The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  She brushed and braided the child’s hair; they set the screen across the room, and tucked Sadik in beside the sleeping baby. Sadik was near tears again saying good night, but within half an hour they heard by her breathing that she was asleep.

  Shevek had settled down at the head of their bed platform with a notebook and the slate he used for calculating.

  “I paged that manuscript today,” Takver said.

  “What did it come to?”

  “Forty-one pages. With the supplement.”

  He nodded. Takver got up, looked over the screen at the two sleeping children, returned, and sat down on the edge of the platform.

  “I knew there was something wrong. But she didn’t say anything. She never has, she’s stoical. It didn’t occur to me it was this. I thought it was just our problem, it didn’t occur to me they’d take it out on children.” She spoke softly and bitterly. “It grows, it keeps growing . . . . Will another school be any different?”

  “I don’t know. If she spends much time with us, probably not.”

  “You certainly aren’t suggesting—”

  “No, I’m not. I’m stating a fact, only. If we choose to give the child the intensity of individual love, we can’t spare her what comes with that, the risk of pain. Pain from us, and through us.”

  “It isn’t fair she should be tormented for what we do. She’s so good, and good-natured, she’s like clear water—” Takver stopped, strangled by a brief rush of tears, wiped her eyes, set her lips.

  “It isn’t what we do. It’s what I do.” He put his notebook down. “You’ve been suffering for it too.”

  “I don’t care what they think.”

  “At work?”

  “I can take another posting.”

  “Not here, not in your own field.”

  “Well, do you want me to go somewhere else? The Sorruba fishery labs at Peace-and-Plenty would take me on. But where does that leave you?” She looked at him angrily. “Here, I suppose?”

  “I could come with you. Skovan and the others are coming along in Iotic, they’ll be able to handle the radio, and that’s my main practical function in the Syndicate now. I can do physics as well in Peace-and-Plenty as I can here. But unless I drop right out of the Syndicate of Initiative, that doesn’t solve the problem, does it? I’m the problem. I’m the one who makes trouble.”

  “Would they care about that, in a little place like Peace-and-Plenty?”

  “I’m afraid they might.”

  “Shev, how much of this hatred have you run up against? Have you been keeping quiet, like Sadik?”

  “And like you. Well, at times. When I went to Concord, last summer, it was a little worse than I told you. Rock-throwing, and a good-sized fight. The students who asked me to come had to fight for me. They did, too, but I got out quick; I was putting them in danger. Well, students want some danger. And after all we’ve asked for a fight, we’ve deliberately roused people. And there are plenty on our side. But now . . . but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not imperiling you and the children, Tak. By staying with you.”

  “Of course you’re not in danger yourself,” she said savagely.

  “I’ve asked for it. But it didn’t occur to me they’d extend their tribal resentment to you. I don’t feel the same about your danger as I do about mine.”

  “Altruist!”

  “Maybe. I can’t help it. I do feel responsible, Tak. Without me, you could go anywhere, or stay here. You’ve worked for the Syndicate, but what they hold against you is your loyalty to me. I’m the symbol. So there doesn’t . . . there isn’t anywhere for me to go.”

  “Go to Urras,” Takver said. Her voice was so harsh that Shevek sat back as if she had hit him in the face.

  She did not meet his eyes, but she repeated, more softly, “Go to Urras. . . . Why not? They want you there. They don’t here! Maybe they’ll begin to see what they’ve lost, when you’re gone. And you want to go. I saw that tonight. I never thought of it before, but when we talked about the prize, at dinner, I saw it, the way you laughed.”

  “I don’t need prizes and rewards!”

  “No, but you do need appreciation, and discussion, and students—with no Sabul-strings attached. And look. You and Dap keep talking about scaring PDC with the idea of somebody going to Urras, asserting his right to self-determination. But if you talk about it and nobody goes, you’ve only strengthened their side—you’ve only proved that custom is unbreakable. Now you’ve brought it up in a PDC meeting, somebody will have to go. It ought to be you. They’ve asked you; you have a reason to go. Go get your reward—the money they’re saving for you,” she ended with a sudden quite genuine laugh.

  “Takver, I don’t want to go to Urras!”

  “Yes, you do; you know you do. Though I’m not sure I know why.”

  “Well, of course I’d like to meet some of the physicists. . . . And see the laboratories at Ieu Eun where they’ve been experimenting with light.” He looked shamefaced as he said it.

  “It’s your right to do so,” Takver said with fierce determination. “If it’s part of your work, you ought to do it.”

  “It would help keep the Revolution alive—on both sides—wouldn’t it?” he said. “What a crazy idea! Like Tirin’s play, only backwards. I’m to go subvert the archists. . . . Well, it would at least prove to them that Anarres exists. They talk with us on the radio, but I don’t think they really believe in us. In what we are.”

  “If they did, they might be scared. They might come and blow us right out of the sky, if you really convinced them.”

  “I don’t think so. I might make a little revolution in their physics again, but not in their opinions. It’s here, here, that I can affect society, even though here they won’t pay attention to my physics. You’re quite right; now that we’ve talked about it, we must do it.” There was a pause. He said, “I wonder what kind of physics the other races do.”

