  “No letters?”

  “No.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd about it? What did you expect, a lectureship at Ieu Eun University? The Seo Oen Prize?”

  “I expected reviews and replies. There’s been time.” He said this as Sabul said, “Hardly been time for reviews yet.”

  There was a pause.

  “You’ll have to realize, Shevek, that a mere conviction of rightness isn’t self-justifying. You worked hard on the book, I know. I worked hard editing it, too, trying to make clear that it wasn’t just an irresponsible attack on Sequency theory, but had positive aspects. But if other physicists don’t see value in your work, then you’ve got to begin looking at the values you hold and seeing where the discrepancy lies. If it means nothing to other people, what’s the good of it? What’s its function?”

  “I’m a physicist, not a functions analyst,” Shevek said amiably.

  “Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst. You’re thirty, aren’t you? By that age a man should know not only his cellular function but his organic function—what his optimum role is the social organism is. You haven’t had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most people—”

  “No. Since I was ten or twelve I’ve known what kind of work I had to do.”

  “What a boy thinks he likes to do isn’t always what his society needs from him.”

  “I’m thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.”

  “You’ve reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment. First the Northsetting Regional Institute—”

  “And a forest project, and farm projects, and practical training, and block committees, and volunteer work since the drought; the usual amount of necessary kleggich. I like doing it, in fact. But I do physics too. What are you getting at?”

  As Sabul did not answer but merely glared under his heavy, oily brows, Shevek added, “You might as well say it plainly, because you’re not going to arrive at it by way of my social conscience.”

  “Do you consider the work you’ve done here functional?”

  “Yes. ‘The more that is organized, the more central the organism: centrality here implying the field of real function.’ Tomar’s Definitions. Since temporal physics attempts to organize everything comprehensible to the human mind, it is by definition a centrally functional activity.”

  “It doesn’t get bread into people’s mouths.”

  “I just spent six decads helping to do that. When I’m called again, I’ll go again. Meanwhile I stick by my trade. If there’s physics to be done, I claim the right to do it.”

  “What you have to face is the fact that at this point there is no physics to be done. Not the kind you do. We’ve got to gear to practicality.” Sabul shifted in his chair. He looked sullen and uneasy. “We’ve had to release five people for reposting. I’m sorry to say that you’re one of them. There it is.”

  “Just where I thought it was,” Shevek said, though in fact he had not till that moment realized that Sabul was kicking him out of the Institute. As soon as he heard it, however, it seemed familiar news; and he would not give Sabul the satisfaction of seeing him shaken.

  “What worked against you was a combination of things. The abstruse, irrelevant nature of the research you’ve done these last several years. Plus a certain feeling, not necessarily justified, but existing among many student and teaching members of the Institute, that both your teaching and your behavior reflect a certain disaffection, a degree of privatism, of nonaltruism. This was spoken of in meeting. I spoke for you, of course. But I’m only one syndic among many.”

  “Since when was altruism an Odonian virtue?” Shevek said. “Well, never mind. I see what you mean.” He stood up. He could not keep seated any longer, but otherwise had himself in control, and spoke perfectly naturally. “I take it you didn’t recommend me for a teaching post elsewhere.”

  “What would have been the use?” said Sabul, almost melodious in self-exculpation. “No one’s taking on new teachers. Teachers and students are working side by side at famine-prevention jobs all over the planet. Of course, this crisis won’t last. In a year or so we’ll be looking back on it, proud of the sacrifices we made and the work we did, standing by each other, share and share alike. But right now . . .”

  Shevek stood erect, relaxed, gazing out the small, scratched window at the blank sky. There was a mighty desire in him to tell Sabul, finally, to go to hell. But it was a different and profounder impulse that found words. “Actually,” he said, “you’re probably right.” With that he nodded to Sabul and left.

  He caught an omnibus downtown. He was still in a hurry, driven. He was following a pattern and wanted to come to the end of it, come to rest. He went to the Division of Labor Central Posting offices to request a posting to the community to which Takver had gone.

  Divlab, with its computers and its huge task of coordination, occupied a whole square; its buildings were handsome, imposing by Anarresti standards with fine plain lines. Inside Central Posting was high-ceilinged and barnlike, very full of people and activity, the walls covered with posting notices and directions as to which desk or department to go to for this business or that. As Shevek waited in one of the lines he listened to the people in front of him, a boy of sixteen and a man in his sixties. The boy was volunteering for a famine prevention posting. He was full of noble feelings, spilling over with brotherhood, adventurousness, hope. He was delighted to be going off on his own, leaving his childhood behind. He talked a great deal, like a child, in a voice not yet used to its deeper tones. Freedom, freedom! rang in his excited talk, in every word; and the old man’s voice grumbled and rumbled through it, teasing but not threatening, mocking but not cautioning. Freedom, the ability to go somewhere and do something, freedom was what the old man praised and cherished in the young one, even while he mocked his self-importance. Shevek listened to them with pleasure. They broke the morning’s series of grotesques.

  As soon as Shevek explained where he wanted to go, the clerk got a worried look, and went off for an atlas, which she opened on the counter between them. “Now look,
” she said. She was an ugly little woman with buck teeth; her hands on the colored pages of the atlas were deft and soft. “That’s Rolny, see, the peninsula sticking down into the North Temaenian. It’s just a huge sandspit. There’s nothing on it at all but the marine laboratories away out there at the end, see? Then the coast’s all swamp and salt marsh till you get clear round here to Harmony—a thousand kilometers. And west of it is the Coast Barrens. The nearest you could get to Rolny would be some town in the mountains. But they’re not asking for emergency postings there; they’re pretty self-sufficing. Of course, you could go there anyhow,” she added in a slightly different tone.

