The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula Le Guin

  “But for what purpose—all this intriguing, this hiding and power-seeking and plotting—what was it all for, Estraven? What were you after?”

  “I was after what you’re after: the alliance of my world with your worlds. What did you think?”

  We were staring at each other across the glowing stove like a pair of wooden dolls.

  “You mean, even if it was Orgoreyn that made the alliance—?”

  “Even if it was Orgoreyn. Karhide would soon have followed. Do you think I would play shifgrethor when so much is at stake for all of us, all my fellow men? What does it matter which country wakens first, so long as we waken?”

  “How the devil can I believe anything you say!” he burst out. Bodily weakness made his indignation sound aggrieved and whining. “If all this is true, you might have explained some of it earlier, last spring, and spared us both a trip to Pulefen. Your efforts on my behalf—”

  “Have failed. And have put you in pain, and shame, and danger. I know it. But if I had tried to fight Tibe for your sake, you would not be here now, you’d be in a grave in Erhenrang. And there are now a few people in Karhide, and a few in Orgoreyn, who believe your story, because they listened to me. They may yet serve you. My greatest error was, as you say, in not making myself clear to you. I am not used to doing so. I am not used to giving, or accepting, either advice or blame.”

  “I don’t mean to be unjust, Estraven—”

  “Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.”

  He put his head in his hands. He said at last, “I’m sorry, Estraven.” It was both apology and admission.

  “The fact is,” I said, “that you’re unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.” I stood up, for my legs were cramped, and found I was trembling with anger and weariness. “Teach me your mindspeech,” I said, trying to speak easily and with no rancor, “your language that has no lies in it. Teach me that, and then ask me why I did what I’ve done.”

  “I should like to do that, Estraven.”

  15. To the Ice

  I WOKE. Until now it had been strange, unbelievable, to wake up inside a dim cone of warmth, and to hear my reason tell me that it was a tent, that I lay in it, alive, that I was not still in Pulefen Farm. This time there was no strangeness in my waking, but a grateful sense of peace. Sitting up I yawned and tried to comb back my matted hair with my fingers. I looked at Estraven, stretched out sound asleep on his sleeping-bag a couple of feet from me. He wore nothing but his breeches; he was hot. The dark secret face was laid bare to the light, to my gaze. Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep: a round, strong face, relaxed and remote, small drops of sweat on the upper lip and over the heavy eyebrows. I remembered how he had stood sweating on the parade-stand in Erhenrang in panoply of rank and sunlight. I saw him now defenseless and half-naked in a colder light, and for the first time saw him as he was.

  He woke late, and was slow in waking. At last he staggered up yawning, pulled on his shirt, stuck his head out to judge the weather, and then asked me if I wanted a cup of orsh. When he found that I had crawled about and brewed up a pot of the stuff with the water he had left in a pan as ice on the stove last night, he accepted a cup, thanked me stiffly, and sat down to drink it.

  “Where do we go from here, Estraven?”

  “It depends on where you want to go, Mr. Ai. And on what kind of travel you can manage.”

  “What’s the quickest way out of Orgoreyn?”

  “West. To the coast. Thirty miles or so.”

  “What then?”

  “The harbors will be freezing or already frozen, here. In any case no ships go out far in winter. It would be a matter of waiting in hiding somewhere until next spring, when the great traders go out to Sith and Perunter. None will be going to Karhide, if the trade-embargoes continue. We might work our passage on a trader. I am out of money, unfortunately.”

  “Is there any alternative?”

  “Karhide. Overland.”

  “How far is it—a thousand miles?”

  “Yes, by road. But we couldn’t go on the roads. We wouldn’t get past the first Inspector. Our only way would be north through the mountains, east across the Gobrin, and down to the border at Guthen Bay.”

  “Across the Gobrin—the ice-sheet, you mean?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s not possible in winter, is it?”

  “I think so; with luck, as in all winter journeys. In one respect a Glacier crossing is better in winter. The good weather, you know, tends to stay over the great glaciers, where the ice reflects the heat of the sun; the storms are pushed out to the periphery. Therefore the legends about the Place inside the Blizzard. That might be in our favor. Little else.”

  “Then you seriously think—”

  “There would have been no point taking you from Pulefen Farm if I did not.”

  He was still stiff, sore, grim. Last night’s conversation had shaken us both.

  “And I take it that you consider the Ice-crossing a better risk than waiting about till spring for a sea-crossing?”

  He nodded. “Solitude,” he explained, laconic.

  I thought it over for a while. “I hope you’ve taken my inadequacies into account. I’m not as coldproof as you, nowhere near it. I’m no expert on skis. I’m not in good shape—though much improved from a few days ago.”

  Again he nodded. “I think we might make it,” he said, with that complete simplicity I had so long taken for irony.

  “All right.”

