Mishnory. Streth Susmy. Iam not hopeful, yet all events show cause for hope. Obsle haggles and dickers with his fellow Commensals, Yegey employs blandishments, Slose proselytizes, and the strength of their following grows. They are astute men, and have their faction well in hand. Only seven of the Thirty-Three are reliable Open Traders; of the rest, Obsle thinks to gain the sure support of ten, giving a bare majority.
One of them seems to have a true interest in the Envoy: Csl. Ithepen of the Eynyen District, who has been curious about the Alien Mission since, while working for the Sarf, he was in charge of censoring the broadcasts we sent out from Erhenrang. He seems to carry the weight of those suppressions on his conscience. He proposed to Obsle that the Thirty-Three announce their invitation to the Star Ship not only to their countrymen, but at the same time to Karhide, asking Argaven to join Karhide’s voice to the invitation. A noble plan, and it will not be followed. They will not ask Karhide to join them in anything.
The Sarf s men among the Thirty-Three of course oppose any consideration at all of the Envoy’s presence and mission. As for those lukewarm and uncommitted whom Obsle hopes to enlist, I think they fear the Envoy, much as Argaven and most of the Court did; with this difference, that Argaven thought him mad, like himself, while they think him a liar, like themselves. They fear to swallow a great hoax in public, a hoax already refused by Karhide, a hoax perhaps even invented by Karhide. They make their invitation, they make it publicly; then where is their shifgrethor, when no Star Ship comes?
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 Eku-men 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 Kar-hide, 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 Erhen-rang. 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 itis-”
“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 Kar-hidish 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 shif-grethor 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-michyp” 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 un-cured, 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, a-larmed. 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.
FromThe Sayings of Tuhulme the High Priest, a book of the Yomesh Canon, composed in North Or-goreyn about 900 years ago.
mesheis the Center of Time. That moment -of his life when he saw all things clearly came when he had lived on earth thirty years, and after it he lived on earth again thirty years, so that the Seeing befell in the center of his life. And all the ages up until the Seeing were as long as the ages will be after the Seeing, which befell in the Center of Time. And in the Center there is no time past and no time to come. In all time past it is. In all time to come it is. It has not been nor yet will it be. It is. It is all.
Nothing is unseen.
The poor man of Sheney came to Meshe lamenting that he had not food to give the child of his flesh, nor grain to sow, for the rains had rotted the seed in the ground and all the folk of his hearth starved. Meshe said, “Dig in the stone-fields of Tuerresh, and you will find there a treasure of silver and precious stones; for I see a king bury it there, ten thousand years ago, when a neighboring king presses feud upon him.”
The poor man of Sheney dug in the moraines of Tuerresh and unearthed where Meshe pointed a great hoard of ancient jewels, and at sight of it he shouted aloud for joy. But Meshe standing by wept at sight of it, saying, “I see a man kill his hearth-brother for one of those carven stones. That is ten thousand years from now, and the bones of the murdered man will lie in this grave where the treasure lies. O man of Sheney, I know too where your grave is: I see you lying in it.” .
The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the Seeing of Meshe, and are in his Eye. We are the pupils of his Eye. Our doing is his Seeing: our being his Knowing.
A hemmen-tree in the heart of Ornen Forest, which lies a hundred miles long and a hundred miles wide, was old and greatly grown, with a hundred branches and on every branch a thousand twigs and on every twig a hundred leaves. The tree said in its rooted being, “All my leaves are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves? and who will count the number of them?”
Meshe passed through the Forest of Ornen in his wanderings, and from that one tree plucked that one leaf.
No raindrop falls in the storms of autumn that ever fell before, and the rain has fallen, and falls, and will fall throughout all the autumns of the years. Meshe saw each drop, where it fell, and falls, and will fall.
In the Eye of Meshe are all the stars, and the darknesses between the stars: and all are bright.
In the answering of the Question of the Lord of Shorth, in the moment of the Seeing, Meshe saw all the sky as if it were all one sun. Above the earth and under the earth all the sphere of sky was bright as the sun’s surface, and there was no darkness. For he saw not what was, nor what will be, but what is. The stars that flee and take away their light all were present in his eye, and all their light shone presently.*
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not. In the Sight of Meshe there is no darkness.
Therefore those that call upon the darkness** are made fools of and spat out from the mouth of Meshe, for they name what is not, calling it Source and End.
There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.
One center, one seeing, one law, one light. Look now into the Eye of Meshe!
“This is a mystical expression of one of the theories used to support the expanding-universe hypothesis, first proposed by the Mathematical School of Sith over four thousand years ago and generally accepted by later cosmologistSj even though meteorological conditions on Gethen prevent their gathering much observational support from astronomy. The rate of expansion (Hubble’s constant; Rerherek’s constant) can in fact be estimated from the observed amount of light in the night sky; the point here involved is that, if the universe were not expanding, the night sky would not appear to be dark. “The Handdarata.
alarmed byEstraven’s sudden reappearance, his familiarity with my affairs, and the fierce urgency of his warnings, I hailed a taxi and drove straight to Obsle’s island, meaning to ask the Commensal how Estraven knew so much and why he had suddenly popped up from nowhere urging me to do precisely what Obsle yesterday had advised against doing. The Commensal was out, the doorkeeper did not know where he was or when he would be in. I went to Yegey’s house with no better luck. A heavy snow, the heaviest of the autumn so far, was falling; my driver refused to take me farther than to Shusgis’ house, as he did not have snow-cleats on his tires. That evening I failed to reach Obsle, Yegey, or Slose by telephone.
At dinner Shusgis explained: a Yomesh festival was going on, the Solemnity of the Saints and Throne-Upholders, and high officials of the Commensality were expected to be seen at the temples. He also explained Estraven’s behavior, shrewdly enough, as that of a man once powerful and now fallen, who grasps at any chance to influence persons or events-always less rationally, more desperately, as time passes and he knows himself sinking into powerless anonymity. I agreed that this would explain Estraven’s anxious, almost frantic manner. The anxiety had however infected me. I was vaguely ill at ease all through that long and heavy meal. Shusgis talked and talked to me and to the many employees, aides and sycophants who sat down at his table nightly; I had never known him so longwinded, so relentlessly jovial. When dinner was over it was pretty late for going out again, and in any case the Solemnity would keep all the Commensals busy, Shusgis said, until a^ter midnight. I decided to pass up supper, and went to bed early. Some time between midnight and dawn I was awakened by strangers, informed that I was under arrest, and taken by an armed guard to the Kundershaden Prison.
Kundershaden is old, one of the few very old buildings left in Mishnory. I had noticed it often as I went about the city, a long grimy many-towered ill-looking place, distinct among the pallid bulks and hulks of the Commensal edifices. It is what it looks like and is called. It is a jail. It is not a front for something else, not a fagade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words.
The guards, a sturdy, solid lot, hustled me through the corridors and left me alone in a small room, very dirty and very brightly lit. In a few minutes another lot of guards came crowding in as escort to a thin-faced man with an air of authority. He dismissed all but two. I asked him if I would be allowed to send word to Commensal Obsle.
“The Commensal knows of your arrest.”
I said, “Knows of it?” very stupidly.
“My superiors act, of course, by order of the Thirty-Three. -You will now undergo interrogation.”
The guards caught my arms. I resisted them, saying angrily, “I’m willing to answer what you ask, you can leave out the intimidation!” The thin-faced man paid no attention, but called back another guard. The three of them got me strapped on a pull-down table, stripped me, and injected me with, I suppose, one” of the veridical drugs.
