The Dispossessed Read online

  “All right. I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? Could it be that if we knew what Urras was really like, we’d like it—some of it—some of us? That what PDC wants to prevent is not just some of them coming here, but some of us wanting to go there?”

  “Go to Urras?” Shevek said, startled.

  They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed. “Who’d ever want to go to Urras?” he demanded. “What for?”

  “To find out what another world’s like. To see what a ‘horse’ is!”

  “That’s childish,” Kvetur said. “There’s life on some other star systems,” and he waved a hand at the moon-washed sky, “so they say. What of it? We had the luck to be born here!”

  “If we’re better than any other human society,” said Tirin, “then we ought to be helping them. But we’re forbidden to.”

  “Forbidden? Nonorganic word. Who forbids? You’re externalizing the integrative function itself,” Shevek said, leaning forward and speaking with intensity. “Order is not ‘orders.’ We don’t leave Anarres, because we are Anarres. Being Tirin, you can’t leave Tirin’s skin. You might like to try being somebody else to see what it’s like, but you can’t. But are you kept from it by force? Are we kept here by force? What force—what laws, governments, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature as Odonians. It’s your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you had no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go to live in a prison?”

  “Oh, hell, no. Can’t I talk? The trouble with you, Shev, is you don’t say anything till you’ve saved up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments, and then you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap—”

  Shevek sat back, looking vindicated.

  But Bedap, a heavy-set, square-faced fellow, chewed on his thumbnail and said, “All the same, Tir’s point remains. It would be good to know that we knew all the truth about Urras.”

  “Who do you think is lying to us?” Shevek demanded.

  Placid, Bedap met his gaze. “Who, brother? Who but ourselves?”

  The sister planet shone down upon them, serene and brilliant, a beautiful example of the improbability of the real.

  The afforestation of the West Temaenian Littoral was one of the great undertakings of the fifteenth decad of the Settlement of Anarres, employing nearly eighteen thousand people over a period of two years.

  Though the long beaches of Southeast were fertile, supporting many fishing and farming communities, the arable area was a mere strip along the sea. Inland and westward clear across the vast plains of Southwest the land was uninhabited except for a few isolated mining towns. It was the region called the Dust.

  In the previous geological era the Dust had been an immense forest of holums, the ubiquitous, dominant plant genus of Anarres. The current climate was hotter and drier. Millennia of drought had killed the trees and dried the soil to a fine grey dust that now rose up on every wind, forming hills as pure of line and barren as any sand dune. The Anarresti hoped to restore the fertility of that restless earth by replanting the forest. This was, Shevek thought, in accordance with the principle of Causative Reversibility, ignored by the Sequency school of physics currently respectable on Anarres, but still an intimate, tacit element of Odonian thought. He would like to write a paper showing the relationship of Odo’s ideas to the ideas of temporal physics, and particularly the influence of Causative Reversibility on her handling of the problem of ends and means. But at eighteen he didn’t know enough to write such a paper, and he never would know enough if he didn’t get back to physics soon and out of the damned Dust.

  At night in the Project camps everybody coughed. In the daytime they coughed less; they were too busy to cough. The dust was their enemy, the fine, dry stuff that clogged the throat and lungs; their enemy and their charge, their hope. Once that dust had lain rich and dark in the shade of trees. After their long work, it might do so again.

  She brings the green leaf from the stone,

  From heart of rock clear water running…

  Gimar was always humming the tune, and now in the hot evening returning to camp over the plain she sang the words aloud.

  “Who does? Who’s ‘she’?” asked Shevek.

  Gimar smiled. Her broad, silky face was smeared and caked with dust, her hair was full of dust, she smelled strongly and agreeably of sweat.

  “I grew up in Southrising,” she said. “Where the miners are. It’s a miner song.”

  “What miners?”

  “Don’t you know? People who were already here when the Settlers came. Some of them stayed and joined the solidarity. Goldminers, tinminers. They still have some feast days and songs of their own. The tadde* was a miner, he used to sing me that when I was little.”

  “Well, then, who’s ‘she’?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just what the song says. Isn’t it what we’re doing here? Bringing green leaves out of stones!”

