The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Bedap knew all his old opponents on the Import-Export Council; he had been coming and fighting them for three years now.

  This speaker was a new one, a young man, probably a new lottery posting to the PDC List. Bedap looked him over benevolently and went on, “Let’s not refight old quarrels, shall we? I propose a new one. We’ve received an interesting message from a group on Urras. It came on the wave length our Ioti contacts use, but it didn’t come at a scheduled time, and was a weak signal. It seems to have been sent from a country called Benbili, not from A-Io. The group called themselves ‘The Odonian Society.’ It appears that they’re post-Settlement Odonians, existing in some fashion in the loopholes of law and government on Urras. Their message was to ‘the brothers on Anarres.’ You can read it in the Syndicate bulletin, it’s interesting. They ask if they might be allowed to send people here.”

  “Send people here? Let Urrasti come here? Spies?”

  “No, as settlers.”

  “They want the Settlement reopened, is that it, Bedap?”

  “They say they’re being hounded by their government, and are hoping for—”

  “Reopen the Settlement! To any profiteer who calls himself an Odonian?”

  To report an Anarresti managerial debate in full would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or among thoughts in an undecided mind.

  “If we let these so-called Odonians come, how do they propose to get here?”

  There spoke the opponent Bedap dreaded, the cool, intelligent woman named Rulag. She had been his cleverest enemy all year in the council. He glanced at Shevek, who was attending this council for the first time, to draw his attention to her. Somebody had told Bedap that Rulag was an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer’s clarity and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist’s hatred of complexity and irregularity. She opposed the Syndicate of Initiative on every issue, including that of its right to exist. Her arguments were good, and Bedap respected her. Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her.

  For there were times when Bedap wondered, privately, whether he and Shevek, when they got together in the winter of ’68 and discussed the means by which a frustrated physicist might print his work and communicate it to physicists on Urras, had not set off an uncontrollable chain of events. When they had finally set up radio contact, the Urrasti had been more eager to talk, to exchange information, than they had expected; and when they had printed reports of those exchanges, the opposition on Anarres had been more virulent than they had expected. People on both worlds were paying more attention to them than was really comfortable. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.

  “I suppose they’d come on one of the freighters,?’ he replied. “Like good Odonians, they’d hitchhike. If their government, or the Council of World Governments, lets them. Would they let them? Would the archists do the anarchists a favor? That’s what I’d like to find out. If we invited a small group, six or eight, of these people, what would happen at that end?”

  “Laudable curiosity,” Rulag said. “We’d know the danger better, all right, if we knew better how things really worked on Urras. But the danger lies in the act of finding out.” She stood up, signifying that she wanted to hold the floor for more than a sentence or two. Bedap winced, and glanced against at Shevek who sat beside him. “Look out for this one,” he muttered. Shevek made no response, but he was usually reserved and shy at meetings, no good at all unless he got moved deeply by something, in which case he was a surprisingly good speaker. He sat looking down at his hands. But as Rulag spoke, Bedap noticed that though she was addressing him, she kept glancing at Shevek.

  “Your Syndicate of Initiative,” she said, emphasizing the pronoun, “has proceeded with building a transmitter, with broadcasting to Urras and receiving from them, and with publishing the communications. You’ve done all this against the advice of the majority of the PDC, and increasing protests from the entire Brotherhood. There have been no reprisals against your equipment or yourselves yet, largely, I believe, because we Odonians have become unused to the very idea of anyone’s adopting a course harmful to others and persisting in it against advice and protest. It’s a rare event. In fact, you are the first of us who have behaved in the way that archist critics always predicted people would behave in a society without laws: with total irresponsibility towards the society’s welfare. I don’t propose to go again into the harm you’ve already done, the handing out of scientific information to a powerful enemy, the confession of our weakness that each of your broadcasts to Urras represents. But now, thinking that we’ve got used to all that, you’re proposing something very much worse. What’s the difference, you’ll say, between talking to a few Urrasti on the shortwave and talking to a few of them here in Abbenay? What’s the difference? What’s the difference between a shut door and an open one? Let’s open the door—that’s what he’s saying, you know, ammari. Let’s open the door, let the Urrasti come! Six or eight pseudo-Odonians on the next freighter. Sixty or eighty Ioti profiteers on the one after, to look us over and see how we can be divided up as a property among the nations of Urras. And the next trip will be six or eight hundred armed ships of war: guns, soldiers, an occupying force. The end of Anarres, the end of the Promise. Our hope lies, it has lain for a hundred and seventy years, in the Terms of the Settlement: No Urrasti off the ships, except the Settlers, then, or ever. No mixing. No contact. To abandon that principle now is to say to the tyrants whom we defeated once, The experiment has failed, come re-enslave us!”