I don’t know how long the questioning lasted or what it concerned, as I was drugged more or less heavily all the time and have no memory of it. When I came to myself again I had no idea how long I had been kept in Kundershaden: four or five days, judging by my physical condition, but I was not sure. For some while after that I did not know what day of the month it was, nor what month, and in fact I came only slowly to comprehend my surroundings at all.
I was in a caravan-truck, much like the truck that had carried me over the Kargav to Rer, but in the van; not the cab. There were twenty or thirty other people in with me, hard to tell how many, since there were no windows and light came only through a slit in the rear door, screened with four thicknesses of steel mesh. We had evidently been traveling some while when I recovered conscious thought, as each person’s place was more or less defined, and the smell of excreta, vomit, and sweat had already reached a point it neither surpassed nor declined from. No one knew any of the others. No one knew where we were being taken. There was little talking. It was the second time I had been locked in the dark with uncomplaining, unhopeful people of Orgoreyn. I knew now the sign I had been given, my first night in this country. I had ignored that black cellar and gone looking for the substance of Orgoreyn above ground, in daylight. No wonder nothing had seemed real.
I felt that the truck was going east, and couldn’t get rid of this impression even when it became plain that it was going west, farther and farther into Orgoreyn. One’s magnetic and directional subsenses are all wrong on other planets; when the intellect won’t or can’t compensate for that wrongness, the result is a profound bewilderment, a feeling that everything, literally, has come loose.
One of the truckload died that night. He had been clubbed or kicked in the abdomen, and died hemor-rhaging from anus and mouth. No one did anything for him; there was nothing to be done. A plastic jug of water had been shoved in amongst us some hours before, but it was long since dry. The man happened to be next to me on the right, and I took his head on my knees to give him relief in breathing,- so he died. We were all naked, but thereafter I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.
The night grew bitter, and we had to get close together for warmth. The corpse, having nothing to give, was pushed out of the group, excluded. The rest of us huddled together, swaying and jolting all in one motion, all night. Darkness was total inside our steel box. We were on some country road, and no truck followed us; even with face pressed up close to the mesh one could see nothing out the door-slit but darkness and the vague loom of fallen snow.
Falling snow; new-fallen snow; long-fallen snow; snow after rain has fallen on it; refrozen snow . . . Orgota and Karhidish have a word for each of these. In Karhidish (which I know better than Orgota) they have by my count sixty-two words for the various kinds, states, ages, and qualities of snow; fallen snow, that is. There is another set of words for the varieties of snowfall; anotherfor ice; a set of twenty or more that define what the temperature range is, how strong a wind blows, and what kind of precipitation is occurring, all together. I sat and tried to draw up lists of these words in my head that night. Each time I recalled another one I would repeat the lists, inserting it in its alphabetical place.
Along after dawn the truck stopped. People screamed out the slit .that there was a dead body in the truck: come and take it out. One after another of us screamed and shouted. We pounded together on the sides and door, making so hideous a pandemonium inside the steel box that we could not stand it ourselves. No one came. The truck stood still for some hours. At last there was a sound of voices outside; the truck lurched, skidding on an ice-patch, and set off again. One could see through the slit that it was late on a sunny morning, and that we were going through wooded hills.
The truck continued thus for three more days and nights-four in all since my awakening. It made no stops at Inspection Points, and I think it never passed through a town of any size. Its journey was erratic, furtive. There were stops to change drivers and recharge batteries; there were other, longer stops for no reason that could be discerned from inside the van. Two of the days it sat still from noon till dark, as if deserted, then began its run again at night. Once a day, around noon, a big jug of water was passed in through a trap in the door.
Counting the corpse there were twenty-six of us, two thirteens. Gethenians often think in thirteens, twenty-sixes, fifty-twos, no doubt because of the 26-day lunar cycle that makes their unvarying month and approximates their sexual cycle. The corpse was shoved up tight against the steel doors that formed the rear wall of our box, where he would keep cold. The rest of us sat and lay and crouched, each in his own place, his territory, his Domain, until night; when the cold grew so extreme that little by little we drew together and merged into one entity occupying one space, warm in the middle, cold at the periphery.
There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Despite our crowdedness and our huddling together nights, we in the truck were remote from one another. Some were stupefied from drugging, some were probably mental or social defectives to start with, all were abused and scared; yet it may be strange that among twenty-five not one ever spoke to all the others together, not even to curse them. Kindness there was and endurance, but in silence, always in silence. Jammed together in the sour darkness of our shared mortality, we bumped one another continually, jolted together, fell over one another, breathed our breaths mingling, laid the heat of our bodies together as a fire is laid-but remained strangers. I never learned the name of any of them in the truck.
One day, the third day I think, when the truck stopped still for hours and I wondered if they had simply left us in some desert place to rot, one of them began to talk to me. He kept telling me a long story about a mill in South Orgoreyn where he had worked, and how he had got into trouble with an overseer. He talked and talked in his soft dull voice and kept putting his hand on mine as if to be sure he had my attention. The sun was getting west of us and as we stood slewed around on the shoulder of the road a shaft of light entered in the window-slit; suddenly, even back in the box, one could see. I saw a girl, a filthy, pretty, stupid, weary girl looking up into my face as she talked, smiling timidly, looking for solace. The young Orgota was in kem-mer, and had been drawn to me. The one time any one of them asked anything of me, and I couldn’t give it. I got up and went to the window-slit as if for air and a look out, and did not come back to my place for a long time.
That night the truck went up long grades, down, up again. From time to time it halted inexplicably. At each halt a frozen, unbroken silence lay outside the steel walls of our box, the silence of vast waste lands, of the heights. The one in kemmer still kept the place beside mine, and still sought to touch me. I stood up for a long time again with my face pressed to the steel mesh of the window, breathing clean air that cut my throat and lungs like a razor. My hands pressed against the metal door became numb. I realized at last that they were or soon would be frostbitten. My breath had made a little ice-bridge between my lips and the mesh. I had to break this bridge with my fingers before I could turn away. When I huddled down with the others I began to shake with cold, a kind of shaking I had not experienced, jumping, racking spasms like the convulsions of fever. The truck started up again. Noise and motion gave an illusion of warmth, dispelling that utter, glacial silence, but I was still too cold to sleep that night. I thought we were at a fairly high altitude most of the night, but it was hard to tell, one’s breathing, heartbeat, and energy-level being unreliable indicators, given the circumstances.
As I knew later, we were crossing the Sembensyens that night, and must have gone up over nine thousand feet on the passes.
I was not much troubled by hunger. The last meal I remembered eating was that long and heavy dinner in Shusgis’ house; they must have fed me in Kunder-shaden, but I had no recollection of it. Eating did not seem to be a part of this existence in the steel box, and I did not often think about it. Thirst, on the other hand, was one of the permanent conditions of life. Once daily at a stop the trap, evidently set into the rear-door for this purpose, was unbolted; one of us thrust out the plastic jug and it was soon thrust back in filled, along with a brief gust of icy air. There was no way to measure out the water among us. The jug was passed, and each got three or four good swallows before the next hand reached for it. No one person or group acted as dispensers or guardians; none saw to it that a drink was saved for the man who coughed, though he was now in a high fever. I suggested this once and those around me nodded, but it was not done. The water was shared more or less equally-no one ever tried to get much more than his share-and was gone within a few minutes. Once the last three, up against the forward wall of the box, got none, the jug being dry when it came to them. The next day two of them insisted on being first in line, and were. The third lay huddled in his front corner un-stirring, and nobody saw to it that he got his share. Why didn’t I try to? I don’t know. That was the fourth day in the truck. If I had been passed over I’m not sure I would have made an effort to get my share. I was aware of his thirst and his suffering, and the sick man’s, and the others’, much as I was aware of my own. I was unable to do anything about any of this suffering, and therefore accepted it, as they did, placidly.
