The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula Le Guin

  Indeed Genly Ai demands of us an inordinate trustfulness.

  To him evidently it is not inordinate.

  And Obsle and Yegey think that a majority of the Thirty-Three will be persuaded to trust him. I do not know why I am less hopeful than they; perhaps I do not really want Orgoreyn to prove more enlightened than Karhide, to take the risk and win the praise and leave Karhide in the shadow. If this envy be patriotic, it comes too late; as soon as I saw that Tibe would soon have me ousted, I did all I could to ensure that the Envoy would come to Orgoreyn, and in exile here I have done what I could to win them to him.

  Thanks to the money he brought me from Ashe I now live by myself again, as a ‘unit’ not a ‘dependent.’ I go to no more banquets, am not seen in public with Obsle or other supporters of the Envoy, and have not seen the Envoy himself for over a halfmonth, since his second day in Mishnory.

  He gave me Ashe’s money as one would give a hired assassin his fee. I have not often been so angry, and I insulted him deliberately. He knew I was angry but I am not sure he understood that he was insulted; he seemed to accept my advice despite the manner of its giving; and when my temper cooled I saw this, and was worried by it. Is it possible that all along in Erhenrang he was seeking my advice, not knowing how to tell me that he sought it? If so, then he must have misunderstood half and not understood the rest of what I told him by my fireside in the Palace, the night after the Ceremony of the Keystone. His shifgrethor must be founded, and composed, and sustained, altogether differently from ours; and when I thought myself most blunt and frank with him he may have found me most subtle and unclear.

  His obtuseness is ignorance. His arrogance is ignorance. He is ignorant of us: we of him. He is infinitely a stranger, and I a fool, to let my shadow cross the light of the hope he brings us. I keep my mortal vanity down. I keep out of his way: for clearly that is what he wants. He is right. An exiled Karhidish traitor is no credit to his cause.

  Conformable to the Orgota law that each “unit” must have employment, I work from Eighth Hour to noon in a plastics factory. Easy work: I run a machine which fits together and heatbonds pieces of plastic to form little transparent boxes. I do not know what the boxes are for. In the afternoon, finding myself dull, I have taken up the old disciplines I learned in Rotherer. I am glad to see I have lost no skill at summoning dothe-strength, or entering the untrance; but I get little good out of the untrance, and as for the skills of stillness and of fasting, I might as well never have learned them, and must start all over, like a child. I have fasted now one day, and my belly screams A week! A month!

  The nights freeze now; tonight a hard wind bears frozen rain. All evening I have thought continually of Estre and the sound of the wind seems the sound of the wind that blows there. I wrote to my son tonight, a long letter. While writing it I had again and again a sense of Arek’s presence, as if I should see him if I turned. Why do I keep such notes as these? For my son to read? Little good they would do him. I write to be writing in my own language, perhaps.

  Harhahad Susmy. Still no mention of the Envoy has been made on the radio, not a word. I wonder if Genly Ai sees that in Orgoreyn, despite the vast visible apparatus of government, nothing is done visibly, nothing is said aloud. The machine conceals the machinations.

  Tibe wants to teach Karhide how to lie. He takes his lessons from Orgoreyn: a good school. But I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.

  A big Orgota foray yesterday across the Ey; they burned the granaries of Tekember. Precisely what the Sarf wants, and what Tibe wants. But where does it end?

  Slose, having turned his Yomesh mysticism onto the Envoy’s statements, interprets the coming of the Ekumen to earth as the coming of the Reign of Meshe among men, and loses sight of our purpose. “We must halt this rivalry with Karhide before the New Men come,” he says. “We must cleanse our spirits for their coming. We must forego shifgrethor, forbid all acts of vengeance, and unite together without envy as brothers of one Hearth.”

  But how, until they come? How to break the circle?

  Guyrny Susmy. Slose heads a committee that purposes to suppress the obscene plays performed in public kemmerhouses here; they must be like the Karhidish huhuth. Slose opposes them because they are trivial, vulgar, and blasphemous.

  To oppose something is to maintain it.

  They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

  Yegey in the Hall of the Thirty-Three today: “I unalterably oppose this blockade of grain-exports to Karhide, and the spirit of competition which motivates it.” Right enough, but he will not get off the Mishnory road going that way. He must offer an alternative. Orgoreyn and Karhide both must stop following the road they’re on, in either direction; they must go somewhere else, and break the circle. Yegey, I think, should be talking of the Envoy and of nothing else.

  To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

  To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

  Tormenbod Susmy. My unease grows: still not one word about the Envoy has been spoken on the Central Bureau Radio. None of the news about him that we used to broadcast from Erhenrang was ever released here, and rumors rising out of illegal radio reception over the border, and traders’ and travelers’ stories, never seem to have spread far. The Sarf has more complete control over communications than I knew, or thought possible. The possibility is awesome. In Karhide king and kyorremy have a good deal of control over what people do, but very little over what they hear, and none over what they say. Here, the government can check not only act but thought. Surely no men should have such power over others.

