The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula Le Guin

  “You for my sake—I for yours,” he said, and laughed again, a slight cheerful sound in the heavy silence. These three days since we came down from the pass have been much hard work for no gain, but Ai is no longer downcast, nor overhopeful; and he has more patience with me. Maybe the drugs are sweated out of him. Maybe we have learned to pull together.

  We spent this day coming down from the basaltic spur which we spent yesterday climbing. From the valley it looked a good road up onto the Ice, but the higher we went the more scree and slick rock-face we met, and a grade ever steeper, till even without the sledge we could not have climbed it. Tonight we are back down at the foot of it in the moraine, the valley of stones. Nothing grows here. Rock, pebble-dump, boulder-fields, clay, mud. An arm of the glacier has withdrawn from this slope within the last fifty or hundred years, leaving the planet’s bones raw to the air; no flesh of earth, of grass. Here and there fumaroles cast a heavy yellowish fog over the ground, low and creeping. The air smells of sulphur. It is 12°, still, overcast. I hope no heavy snow falls until we have got over the evil ground between this place and the glacier-arm we saw some miles to the west from the ridge. It seems to be a wide ice-river running down from the plateau between two mountains, volcanoes, both capped with steam and smoke. If we can get onto it from the slopes of the nearer volcano, it may provide us a road up onto the plateau of ice. To our east a smaller glacier comes down to a frozen lake, but it runs curving and even from here the great crevasses in it can be seen; it is impassible to us, equipped as we are. We agreed to try the glacier between the volcanoes, though by going west to it we lose at least two days’ mileage towards our goal, one in going west and one in regaining the distance.

  Opposthe Thern. Snowing neserem.7 No travel in this. We both slept all day. We have been hauling nearly a halfmonth, the sleep does us good.

  Ottormenbod Thern. Snowing neserem. Enough sleep. Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game. As he remarked, there are plenty of stones here to play go with.

  He endures the cold pretty well, and if courage were enough, would stand it like a snow-worm. It is odd to see him bundled up in hieb and overcoat with the hood up, when the temperature is above zero; but when we sledge, if the sun is out or the wind not too bitter, he takes off the coat soon and sweats like one of us. We must compromise as to the heating of the tent. He would keep it hot, I cold, and either’s comfort is the other’s pneumonia. We strike a medium, and he shivers outside his bag, while I swelter in mine; but considering from what distances we have come together to share this tent a while, we do well enough.

  Getheny Thanern. Clear after the blizzard, wind down, the thermometer around 15° all day. We are camped on the lower western slope of the nearer volcano: Mount Dremegole, on my map of Orgoreyn. Its companion across the ice-river is called Drumner. The map is poorly made; there is a great peak visible to the west not shown on it at all, and it is all out of proportion. The Orgota evidently do not often come into their Fire-Hills. Indeed there is not much to come for, except grandeur. We hauled eleven miles today, difficult work: all rock. Ai is asleep already. I bruised the tendon of my heel, wrenching it like a fool when my foot was caught between two boulders, and limped out the afternoon. The night’s rest should heal it. Tomorrow we should get down onto the glacier.

  Our food-supplies seem to have sunk alarmingly, but it is because we have been eating the bulky stuff. We had between ninety and a hundred pounds of coarse foodstuffs, half of it the load I stole in Turuf; sixty pounds of this are gone, after fifteen days’ journey. I have started on the gichy-michy at a pound a day, saving two sacks of kadik-germ, some sugar, and a chest of dried fishcakes for variety later. I am glad to be rid of that heavy stuff from Turuf. The sledge pulls lighter.

  Sordny Thanern. In the 20’s; frozen rain, wind pouring down the ice-river like the draft in a tunnel. Camped a quarter mile in from the edge, on a long flat streak of firn. The way down from Dremegole was rough and steep, on bare rock and rock-fields; the glacier’s edge heavily crevassed, and so foul with gravel and rocks caught in the ice that we tried the sledge on wheels there too. Before we had got a hundred yards a wheel wedged fast and the axle bent. We use runners henceforth. We made only four miles today, still in the wrong direction. The effluent glacier seems to run on a long curve westerly up to the Gobrin plateau. Here between the volcanoes it is about four miles wide, and should not be hard going farther in towards the center, though it is more crevassed than I had hoped, and the surface rotten.

  Drumner is in eruption. The sleet on one’s lips tastes of smoke and sulphur. A darkness loured all day in the west even under the rainclouds. From time to time all things, clouds, icy rain, ice, air, would turn a dull red, then fade slowly back to gray. The glacier shakes a little under our feet.

  Eskichwe rem ir Her hypothesized that the volcanic activity in N.W. Orgoreyn and the Archipelago has been increasing during the last ten or twenty millennia, and presages the end of the Ice, or at least a recession of it and an interglacial period. CO2 released by the volcanoes into the atmosphere will in time serve as an insulator, holding in the long-wave heat-energy reflected from the earth, while permitting direct solar heat to enter undiminished. The average world temperature, he says, would in the end be raised some thirty degrees, till it attains 72°. I am glad I shall not be present. Ai says that similar theories have been propounded by Terran scholars to explain the still incomplete recession of their last Age of Ice. All such theories remain largely irrefutable and unprovable; no one knows certainly why the ice comes, why it goes. The Snow of Ignorance remains untrodden.