I know that people might behave very differently in the same circumstances. These were Orgota, people trained from birth in a discipline of cooperation, obedience, submission to a group purpose ordered from above. The qualities of independence and decision were weakened in them. They had not much capacity for anger. They formed a whole, I among them; each felt it, and it was a refuge and true comfort in the night, that wholeness of the huddled group each drawing life from the others. But there was no spokesman for the whole, it was headless, passive.
Men whose will was tempered to a sharper edge might have done much better: talked more, shared the water more justly, given more ease to the sick, and kept their courage higher. I don’t know. I only know what it was like inside that truck.
On the fifth morning, if my count is right, from the day I wakened in the truck, it stopped. We heard talking outside and calling back and fortH. The steel rear-doors were unbolted from the outside and flung wide open.
One by one we crept to that open end of the steel box, some on hands and knees, and jumped or crawled down onto the ground. Twenty-four of us did. Two dead men, the old corpse and a new one, the one who had not got his drink of water for two days, were dragged out.
It was cold outside, so cold and so glaring with white sunlight on white snow that to leave the fetid shelter of the truck was very hard, and some of us wept. We stood bunched up beside the great truck, all of us naked and stinking, our little whole, our night-entity exposed to the bright cruel daylight. They broke us up, made us form a line, and led us towards a building a few hundred yards away. The metal walls and snow-covered roof of the building, the plain of snow all around, the great range of mountains that lay under the rising sun, the vast sky, all seemed to shake and glitter with excess of light.
We were lined up to wash ourselves at a big trough in a frame hut; everybody began by drinking the wash-water. After that we were led into the main building and given undershirts, gray felt shirts, breeches, leggings, and felt boots. A guard checked off our names on a list as we filed into the refectory, where with a hundred or more other people in gray we sat at bolted-down tables and were serve.d breakfast: grain-porridge and beer. After that the whole lot of us, new prisoners and old, were divided up into squads of twelve. My squad was taken to a sawmill a few hundred yards behind the main building, inside the fence. Outside the fence and not far from it a forest began that covered the folded hills as far to northward as the eye could see. Under the direction of our guard we carried and stacked sawn boards from the mill to a huge shed where lumber was stored through the winter.
It was not easy to walk, stoop, and lift loads, after the days in the truck. They didn’t let us stand idle, but they didn’t force the pace either. In the middle of the day we were served a cupful of the unfermented grain-brew, orsh; before sunset we were taken back to the barracks and given dinner, porridge with some vegetables, and beer. By nightfall we were locked into the dormitory, which was kept fully lighted all night. We slept on five-foot-deep shelves all around the walls of the room in two tiers. Old prisoners scrambled for the upper tier, the more desirable, since heat rises. For bedding each man was issued a sleeping-bag at the door. They were coarse heavy bags, foul with other men’s sweat, but well insulated and warm. Their drawback for me was their shortness. An average-sized Geth-enian could get clear inside head and all, but I couldn’t; nor could I ever stretch out fully on the sleeping-shelf. The place was called Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm and Resettlement Agency. Pulefen, District Thirty, is in the extreme northwest of the habitable zone of Orgoreyn, bounded by the Sembensyen Mountains, the Esagel River, and the coast. The area is thinly settled, without big cities. The town nearest us was a place called Turuf, several miles to the southwest; I never saw it. The Farm was on the edge of a great unpopulated forest region, Tarrenpeth. Too far north for the larger trees, hemmen or serem or black vate, the forest was all of one kind of tree, a gnarled scrubby conifer ten or twelve feet high, gray-needled, called thore. Though the number of native species, plant or animal, on Winter is unusually small, the membership of each species is very large: there were thousands of square miles of thore-trees, and nothing much else, in that one forest. Even the wilderness is carefully husbanded there, and though that forest had been logged for centuries there were no waste places in it, no desolations of stumps, no eroded slopes. It seemed that every tree in it was accounted for, and that not one grain of sawdust from our mill went unused. There was a small plant on the Farm, and when the weather prevented parties from going out into the forest we worked in the mill or in the plant, treating and compressing chips, bark, and sawdust into various forms, and extracting from the dried thore-needles a resin used in plastics.
The work was genuine work, and we were not overdriven. If they had allowed a little more food and better clothing much of the work would have been pleasant, but we were too hungry and cold most of the time for any pleasure. The guards were seldom harsh and never cruel. They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate-not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge. Among my fellow-prisoners I had also for the first time on Winter a certain feeling of being a man among women, or among eunuchs. The prisoners had that same flabbiness and coarseness. They were hard to tell apart; their emotional tone seemed always low, their talk trivial. I took this lifeless-ness and leveling at first for the effect of the privation of food, warmth, and liberty, but I soon found out that it was more specific an effect than that: it was the result of the drugs given all prisoners to keep them out of kemmer.
I knew that drugs existed which could reduce or virtually eliminate the potency phase- of the Gethenian sexual cycle; they were used when convenience, medicine, or morality dictated abstinence. One kemmer, or several, could be skipped thus without ill effect. The voluntary use of such drugs was common and accepted. It had not occurred to me that they might be administered to unwilling persons.
There were good reasons. A prisoner in kemmer would be a disruptive element in his work-squad. If let off work, what was to be done with him?-especially if no other prisoner was in kemmer at the time, as was possible, there being only some 150 of us. To go through kemmer without a partner is pretty hard on a Gethenian; better, then, simply obviate the misery and wasted work-time, and not go through kemmer at alL So they prevented it.
Prisoners who had been there for several years were psychologically and I believe to some extent physically adapted to this chemical castration. They were as sexless as steers. They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
Being so strictly denned and limited by nature, the sexual urge of Gethenians is really not much interfered with by society: there is less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex there than in any bisexual society I know of. Abstinence is entirely voluntary; indulgence is entirely acceptable. Sexual fear and sexual frustration are both extremely rare. This was the first case I had seen of the social purpose running counter to the sexual drive. Being a suppression, not merely a repression, it produced not frustration, but something more ominous, perhaps, in the long run: passivity.
There are no communal insects on Winter. Gethenians do not share their earth as Terrans do with those older societies, those innumerable cities of little sexless workers possessing no instinct but that of obedience to the group, the whole. If there were ants on Winter, Gethenians might have tried to imitate them long ago. The regime of the Voluntary Farms is a fairly recent thing, limited to one country of the planet and literally unknown elsewhere. But it is an ominous sign of the direction that a society of people so vulnerable to sexual control might take.
At Pulefen Farm we were, as I said, underfed for the work we did, and our clothing, particularly our footgear, was completely inadequate for that winter climate. The guards, most of them probationary prisoners, were not much better off. The intent of the place and its regime was punitive, but not destructive, and I think it might have been endurable, without the drug-gings and the examinations.
Some of the prisoners underwent the examination in groups of twelve; they merely recited a sort of confessional and catechism, got their anti-kemmer shot, and were released to work. Others, the political prisoners, were subjected every fifth day to questioning under drugs.
I don’t know what drugs they used. I don’t know the purpose of the questioning. I have no idea what questions they asked me. I would come to myself in the dormitory after a few hours, laid out on the sleeping-shelf with six or seven others, some waking like myself, some still slack and blank in the grip of the drug. When we were all afoot the guards would take us out to the plant to work; but after the third or fourth of these examinations I was unable to get up. They let me be, and next day I could go out with my squad, though I felt shaky. After the next examination I was helpless for two days. Either the anti-kemmer hormones or the veridicals evidently had a toxic effect on my non-Geth-enian nervous system, and the effect was cumulative.