  He glanced at me, and drank down his cup of tea. Tea it might as well be called; brewed from roasted perm-grain, orsh is a brown, sweetsour drink, strong in vitamins A and C, sugar, and a pleasant stimulant related to lobeline. Where there is no beer on Winter there is orsh; where there is neither beer nor orsh, there are no people.

  “It will be hard,” he said, setting down his cup. “Very hard. Without luck, we will not make it.”

  “I’d rather die up on the Ice than in that cesspool you got me out of.”

  He cut off a chunk of dried breadapple, offered me a slice, and sat meditatively chewing. “We’ll need more food,” he said.

  “What happens if we do make it to Karhide—to you, I mean? You’re still proscribed.”

  He turned his dark, otter’s glance on me. “Yes. I suppose I’d stay on this side.”

  “And when they found you’d helped their prisoner escape—?”

  “They needn’t find it.” He smiled, bleak, and said, “First we have to cross the Ice.”

  I broke out, “Listen, Estraven, will you forgive what I said yesterday—”

  “Nusuth.” He stood up, still chewing, put on his hieb, coat, and boots, and slipped otterlike out the self-sealing valved door. From outside he stuck his head back in: “I may be late, or gone overnight. Can you manage here?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” With that he was off. I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was recovering, and willing to go; he was out of thangen; the instant that was all clear, he was off. He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was.

  Yet he considered himself a slow man, poor in emergencies.

  Once he told me that, being so slow-thinking, he had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his “luck” was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him. He said it seriously; it may have been true. The Foretellers of the Fastnesses are not the only people on Winter who can see ahead. They have tamed and trained the hunch, but not increased its certainty. In this matter the Yomeshta also have a point: the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of se
eing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole.

  I kept the little heater-stove at its hottest setting while Estraven was gone, and so got warm clear through for the first time in—how long? I thought it must be Thern by now, the first month of winter and of a new Year One, but I had lost count in Pulefen.

  The stove was one of those excellent and economical devices perfected by the Gethenians in their millennial effort to outwit cold. Only the use of a fusion-pack as power source could improve it. Its bionic-powered battery was good for fourteen months’ continuous use, its heat output was intense, it was stove, heater, and lantern all in one, and it weighed about four pounds. We would never have got fifty miles without it. It must have cost a good deal of Estraven’s money, that money I had loftily handed over to him in Mishnory. The tent, which was made of plastics developed for weather-resistance and designed to cope with at least some of the inside water-condensation that is the plague of tents in cold weather; the pesthry-fur sleeping-bags; the clothes, skis, sledge, food-supplies, everything was of the finest make and kind, lightweight, durable, expensive. If he had gone to get more food, what was he going to get it with?

  He did not return till nightfall next day. I had gone out several times on snowshoes, gathering strength and getting practice by waddling around the slopes of the snowy vale that hid our tent. I was competent on skis, but not much good on snowshoes. I dared not go far over the hilltops, lest I lose my backtrack; it was wild country, steep, full of creeks and ravines, rising fast to the cloud-haunted mountains eastward. I had time to wonder what I would do in this forsaken place if Estraven did not come back.

  He came swooping over the dusky hill—he was a magnificent skier—and stopped beside me, dirty and tired and heavy-laden. He had on his back a huge sooty sack stuffed full of bundles: Father Christmas, who pops down the chimneys of old Earth. The bundles contained kadik-germ, dried breadapple, tea, and slabs of the hard, red, earthy-tasting sugar that Gethenians refine from one of their tubers.

  “How did you get all this?”

  “Stole it,” said the one-time Prime Minister of Karhide, holding his hands over the stove, which he had not yet turned down; he, even he, was cold. “In Turuf. Close thing.” That was all I ever learned. He was not proud of his exploit, and not able to laugh at it. Stealing is a vile crime on Winter; indeed the only man more despised than the thief is the suicide.

  “We’ll use up this stuff first,” he said, as I set a pan of snow on the stove to melt. “It’s heavy.” Most of the food he had laid in previously was ‘hyperfood’ rations, a fortified, dehydrated, compressed, cubed mixture of high-energy foods—the Orgota name for it is gichy-michy, and that’s what we called it, though of course we spoke Karhidish together. We had enough of it to last us sixty days at the minimal standard ration: a pound a day apiece. After he had washed up and eaten, Estraven sat a long time by the stove that night figuring out precisely what we had and how and when we must use it. We had no scales, and he had to estimate, using a pound box of gichy-michy as standard. He knew, as do many Gethenians, the caloric and nutritive value of each food; he knew his own requirements under various conditions, and how to estimate mine pretty closely. Such knowledge has high survival-value, on Winter.

