The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors’ approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t ‘break’ a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people. We’re only just beginning to feel what it’s like to be revolutionaries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isn’t comfortable.”

  “Some people understand,” Takver said with determined optimism. “A woman on the omnibus yesterday. I don’t know where I’d met her, tenth-day work some time, I suppose; she said, ‘It must be wonderful to live with a great scientist, it must be so interesting!’ And I said, ‘Yes, at least there’s always something to talk about’. . . . Pilun, don’t go to sleep, baby! Shevek will be home soon and we’ll go to commons. Jiggle her, Dap. Well, anyway, you see, she knew who Shev was, but she wasn’t hateful or disapproving, she was very nice.”

  “People do know who he is,” Bedap said. “It’s funny, because they can’t understand his books any more than I can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate, myself. And yet people know of him, they have this feeling he’s something to be proud of. That’s one thing the Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed Shev’s books. It may be the only wise thing we’ve done.”

  “Oh, now! You must have had a bad session at PDC today.”

  “We did. I’d like to cheer you up, Takver, but I can’t. The Syndicate is cutting awfully close to the basic societal bond, the fear of the stranger. There was a young fellow there today openly threatening violent reprisal. Well, it’s a poor option, but he’ll find others ready to take it. And that Rulag, by damn, she’s a formidable opponent!”

  “You know who she is, Dap?”

  “Who she is?”

  “Shev never told you? Well, he doesn’t talk about her. She’s the mother.”

  “Shev’s mother?”

  Takver nodded. “She left when he was two. The father stayed with him. Nothing unusual, of course. Except Shev’s feelings. He feels that he lost something essential—he and the father both. He doesn’t make a general principle out of it, that parents should always keep the children, or anything. But the importance loyalty has for him, it goes back to that, I think.”

  “What’s unusual,” said Bedap energetically, oblivious of Pilun, who had gone sound asleep on his lap, “distinctly unusual, is her feelings about him! She’s been waiting for him to come to an Import-Export meeting, you could tell, today. She knows he’s the soul of the group, and she hates us because of him. Why? Guilt? Has the Odonian Society gone so rotten we’re motivated by guilt? . . . You know, now that I know it, they look alike. Only in her, it’s all gone hard, rock-hard—dead.”

  The door opened as he was speaking. Shevek and Sadik came in. Sadik was ten years old, tall for her age and thin, all long legs, supple and fragile, with a cloud of dark hair. Behind her came Shevek; and Bedap, looking at him in the curious new light of his kinship with Rulag, saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness to which all the past contributes: the splendid reticent face, full of life but worn down, worn to the bone. It was an intensely individual face, and yet the features were not only like Rulag’s but like many others among the Anarresti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.

  In the room, meantime, much closeness, commotion, communion: greetings, laughter, Pilun being passed around, rather crossly on her part, to be hugged, the bottle being passed around to be poured, questions, conversations. Sadik was the center first, because she was the least often there of the family; then Shevek. “What did old Greasy Beard want?”

  “Were you at the Institute?” Takver asked, examining him as he sat beside her.

  “Just went by there. Sabul left me a note this morning at the Syndicate.” Shevek drank off his fruit juice and lowered the cup, revealing a curious set to his mouth, a nonexpression. “He said the Physics Federation has a full-time posting to fill. Autonomous, permanent.”

  “For you, you mean? There? At the Institute?”

  He nodded.

  “Sabul told you?”

  “He’s trying to enlist you,” Bedap said.

  “Yes, I think so. If you can’t uproot it, domesticate it, as we used to say in Northsetting.” Shevek suddenly and spontaneously laughed. “It is funny, isn’t it?” he said.

  “No,” said Takver. “It isn’t funny. It’s disgusting. How could you go talk to him, even? After all the slander he’s spread about you, and the lies about the Principles being stolen from him, and not telling you that the Urrasti gave you that prize, and then just last year, when he got those kids who organized the lecture series broken up and sent away because of your ‘crypto-authoritarian influence’ over them—you an authoritarian!—that was sickening, unforgivable. How can you be civil to a man like that?”

  “Well, it isn’t all Sabul, you know. He’s just a spokesman.”

  “I know, but he loves to be the spokesman. And he’s been so squalid for so long! Well, what did you say to him?”

  “I temporized—as you might say,” Shevek said, and laughed again. Takver glanced at him again, knowing now that he was, for all his control, in a state of extreme tension or excitement.

  “You didn’t turn him down flat, then?”