I remember planning how I would plead with the Inspector when the next examination came. I would start by promising to answer truthfully anything he asked, without drugs; and later I would say to him, “Sir, don’t you see how useless it is to know the answer to the wrong question?” Then the Inspector would turn into Faxe, with the Foreteller’s gold chain around his neck, and I would have long conversations with Faxe, very pleasantly, while I controlled the drip of acid from a tube into a vat of pulverized wood-chips. Of course when I came to the little room where they examined us, the Inspector’s aide had pulled back my collar and given me the injection before I could speak, and all I remember from that session, or perhaps the memory is from an earlier one, is the Inspector, a tired-looking young Orgota with dirty fingernails, saying drearily, “You must answer my questions in Orgota, you must not speak any other language. You must speak in Orgota.”
There was no infirmary. The principle of the Farm was work or die; but there were leniencies in practice-gaps between work and death, provided by the guards. As I said, they were not cruel; neither were they kind. They were slipshod and didn’t much care, so long as they kept out of trouble themselves. They let me and another prisoner stay in the dormitory, simply left us there in our sleeping-bags as if by oversight, when it was plain that we could not stand up on our feet. I was extremely ill after the last examination; the other, a middle-aged fellow, had some disorder or disease of the kidney, and was dying. As he could not die all at once, he was allowed to spend some time at it, on the sleeping-shelf.
I remember him more clearly than anything else in Pulefen Farm. He was physically a typical Gethenian of the Great Continent, compactly made, short-legged and short-armed, with a solid layer of subcutaneous fat giving him even in illness a sleek roundness of body. He had small feet and hands, rather broad hips, and a deep chest, the breasts scarcely more developed than in a male of my race. His skin was dark ruddy-brown, his black hair fine and fur-like. His face was broad, with small, strong features, the cheekbones pronounced. It is a type not unlike that of various isolated Terran groups living in very high altitudes or Arctic areas. His name was Asra; he had been a carpenter. We talked.
Asra was not, I think, unwilling to die, but he was afraid of dying; he sought distraction from his fear.
We had little in common other than our nearness to death, and that was not what we wanted to talk about; so, much of the time, we did not understand each other very well. It did not matter to him. I, younger and incredulous, would have liked understanding, comprehension, explanation. But there was no explanation. We talked.
At night the barracks dormitory was glaring, crowded, and noisy. During the day the lights were turned off and the big room was dusky, empty, still. We lay close together on the sleeping-shelf and talked softly. Asra liked best to tell long meandering tales about his young days on a Commensal farm in the Kunderer Valley, that broad splendid plain I had driven through coming from the border to Mishnory. His dialect was strong, and he used many names of people, places, customs, tools, that I did not know the meaing of, so I seldom caught more than the drift of his reminiscences. When he was feeling easiest, usually around noon, I would ask him for a myth or tale. Most Gethenians are well stuffed with these. Their literature, though it exists in written form, is a live oral tradition, and they are all in this sense literate. Asra knew the Orgota staples, the Short-Tales of Meshe, the tale of Parsid, parts of the great epics and the novel-like Sea-Traders saga. These, and bits of local lore recalled from his childhood, he would tell in his soft slurry dialect, and then growing tired would ask me for a story. “What do they tell in Karhide?” he would say, rubbing his legs, which tormented him with aches and shooting pains, and turning to me his face with its shy, sly, patient smile.
Once I said, “I know a story about people who live on another world.”
“What kind of world would that be?”
“One like this one, all in all; but it doesn’t go around the sun. It goes around the star you call Selemy. That’s a yellow star like the sun, and on that world, under that sun, live other people.”
“That’s in the Sanovy teachings, that about the other worlds. There used to be an old Sanovy crazy-priest would come by my Hearth when I was little and tell us children all about that, where the liars go when they die, and where the suicides go, and where the thieves go- that’s where we’re going, me and you, eh, one of those places?”
“No, this I’m telling of isn’t a spirit-world. A real one. The people that live on it are real people, alive, just like here. But very-long-ago they learned how to fly.” Asra grinned.
“Not by flapping their arms, you know. They flew in machines like cars.” But it was hard to say in Orgota, which lacks a word meaning precisely “to fly”; the closest one can come has more the meaning of “glide.” “Well, they learned how to make machines that went right over the air as a sledge goes over snow. And after a while they learned how to make them go farther and faster, till they went like the stone out of a sling off the earth and over the clouds and out of the air, clear to another world, going around another sun. And when they got to that world, what did they find there but men....”
“Sliding in the air?”
“Maybe, maybe not. . . . When they got to my world, we already knew how to get about in the air. But they taught us how to get from world to world, we didn’t yet have the machines for that.”
Asra was puzzled by the injection of the teller into the tale. I was feverish, bothered by the sores which the drugs had brought out on my arms and chest, and I could not remember how I had meant to weave the story.
“Go on,” he said, trying to make sense of it. “What did they do besides go in the air?”
“Oh, they did much as people do here. But they’re all in kemmer all the time.”
He chuckled. There was of course no chance of concealment in this life, and my nickname among prisoners and guards was, inevitably, “the Pervert.” But where there is no desire and no shame no one, however anomalous, is singled out; and I think Asra made no connection of this notion with myself and my peculiarities. He saw it merely as a variation on an old theme, and so he chuckled a little and said, “In kemmer all the time. ... Is it a place of reward, then? Or a place of punishment?”
“I don’t know, Asra. Which is this world?”
“Neither, child. This here is just the world, it’s how it is. You get born into it and . . . things are as they are....”
“I wasn’t born into it. I came to it. I chose it.”
The silence and the shadow hung around us. Away off in the country silence beyond the barracks walls there was one tiny edge of sound, a handsaw keening: nothing else.
“Ah well. . . . Ah well,” Asra murmured, and sighed, and rubbed his legs, making a little moaning sound that he was not aware of himself. “We none of us choose,” he said.
A night or two after that he went into coma, and presently died. I had not learned what he had been sent to the Voluntary Farm for, what crime or fault or irregularity in his identification papers, and knew only that he had been in Pulef en Farm less than a year.
The day after Asra’s death they called me for examination; this time they had to carry me in, and I can’t remember anything further than that.
whenObsle and Yegey both left town, and Slose’s doorkeeper refused me entrance, I knew it was time to turn to my enemies, for there was no more good in my friends. I went to Commissioner Shusgis, and blackmailed him. Lacking sufficient cash to buy him with, I had to spend my reputation. Among the perfidious, the name of traitor is capital in itself. I told him that I was in Orgoreyn as agent of the Nobles Faction in Karhide, which was planning the assassination of Tibe, and that he had been designated as my Sarf contact; if he refused to give me the information I needed I would tell my friends in Erhenrang that he was a double agent, serving the Open Trade Faction, and this word would of course get back to Mishnory and to the Sarf: and the damned fool believed me. He told me quick enough what I wanted to know; he even asked me if I approved.
I was not in immediate danger from my friends Obsle, Yegey, and the others. They had bought their safety by sacrificing the Envoy, and trusted me to make no trouble for them or myself. Until I went to Shusgis, no one in the Sarf but Gaum had considered me worthy their notice, but now they would be hard at my heels. I must finish my business and drop out of sight. Having no way to get word directly to anyone in Karhide, as mail would be read and telephone or radio listened to, I went for the first time to the Royal Embassy. Sardon rem ir Chene-wich, whom I had known well at court, was on the staff there. He agreed at once to convey to Argaven a message stating what had become of the Envoy and where he was to be imprisoned. I could trust Chenewich, a clever and honest person, to get the message through uninter-cepted, though what Argaven would make of it or do with it I could not guess. I wanted Argaven to have that information in case Ai’s Star Ship did come suddenly falling down out of the clouds; for at that time I still kept some hope that he had signaled the Ship before the Sarf arrested him.