  When at last he had got our rations planned out, he rolled over onto his bag and went to sleep. During the night I heard him talking numbers out of his dreams: weights, days, distances…

  We had, very roughly, eight hundred miles to go. The first hundred would be north or northeast, going through the forest and across the northernmost spurs of the Sembensyen range to the great glacier, the ice-sheet that covers the double-lobed Great Continent everywhere north of the 45th parallel, and in places dips down almost to the 35th. One of these southward extensions is in the region of the Fire-Hills, the last peaks of the Sembensyens, and that region was our first goal. There among the mountains, Estraven reasoned, we should be able to get onto the surface of the ice-sheet, either descending onto it from a mountain-slope or climbing up to it on the slope of one of its effluent glaciers. Thereafter we would travel on the Ice itself, eastward, for some six hundred miles. Where its edge trends north again near the Bay of Guthen we would come down off it and cut southeast a last fifty or a hundred miles across the Shenshey Bogs, which by then should be ten or twenty feet deep in snow, to the Karhidish border.

  This route kept us clear from start to finish of inhabited, or inhabitable, country. We would not be meeting any Inspectors. This was indubitably of the first importance. I had no papers, and Estraven said that his wouldn’t hold up under any further forgeries. In any case, though I could pass for a Gethenian when no one expected anything else, I was not disguisable to an eye looking for me. In this respect, then, the way Estraven proposed for us was highly practical.

  In all other respects it seemed perfectly insane.

  I kept my opinion to myself, for I fully meant what I’d said about preferring to die escaping, if it came down to a choice of deaths. Estraven, however, was still exploring alternatives. Next day, which we spent in loading and packing the sledge very carefully, he said, “If you raised the Star Ship, when might it come?”

  “Anywhere between eight days and a halfmonth, depending on where it is in its solar orbit relative to Gethen. It might be on the other side of the sun.”

  “No sooner?”

  “No sooner. The NAFAL motive can’t be used within a solar system. The ship can come in only on rocket drive, which puts her at least eight days away. Why?”

  He tugged a cord tight and knotted it before he answered. “I was considering the wisdom of trying to ask aid from your world, as mine seems unhelpful. There’s a radio beacon in Turuf.”

  “How powerful?”

  “Not very. The nearest big transmitter would be in Kuhumey, about four hundred miles south of here.”

  “Kuhumey’s a big town, isn’t it?”

  “A quarter of a million souls.”

  “We’d have to get the use of the radio transmitter somehow; then hide out for at least eight days, with the Sarf alerted…Not much chance.”

  He nodded.

  I lugged the last sack of kadik-germ out of the tent, fitted it into its niche in the sledge-load, and said, “If I had called the ship that night in Mishnory—the night you told me to—the night I was arrested…But Obsle had my ansible; still has it, I suppose.”

  “Can he use it?”

  “No. Not even by chance, fiddling about. The coordinate-settings are extremely complex. But if only I’d used it!”

  “If only I’d known the game was already over, that day,” he said, and smiled. He was not one for regrets.

  “You did, I think. But I didn’t believe you.”

  When the sledge was loaded, he insisted that we spend the rest of the day doing nothing, storing energy. He lay in the tent writing, in a little notebook, in his small, rapid, vertical-cursive Karhidish hand, the account that appears as the previous chapter. He hadn’t been able to keep up his journal during the past month, and that annoyed him; he was pretty methodical about that journal. Its writing was, I think, both an obligation to and a link with his family, the Hearth of Estre. I learned that later, however; at the time I didn’t know what he was writing, and I sat waxing skis, or doing nothing. I whistled a dance-tune, and stopped myself in the middle. We only had one tent, and if we were going to share it without driving each other mad, a certain amount of self-restraint, of manners, was evidently required…Estraven had looked up at my whistling, all right, but not with irritation. He looked at me rather dreamily, and said, “I wish I’d known about your Ship last year…Why did they send you onto this world alone?”

  “The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.”

  “The First Envoy’s life is held cheap.”

  “No; the Ekumen really doesn’t hold anybody’s life cheap. So it follows, better to put one life in danger than two, or twenty. It’s also very expensive and ti
me-consuming, you know, shipping people over the big jumps. Anyhow, I asked for the job.”

  “In danger, honor,” he said, evidently a proverb, for he added mildly, “We’ll be full of honor when we reach Karhide…”

  When he spoke, I found myself believing that we would in fact reach Karhide, across eight hundred miles of mountain, ravine, crevasse, volcano, glacier, ice-sheet, frozen bog or frozen bay, all desolate, shelterless, and lifeless, in the storms of midwinter in the middle of an Ice Age. He sat writing up his records with the same obdurate patient thoroughness I had seen in a mad king up on a scaffolding mortaring a joint, and said, “When we reach Karhide…”

  His when was no mere dateless hope, either. He intended to reach Karhide by the fourth day of the fourth month of winter, Arhad Anner. We were to start tomorrow, the thirteenth of the first month, Tormenbod Thern. Our rations, as well as he could calculate, might be stretched at farthest to three Gethenian months, 78 days; so we would go twelve miles a day for seventy days, and get to Karhide on Arhad Anner. That was all settled. No more to do now but get a good sleep.