  “I said that I’d resolved some years ago to accept no regular work postings, so long as I was able to do theoretical work. So he said that since it was an autonomous post I’d be completely free to go on with the research I’d been doing, and the purpose of giving me the post was to—let’s see how he put it—‘to facilitate access to experimental equipment at the Institute, and to the regular channels of publication and dissemination.’ The PDC press, in other words.”

  “Why, then you’ve won,” Takver said, looking at him with a queer expression. “You’ve won. They’ll print what you write. It’s what you wanted when we came back here five years ago. The walls are down.”

  “There are walls behind the walls,” Bedap said.

  “I’ve won only if I accept the posting. Sabul is offering to . . . legalize me. To make me official. In order to dissociate me from the Syndicate of Initiative. Don’t you see that as his motive, Dap?”

  “Of course,” Bedap said. His face was somber. “Divide to weaken.”

  “But to take Shev back into the Institute, and print what he writes on the PDC press, is to give implied approval to the whole Syndicate, isn’t it?”

  “It might mean that to most people,” Shevek said.

  “No, it won’t,” Bedap said. “It’ll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists. But the good Odonians at the Institute gently showed him his errors and he has returned to the path of social-organic truth. Leaving the Syndicate of Initiative shorn of its one conceivable claim to the attention of anybody on Anarres or Urras.”

  “I’m not leaving the Syndicate, Bedap.”

  Bedap lifted his head, and said after a minute. “No, I know you’re not.”

  “All right. Let’s go to dinner. This belly growls: listen to it, Pilun, hear it? Rrowr, rrowr!”

  “Hup!” Pilun said in a tone of command. Shevek picked her up and stood up, swinging her onto his shoulder. Behind his head and the child’s, the single mobile hanging in this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in completely interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. Takver called it the Inhabitation of T
ime.

  They went to the Pekesh commons, and waited till the registry board showed a sign-out, so they could bring Bedap in as a guest. His registering there signed him out of the commons where he usually ate, as the system was coordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly mechanized “homeostatic processes” beloved by the early Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustrations, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in Abbenay, having a tradition of great cooks. An opening appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek’s and Takver’s joined them at table. Otherwise they were let alone—left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter. They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every now and then Bedap felt that around them there was a circle of silence.

  “I don’t know what the Urrasti will think up next,” he said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself, to his annoyance, lowering his voice. “They’ve asked to come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the next move be?”

  “I didn’t know they’d actually asked Shev to go there,” Takver said with a half frown.

  “Yes, you did,” Shevek said. “When they told me that they’d given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they asked if I couldn’t come, remember? To get the money that goes with it!” Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had alway been alone.

  “That’s right. I did know that. It just didn’t register as an actual possibility. You’d been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Urras, just to shock them.”

  “That’s what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made me say it.”

  “Were they shocked?”

  “Hair on end, eyes bulging—”

  Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek, exercising her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. “O mathery bathery,” she proclaimed, “Abbery abbery babber dab!” Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned long ago that you took Shevek with complications or not at all. The most silent one of them all was Sadik.

  Bedap stayed on with them for an hour after dinner in the pleasant, spacious common rooms of the domicile, and when he got up to go offered to accompany Sadik to her school dormitory, which was on his way. At this something happened, one of those events or signals obscure to those outside a family; all he knew was that Shevek, with no fuss or discussion, was coming along. Takver had to go feed Pilun, who was getting louder and louder. She kissed Bedap, and he and Shevek set off with Sadik, talking. They talked hard, and walked right past the learning center. They turned back. Sadik had stopped before the dormitory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood equally still for a moment, then went to her. “What is wrong, Sadik?”

  The child said, “Shevek, may I stay in the room tonight?”

  “Of course. But what’s wrong?”

  Sadik’s delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. “They don’t like me, in the dormitory,” she said, her voice becoming shrill with tension, but even softer than before.

  “They don’t like you? What do you mean?”

  They did not touch each other yet. She answered him with desperate courage. “Because they don’t like—they don’t like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and—and you. They call— The big sister in the dorm room, she said you—we were all tr— She said we were traitors,” and saying the word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek caught her and held her. She held to him with all her strength, weeping in great gasping sobs. She was too old, too tall for him to pick up. He stood holding her, stroking her hair. He looked over her dark head at Bedap. His own eyes were full of tears. He said, “It’s all right, Dap. Go on.”