  Shusgis and others take Genly Ai about the city openly. I wonder if he sees that this openness hides the fact that he is hidden. No one knows he is here. I ask my fellow-workers at the factory, they know nothing and think I am talking of some crazy Yomesh sectarian. No information, no interest, nothing that might advance Ai’s cause, or protect his life.

  It is a pity he looks so like us. In Erhenrang people often pointed him out on the street, for they knew some truth or talk about him and knew he was there. Here where his presence is kept secret his person goes unremarked. They see him no doubt much as I first saw him: an unusually tall, husky, and dark youth just entering kemmer. I studied the physicians’ reports on him last year. His differences from us are profound. They are not superficial. One must know him to know him alien.

  Why do they hide him, then? Why does not one of the Commensals force the issue and speak of him in a public speech or on the radio? Why is even Obsle silent? Out of fear.

  My king was afraid of the Envoy; these fellows are afraid of one another.

  I think that I, a foreigner, am the only person Obsle trusts. He has some pleasure in my company (as I in his), and several times has waived shifgrethor and frankly asked my advice. But when I urge him to speak out, to raise public interest as a defense against factional intrigue, he does not hear me.

  “If the entire Commensality had their eyes on the Envoy, the Sarf would not dare touch him,” I say, “or you, Obsle.”

  Obsle sighs. “Yes, yes, but we can’t do it, Estraven. Radio, printed bulletins, scientific periodicals, they’re all in the Sarf’s hands. What am I to do, make speeches on a street-corner like some fanatic priest?”

  “Well, one can talk to people, set rumors going; I had to do something of the same sort last year
in Erhenrang. Get people asking questions to which you have the answer, that is, the Envoy himself.”

  “If only he’d bring that damned Ship of his down here, so that we had something to show people! But as it is—”

  “He won’t bring his Ship down until he knows that you’re acting in good faith.”

  “Am I not?” cries Obsle, fattening out like a great hob-fish—“Haven’t I spent every hour of the past month on this business? Good faith! He expects us to believe whatever he tells us, and then doesn’t trust us in return!”

  “Should he?”

  Obsle puffs and does not reply.

  He comes nearer honesty than any Orgota government official I know.

  Odgetheny Susmy. To become a high officer in the Sarf one must have, it seems, a certain complex form of stupidity. Gaum exemplifies it. He sees me as a Karhidish agent attempting to lead Orgoreyn into a tremendous prestige-loss by persuading them to believe in the hoax of the Envoy from the Ekumen; he thinks that I spent my time as Prime Minister preparing this hoax. By God, I have better things to do than play shifgrethor with scum. But that is a simplicity he is unequipped to see. Now that Yegey has apparently cast me off Gaum thinks I must be purchasable, and so prepared to buy me out in his own curious fashion. He has watched me or had me watched close enough that he knew I would be due to enter kemmer on Posthe or Tormenbod; so he turned up last night in full kemmer, hormone-induced no doubt, ready to seduce me. An accidental meeting on Pyenefen Street. “Harth! I haven’t seen you in a halfmonth, where have you been hiding yourself lately? Come have a cup of ale with me.”

  He chose an alehouse next door to one of the Commensal Public Kemmerhouses. He ordered us not ale, but lifewater. He meant to waste no time. After one glass he put his hand on mine and shoved his face up close, whispering, “We didn’t meet by chance, I waited for you: I crave you for my kemmering tonight,” and he called me by my given name. I did not cut his tongue out, because since I left Estre I don’t carry a knife. I told him that I intended to abstain while in exile. He cooed and muttered and held on to my hands. He was going very rapidly into full phase as a woman. Gaum is very beautiful in kemmer, and he counted on his beauty and his sexual insistence, knowing, I suppose, that being of the Handdara I would be unlikely to use kemmer-reduction drugs, and would make a point of abstinence against the odds. He forgot that detestation is as good as any drug. I got free of his pawing, which of course was having some effect on me, and left him, suggesting that he try the public kemmerhouse next door. At that he looked at me with pitiable hatred: for he was, however false his purpose, truly in kemmer and deeply roused.

  Did he really think I’d sell myself for his small change? He must think me very uneasy; which, indeed, makes me uneasy.

  Damn them, these unclean men. There is not one clean man among them.

  Odsordny Susmy. This afternoon Genly Ai spoke in the Hall of the Thirty-Three. No audience was permitted and no broadcast made, but Obsle later had me in and played me his own tape of the session. The Envoy spoke well, with moving candor and urgency. There is an innocence in him that I have found merely foreign and foolish; yet in another moment that seeming innocence reveals a discipline of knowledge and a largeness of purpose that awes me. Through him speaks a shrewd, and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.

  He speaks better now than he did in Erhenrang, more simply and more subtly; he has learned his job in doing it, like us all.

  His speech was often interrupted by members of the Domination faction demanding that the President stop this lunatic, turn him out, and get on with the order of business. Csl. Yemenbey was most obstreperous, and probably spontaneous. “You don’t swallow this gichy-michy?” he kept roaring across to Obsle. Planned interruptions which made part of the tape hard to follow were led, Obsle says, by Kaharosile.—From memory:

  Alshel (presiding): Mr. Envoy, we find this information, and the proposals made by Mr. Obsle, Mr. Slose, Mr. Ithepen, Mr. Yegey and others, most interesting—most stimulating. We need, however, a little more to go on. (Laughter) Since the King of Karhide has your…the vehicle you arrived on, locked up where we can’t see it, would it be possible, as suggested, for you to bring down your…Star Ship? What do you call it?

