The Dispossessed

by Ursula Le Guin

  “I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it.”

  “Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?”

  “With the annihilation of space.”

  She was silent a while. “Is that what you do?” she said in her mild, amused voice.

  “No. It is not what I do! In the first place, I am not an inventor, an engineer. I am a theorist. What they want from me is a theory. A theory of the General Field in temporal physics. Do you know what that is?”

  “Shevek, your Cetian physics, your Noble Science, is completely beyond my grasp. I am not trained in mathematics, in physics, in philosophy, and it seems to consist of all of those, and cosmology, and more besides. But I know what you mean when you say the Theory of Simultaneity, in the way I know what is meant by the Theory of Relativity; that is, I know that relativity theory led to certain great practical results; and so I gather that your temporal physics may make new technologies possible.”

  He nodded. “What they want,” he said, “is the instantaneous transferral of matter across space. Transilience. Space travel, you see, without traversal of space or lapse of time. They may arrive at it yet; not from my equations, I think. But they can make the ansible, with my equations, if they want it. Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas can.”

  “What is an ansible, Shevek?”

  “An idea.” He smiled without much humor. “It will be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.”

  Keng laughed. “The simplicity of physicists! So I could pick up the—ansible?—and talk with my son in Delhi? And with my granddaughter, who was five when I left, and who lived eleven years while I was traveling from Terra to Urras in a nearly light-speed ship. And I could find out what’s happening at home now, not eleven years ago. And decisions could be made, and agreements reached, and information shared. I could talk to diplomats on Chiffewar, you could talk to physicists on Hain, it wouldn’t take ideas a generation to get from world to world…Do you know, Shevek, I think your very simple matter might change the lives of all the billions of people in the nine Known Worlds?”

  He nodded.

  “It would make a league of worlds possible. A federation. We have been held apart by the years, the decades between leaving and arriving, between question and response. It’s as if you had invented human speech! We can talk—at last we can talk together.”

  “And what will you say?”

  His bitterness startled Keng. She looked at him and said nothing.

  He leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his forehead painfully. “Look,” he said, “I must explain to you why I have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have cut ourselves off. We don’t talk with other people, the rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw no use in it. So I came here. Here is what I need—the talk, the sharing, an experiment in the Light Laboratory that proves something it wasn’t meant to prove, a book of Relativity Theory from an alien world, the stimulus I need. And so I finished the work, at last. It is not written out yet, but I have the equations and the reasoning, it is done. But the ideas in my head aren’t the only ones important to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from me.”

  “What else could you do, Shevek?”

  “Is there no alternative to selling? Is there not such a thing as the gift?”

  “Yes—”

  “Do you not understand that I want to give this to you—and to Hain and the other worlds—and to the countries of Urras? But to you all! So that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good.”

  “In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good,” Keng said.

  “In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master.”

  Keng’s calmness was a much more forced, willed affair than it had been at the beginning of their talk. The strength of Shevek’s personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable. She was shaken by him, and looked at him with compassion and a certain awe.

  “What is it like,” she said, “what can it be like, the society that made you? I heard you speak of Anarres, in the Square, and I wept listening to you, but I didn’t really believe you. Men always speak so of their homes, of the absent land…But you are not like other men. There is a difference in you.”

  “The difference of the idea,” he said. “It was for that idea that I came here, too. For Anarres. Since my people refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others look at us. I thought it would be better not to hold apart behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a world among the others, giving and taking. But there I was wrong—I was absolutely wrong.”

  “Why so? Surely—”

  “Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”

  For all his passion he spoke simply, with a kind of humility, and again the Ambassador from Terra watched him with a guarded yet sympathetic wonder, as if she had no idea how to take that simplicity.

  “We are both aliens here, Shevek,” she said at last. “I from much farther away in space and time. Yet I begin to think that I am much less alien to Urras than you are…Let me tell you how this world seems to me. To me, and to all my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Urras is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds. It is the world that comes as close as any could to Paradise.”

  She looked at him calmly and keenly; he said nothing.

  “I know it’s full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with hope. Is that not true?”

  He nodde
d.

  “Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine, you who see my Paradise as Hell, will you ask what my world must be like?”

  He was silent, watching her, his light eyes steady.

  “My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert…We survive there as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the charity of the Hainish. They came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the sick one. They are a very strange people, the Hainish; older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists. They are moved by a guilt we don’t even understand, despite all our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I think, by the past, their endless past. Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival. We had achieved that much, when the Hainish came. They brought us…a little more hope. Not very much. We have outlived it…We can only look at this splendid world, this vital society, this Urras, this Paradise, from the outside. We are capable only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little. Not very much.”

  “Then Anarres, as you heard me speak of it—what would Anarres mean to you, Keng?”

  “Nothing. Nothing, Shevek. We forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago, before it ever came into being.”

  Shevek got up and went over to the window, one of the long horizontal window slits of the tower. There was a niche in the wall below it, into which an archer would step up to look down and aim at assailants at the gate; if one did not take that step up one could see nothing from it but the sunwashed, slightly misty sky. Shevek stood below the window gazing out, the light filling his eyes.

  “You don’t understand what time is,” he said. “You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it’s something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything…And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres. You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you did not really believe it. You don’t believe in Anarres. You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment…My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us.”

  Keng sat with a startled and thoughtful, and perhaps slightly dazed, expression.

  “I don’t understand—I don’t understand,” she said at last. “You are like somebody from our own past, the old idealists, the visionaries of freedom; and yet I don’t understand you, as if you were trying to tell me of future things; and yet, as you say, you are here, now!…” She had not lost her shrewdness. She said after a little while, “Then why is it that you came to me, Shevek?”

  “Oh, to give you the idea. My theory, you know. To save it from becoming a property of the Ioti, an investment or a weapon. If you are willing, the simplest thing to do would be to broadcast the equations, to give them to physicists all over this world, and to the Hainish and the other worlds, as soon as possible. Would you be willing to do that?”

  “More than willing.”

  “It will come to only a few pages. The proofs and some of the implications would take longer, but that can come later, and other people can work on them if I cannot.”

  “But what will you do then? Do you mean to go back to Nio? The city is quiet now, apparently, the insurrection seems to be defeated, at least for the time being; but I’m afraid the Ioti government regards you as an insurrectionary. There is Thu, of course—”

  “No. I don’t want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the Ioti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by killing me or putting me in jail for life. I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t want to die here in Hell at all. Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?” He laughed; he had regained all his gentleness of manner. “But if you could send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.”

  “I thought I knew what ‘realism’ was,” Keng said. She smiled, but it was not an easy smile.

  “How can you, if you don’t know what hope is?”

  “Don’t judge us too hardly, Shevek.”

  “I don’t judge you at all. I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return.”

  “Nothing? You call your theory nothing?”

  “Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit,” he said, turning to her, “and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.”

  12“I want to introduce a project,” said Bedap, “from the Syndicate of Initiative. You know that we’ve been in radio contact with Urras for about twenty decads—”

  “Against the recommendation of this council, and the Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the List!”

  “Yes,” Bedap said, looking the speaker up and down, but not protesting the interruption. There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a winning diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place—inside a living animal.

  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 re-fight 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? Le
t 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.