  There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go; rather he felt useless, diminished. “I am thirty-nine years old,” he thought as he walked on towards his domicile, the five-man room where he lived in perfect independence. “Forty in a few decads. What have I done? What have I been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people’s lives because I don’t have one, I never took the time. And the time’s going to run out on me, all at once, and I will never have had . . . that.” He looked back, down the long, quiet street, where the corner lamps made soft pools of light in the windy darkness, but he had gone too far to see the father and daughter, or they had gone. And what he meant by “that” he could not have said, good as he was with words; yet he felt that he understood it clearly, that all his hope was in the understanding, and that if he would be saved he must change his life.

  When Sadik was calm enough to let go of him, Shevek left her sitting on the front step of the dormitory, and went in to tell the vigilkeeper that she would be staying with the parents this night. The vigilkeeper spoke coldly to him. Adults who worked in children’s dormitories had a natural tendency to disapprove of overnight dom visits, finding them disruptive; Shevek told himself he was probably mistaken in feeling anything more than such disapproval in the vigilkeeper. The halls of the learning center were brightly lit, ringing with noise, music practice, children’s voices. There were all the old sounds, the smells, the shadows, the echoes of childhood which Shevek remembered, and with him the fears. One forgets the fears.

  He came out and walked home with Sadik, his arms around her thin shoulders. She was silent, still struggling. She said abruptly as they came to their entry in the Pekesh main domicile, “I know it isn’t agreeable for you and Takver to have me overnight.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Because you want privacy, adult couples need privacy.”

  “There’s Pilun,” he observed.

  “Pilun doesn’t count.”

  “Neither do you.”

  She sniffled, attempting to smile.

  When they came into the light of the room, however, her white, red-patched, puffy face at once startled Takver into saying, “Whatever is wrong?”—and Pilun, interrupted in sucking, startled out of bliss, began to howl, at which Sadik broke down again, and for a while it appeared that everyone was crying, and comforting each other, and refusing comfort. This sorted out quite suddenly into silence, Pilun on the mother’s lap, Sadik on the father’s.

  When the baby was replete and put down to sleep, Takver said in a low but impassioned voice, “Now! What is it?”

  Sadik had gone half to sleep herself, her head on Shevek’s chest. He could feel her gather herself to answer. He stroked her hair to keep her quiet, and answered for her. “Some people at the learning center disapprove of us.”

  “And by damn what damned right have they to disapprove of us?”

  “Shh, shh. Of the Syndicate.”

  “Oh,” Takver said, a queer guttural noise, and in buttoning up her tunic she tore the button right off the fabric. She stood looking down at it on her palm. Then she looked at Shevek and Sadik.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “A long time,” Sadik said, not lifting her head.

  “Days, decads, all quarter?”

  “Oh, longer. But they get . . . they’re meaner in the dorm now. At night. Terzol doesn’t stop them.” Sadik spoke rather like a sleep-talker, and quite serenely, as if the matter no longer concerned her.

  “What do they do?” Takver asked, though Shevek’s gaze warned her.

  “Well, they . . . they’re just mean. They keep me out of the games and things. Tip, you know, she was a friend, she used to come and talk at least after lights out. But she stopped. Terzol is the big sister in the dorm now, and
she’s . . . she says, ‘Shevek is—Shevek—‘ “

  He broke in, feeling the tension rise in the child’s body, the cowering and the summoning of courage, unendurable. “She says, ‘Shevek is a traitor, Sadik is an egoizer’— You know what she says, Takver!” His eyes were blazing. Takver came forward and touched her daughter’s cheek, once, rather timidly. She said in a quiet voice, “Yes, I know,” and went and sat down on the other bed platform, facing them.

  The baby, tucked away next to the wall, snored slightly. People in the next room came back from commons, a door slammed, somebody down in the square called good night and was answered from an open window. The big domicile, two hundred rooms, was astir, alive quietly all around them; as their existence entered into its existence so did its existence enter into theirs, as part of a whole. Presently Sadik slipped off her father’s knees and sat on the platform beside him, dose to him. Her dark hair was rumpled and tangled, hanging around her face.

  “I didn’t want to tell you, because . . .” Her voice sounded thin and small. “But it just keeps getting worse. They make each other meaner.”

  “Then you won’t go back there,” Shevek said. He put his arm around her, but she resisted, sitting straight.

  “If I go and talk to them—” said Takver.

  “It’s no use. They feel as they feel.”

  “But what is this we’re up against?” Takver asked with bewilderment.

  Shevek did not answer. He kept his arm around Sadik, and she yielded at last, leaning her head against his arm with a weary heaviness. “There are other learning centers,” he said at last, without much certainty.

  Takver stood up. She clearly could not sit still and wanted to do something, to act. But there was not much to do. “Let me braid your hair, Sadik,” she said in a subdued voice.