  Over Drumner in the dark now a great table of dull fire burns.

  Eps Thanern. The meter reads sixteen miles hauled today, but we are not more than eight miles in a straight line from last night’s camp. We are still in the ice-pass between the two volcanoes. Drumner is in eruption. Worms of fire crawl down its black sides, seen when wind clears off the roil and seethe of ash-cloud and smoke-cloud and white steam. Continuously, with no pause, a hissing mutter fills the air, so huge and so long a sound that one cannot hear it when one stops to listen; yet it fills all the interstices of one’s being. The glacier trembles perpetually, snaps and crashes, jitters under our feet. All the snow-bridges that the blizzard may have laid across crevasses are gone, shaken down, knocked in by this drumming and jumping of the ice and the earth beneath the ice. We go back and forth, seeking the end of a slit in the ice that would swallow the sledge whole, then seeking the end of the next, trying to go north and forced always to go west or east. Above us Dremegole, in sympathy with Drumner’s labor, grumbles and farts foul smoke.

  Ai’s face was badly frostbitten this morning, nose, ears, chin all dead gray when I chanced to look at him. Kneaded him back to life and no damage done, but we must be more careful. The wind that blows down off the Ice is, in simple truth, deadly; and we have to face it as we haul.

  I shall be glad to get off this slit and wrinkled ice-arm between two growling monsters. Mountains should be seen, not heard.

  Arhad Thanern. Some sove-snow, between 15 and 20°. We went twelve miles today, about five of them profitable, and the rim of the Gobrin is visibly nearer, north, above us. We now see the ice-river to be miles wide: the “arm” between Drumner and Dremegole is only one finger, and we now are on the back of the hand. Turning and looking down from this camp one sees the glacier-flow split, divided, torn and churned by the black steaming peaks that thwart it. Looking ahead one sees it broaden, rising and curving slowly, dwarfing the dark ridges of earth, meeting the ice-wall far above under veils of cloud and smoke and snow. Cinders and ash now fall with the snow, and the ice is thick with clinkers on it or sunk in it: a good walking surface but rather rough for hauling, and the runners need recoating already. Two or three times volcanic projectiles hit the ice quite near us. They hiss loudly as they strike, and burn themselves a socket in the ice. Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep
infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself.

  Praise then Creation unfinished!

  Netherhad Thanern. No snow since morning; overcast and windy, at about 15°. The great multiple glacier we are on feeds down into the valley from the west, and we are on its extreme eastern edge. Dremegole and Drumner are now somewhat behind us, though a sharp ridge of Dremegole still rises east of us, almost at eyelevel. We have crept and crawled up to a point where we must choose between following the glacier on its long sweep westward and so up gradually onto the plateau of ice, or climbing the ice-cliffs a mile north of tonight’s camp, and so saving twenty or thirty miles of hauling, at the cost of risk.

  Ai favors the risk.

  There is a frailty about him. He is all unprotected, exposed, vulnerable, even to his sexual organ which he must carry always outside himself; but he is strong, unbelievably strong. I am not sure he can keep hauling any longer than I can, but he can haul harder and faster than I—twice as hard. He can lift the sledge at front or rear to ease it over an obstacle. I could not lift and hold that weight, unless I was in dothe. To match his frailty and strength, he has a spirit easy to despair and quick to defiance: a fierce impatient courage. This slow, hard, crawling work we have been doing these days wears him out in body and will, so that if he were one of my race I should think him a coward, but he is anything but that; he has a ready bravery I have never seen the like of. He is ready, eager, to stake life on the cruel quick test of the precipice.

  “Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.” He makes fear serve him. I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.

  Streth Thanern. No luck. No way to get the sledge up, though we spent the day at it.

  Sove-snow in flurries, thick ash mixed with it. It was dark all day, as the wind veering around from the west again blew the pall of Drumner’s smoke on us. Up here the ice shakes less, but there came a great quake while we tried to climb a shelving cliff; it shook free the sledge where we had wedged it and I was pulled down five or six feet with a bump, but Ai had a good handhold and his strength saved us from all careering down to the foot of the cliff, twenty feet or more. If one of us breaks a leg or shoulder in these exploits, that is probably the end of both of us; there, precisely, is the risk—rather an ugly one when looked at closely. The lower valley of the glaciers behind us is white with steam: lava touches ice, down there. We certainly cannot go back. Tomorrow we shall try the ascent farther west.

  Beren Thanern. No luck. We must go farther west. Dark as late twilight all day. Our lungs are raw, not from cold (it remains well above zero even at night, with this west wind) but from breathing the ash and fumes of the eruption. By the end of this second day of wasted effort, scrabbling and squirming over pressure-blocks and up ice-cliffs always to be stopped by a sheer face or overhang, trying farther on and failing again, Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual—how can I guess why Ai must not weep? Yet his name is a cry of pain. For that I first sought him out in Erhenrang, a long time ago it seems now; hearing talk of “an Alien” I asked his name, and heard for answer a cry of pain from a human throat across the night. Now he sleeps. His arms tremble and twitch, muscular fatigue. The world around us, ice and rock, ash and snow, fire and dark, trembles and twitches and mutters. Looking out a minute ago I saw the glow of the volcano as a dull red bloom on the belly of vast clouds overhanging the darkness.