I was now in peril, and if I had been seen to enter the Embassy, in instant peril. I went straight from its door to the caravan port on the Southside and before noon of that day, Odstreth Susmy, I left Mishnory as I had entered it, as carry-loader on a truck. I had my old permits with me, a little altered to fit the new job. Forgery of papers is risky in Orgoreyn wheres they are inspected fifty-two times daily, but it is not rare for being risky, and my old companions in Fish Island had shown me the tricks of it. To wear a false name galls me, but nothing else would save me, or get me clear across the width of Orgoreyn to the coast of the Western Sea.
My thoughts were all there in the west as the caravan went rumbling across the Kunderer Bridge and out of Mishnory. Autumn was facing towards winter now, and I must get to my destination before the roads closed to fast traffic, and while there was still some good in getting there. I had seen a Voluntary Farm over in Komsvashom when I was in the Sinoth Administration, and had talked with ex-prisoners of Farms. What I had seen and heard lay heavy on me now. The Envoy, so vulnerable to cold that he wore a coat when the weather was in the 30’s, would not survive winter in Pulefen. Thus need drove me fast, but the caravan took me slow, weaving from town to towm northward and southward of the way, loading and unloading, so that it took me a halfmonth to get to Ethwen, at the mouth of the River Esagel.
In Ethwen I had luck. Talking with men in the Transient-House I heard of the fur trade up the river, how licensed trappers went up and down river by sledge or iceboat through Tarrenpeth Forest almost to the Ice. Out of their talk of traps came my plan of trap-springing. There are white-fur pesthry in Kerm Land as in the Gobrin Hinterlands; they like places that lie under the breath of the glacier. I had hunted them when I was young in the thore-forests of Kerm, why not go trapping them now in the thore-forests of Pulefen?
In that far west and north of Orgoreyn, in the great wild lands west of the Sembensyen, men come and go somewhat as they like, for there are not enough Inspectors to keep them all penned in. Something of the old freedom survives the New Epoch, there. Ethwen is a gray port built on the gray rocks of Esagel Bay; a rainy sea-wind blows in the streets, and the people are grim seamen, straight-spoken. I look back with praise to Ethwen, where my luck changed.
I bought skis, snowshoes, traps, and provisions, acquired my hunter’s license and authorization and identification and so forth from the Commensal Bureau, and set out afoot up the Esagel with a party of hunters led by an old man called Mavriva. The river was not yet frozen, and wheels were on the roads still, for it rained more than it snowed on this coastal slope even now in the year’s last month. Most hunters waited till full winter, and in the month of Them went up the Esagel by iceboat, but Mavriva meant to get far north early and trap the pesthry as they first came down into the forests in their migration. Mavriva knew the Hinterlands, the North Sembensyen, and the Fire-Hills as well as any man knows them, and in those days going upriver I learned much from him that served me later.
At the town called Turuf I dropped out of the party feigning illness. They went on north, after which I struck out northeastward by myself into the high foothills of the Sembensyen. I spent some days learning the land and then, caching almost all I carried in a hidden valley twelve or thirteen miles from Turuf, I came back to the town, approaching it from the south again, and this time entered it and put up at the Transient-House. As if stocking up for a trapping run I bought skis, snowshoes, and provisions, a fur bag and winter clothing, all over again; also a Chabe stove, a polyskin tent, and a light sledge to load it all on. Then nothing to do but wait for the rain to turn to snow and the mud to ice: not long, for I had spent over a month on my way from Mishnory to Turuf. On Arhad Them the winter was frozen in and the snow I had waited for was falling.
I passed the electric fences of Pulefen Farm in early afternoon, all track and trace behind me soon covered by the snowfall. I left the sledge in a stream-gully well into the forest east of the Farm and carrying only a backpack snowshoed back around to the road; along it I came openly to the Farm’s front gate. There I showed the papers which I had reforged again while waiting in Turuf. They were “blue stamp” now, identifying me as Thener Benth, paroled convict, and attached to them was an order to report on or before Eps Them to Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm for two years’ guard duty. A sharp-eyed Inspector would have been suspicious of those battered papers, but there were few sharp eyes here.
Nothing easier than getting into prison. I was somewhat reassured as to the getting out.
The chief guard on duty berated me for arriving a day later than my orders specified, and sent me to the barracks. Dinner was over, and luckily it was too late to issue me regulation boots and uniform and confiscate my own good clothing. They gave me no gun, but I found one handy while I scrounged around the kitchen coaxing the cook for a bite to eat. The cook kept his gun hung on a nail behind the bake-ovens. I stole it. It had no lethal setting; perhaps none of the guards’ guns did. They do not kill people on their Farms: they let hunger and winter and despair do their murders for them.
There were thirty or forty jailkeepers and a hundred and fifty or sixty prisoners, none of them very well off, most of them sound asleep though it was not much past Fourth Hour. I got a young guard to take me around and show me the prisoners asleep. I saw them in the staring light of the great room they slept in, and all but gave up my hope of acting that first night before 1 had drawn suspicion on myself. They were all hidden away on the longbeds in their bags like babies in wombs, invisible, indistinguishable. -All but one, there, too long to hide, a dark face like a skull, eyes shut and sunken, a mat of long, fibrous hair.
The luck that had turned in Ethwen now turned the world with it under my hand. I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bobsled down the steep, dangerous hour.
Since I still went roaming and prying about, in my part as a restless curious dimwitted fellow, they wrote me onto the late watch-shift; by midnight all but I and one other late watcher within doors slept. I kept up my shiftless poking about the place, wandering up and down from time to time by the longbeds. I settled my plans, and began to ready my will and body to enter dothe, for my own strength would never suffice unaided by the strength out of the Dark. A while before dawn I went into the sleeping-room once more and with the cook’s gun gave Genly Ai a hundredth-second of stun to the brain, then hoisted him up bag and all and carried him out over my shoulder to the guardroom. “What’s doing?” says the other guard half asleep, “let him bel”
“He’s dead.”
“Another one dead? By Meshe’s guts, and not hardly winter yet.” He turned his head sideways to look into the Envoy’s face as it hung down on my back. “That one, the Pervert, is it. By the Eye, I didn’t believe all they say about Karhiders, till I took a look at him, the ugly freak he is. He spent all week on the longbed moaning and sighing, but I didn’t think he’d die right off like that. Well, go dump him outside where he’ll keep till daylight, don’t stand there like a carry-loader with a sack of turds.. ..”
I stopped by the Inspection Office on my way down the corridor, and I being the guard none stopped me from entering and looking till I found the wall-panel that contained the alarms and switches. None was labeled, but guards had scratched letters beside the switches to jog their memory when haste was needed; taking F.f. for “fences” I turned that switch to cut the current to the outermost defenses of the Farm, and then went on, pulling Ai along now by the shoulders. I came by the guard on duty in the watchroom by the door. I made a show of laboring to haul the dead load, for the dothe-strength was full within me and I did not want it seen how easily, in fact, I could pull or carry the weight1of a man heavier than myself. I said, “A dead prisoner, they said get him out of the sleeping-room. Where do I stow him?”
