The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula Le Guin

  I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainishnorm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. The nearest to crisis that our sexual desires brought us was on a night early in the journey, our second night up on the Ice. We had spent all day struggling and back-tracking in the cut-up, crevassed area east of the Fire-Hills. We were tired that evening but elated, sure that a clear course would soon open out ahead. But after dinner Estraven grew taciturn, and cut my talk off short. I said at last after a direct rebuff, “Harth, I’ve said something wrong again, please tell me what it is.”

  He was silent.

  “I’ve made some mistake in shifgrethor. I’m sorry; I can’t learn. I’ve never even really understood the meaning of the word.”

  “Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow.”

  We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.

  And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

  He explained, stiffly and simply, that he was in kemmer and had been trying to avoid me, insofar as one of us could avoid the other. “I must not touch you,” he said, with extreme constraint; saying that he looked away.

  I said, “I understand. I agree completely.”

  For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.

  We talked some more that night, and I recall being very hard put to it to answer coherently when he asked me what women were like. We were both rather stiff and cautious with each other for the next couple of days. A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. It would never have occurred to me before that night that I could hurt Estraven.

  Now that the barriers were down, the limitation, in my terms, of our converse and understanding seemed intolerable to me. Quite soon, two or three nights later, I said to my companion as we finished our dinner—a special treat, sugared kadik-porridge, to celebrate a twenty-mile run—“Last spring, that night in the Corner Red Dwelling, you said you wished I’d tell you more about paraverbal speech.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Do you want to see if I can teach you how to speak it?”

  He laughed. “You want to catch me lying.”

  “If you ever lied to me, it was long ago, and in another country.”

  He was an honest person, but rarely a direct one. That tickled him, and he said, “In another country I may tell you other lies. But I thought you were forbidden to teach your mind-science to…the natives, until we join the Ekumen.”

  “Not forbidden. It’s not done. I’ll do it, though, if you like. And if I can. I’m no Educer.”

  “There are special teachers of the skill?”

  “Yes. Not on Alterra, where there’s a high occurrence of natural sensitivity, and—they say—mothers mindspeak to their unborn babies. I don’t know what the babies answer. But most of us have to be taught, as if it were a foreign language. Or rather as if it were our native language, but learned very late.”

  I think he understood my motive in offering to teach him the skill, and he wanted very much to learn it. We had a go at it. I recalled what I could of how I had been educed, at age twelve. I told him to clear his mind, let it be dark. This he did, no doubt, more promptly and thoroughly than I ever had done: he was an adept of the Handdara, after all. Then I mindspoke to him as clearly as I could. No result. We tried it again. Since one cannot bespeak until one has been bespoken, until the telepathic potentiality has been sensitized by one clear reception, I had to get through to him first. I tried for half an hour, till I felt hoarse of brain. He looked crestfallen. “I thought it would be easy for me,” he confessed. We were both tired out, and called the attempt off for the night.

  Our next efforts were no more successful. I tried sending to Estraven while he slept, recalling what my Educer had told me about the occurrence of “dream-messages” among pre-telepathic peoples, but it did not work.

  “Perhaps my species lacks the capacity,” he said. “We have enough rumors and hints to have made up a word for the power, but I don’t know of any proven instances of telepathy among us.”

  “So it was with my people for thousands of years. A few natural Sensitives, not comprehending their gift, and lacking anyone to receive from or send to. All the rest latent, if that. You know I told you that except in the case of the born Sensitive, the capacity, though it has a physiological basis, is a psychological one, a product of culture, a side-effect of the use of the mind. Young children, and defectives, and members of un-evolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction, intricate cultural adjustments, esthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to reach a certain level before the connections can be made—before the potentiality can be touched at all.”

  “Perhaps we Gethenians haven’t attained that level.”

  “You’re far beyond it. But luck is involved. As in the creation of amino acids…Or to take analogies on the cultural plane—only analogies, but they illuminate—the scientific method, for instance, the use of concrete, experimental techniques in science. There are peoples of the Ekumen who possess a high culture, a complex society, philosophies, arts, ethics, a high style and a great achievement in all those fields; and yet they have never learned to weigh a stone accurately. They can learn how, of course. Only for half a million years they never did…There are peoples who have no higher mathematics at all, nothing beyond the simplest applied arithmetic. Every one of them is capable of understanding the calculus, but not one of them does or ever has. As a matter of fact, my own people, the Terrans, were ignorant until about three thousand years ago of the uses of zero.” That made Estraven blink. “As for Gethen, what I’m curious about is whether the rest of us may find ourselves to have the capacity for Foretelling—whether this too is a part of the evolution of the mind—if you’ll teach us the techniques.”

  “You think it a useful accomplishment?”

  “Accurate prophecy? Well, of course!—”

  “You might have to come to believe that it’s a useless one, in order to practice it.”

  “Your Handdara fascinates me, Harth, but now and then I wonder if it isn’t simply paradox developed into a way of life…”
r />   We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying. Presently Estraven yawned and said, “I am deaf, deaf as a rock. We’d better sleep.” I assented. He turned out the light, murmuring his brief praise of darkness; we burrowed down into our bags, and within a minute or two he was sliding into sleep as a swimmer slides into dark water. I felt his sleep as if it were my own: the empathic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him, sleepily, by his name—“Therem!”

  He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud. “Arek! is that you?”

  “No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you.”

  His breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light, stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. “I dreamed,” he said, “I thought I was at home—”

  “You heard me mindspeak.”

  “You called me—It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He’s dead. You called me—you called me Therem? I…This is more terrible than I had thought.” He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.

  “Harth, I’m very sorry—”

  “No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man’s voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me ‘Harth’? Oh, I see why there’s no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing…All right. All right, speak to me again.”