  Orny Thanern. No luck. This is the twenty-second day of our journey, and since the tenth day we have made no progress eastward, indeed have lost twenty or twenty-five miles by going west; since the eighteenth day we have made no progress of any kind, and might as well have sat still. If we ever do get up on the Ice, will we have food enough left to take us across it? This thought is hard to dismiss. Fog and murk of the eruption cut seeing very close, so that we cannot choose our path well. Ai wants to attack each ascent, however steep, that shows any sign of shelving. He is impatient with my caution. We have got to watch our tempers. I will be in kemmer in a day or so, and all strains will increase. Meanwhile we butt our heads on cliffs of ice in a cold dusk full of ashes. If I wrote a new Yomesh Canon I should send thieves here after death. Thieves who steal sacks of food by night in Turuf. Thieves who steal a man’s hearth and name from him and send him out ashamed and exiled. My head is thick, I must cross out all this stuff later, too tired to reread it now.

  Harhahad Thanern. On the Gobrin. The twenty-third day of our journey. We are on the Gobrin Ice. As soon as we set out this morning we saw, only a few hundred yards beyond last night’s camp, a pathway open up to the Ice, a highway curving broad and cinder-paved from the rubble and chasms of the glacier right up through the cliffs of ice. We walked up it as if strolling along the Sess Embankment. We are on the Ice. We are headed east again, homeward.

  I am infected by Ai’s pure pleasure in our achievement. Looked at soberly it is as bad as ever, up here. We are on the plateau’s rim. Crevasses—some wide enough to sink villages in, not house by house but all at once—run inland, northward, right out of sight. Most of them cut across our way, so we too must go north, not east. The surface is bad. We screw the sledge along amongst great lumps and chunks of ice, immense debris pushed up by the straining of the great plastic sheet of ice against and among the Fire-Hills. The broken pressure-ridges take queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults. A mile thick to start with, the Ice here rises and thickens, trying to flow over the mountains and choke the fire-mouths with silence. Some miles to the north a peak rises up out of the Ice, the sharp graceful barren cone of a young volcano: younger by thousands of years than the ice-sheet that grinds and shoves, all shattered into chasms and jammed up into great blocks and ridges, over the six thousand feet of lower slopes we cannot see.

  During the day, turning, we saw the smoke of Drumner’s eruption hang behind us like a gray-brown extension of the surface of the Ice. A steady wind blows along at ground level from the northeast, clearing this higher air of the soot and stink of the planet’s bowels which we have breathed for days, flattening out the smoke behind us to cover, like a dark lid, the glaciers, the lower mountains, the valleys of stones, the rest of the earth. There is nothing, the Ice says, but Ice.—But the young volcano there to northward has another word it thinks of saying.

  No snowfall, a thin high overcast. -4° on the plateau at dusk. A jumble of firn, new ice, and old ice underfoot. The new ice is tricky, slick blue stuff just hidden by a white glaze. We have both been down a good deal. I slid fifteen feet on my belly across one such slick. Ai, in harness, doubled up laughing. He apologized and explained he had thought himself the only person on Gethen who ever slipped on ice.

  Thirteen miles today; but if we try to keep up such a pace among these cut, heaped, crevassed pressure-ridges we shall wear ourselves out or come to worse grief than a bellyslide.

  The waxing moon is low, dull as dry blood; a great brownish, iridescent halo surrounds it.

  Guyrny Thanern. Some snow, rising wind and falling temperature. Thirteen miles again today, which brings our distance logged since we left our first camp to 254 miles. We have averaged about ten and a half miles a day; eleven and a half omitting the two days spent waiting out the blizzard. 75 to 100 of those miles of hauling gave us no onward gain. We are not much nearer Karhide than we were when we set out. But we stand a better chance, I think, of getting there.

  Since we came up out of the volcano-murk our spirit is not all spent in work and worry, and we talk again in the tent after our dinner. As I am in kemmer I would find it easier to ignore Ai’s presence, but this is difficult in a two-man tent. The trouble is of
course that he is, in his curious fashion, also in kemmer: always in kemmer. A strange lowgrade sort of desire it must be, to be spread out over every day of the year and never to know the choice of sex, but there it is; and here am I. Tonight my extreme physical awareness of him was rather hard to ignore, and I was too tired to divert it into untrance or any other channel of the discipline. Finally he asked, had he offended me? I explained my silence, with some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am: up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. There is no world full of other Gethenians here to explain and support my existence. We are equals at last, equal, alien, alone. He did not laugh, of course. Rather he spoke with a gentleness that I did not know was in him. After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.

  “Your race is appallingly alone in its world. No other mammalian species. No other ambisexual species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as pets. It must color your thinking, this uniqueness. I don’t mean scientific thinking only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers—it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.”

  “The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.”

  “Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgoreyn is in the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around. What do the Handdarata say?”