“I don’t know. Get him outside. Under a roof, so he won’t get snow-buried and float up stinking next spring in the thaws. It’s snowing peditia.” He meant what we call sove-snow, a thick, wet fall, the best of news to me. “All right, all right,” I said, and lugged my load outside and around the corner of the barracks, out of his sight. I got Ai up over my shoulders again, went northeast a few hundred yards, clambered up over the dead fence and slung my burden down, jumped down free, took up Ai once more and made off as fast as I could towards the river. I was not far from the fence when a whistle began to shriek and the floodlights went on. It snowed hard enough to hide me, but not hard enough to hide my tracks within minutes. Yet when I got down to the river they were not yet on my trail. I went north on clear ground under the trees, or through the water when there was no clear ground; the river, a hasty little tributary of the Esagel, was still unfrozen. Things were growing plain now in the dawn and I went fast. In full dothe I found the Envoy, though a long awkward load, no heavy one. Following the stream into the forest I came to the ravine where my sledge was, and onto the sledge I strapped the Envoy, loading my stuff around and over him till he was well hidden, and a weathersheet over all; then I changed clothes, and ate some food from my pack, for the great hunger one feels in long-sustained dothe was already gnawing at me. Then I set off north on the main Forest Road. Before long a pair of skiers came up with me.
I was now dressed and equipped as a trapper, and told them that I was trying to catch up with Mavriva’s outfit, which had gone north in the last days of Grende. They knew Mavriva, and accepted my story after a glance at my trapper’s license. They were not expecting to find the escaped men heading north, for nothing lies north of Pulefen but the forest and the Ice; they were perhaps not very interested in finding the escaped men at all. Why should they be? They went on, and only an hour later passed me again on their way back to the Farm. One of them was the fellow I had stood late watch with. He had never seen my face, though he had had it before his eyes half the night.
When they were surely gone I turned off the road and all that day followed a long halfcircle back through the forest and the foothills east of the Farm, coming in at last from the east, from the wilderness, to the hidden dell above Turuf where I had cached all my spare equipment. It was hard sledging in that much-folded land, with more than my weight to pull, but the snow was thick and already growing firm, and I was in dothe. I had to maintain the condition, for once one lets the dothe-strength lapse one is good for nothing at all. I had never maintained dothe before for over an hour or so, but I knew that some of the Old Men can keep in the full strength for a day and a night or even longer, and my present need proved a good supplement to my training. In dothe one does not worry much, and what anxiety I had was for the Envoy, who should have waked long ago from the light dose of sonic I had given him. He never stirred, and I had no time to tend to him. Was his body so alien that what to us is mere paralysis was death to him? When the wheel turns under your hand, you must watch your words: and I had twice called him dead, and carried him as the dead are carried. The thought would come that this was then a dead man that I hauled across the hills, and that my luck and his Jife had gone to waste after all. At that I would sweat and swear, and the dothe-strength would seem to run out of me like water out of a broken jar. But I went on, and the strength did not fail me till I had reached the cache in the foothills, and set up the tent, and done what I could for Ai. I opened a box of hyperfood cubes, most of which I devoured, but some of which I got into him as a broth, for he looked near to starving. There were ulcers on his arms and breast, kept raw by the filthy sleeping-bag he lay in. When these sores were cleaned and he lay warm in the fur bag, as well hidden as winter and wilderness could hide him, there was no more I could do. Night had fallen and the greater darkness, the payment for the voluntary summoning of the body’s full strength, was coming hard upon me; to darkness I must entrust myself, and him. We slept. Snow fell. All the night and day and night of my f/iangen-sleep it must have snowed, no blizzard, but the first great snowfall of winter. When at last I roused and pulled myself up to look out, the tent was half buried. Sunlight and blue shadows lay vivid on the snow. Far and high in the east one drift of gray dimmed the sky’s brightness: the smoke of Udenushreke, nearest to us of the Fire-Hills. Around the little peak of the tent lay the snow, mounds, hillocks, swells, slopes, all white, untrodden.
Being still in the recovery-period I was very weak and sleepy, but whenever I could rouse myself I gave Ai broth, a little at a time; and in the evening of that day he came to life, ii not to his wits. He sat up crying out as if in great terror. When I knelt by him he struggled to get away from me, and the effort being too much for him,fainted. That night he talked much, in no tongue I knew. It was strange, in that dark stillness of the wilds, to hear him mutter words of a language he had learned on another world than this. The next day was hard, for whenever I tried to look after him he took me, I think, for one of the guards at the Farm, and was in terror that I would give him some drug. He would break out into Orgota and Karhidish all babbled pitifully together, begging me “not to,” and he fought me with a panic strength. This happened again and again, and as I was still in thangen and weak of limb and will, it seemed I could not care for him at all. That day I thought that they had not only drugged but mindchanged him, leaving him insane or imbecile. Then I wished that he had died on the sledge in the thore-forest, or that I had never had any luck at all, but had been arrested as I left Mishnory and sent to some Farm to work out my own damnation.
I woke from sleep and he was watching me.
“Estraven?” he said in a weak amazed whisper.
Then my heart lifted up. I could reassure him, and see to his needs; and that night we both slept well.
The next day he was much improved, and sat up to eat. The sores on his body were healing. I asked him what they were.
“I don’t know. I think the drugs caused them; they kept giving me injections. . . .”
“To prevent kemmer?” That was one report I had heard from men escaped or released from Voluntary Farms.
“Yes. And others, I don’t know what they were, veri-dicals of some kind. They made me ill, and they kept giving them to me. What were they trying to find out, what could I tell them?”
“They may have not so much been questioning as domesticating you.” “Domesticating?” \ “Rendering you docile by a forced addiction to one of the orgrevy derivatives. That practice is not unknown in Karhide. Or they may have been carrying out an experiment on you and the others. I have been told they test mindchanging drugs and techniques on prisoners in the Farms. I doubted that, when I heard it; not now.” “You have these Farms in Karhide?” “In Karhide?” I said. “No.”
He rubbed his forehead fretfully. “They’d say in Mish-nory that there are no such places in Orgoreyn, I suppose.”
“On the contrary. They’d boast of them, and show you tapes and pictures of the Voluntary Farms, where deviates are rehabilitated and vestigial tribal groups are given refuge. They might show you around the First District Voluntary Farm just outside Mishnory, a fine showplace from all accounts. If you believe that we have Farms in Karhide, Mr. Ai, you overestimate us seriously. We are not a sophisticated people.”
He lay a long time staring at the glowing Chabe stove, which I had turned up till it gave out suffocating heat. Then he looked at me.
“You told me this morning, I know, but my mind wasn’t clear, I think. Where are we, how did we get here?” I told him again.
‘•You simply . .. walked out with me?” “Mr. Ai, any one of you prisoners, or all of you together, could have walked out of that place, any night. If you weren’t starved, exhausted, demoralized, and drugged; and if you had winter clothing; and if you had somewhere to go. . . . There’s the catch. Where would you go? To a town? No papers; you’re done for. Into the wilderness? No shelter; you’re done for. In summer, I expect they bring more guards into Pulefen Farm. In winter, they use winter itself to guard it.”
He was scarcely listening. “You couldn’t carry me a hundred feet, Estraven. Let alone run, carrying, me, a couple of miles cross-country in the dark-”
“I was in dothe.”
He hesitated. “Voluntarily induced?”
“Yes.”
“You are ... one of the Handdarata?”
“I was brought up in the Handdara, and indwelt two years at Rotherer Fastness. In Kerm Land most people of the Inner Hearths are Handdarata.”
“I thought that after the dothe period, the extreme drain on one’s energy necessitated a sort of collapse-”
“Yes; thangen, it’s called, the dark sleep. It lasts much longer than the dothe period, and once you enter the recovery period it’s very dangerous to try to resist it. I slept straight through two nights. I’m still in thangen now; I couldn’t walk over the hill. And hunger’s part of it, I’ve eaten up most of the rations I’d planned to last me the week.”
“All right,” he said with peevish haste. “I see, I believe you-what can I do but believe you. Here I am, here you are. . . . But I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you did all this for.”