  Ai: Starship is a good name, sir.

  Alshel: Oh? What do you call it?

  Ai: Well, technically, it’s a manned interstellar Cetian Design NAFAL-20.

  Voice: You’re sure it’s not St. Pethethe’s sledge? (Laughter)

  Alshel: Please. Yes. Well, if you can get this ship down onto the ground here—solid ground you might say—so that we can, as it were, have some substantial—

  Voice: Substantial fishguts!

  Ai: I want very much to bring that ship down, Mr. Alshel, as proof and witness of our reciprocal good faith. I await only your preliminary public announcement of the event.

  Kaharosile: Don’t you see, Commensals, what all this is? It’s not just a stupid joke. It is, in intention, a public mockery of our credulity, our gullibility, our stupidity—engineered, with incredible impudence, by this person who stands here before us today. You know he comes from Karhide. You know he is a Karhidish agent. You can see he is a sexual deviant of a type which in Karhide, due to the influence of the Dark Cult, is left uncured, and sometimes is even artificially created for the Foretellers’ orgies. And yet when he says “I am from outer space” some of you actually shut your eyes, abase your intellects, and believe! Never could I have thought it possible, etc., etc.

  To judge by the tape, Ai withstood gibes and assaults with patience. Obsle says he handled himself well. I was hanging about outside the Hall to see them come out after the Session of the Thirty-Three. Ai had a grim pondering look. Well he might.

  My helplessness is intolerable. I was one who set this machine running, and now cannot control its running. I slink in the streets with my hood pulled forward, to catch a glimpse of the Envoy. For this useless sneaking life I threw away my power, my money, and my friends. What a fool you are, Therem.

  Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?

  Odeps Susmy. The transmitting device Genly Ai has now turned over to the Thirty-Three, in Obsle’s care, is not going to change any minds. No doubt it does what he says it does, but if Royal Mathematician Shorst would say of it only, “I don’t understand the principles,” then no Orgota mathematician or engineer will do much better, and nothing is proved or disproved. An admirable outcome, were this world one Fastness of the Handdara, but alas we must walk forward troubling the new snow, proving and disproving, asking and answering.

  Once more I pressed on Obsle the feasibility of having Ai radio his Star Ship, waken the people aboard, and ask them to converse with the Commensals by radio hook-up to the Hall of the Thirty-Three. This time Obsle had a reason ready for not doing so. “Listen, Estraven my dear, the Sarf runs all our radio, you know that by now. I have no idea, even I, which of the men in Communications are the Sarf men; most of them, no doubt, for I know as a fact that they run the transmitters and receivers on every level right down to the technicians and repairmen. They could and would block—or falsify—any transmission we received, if we did receive one! Can you imagine that scene, in the Hall? We ‘Outer-spacers’ victims of our own hoax, listening with bated breath to a clutter of static—and nothing else—no answer, no Message?”

  “And you have no money to hire some loyal technicians, or buy off some of theirs?” I asked; but no use. He fears for his own prestige. His behavior towards me is already changed. If he calls off his reception for the Envoy tonight, things are in a bad way.

  Odarhad Susmy. He called off the reception.

  This morning I went to see the Envoy, in proper Orgota style. Not openly, at Shusgis’ house, where the staff must be crawling with
Sarf agents, Shusgis being one himself, but in the street, by chance, Gaum-fashion, sneaking and creeping. “Mr. Ai, will you hear me a moment?”

  He looked around startled, and recognizing me, alarmed. After a moment he broke out, “What good is it, Mr. Harth? You know that I can’t rely on what you say—since Erhenrang—”

  That was candid, if not perceptive; yet it was perceptive too: he knew that I wanted to advise him, not to ask something of him, and spoke to save my pride.

  I said, “This is Mishnory, not Erhenrang, but the danger you are in is the same. If you cannot persuade Obsle or Yegey to let you make radio contact with your ship, so that the people aboard it can while remaining safe lend some support to your statements, then I think you should use your own instrument, the ansible, and call the ship down at once. The risk it will run is less than the risk you are now running, alone.”

  “The Commensals’ debates concerning my messages have been kept secret. How do you know about my ‘statements,’ Mr. Harth?”

  “Because I have made it my life’s business to know—”

  “But it is not your business here, sir. It is up to the Commensals of Orgoreyn.”

  “I tell you that you’re in danger of your life, Mr. Ai,” I said; to that he said nothing, and I left him.

  I should have spoken to him days ago. It is too late. Fear undoes his mission and my hope, once more. Not fear of the alien, the unearthly, not here. These Orgota have not the wits nor size of spirit to fear what is truly and immensely strange. They cannot even see it. They look at the man from another world and see what? a spy from Karhide, a pervert, an agent, a sorry little political Unit like themselves.

  If he does not send for the ship at once it will be too late; it may be already too late.

  It is my fault. I have done nothing right.