  “What other races?”

  “The aliens. People from Hain and other solar systems. There are two alien Embassies on Urras, Hain and Terra. The Hainish invented the interstellar drive Urras uses now. I suppose they’d give it to us, too, if we were willing to ask for it. It would be interesting to . . .” He did not finish.

  After another long pause he turned to her and said in a changed, sarcastic tone, “And what would you do while I went visiting the propertarians?”

  “Go to the Sorruba coast with the girls, and live a very peaceful life as a fish-lab technician. Until you come back.”

  “Come back? Who knows if I could come back?”

  She met his gaze straight on. “What would prevent you?”

  “Maybe the Urrasti. They might keep me. No one there is free to come and go, you know. Maybe our own people. They might prevent me from landing. Some of them in PDC threatened that, today. Rulag was one of them.”

  “She would. She only knows denial. How to deny the possibility of coming home.”

  “That is quite true. That says it completely,” he said, settling back again and looking at Takver with contemplative admiration. “But Rulag isn’t the only one, unfortunately. To a great many people, anyone who went to Urras and tried to come back would simply be a traitor, a spy.”

  “What would they actually do about it?”

  “Well, if they persuaded Defense of the danger, they could shoot down the ship.”

  “Would Defense be that stupid?”

  “I don’t think so. But anybody outside Defense could make explosives with blasting powder and blow up the ship on the ground. Or, more likely, attack me once I was outside the ship. I think that’s a definite possibility. It should be included in a plan to make a round-trip tour of the scenic areas of Urras.”

  “Would it be worth while to you—that risk?”

  He looked forward at nothing for a time. “Yes,” he said, “in a way. If I could finish the theory there, and give it to them—to us and them and all the worlds, you know—I’d like that. Here I’m walled in. I’m c
ramped, it’s hard to work, to test the work, always without equipment, without colleagues and students. And then when I do the work, they don’t want it. Or, if they do, like Sabul, they want me to abandon initiative in return for receiving approval. They’ll use the work I do, after I’m dead, that always happens. But why must I give my lifework as a present to Sabul, all the Sabuls, the petty, scheming, greedy egos of one single planet? I’d like to share it. It’s a big subject I work on. It ought to be given out, handed around. It won’t run out!”

  “All right, then,” Takver said, “it is worth it.”

  “Worth what?”

  “The risk. Perhaps not being able to come back.”

  “Not being able to come back,” he repeated. He looked at Takver with a strange, intense, yet abstracted gaze.

  “I think there are more people on our side, on the Syndicate’s side, than we realize. It’s just that we haven’t actually done much—done anything to bring them together—taken any risk. If you took it, I think they’d come out in support of you. If you opened the door, they’d smell fresh air again, they’d smell freedom.”

  “And they might all come rushing to slam the door shut.”

  “If they do, too bad for them. The Syndicate can protect you when you land. And then, if people are still so hostile and hateful, we’ll say the hell with them. What’s the good of an anarchist society that’s afraid of anarchists? We’ll go live in Lonesome, in Upper Sedep, in Uttermost, we’ll go live alone in the mountains if we have to. There’s room. There’d be people who’d come with us. We’ll make a new community. If our society is settling down into politics and power seeking, then we’ll get out, we’ll go make an Anarres beyond Anarres, a new beginning. How’s that?”

  “Beautiful,” he said, “it’s beautiful, dear heart. But I’m not going to go to Urras, you know.”

  “Oh, yes. And you will come back,” Takver said. Her eyes were very dark, a soft darkness, like the darkness of a forest at night. “If you set out to. You always get to where you’re going. And you always come back.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Takver. I’m not going to Urras!”

  “I’m worn out,” Takver said, stretching, and leaning over to put her forehead against his arm. “Let’s go to bed.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Anarres • Urras

  BEFORE they broke orbit, the view ports were filled with the cloudy turquoise of Urras, immense and beautiful. But the ship turned, and the stars came into sight, and Anarres among them like a round bright rock; moving yet not moving, thrown by what hand, timelessly circling, creating time.

  They showed Shevek all over the ship, the interstellar Davenant. It was as different as it could be from the freighter Mindful. From the outside it was as bizarre and fragile-looking as a sculpture in glass and wire; it did not have the look of a ship, a vehicle, about it at all, not even a front and back end, for it never traveled through any atmosphere thicker than that of interplanetary space. Inside, it was as spacious and solid as a house. The rooms were large and private, the walls wood-paneled or covered with textured weavings, the ceilings high. Only it was like a house with the blinds drawn, for few rooms had view ports, and it was very quiet. Even the bridge and the engine rooms had this quietness about them, and the machines and instruments had the simple definitiveness of design of the fittings of a sailing ship. For recreation, there was a garden, where the lighting had the quality of sunlight, and the air was sweet with the smell of earth and leaves; during ship night the garden was darkened, and its ports cleared to the stars.

