“My race is very old,” Ketho said. “We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”
“We are the children of time,” Shevek said, in Pravic. The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in Iotic: “We are the children of time.”
“I shall speak to the commander,” Ketho said, as grave as ever, but with a very slight tremor in his voice of excitement, of hope.
Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenant’s garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. Shevek stood at the high, cleared view port, looking at the night side of Anarres, a dark curve across half the stars. He was wondering if Takver would be there, at the Port. She had not yet arrived in Abbenay from Peace-and-Plenty when he last talked with Bedap, so he had left it to Bedap to discuss and decide with her whether it would be wise for her to come out to the Port. “You don’t think I could stop her even if it wasn’t?” Bedap had said. He wondered also what kind of ride she might have got from the Sorruba coast; a dirigible, he hoped, if she had brought the girls along. Train riding was hard, with children. He still recalled the discomforts of the trip from Chakar to Abbenay, in ’68, when Sadik had been trainsick for three mortal days.
The door of the garden room opened, increasing the dim illumination. The commander of the Davenant looked in and spoke his name; he answered; the commander came in, with Ketho.
“We have the entry pattern for our landing craft from your ground control,” the commander said. He was a short, iron-colored Terran, cool and businesslike. “If you’re ready to go, we’ll start launch procedure.”
“Yes.”
The commander nodded and left. Ketho came forward to stand beside Sehevek at the port.
“You’re sure you want to walk through this wall with me, Ketho? You know, for me, it’s easy. Whatever happens, I am coming home. But you are leaving home. “True journey is return. . . .’ ”
“I hope to return,” Ketho said in his quiet voice. “In time.”
“When are we to enter the landing craft?”
“In about twenty minutes.”
“I’m ready. I have nothing to pack.” Shevek laughed, a laugh of clear, unmixed happiness. The other man looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar. He stood beside Shevek as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it.
“It will be early morning at Anarres Port,” he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port.
Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just coming into sight.
“I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight,” he thought. “I will lie down beside Takver. I wish I’d brought the picture, the baby sheep, to give Pilun.”
But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.
*Papa. A small child may call any adult mamme or tadde. Gimar’s tadde may have been her father, an uncle, or an unrelated adult who showed her parental or grandparental responsibility and affection. She may have called several people tadde or mamme, but the word has a more specific use than ammar (brother/sister), which may be used to anybody.
Also by Ursula Le Guin
Rocannon’s World (1966) The Compass Rose (1982)
Planet of Exile (1966)
Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987)
City of Illusions (1967) Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996)
A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) POETRY:
The Lathe of Heaven (1971) Wild Oats and Fireweed (1988)
The Farthest Shore (1972) Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems (1982)
The Word for World is Forest (1976)
Orsinian Tales (1976) NON-FICTION:
Malafrena (1979) The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979)
The Eye of the Heron (1982) Dancing at the End of the World:Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989)
Always Coming Home (1985)
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990) AS EDITOR:
Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (1991) Nebula Award Stories 11 (1976)
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994) Interfaces (with Virginia Kidd) (1980)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) Edges (with Virginia Kidd) (1989)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS:
The Wind's Twelve Quarters(1975)
About the Author
Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more a 100 short stories, 2 collections of essays, 4 volumes of poetry, and 18 novels. Her best known fantasy works, the Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field of its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity.
Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Table of Contents
THE DISPOSSESSED
Enter the SF Gateway
CONTENTS
MAPS
Anarres
Urras
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Also by Ursula Le Guin
About the Author
The Dispossessed Page 36