  “Sounds like religion.”

  “You and your fancy book-words. It’s just a song. Oh, I wish we were back at the other camp and could have a swim. I stink!”

  “I stink.”

  “We all stink.”

  “In solidarity…”

  But this camp was fifteen kilos from the beaches of the Temae and there was only dust to swim in.

  There was a man in camp whose name, spoken, sounded like Shevek’s: Shevet. When one was called the other answered. Shevek felt a kind of affinity for the man, a relation more particular than that of brotherhood because of this random similarity. A couple of times he saw Shevet eyeing him. They did not speak to each other yet.

  Shevek’s first decads in the afforestation project had been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such as physics should not be called upon for these projects and special levies. Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didn’t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a tot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the “heavies” on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.

  He found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those younger than himself treated him like a boy. Scornful and resentful, he took pleasure only in writing to his friends Tirin and Rovab in a code they had worked out at the Institute, a set of verbal equivalents to the special symbols of temporal physics. Written out, these seemed to make sense as a message, but were in fact nonsense, except for the equation or philosophical formula they masked. Shevek’s and Rovab’s equations were genuine. Tirin’s letters were very funny and would have convinced anyone that they referred to real emotions and events, but the physics in them was dubious. Shevek sent off one of these puzzles often, once he found that he could work them out in his head while he was digging holes in rock with a dull shovel in a dust storm. Tirin answered several times, Rovab only once. She was a cold girl, he knew she was cold. But none of them at the Institute knew how wretched
he was. They hadn’t been posted, just as they were beginning independent research, to a damned tree-planting project. Their central function wasn’t being wasted. They were working: doing what they wanted to do. He was not working. He was being worked.

  Yet it was queer how proud you felt of what you got done this way—all together—what satisfaction it gave. And some of the workmates were really extraordinary people. Gimar, for instance. At first her muscular beauty had rather awed him, but now he was strong enough to desire her.

  “Come with me tonight, Gimar?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, and looked at him with so much surprise that he said, with some dignity of pain, “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are.”

  “Then—”

  “I’m partnered. He’s back home.”

  “You might have said,” Shevek said, going red.

  “Well, it didn’t occur to me I ought to. I’m sorry, Shev.” She looked so regretfully at him that he said, with some hope, “You don’t think—”

  “No. You can’t work a partnership that way, some bits for him and some bits for others.”

  “Life partnership is really against the Odonian ethic, I think,” Shevek said, harsh and pedantic.

  “Shit,” said Gimar in her mild voice. “Having’s wrong; sharing’s right. What more can you share than your whole self, your whole life, all the nights and all the days?”

  He sat with his hands between his knees, his head bowed, a long boy, rawboned, disconsolate, unfinished. “I’m not up to that,” he said after a while.

  “You?”

  “I haven’t really ever known anybody. You see how I didn’t understand you. I’m cut off. Can’t get in. Never will. It would be silly for me to think about a partnership. That sort of thing is for…for human beings…”

  With timidity, not a sexual coyness but the shyness of respect, Gimar put her hand on his shoulder. She did not reassure him. She did not tell him he was like everybody else. She said, “I’ll never know anyone like you again, Shev. I never will forget you.”

  All the same, a rejection is a rejection. For all her gentleness he went from her with a lame soul, and angry.

  The weather was very hot. There was no coolness except in the hour before dawn.

  The man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night after supper. He was a stocky, handsome fellow of thirty. “I’m tired of getting mixed up with you,” he said. “Call yourself something else.”

  The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. “Change your own name if you don’t like it,” he said.

  “You’re one of those little profiteers who goes to school to keep his hands clean,” the man said. “I’ve always wanted to knock the shit out of one of you.”

  “Don’t call me profiteer!” Shevek said, but this wasn’t a verbal battle. Shevet knocked him double. He got in several return blows, having long arms and more temper than his opponent expected: but he was outmatched. Several people paused to watch, saw that it was a fair fight but not an interesting one, and went on. They were neither offended nor attracted by simple violence. Shevek did not call for help, so it was nobody’s business but his own. When he came to he was lying on his back on the dark ground between two tents.