At that my temper broke, and I must stare at the ice-knife which lay close by my hand, not looking at him and not replying until I had controlled my anger. Fortunately there was not yet much heat or quickness in my heart, and I said to myself that he was an ignorant man, a foreigner, ill-used and frightened. So I arrived at justice, and said finally, “I feel that it is in part my fault that you came to Orgoreyn and so to Pulefen Farm. I am trying to amend my fault.”
“You had nothing to do with my coming to Orgoreyn.” “Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us. Let me go back to last spring. I began to encourage King Argaven to wait, to make no decision concerning you or your mission, about a halfmonth before the day of the Ceremony of the Keystone. The audience was already planned, and it seemed best to go through with it, though without looking for any results from it. All this I thought you understood, and in that I erred. I took too much for granted;/1 didn’t wish to offend you, to advise you; I thought you understood the danger of Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe’s sudden ascendancy in the kyorremy. If Tibe had known any good reason to fear you, he would have accused you of serving a faction, and Argaven, who is very easily moved by fear, would likely have had you murdered. I wanted you down, and safe, while Tibe was up and powerful. As it chanced, I went down with you. I was bound to fall, though I didn’t know it would be that very night we talked together; but no one is Argaven’s prime minister for long. After I received the Order of Exile I could not communicate with you lest I contaminate you with my disgrace, and so increase your peril. I came here to Orgoreyn. I tried to suggest to you that you should also come to Orgoreyn. I urged the men I distrusted least among the Thirty-Three Commensals to grant you entry; you would not have got it without their favor. They saw, and I encouraged them to see, in you a way towards power, a way out of the increasing rivalry with Karhide and back towards the restoration of open trade, a chance perhaps to break the grip of the Sarf. But they are over-cautious men, afraid to act. Instead of proclaiming you, they hid you, and so lost their chance, and sold you to the Sarf to save theirown pelts. I counted too much on them, and therefore the fault is mine.”
“But for what purpose-all this intriguing, this hiding and power-seeking and plotting-what was it all for, Es-traven? 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 I 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.”
Iwoke. 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 Pule-fen 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-cross-ing?” -
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 had. Without luck, we will not make it.”
“I’drather 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 seeing (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 Them 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 Estra-ven 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 Kar-hide, 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 itl”
“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 time-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, Tor-menbod Them. 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.
We set off at dawn, on snowshoes, in a thin, windless snowfall. The surface over the hills was bessa, soft and still unpacked, what Terran skiers I think call “wild” snow. The sledge was heavy loaded; Estraven guessed the total weight to pull at something over 300 pounds. It was hard to pull in the fluffy snow, though it was as handy as a well-designed little boat; the runners were marvels, coated with a polymer that cut resistance almost to nothing, but of course that was no good when the whole thing was stuck in a drift. On such a surface, and going up and down slopes and gullies, we found it best to go one in harness pulling and one behind pushing. The snow fell, fine and mild, all day long. We stopped twice for a bite of food. In all the vast hilly country there was no sound. We went on, and all of a sudden it was twilight. We halted in a valley very like the one we had left that morning, a dell among white-humped hills. I was so tired I staggered, yet I could not believe the day was over. We had covered, by the sledge-meter, almost fifteen miles.
If we could go that well in soft snow, fully loaded, through a steep country whose hills and valleys all ran athwart our way, then surely we could do better up on the Ice, with hard snow, a level way, and a load always lighter. My trust in Estraven had been more willed than spontaneous; now I believed him completely. We would be in Karhide in seventy days.
“You’ve traveled like this before?” I asked him.
“Sledged? Often.”
“Long hauls?”
“I went a couple of hundred miles on the Kerm Ice one autumn, years ago.”
The lower end of Kerm Land, the mountainous southernmost peninsula of the Karhide semi-continent, is, like the north, glaciated. Humanity on the Great Continent of Gethen lives in a strip of land between two white walls. A further decrease of 8% in solar radiation, they calculate, would bring the walls creeping together; there would be no men, no land; only ice.
“What for?”
“Curiosity, adventure.” He hesitated and smiled slightly. “The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life,” he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations.
“Ah: you were consciously extending the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being; one manifestation of which is exploration.” We were both well pleased with ourselves, sitting in the warm tent, drinking hot tea and waiting for the kadik-germ porridge to boil.
“That’s it,” he said. “Six of us. All very young. My brother and I from Estre, four of our friends from Stok. There was no purpose for the journey. We wanted to see Teremander, a mountain that stands up out of the Ice, down there. Not many people have seen it from the land.”
The porridge was ready, a different matter from the stiff bran mush of Pulefen Farm; it tasted like the roast chestnuts of Terra, and burned the mouth splendidly. Warm through, benevolent, I said, “The best food I’ve eaten on Gethen has always been in your company, Estraven.”
“Not at that banquet in Mishnory.”
“No, that’s true. . . . You hate Orgoreyn, don’t you?”
“Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me.
Yet he added, scrupulous, “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”
There we understood each other. “I know something of that joy,” I said.
“Yes; so I judged.”
I rinsed our bowls with hot water and dumped the rinsings out the. valve-door of the tent. It was blind dark outside; snow fell fine and thin, just visible in the oval dim shaft of light from the valve. Sealed again in the dry warmth of the tent, we laid out our bags. He said something, “Give the bowls to me, Mr. Ai,” or some such remark, and I said, “Is it going to be ‘Mr.’ clear across the Gobrin Ice?”
He looked up and laughed. “I don’t know what to call you.”
“My name is Genly Ai.”
“I know. You use my landmine.”
“I don’t know what to call you either.”
“Harth.”
“Then I’m Ai.-Who uses first names?”
“Hearth-brothers, or friends,” he said, and saying it was remote, out of reach, two feet from me in a tent eight feet across. No answer to that. What is more arrogant than honesty? Cooled, I climbed into my fur bag. “Good night, Ai,” said the alien, and the other alien said, “Good night, Harth.”
A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Therein Harth, or any other of his race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand’s touch, changelings in the human cradle, they wereno flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us.
We slept. I woke once and heard the snow ticking thick and soft on the tent.
Estraven was up at dawn getting breakfast. The day broke bright. We loaded up and were off as the sun gilded the tops of the scrubby bushes rimming the dell, Estraven pulling in harness and I as pusher and rudder at the stern. The snow was beginning to get a crust on it; on clear downslopes we went like a dog-team, at a run. That day we skirted and then entered the forest that borders Pulefen Farm, the forest of dwarfs, thick-set, gnurl-limbed, ice-bearded thore-trees. We dared not use the main road north, but logging-roads lent their direction to us sometimes for a while, and as the forest was kept clear of fallen trees and undergrowth we got on well. Once we were in Tarrenpeth there were fewer ravines or steep ridges. The sledge-meter at evening said twenty miles for the day’s run, and we were less tired than the night before.
One palliative of winter on Winter is that the days stay light. The planet has a few degrees of tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, not enough to make an appreciable seasonal difference in low latitudes. Season is not a hemispheric effect but a global one, a result of the elliptoid orbit. At the far and slow-moving end of the orbit, approaching and departing from aphelion, there is just enough loss of solar radiation to disturb the already uneasy weather patterns, to chill down what is cold already, and turn the wet gray summer into white violent winter. Dryer than the rest of the year, winter might be pleasanter, if it were not for the cold. The sun, when you see it, shines high; there is no slow bleeding away of light into the darkness, as on the polar slopes of Earth where cold and night come on together.
Gethen has a bright winter, bitter, terrible, and bright.