  “It’s too far from Rolny,” he said, looking at the map, noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated town where Takver had grown up, Round Valley. “Don’t they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Somebody to feed the fish?”

  “I’ll check.”

  The human/computer network of files in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of information concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each of the general economy of the worldwide society. “They just filled an emergency draft—that’s the partner, isn’t it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians and an experienced seiner. Staff complete.”

  Shevek leaned his elbows on the counter and bowed his head, scratching it, a gesture of confusion and defeat masked by self-consciousness. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Look, brother, how long is the partner’s posting?”

  “Indefinite.”

  “But it’s a famine-prevention job, isn’t it? It’s not going to go on like this forever. It can’t! It’ll rain, this winter.”

  He looked up into his sister’s earnest, sympathetic, harried face. He smiled a little, for he could not leave her effort to give hope without response.

  “You’ll get back together. Meanwhile—”

  “Yes. Meanwhile,” he said.

  She awaited his decision.

  It was his to make; and the options were endless. He could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place in the research station. He could live anywhere and do nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest commons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.

  The identity of the words “work” and “play” in Pravic had, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word “work” in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both implied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. “The saint is never busy,” she had said, perhaps wistfully.

  But the choices of the social being are never made alone.

  “Well,” Shevek said, “I just came back from a famine prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?”

  The clerk gave him an elder-sisterly look, incredulous but forgiving. “There’s about seven hundred Urgent calls posted around the room,” she said. “Which one would you like?”

  “Any of them need math?”

  “They’re mostly farming and skilled labor. Do you have any engineering training?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, there’s work-coordinating. That certainly takes a head for figures. How about this one?”

  “All right.”

  “That’s down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know.”

  “I’ve been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say, someday it will rain. . . .

  She nodded, smiling, and typed into his Divlab record: FROM Abbenay, NW Cent Inst Sci, TO Elbow, SW wk co, phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG: 5-1-3-165 —indefinite.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Urras

  SHEVEK was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service. Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and take along cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his whole body continued to feel strange to him—to feel, somehow, vile. As he began to be able to think again, fragments and moments of the night before came into his mind, vivid, senseless little scenes from the party at Vea’s. He tried not to think about them, and then could think of nothing else. Everything, everything became vile. He sat down at his desk, and sat there staring, motionless, perfectly miserable, for half an hour.

  He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from the sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he had never really accepted their judgment. He had never been ashamed.

  He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was a chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor would the knowledge have made much difference to him. Shame—the sense of vileness and of self-estrangement—was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the end of the evening at Vea’s. It was not only poor Vea who had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.

  He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head on his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of shame.

  On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society.

  Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

  On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

  He saw now—in detail, item by item from the beginning—that he had made a mistake in coming to Urras; his first big mistake, and one that was likely to last him the rest of his life. Once he had seen it, once he had rehearsed all the evidences of it that he had suppressed and denied for months—and it took him a long time, sitting there motionless at his desk—until he had arrived at the ludicrous and abominable last scene with Vea, and had lived through that again too, and felt his face go hot until his ears sang: then he was done with it. Even in this postalcoholic vale of tears, he felt no guilt. That was all done, now, and what must be thought about was, what must he do now? Having locked himself in jail, how might he act as a free man?

  He would not do physics for the politicians. That was clear, now.

  If he stopped working, would they let him go home?

  At this, he drew a long breath and raised his head, looking with unseeing eyes at the sunlit green landscape out the window. It was the first time he had let himself think of going home as a genuine possibility. The thought threatened to break down the gates and flood him with urgent yearning. To speak Pravic, to speak to friends, to see Takver, Pilun, Sadik, to touch the dust of Anarres. . . .

  They would not let him go. He had not paid his way. Nor could he let himself go: give up and run.

  As he sat at the desk in the bright morning sunlight he brought his hands down against the edge of the desk deliberately and sharply, twice, three times; his face w
as calm and appeared thoughtful.

  “Where do I go?” he said aloud.

  A knock on the door. Efor came in with a breakfast tray and the morning papers. “Come in at six usual but catching up your sleep,” he observed, setting out the tray with admirable deftness.

  “I got drunk last night,” Shevek said.

  “Beautiful while it lasts,” said Efor. “That be all, sir? Very well,” and he exited with the same deftness, bowing on the way to Pae, who entered as he left.

  “Didn’t mean to barge in on your breakfast! On my way back from chapel, just thought I’d look in.”

  “Sit down. Have some chocolate.” Shevek was unable to eat unless Pae made some pretense at least of eating with him. Pae took a honey roll and crumbled it about on a plate. Shevek still felt rather shaky but very hungry now, and attacked his breakfast with energy. Pae seemed to find it harder than usual to start conversation.

  “You’re still getting this trash?” he asked at last in an amused tone, touching the folded newspapers Efor had set on the table.

  “Efor brings them.”

  “Does he?”

  “I asked him to,” Shevek said, glancing at Pae, a split-second reconnoitering glance. “They broaden my comprehension of your country. I take an interest in your lower classes. Most Anarresti came from the lower classes.”

  “Yes, of course,” the younger man said, looking respectful and nodding. He ate a small bite of honey roll. “I think I’d like a drop of that chocolate after all,” he said, and rang the bell on the tray. Efor appeared at the door. “Another cup,” Pae said without turning. “Well, sir, we’d looked forward to taking you about again, now the weather’s turning fine, and showing you more of the country. Even a visit abroad, perhaps. But this damned war has put an end to all such plans, I’m afraid.”

  Shevek looked at the headline of the topmost paper: IO, THU CLASH NEAR BENBILI CAPITAL.