  “Not at all,” Bedap said promptly. “The message is clear: The experiment has succeeded, we’re strong enough now to face you as equals.”

  The argument proceeded as before, a rapid hammering of issues. It did not last long. No vote was taken, as usual. Almost everyone present was strongly for sticking to the Terms of the Settlement, and as soon as this became clear Bedap said, “All right, I’ll take that as settled. Nobody comes in on the Kuieo Fort or the Mindful. In the matter of bringing Urrasti to Anarres, the Syndicate’s aims clearly must yield to the opinion of the society as a whole; we asked your advice, and we’ll follow it. But there’s another aspect of the same question. Shevek?”

  “Well, there’s the question,” Shevek said, “of sending an Anarresti to Urras.”

  “There were exclamations and queries. Shevek did not raise his voice, which was not far above a mumble, but persisted. “It wouldn’t harm or threaten anyone living on Anarres. And it appears that it’s a matter of the individual’s right; a kind of test of it, in fact. The Terms of the Settlement don’t forbid it. To forbid it now would be an assumption of authority by the PDC, an abridgment of the right of the Odonian individual to initiate action harmless to others.”

  Rulag sat forward. She was smiling a little. “Anyone can leave Anarres,” she said. Her light eyes glanced from Shevek to Bedap and back. “He can go whenever he likes, if the propertarians’ freighters will take him. He can’t come back.”

  “Who says he can’t?” Bedap demanded.

  “The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement. Nobody will be allowed off the freight ships farther than the boundary of the Port of Anarres.”

  “Well, now, that was surely meant to apply to Urrasti, not Anarresti,” said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.

  “A person coming from Urras is an Urrasti,” said Rulag.

  “Legalisms, legalisms! What’s all this quibbling?” said a calm, heavy woman named Trepil.

  “Quibbling!” cried the new member, the young man. He had a Northrising accent
and a deep, strong voice. “If you don’t like quibbling, try this. If there are people here that don’t like Anarres, let ’em go. I’ll help. I’ll carry ’em to the Port, I’ll even kick ’em there! But if they try to come sneaking back, there’s going to be some of us there to meet them. Some real Odonians. And they won’t find us smiling and saying, ‘Welcome home, brothers.’ They’ll find their teeth knocked down their throats and their balls kicked up into their bellies. Do you understand that? Is it clear enough for you?”

  “Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain as a fart,” said Bedap. “Clarity is a function of thought. You should learn some Odonianism before you speak here.”

  “You’re not worthy to say the name of Odo!” the young man shouted. “You’re traitors, you and the whole Syndicate! There are people all over Anarres watching you. You think we don’t know that Shevek’s been asked to go to Urras, to go sell Anarresti science to the profiteers? You think we don’t know that all you snivelers would love to go there and live rich and let the propertarians pat you on the back? You can go! Good riddance! But if you try coming back here, you’ll meet with justice!”

  He was on his feet and leaning across the table, shouting straight into Bedap’s face. Bedap looked up at him and said, “You don’t mean justice, you mean punishment. Do you think they’re the same thing?”

  “He means violence,” Rulag said. “And if there is violence, you will have caused it. You and your Syndicate. And you will have deserved it.”

  A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepil began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners’ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. “. . . what men deserve,” he was saying. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” They were, of course, Odo’s words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself, as if they came from his own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up slowly, slowly from the desert sand.

  Rulag listened, her head erect, her face set, like that of a person repressing pain. Across the table from her Shevek sat with his head bowed. The words left a silence after them, and he looked up and spoke into it.

  “You see,” he said, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. ‘The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.”

  Rulag replied, as quietly as he, but very coldly, “You have no right to involve us all in a risk that private motives compel you to take.”

  “No one who will not go as far as I’m willing to go has any right to stop me from going,” Shevek answered. Their eyes met for a second; both looked down.

  “The risk of a trip to Urras involves nobody but the person going,” Bedap said. “It changes nothing in the terms of the Settlement, and nothing in our relationship with Urras, except, perhaps, morally—to our advantage. But I don’t think we’re ready, any of us, to decide on it. I’ll withdraw the topic for the present, if it’s agreeable to the rest of you.”

  They assented, and he and Shevek left the meeting.

  “I’ve got to go over to the Institute,” Shevek said as they came out of the PDC building. “Sabul sent me one of his toenail clippings—first in years. What’s on his mind, I wonder?”

  “What’s on that woman Rulag’s mind, I wonder! She’s got a personal grudge against you. Envy, I suppose. We won’t put you two across a table again, or we’ll get nowhere. Though that young fellow from Northrising was bad news, too. Majority rule and might makes right! Are we going to get our message across, Shev? Or are we only hardening the opposition to it?”