  “Wait.”

  “No. Go on.”

  With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: “Therem, my friend, there’s nothing to fear between us.”

  He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had. “Ah, but there is,” he said.

  After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, “You spoke in my language.”

  “Well, you don’t know mine.”

  “You said there would be words, I know…Yet I imagined it as—an understanding—”

  “Empathy’s another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centers of the brain are activated, as well as—”

  “No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?” His voice was strained.

  “That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.”

  “Nusuth… My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Estraven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We…I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.”

  We were both silent for some time. I could not know, or ask, what lay behind his words: it had cost him too much to say the little he had said.

  I said at last, “Bespeak me, Therem. Call me by my name.” I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily. Had I been a Listener, I could have heard him think.

  “No,” he said. “Never. Not yet…”

  But no amount of shock, awe, terror could restrain that insatiable, outreaching mind for long. After he had cut out the light again I suddenly heard his stammer in my inward hearing—“Genry—” Even mindspeaking he never could say “l” properly.

  I replied at once. In the dark he made an inarticulate sound of fear that had in it a slight edge of satisfaction. “No more, no more,” he said aloud. After a while we got to sleep at last.

  It never came easy to him. Not that he lacked the gift or could not develop the skill, but it disturbed him profoundly, and he could not take it for granted. He quickly learned to set up the barriers, but I’m not sure he felt he could count on them. Perhaps all of us were so, when the first Educers came back centuries ago from Rokanon’s World teaching the “Last Art” to us. Perhaps a Gethenian, being singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness, a breach of integrity hard for him to tolerate. Perhaps it was Estraven’s own character, in which candor and reserve were both strong: every word he said rose out of a deeper silence. He heard my voice bespeaking him as a dead man’s, his brother’s voice. I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between him and that brother, but I knew that whenever I bespoke him something in him winced away as if I touched a wound. So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.

  And day after day we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The midpoint in time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Anner, found us far short of our halfway point in space. By the sledge-meter we had indeed traveled about four hundred miles, but probably only three-quarters of that was real forward gain, and we could estimate only very roughly how far still remained to go. We had spent days, miles, rations in our long struggle to get up onto the Ice. Estraven was not so worried as I by the hundreds of miles that still lay ahead of us. “The sledge is lighter,” he said. “Towards the end it will be still lighter; and we can cut rations, if necessary. We have been eating very well, you know.”

  I thought he was being ironic, but I should have known better.

  On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he drank orsh or sugar-water at mealtimes. He insisted that I eat, though only half-rations. “You have no experience in starvation,” he said.

  I was humiliated. “How much have you—Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister—?”

  “Genry, we practice privation until we’re experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child at home in Estre, and by the Handdarata in Rotherer Fastness. I got out of practice in Erhenrang, true enough, but I began making up for it in Mishnory…Please do as I say, my friend; I know what I’m doing.”

  He did, and I did.

  We went on for four more days of very bitter cold, never above -25°, and then came another blizzard whooping up in our faces from the east on a gale wind. Within two minutes of the first strong gusts the snow blew so thick that I could not see Estraven six feet away. I had turned my back on him and the sledge and the plastering, blinding, suffocating snow in order to get my breath, and when a minute later I turned around he was gone. The sledge was gone. Nothing was there. I took a few steps to where they had been and felt about. I shouted, and could not hear my own voice. I was deaf and alone in a universe filled solid with small stinging gray streaks. I panicked and began to blunder forward, mindcalling frantically, “Therem!”

  Right under my hand, kneeling, he said, “Come on, give me a hand with the tent.”

  I did so, and never mentioned my minute of panic. No need to.

  This blizzard lasted two days; there were five days lost, and there would be more. Nimmer and Anner are the months of the great storms.

  “We’re beginning to cut it rather fine, aren’t we,” I said one night as I measured out our gichy-michy ration and put it to soak in hot water.

  He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. “With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.”

  It was what he had said from the start. With all my anxieties, my sense of taking a last desperate gamble, and so on, I had not been realistic enough to believe him. Even now I thought, Surely when we’ve worked so hard—

  But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.

  “How is your luck running, Therem?” I said at last.

  He did not smile at that. Nor did he answer. Only after a while he said, “I’ve been thinking about them all, down there.” Down there, for us, had come to mean the south, the world below the plateau of ice, the region of earth, men, roads, cities, all of which had become hard to imagin
e as really existing. “You know that I sent word to the king concerning you, the day I left Mishnory. I told him what Shusgis told me, that you were going to be sent to Pulefen Farm. At the time I wasn’t clear as to my intent, but merely followed my impulse. I have thought the impulse through, since. Something like this may happen: The king will see a chance to play shifgrethor. Tibe will advise against it, but Argaven should be growing a little tired of Tibe by now, and may ignore his counsel. He will inquire. Where is the Envoy, the guest of Karhide?—Mishnory will lie. He died of horm-fever this autumn, most lamentable.—Then how does it happen that we are informed by our own Embassy that he’s in Pulefen Farm?—He’s not there, look for yourselves.—No, no, of course not, we accept the word of the Commensals of Orgoreyn…But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance you get. Bring your people to Karhide and accomplish your mission, at once, before Argaven has had time to see the possible enemy in you, before Tibe or some other councillor frightens him once more, playing on his madness. If he makes the bargain with you, he will keep it. To break it would be to break his own shifgrethor. The Harge kings keep their promises. But you must act fast, and bring the Ship down soon.”

  “I will, if I receive the slightest sign of welcome.”

  “No: forgive my advising you, but you must not wait for welcome. You will be welcomed, I think. So will the Ship. Karhide has been sorely humbled this past half-year. You will give Argaven the chance to turn the tables. I think he will take the chance.”