We were three days getting through Tarrenpeth Forest. On the last, Estraven stopped and made camp early, in order to set traps. He wanted to catch some pesthry. They are one of the larger land-animals of Winter, about the size of a fox, oviparous vegetarians with a splendid coat of gray or white fur. He was after the meat, for pesthry are edible. They were migrating south in vast numbers; they are so light-footed and solitary that we saw only two or three as we hauled, but the snow was thick-starred in every glade of the there-forest with countless little snowshoe tracks, all heading south. Estraven’s snares were full in an hour or two. He cleaned and cut up the six beasts, hung some of the meat to freeze, stewed some for our meal that night. Gethenians are not a hunting people, because there is very little to hunt-no large herbivores, thus no large carnivores, except in the teeming seas. They fish, and farm. I had never before seen a Gethenian with blood on his hands.
Estraven looked at the white pelts. “There’s a week’s room and board for a pesthry-hunter,” he said. “Gone to waste.” He held out one for me to touch. The fur was so soft and deep that you could not be certain when your hand began to feel it. Our sleeping-bags, coats, and hoods were lined with that same fur, an unsurpassed insulator and very beautiful to see. “Hardly seems worth it,” I said, “for a stew.”
Estraven gave me his brief dark stare and said, “We need protein.” And tossed away the pelts, where overnight the russy, the fierce little rat-snakes, would devour them and the entrails and the bones, and lick clean the bloody snow.
He was right; he was generally right. There was a pound or two of edible meat on a pesthry. I ate myhalf of the stew that night and could have eaten his without noticing. Next morning, when we started up into the mountains, I was twice the sledge-engine I had been.
We went up that day. The beneficent snowfall and kroxet- windless weather between 0° F. and 20°-that had seen us through Tarrenpeth and out of range of probable pursuit, now dissolved wretchedly into above-freezing temperatures and rain. Now I began to understand why Gethenians complain when the temperature rises in winter, and cheer up when it falls. In the city, rain is an inconvenience; to a traveler it is a catastrophe. We hauled that sledge up the flanks of the Sembensyens all morning through a deep, cold porridge of rain-sodden snow. By afternoon on steep slopes the snow was mostly gone. Torrents of rain, miles of mud and gravel. We cased the runners, put the wheels on the sledge, and hauled on up. As a wheeled cart it was a bitch, sticking and tipping every moment. Dark fell before we found any shelter of cliff or cave to set up the tent in, so that despite all our care things got wet. Estraven had said that a tent such as ours would house us pretty comfortably in any weather at all, so long as we kept it dry inside. “Once you can’t dry out your bags, you lose too much body-heat all night, and you don’t sleep well. Our food-ration’s too short to allow us to afford that. We can’t count on any sunlight to dry things out, so we must not get them wet.” I had listened, and had been as scrupulous as he about keeping snow and wet out of the tent, so that there was only the unavoidable moisture from our cooking, and our lungs and pores, to be evaporated. But this night everything was wet through before we could get the tent up. We huddled steaming over the Chabe stove, and presently had a stew of pesthry meat to eat, hot and solid, good enough almost to compensate for everything else. The sledge-meter, ignoring the hard uphill work we had done all day, said we had come only nine miles.
“First day we’ve done less than our stint,” I said.
Estraven nodded, and neatly cracked a legbone for the marrow. He had stripped off his wet outer clothes and sat in shirt and breeches, barefoot, collar open. I was still too cold to take off my coat and hieb and boots. There he sat cracking marrowbones, neat, tough, durable, his sleek furlike hair shedding the water like a bird’s feathers: he dripped a little onto his shoulders, like house-eaves dripping, and never noticed it. He was not discouraged. He belonged here.
The first meat-ration had given me some intestinal cramps, and that night they got severe. I lay awake in the soggy darkness loud with rain.
At breakfast he said, “You had a bad night.”
“How did you know?” For he slept very deeply, scarcely moving, even when I left the tent.
He gave me that look again. “What’s wrong?”
“Diarrhea.”
He winced and said savagely, “It’s the meat,”
“I suppose so.”
“My fault. I should-”
“It’s all right.”
“Can you travel?”
“Yes.”
Rain fell and fell. A west vyind off the sea kept the temperature in the thirties, even here at three or four thousand feet of altitude. We never saw more than a quarter-mile ahead through the gray mist and mass of rain. What slopes rose on above us I never looked up to see: nothing to see but rain falling. We went by compass, keeping as much to northward as the cut and veer of the great slopes allowed.
The glacier had been over these mountainsides, in the hundreds of thousands of years it had been grinding back and forth across the North. There were tracks scored along granite slopes, long and straight as if cut with a great U-gouge. We could pull the sledge along those scratches sometimes as if along a road.
I did best pulling; I could lean into the harness, and the work kept me warm. When we stopped for a bite of food at midday, I felt sick and cold, and could not eat. We went on, climbing again now. Rain fell, and fell, and fell. Estraven stopped us under a great overhang of black rock, along in mid-afternoon. He had the tent up almost before I was out of harness. He ordered me to go in and. lie down.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“You’re not,” he said. “Go on.”
I obeyed, but I resented his tone. When he came into the tent with our night’s needs, I sat up to cook, it being my turn. He told me in the same peremptory tone to lie still.
“You needn’t order me about,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said inflexibly, his back turned.
“I’m not sick, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know. If you won’t say frankly, I must go by your looks. You haven’t recovered your strength, and the going has been hard. I don’t know where your limits lie.”
“I’ll tell you when I reach them.”
I was galled by his patronizing. He was a head shorter than I, and built more like a woman than a man, more fat than muscle; when we hauled together I had to shorten my pace to his, hold in my strength so as not to out-pull him: a stallion in harness with a mule-
“You’re no longer ill, then?”
“No. Of course I’m tired. So are you.”
“Yes, I am,” he said. “I was anxious about you. We have a long way to go.”
He had not meant to patronize. He had thought me sick, and sick men take orders. He was frank, and expected a reciprocal frankness that I might not be able to supply. He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.
On the other hand, if he could lower all his standards of shifgrethor, as I realized he had done with me, perhaps I could dispense with the more competitive elements of my masculine self-respect, which he certainly understood as little as I understood shifgrethor. . . .
“How much of it did we cover today?”
He looked around and smiled a little, gently. “Six miles,” he said.
The next day we did seven miles, the next day twelve, and the day after that we came out of the rain, and out of the clouds, and out of the regions of mankind. It was the ninth day of our journey. We were five to six thousand feet above sealevel now, on a high plateau full of the evidences of recent mountain-building and vul-canism; we were in the Fire-Hills of the Sembensyen Range. The plateau narrowed gradually to a valley and the valley to a pass between long ridges. As we approached the end of the pass the rainclouds were thinning and rending. A cold north wind dispersed them utterly, laying bare the peaks above the ridges to our right and left, basalt and snow, piebald and patchwork of black and white brilliant under the sudden sun in a dazzling sky. Ahead of us, cleared and revealed by the same vast sweep of the wind, lay twisted valleys, hundreds of feet below, full of ice and boulders. Across those valleys a great wall stood, a wall of ice, and raising our eyes up and still up to the rim of the wall we saw the Ice itself, the Gobrin Glacier, blinding and horizonless to the utmost north, a white, a white the eyes could not look on.
Here and there out of the valleys full of rubble and out of the cliffs and bends and masses of the great icefield’s edge, black ridges rose; one great mass loomed up out of the plateau to the height of the gateway peaks we stood between, and from its side drifted heavily a mile-long wisp of smoke. Farther off there were others: peaks, pinnacles, black cindercones on the glacier. Smoke panted from fiery mouths that opened out of the ice.
Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. “I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said.
I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
It had not rained, here on these north-facing slopes. Snow-fields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off-down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.