  “We may really have to send somebody off to Urras—prove our right to by acts, if words won’t do it.”

  “Maybe. So long as it isn’t me! I’ll talk myself purple about our right to leave Anarres, but if I had to do it, by damn, I’d slit my throat.”

  Shevek laughed. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be home in an hour or so. Come eat with us tonight.”

  “I’ll meet you at the room.”

  Shevek set off down the street with his long stride; Bedap stood hesitating in front of the PDC building. It was midafternoon, a windy, sunny, cold spring day. The streets of Abbenay were bright, scoured-looking, alive with light and people. Bedap felt both excited and let down. Everything, including his emotions, was promising yet unsatisfactory. He went off to the domicile in the Pekesh Block where Shevek and Takver now lived, and found, as he had hoped, Takver at home with the baby.

  Takver had miscarried twice and then Pilum had come along, later and a little unexpected, but very welcome. She had been small at birth and now, getting on to two, was still small, with thin arms and legs. When Bedap held her he was always vaguely frightened of or repelled by the feeling of those arms, so fragile that he could have broken them simply with a twist of his hand. He was very fond of Pilun, fascinated by her cloudy grey eyes and won by her utter trustfulness, but whenever he touched her he knew consciously, as he had not done before, what the attraction of cruelty is, why the strong torment the weak. And therefore—though he could not have said why “therefore”—he also understood something that had never made much sense to him, or interested him at all: parental feeling. It gave him a most extraordinary pleasure when Pilun called him “tadde.”

  He sat down on the bed platform under the window. It was a good-sized room with two platforms. The floor was matted; there was no other furniture, no chairs or tables, only a little movable fence that marked off a play space or screened Pilun’s bed. Takver had the long, wide drawer of the other platform open, sorting piles of papers kept in it. “Do hold Pilun, dear Dap!” she said with her large smile, when the baby began working towards him. “She’s been into these papers at least ten times, every time I get them sorted. I’ll be done in just a minute here—ten minutes.”

  “Don’t hurry. I don’t want to talk. I just want to sit here. Come on, Pilun. Walk—there’s a girl! Walk to Taddle Dap. Now I’ve got you!”

  Pilun sat contentedly on his knees and studied his hand. Bedap was ashamed of his nails, which he no longer bit but which remained deformed from biting, and at first he closed his hand to hide them; then he was ashamed of shame, and opened up his hand. Pilun patted it.

  “This is a nice room,” he said. “With the north light. It’s always calm in here.”

  “Yes. Shh, I’m counting these.”

  After a while she put the piles of papers away and shut the drawer. “There! Sorry. I told Shev I’d page that article for him. How about a drink?”

  Rationing was still in force on many staple foods, though much less strict than it had been five years before. The fruit orchards of Northrising had suffered less and recovered quicker from the drought than the grain-growing
regions, and last year dried fruits and fruit juices had gone off the restricted list. Takver had a bottle standing in the shaded window. She poured them each a cupful, in rather lumpy earthenware cups which Sadik had made at school. She sat down opposite Bedap and looked at him, smiling. “Well, how’s it going at PDC?”

  “Same as ever. How’s the fish lab?”

  Takver looked down into her cup, moving it to catch the light on the surface of the liquid. “I don’t know. I’m thinking of quitting.”

  “Why, Takver?”

  “Rather quit than be told to. The trouble is, I like that job, and I’m good at it. And it’s the only one like it in Abbenay. But you can’t be a member of a research team that’s decided you’re not a member of it.”

  “They’re coming down harder on you, are they?”

  “All the time,” she said, and looked rapidly and unconsciously at the door, as if to be sure that Shevek was not there, hearing. “Some of them are unbelievable. Well, you know. There’s no use going on about it.”

  “No, that’s why I’m glad to catch you alone. I don’t really know. I, and Shev, and Skovan, and Gezach, and the rest of us who spend most of the time at the printing shop or the radio tower, don’t have postings, and so we don’t see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initiative. I’m at PDC a lot, but that’s a special situation, I expect opposition there because I create it. What is it that you run up against?”

  “Hatred,” Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. “Real hatred. The director of my project won’t speak to me any more. Well, that’s not much loss. He’s a stick anyhow. But some of the others do tell me what they think. . . . There’s a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I’m on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak to her about something. She wouldn’t let me talk. ‘Don’t you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers,’ and so on and so on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque.” Takver laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as she sat curled in the angle of Bedap’s arm, and then yawned. “But you know, it was frightening. I’m a coward, Dap. I don’t like violence. I don’t even like disapproval!”