  Though its interstellar journeys lasted only a few hours or days shiptime, a near-lightspeed ship such as this might spend months exploring a solar system, or years in orbit around a planet where its crew was living or exploring. Therefore it was made spacious, humane, livable, for those who must live aboard it. Its style had neither the opulence of Urras nor the austerity of Anarres, but struck a balance, with the effortless grace of long practice. One could imagine leading that restricted life without fretting at its restrictions, contentedly, meditatively. They were a meditative people, the Hainish among the crew, civil, considerate, rather somber. There was little spontaneity in them. The youngest of them seemed older than any of the Terrans aboard.

  But Shevek was seldom very observant of them, Terrans or Hainish, during the three days that the Davenant, moving by chemical propulsion at conventional speeds, took to go from Urras to Anarres. He replied when spoken to; he answered questions willingly, but he asked very few. When he spoke, it was out of an inward silence. The people of the Davenant, particularly the younger ones, were drawn to him, as if he had something they lacked or was something they wished to be. They discussed him a good deal among themselves, but they were shy with him. He did not notice this. He was scarcely aware of them. He was aware of Anarres, ahead of him. He was aware of hope deceived and of the promise kept; of failure; and of the sources within his spirit, unsealed at last, of joy. He was a man released from jail, going home to his family. Whatever such a man sees along his way he seems only as reflections of the light. On the second day of the voyage he was in the communications room, talking with Anarres on the radio, first on the PDC wave length and now with the Syndicate of Initiative. He sat leaning forward, listening, or answering with a spate of the clear, expressive language that was his native tongue, sometimes gesturing with his free hand as if his interlocutor could see him, occasionally laughing. The first mate of the Davenant, a Hainishman named Ketho, controlling the radio contact, watched him thoughtfully. Ketho had spent an hour after dinner the night before with Shevek, along with the commander and other crew members; he had asked—in a quiet, undemanding, Hainish way—a good many questions about Anarres.

  Shevek turned to him at last. “All right, done. The rest can wait till I’m home. Tomorrow they will contact you to arrange the entry procedure.”

  Ketho nodded. “You got some good news,” he said.

  “Yes, I did. At least some, what do you call it, lively news.” They had to speak Iotic together; Shevek was more fluent in the language than Ketho, who spoke it very correctly and stiffly. “The landing is going to be exciting,” Shevek went on. “A lot of enemies and a lot of friends will be there. The good news is the friends. . . . It seems there are more of them than when I left.”

  “This danger of attack, when you land,” Ketho said. “Surely the officers of the Port of Anarres feel that they can control the dissidents? They would not deliberately tell you to come down and be murdered?”

  “Well, they are going to protect me. But I am also a dissident, after all. I asked to take the risk. That’s my privilege, you see, as an Odonian.” He smiled at Ketho. The Hainishman did not smile back; his face was serious. He was a handsome man of about thirty, tall and light-skinned like a Cetian, but nearly hairless like a Terran, with very strong, fine features.

  “I am glad to be able to share it with you,” he said. “I will be taking you down in the landing craft.”

  “Good,” Shevek said. “It isn’t everyone who would care to accept our privileges!”

  “More than you think, perhaps,” Ketho said. “If you would allow them to.”

  Shevek, whose mind had not been fully on the conversation, had been about to leave; this stopped him. He looked at Ketho, and after a moment said, “Do you mean that you would like to land with me?”

  The Hainishman answered with equal directness, “Yes, I would.”

  “Would the commander permit it?”

  “Yes. As an officer of a mission ship, in fact, it is part of my duty to explore and investigate a new world when possible. The commander and I have spoken of the possibility. We discussed it with our ambassadors before we left. Their feeling was that no formal request should be made, since your people’s policy is to forbid foreigners to land.”

  “Hm,” Shevek said, noncommittal. He went over to the far wall and stood for a while in front of a picture, a Hainish landscape, very simple and subtle, a dark river flowing
among reeds under a heavy sky. “The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres,” he said, “do not permit Urrasti to land, except inside the boundary of the Port. Those terms still are accepted. But you’re not an Urrasti.”

  “When Anarres was settled, there were no other races known. By implication, those terms include all foreigners.”

  “So our managers decided, sixty years ago, when your people first came into this solar system and tried to talk with us. But I think they were wrong. They were just building more walls.” He turned around and stood, his hands behind his back, looking at the other man. “Why do you want to land, Ketho?”

  “I want to see Anarres,” the Hainishman said. “Even before you came to Urras, I was curious about it. It began when I read Odo’s works. I became very interested. I have—” He hesitated, as if embarrassed, but continued in his repressed, conscientious way, “I have learned a little Pravic. Not much yet.”

  “It is your own wish, then—your own initiative?”

  “Entirely.”

  “And you understand that it might be dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things are . . . a little broken loose, on Anarres. That’s what my friends on the radio have been telling me about. It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists! All this has been going on while I was gone. So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I cannot push too far. I cannot take you as an official representative of some foreign government. That will not do, on Anarres.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Once you are there, once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe.” He looked around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless walls, and back at Ketho. “You would find yourself very much alone,” he said.