  He had a ringing in his right ear for a couple of days, and a split lip that took long to heal because of the dust, which irritated all sores. He and Shevet never spoke again. He saw the man at a distance, at other cookfires, without animosity. Shevet had given him what he had to give, and he had accepted the gift, though for a long time he never weighed it or considered its nature. By the time he did so there was no distinguishing it from another gift, another epoch in his growing up. A girl, one who had recently joined his work gang, came up to him just as Shevet had in the darkness as he left the cookfire, and his lip wasn’t healed yet…He never could remember what she said; she had teased him; again he responded simply. They went out into the plain in the night, and there she gave him the freedom of the flesh. That was her gift, and he accepted it. Like all children of Anarres he had had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls, but he and they had been children; he had never got further than the pleasure he assumed was all there was to it. Beshun, expert in delight, took him into the heart of sexuality, where there is no rancor and no ineptitude, where the two bodies striving to join each other annihilate the moment in their striving, and transcend the self, and transcend time.

  It was all easy now, so easy, and lovely, out in the warm dust, in the starlight. And the days were long, and hot, and bright, and the dust smelled like Beshun’s body.

  He worked now in a planting crew. The trucks had come down from Northeast full of tiny trees, thousands of seedlings raised in the Green Mountains, where it rained up to forty inches a year, the rain belt. They planted the little trees in the dust.

  When they were done, the fifty crews who had worked the second year of the project drove away in the flatbed trucks, and they looked back as they went. They saw what they had done. There was a mist of green, very faint, on the pallid curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead land lay, very lightly, a veil of life. They cheered, sang, shouted from truck to truck. Tears came into Shevek’s eyes. He thought, She brings the green leaf from the stone…Gimar had been posted back to Southrising a long time ago. “What are you making faces about?” Beshun asked him, squeezing next to him as the truck jounced and running her hand up and down his hard, dust-whitened arm.

  “Women,” Vokep said, in the truck depot in Tin Ore, Southwest. “Women think they own you. No woman can really be an Odonian.”

  “Odo herself—?”

  “Theory. And no sex life after Asieo was killed, right? Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.”

  “You think they’re different from men there?”

  “I know it. What a man wants is freedom. What a woman wants is property. She’ll only let you go if she can trade you for something else. All women are propertarians.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say about half the human race,” said Shevek, wondering if the man was right. Beshun had cried herself sick when he got posted back to Northwest, had raged and wept and tried to make him tell her he couldn’t live without her and insisted she couldn’t live without him and they must be partners. Partners, as if she could have stayed with any one man for half a year!

  The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. This frame of words could not contain the totality of experience any more than any other, and Shevek was aware of the area left out, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Certainly he had felt that he owned Beshun, possessed her, on some of those starlit nights in the Dust. And she had thought she owned him. But they had both been wrong; and Beshun, despite her sentimentality, knew it; she had kissed him goodbye at last smiling, and let him go. She had not owned him. His own body had, in its first outburst of adult sexual passion, possessed him indeed—and her. But it was over with. It had happened. It would never (he thought, eighteen years old, sitting with a traveling-acquaintance in the truck depot of Tin Ore at midnight over a glass of sticky sweet fruit drink, waiting to hitch a ride on a convoy going north), it could never happen again. Much would yet happen, but he would not be taken off guard a second time, knocked down, defeated. Defeat, surrender, had its raptures. Beshun herself might never want any joy beyond them. And why should she? It was she, in her freedom, who had set him free.

  “You know, I don’t agree,” he said to long-faced Vokep, an agricultural chemist traveling to Abbenay.
“I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”

  Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kids,” he said. “Having babies. Makes ’em propertarians. They won’t let go.” He sighed. “Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule. Don’t ever let yourself be owned.”

  Shevek smiled and drank his fruit juice. “I won’t,” he said.

  It was a joy to him to come back to the Regional Institute, to see the low hills patchy with bronze-leaved scrub holum, the kitchen gardens, domiciles, dormitories, workshops, classrooms, laboratories, where he had lived since he was thirteen. He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.