Ursula K. LeGuin - The Dispossesed

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file:///F|/rah/Ursula%20LeGuin/LeGuin,%20Ursula%20K%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.txt

Chapter I

^asse^ ifftfma

There was a wall. It did not look important It was built of

uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right

over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed

the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into

mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea

was real. It was important. For seven generations there

had been nothing in the world more important than that

wafl.

Like aB walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was

inside it and what was outside it depended upon which

side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the watt enclosed a barren

sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field

there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad,

three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The

dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no

gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was

even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine.

The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the

ships that came down out of space, and the men that came

on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest

of- the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres

outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anar-

res: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp,

cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

A number of people were coming along the road to-

wards the landing field, or standing around where the road

cut through the wall.

People often came out from the nearby city of Abbenay

in hopes of seeing a spaceship, or simply to see the wall.

After all, it was the only boundary wall on their world.

Nowhere else could they see a sign that said No Trespass-

ing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to it. They came

up to the wall; they sat on it. There might be a gang to

watch, offloading crates from track trucks at the ware-

houses. There might even be a freighter on the pad.

Freighters came down only eight times a year, unan-

nounced except to syndics actually working at the Port, so

when the spectators were lucky enough to see one they

were excited, at first. But there they sat, and there it sat, a

squat black tower in a mess of movable cranes, away off

across the field. And then a woman came over from one

of the warehouse crews and said, "We're shutting down

for today, brothers." She was wearing the Defense arm-

band, a sight almost as rare as a spaceship. That was a bit

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of a thrill. But though her tone was mild, it was final.

She was the foreman of this gang, and if provoked would

be backed up by her syndics. And anyhow there wasn't

anything to see. The aliens, the off-woriders, stayed hiding

in their ship. No show.

It was a dull show for the Defense crew, too. Some-

times the foreman wished that somebody would just try to

cross the wall, an alien crewman jumping ship, or a kid

from Abbenay trying to sneak in for a closer look at the

freighter. But it never happened. Nothing ever happened.

When something did happen she wasn't ready for it

The captain of the freighter Mindful said to her, "Is that

mob after my ship?"

The foreman looked and saw that in fact there was a

real crowd around the gate, a hundred or more people.

They were standing around, just standing, the way people

had stood at produce-train stations during the Famine. It

gave the foreman a scare.

**No. They, ah, protest," she said in her slow and limited

lotic. "Protest the, ah, you know. Passenger?"

"You mean they're after this bastard we're supposed to

take? Are they going to try to stop him, or us?"

The word "bastard," untranslatable in the foreman's lan-

guage; meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign

term for her people, but she had never liked the sound of

it, or the captain's tone, or the captain. "Can you look

after you?" she asked briefly.

**HeU, yea. You just get the rest of this cargo omoaded,

quick. And get this passenger bastard on board. No mob of

Oddies is about to give us any trouble.*' He patted the

thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed

penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman.

She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a

weapon, a cold glance. "Ship will be loaded by fourteen

hours." she said. "Keep crew on board safe. Liftoff at

fourteen hours forty. If you need help, leave message on

tape at Ground Control" She strode off before the captain

could one-up her. Anger made her more forceful with her

crew and the crowd. •'Clear the road theret" she ordered

as she neared the waD. "Trucks are coming through, some-

body's going to get hurt. Clear asidel"

The men and women in the crowd argued with her and

with one another. They kept crossing the road, and some

came inside the wall. Yet they did more or less clear th&

way. If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob,

they had no experience in being one. Members of a com-

munity, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved

by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as

there were people. And they did not expect commands to

bo arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them.

Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.

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Some of them had come there to kill a traitor. Others

had come to prevent him from leaving, or to yell insults

at him, or just to look at him; and all these others ob-

structed the sheer brief path of the assassins. None of them

had firearms, though a couple had knives. Assault to them

meant bodily assault; they wanted to take the traitor into

their own hands. They expected him to come guarded, in a

vehicle. While they were trying to inspect a goods truck

and arguing with its outraged driver, the man they wanted

came walking up the road, alone. When they recognized

him he was already halfway across the field, with five De-

fense syndics following him. Those who had wanted to kill

him resorted to pursuit, too-late, and to rock throwing, not

quite too late. They barely winged the man they wanted,

just as he got to the ship, but a two-pound flint caught one

of the Defense crew on the side of the head and killed

him on die spot.

The hatches of the ship closed. The Defense crew turned

back, carrying their dead companion; they made no effort

to stop the leaders of the crowd who came racing towards

the ship, though the foreman, white with shock and rage,

cursed them to hell as they ran past, and they swerved to

avoid her. Once at the ship, the vanguard of the crowd

scattered and stood irresolute. The silence of the ship, the

abrupt movements of the huge skeletal gantries, the strange

burned look of the ground, the absence of anything in

human scale, disoriented them. A blast of steam or gas

from something connected with the ship made some of

them start; they looked up uneasily at the rockets, vast

black tunnels overhead. A siren whooped in warning, far

across the field. First one person and then another started

back towards the gate. Nobody stopped them. Within ten

minutes the field was clear, the crowd scattered out along

the road to Abbenay. Nothing appeared to have happened,

after all.

Inside the Mindful a great deal was happening. Since

Ground Control had pushed launch time up, all routines

had to be rushed through in double time. The captain had

ordered that the passenger be strapped down and locked

in, in the crew lounge, along with the doctor, to get them

out from underfoot There was a screen in there, they

could watch the liftoff if they liked.

The passenger watched. He saw the field, and the wall

around the field, and far outside the wall the distant slopes

of the Ne Theras, speckled with scrub holum and sparse,

silvery moonthom.

AH this suddenly rushed dazzling down the screen. The

passenger felt his head pressed back against the padded

rest. It was like a dentist's examination, the head pressed

back, the jaw forced open. He could not get his breath, he

felt sick, he felt bis bowels loosen with fear. His whole

body cried out to the enormous forces that had taken

hold of him. Not now, not yet, wait!

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His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and re-

porting to him took him out of the autism of terror. For

on the screen now was a strange sight, a great pallid plain

of stone. It was the desert seen from the mountains above

Grand Valley. How had he got back to Grand Valley? He

tried to tell himself that he was in an airship. No, in a

spaceship. The edge of the plain flashed with the brightness

of light on water, light across a distant sea. There was no

water in those deserts. What was he seeing, then? The

stone plain was no longer plane but hollow, like a huge

bowl full of sunlight. As he watched in wonder it grew

shallower, spilling out its light All at once a line broke

across it, abstract, geometric, the perfect section of a cir-

cle. Beyond that arc was blackness. This blackness re-

versed the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the

stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light but

convex, reflecting, rejecting light. It was not a plain or a

bowl but a sphere, a ball of white stone falling down in

blackness, falling away. It was his world.

"I don't understand," he said aloud.

Someone answered him. For a while he failed to com-

prehend that the person standing by his chair was speaking

to him, answering him, for he no longer understood what

an answer is. He was clearly aware of only one thing, his

own total isolation. The world bad fallen out from under

him, and be was left alone.

He had always feared that this would happen, more

than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self

and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest

He was able at last to look up at the man standing be-

side him. It was a stranger, of course. From now on there

would be only strangers. He was speaking in a foreign

language: lotic. The words made sense. All the little

things made sense; only the whole thing did not. The man

was saying something about the straps that held him into

the chair. He fumbled at them. The chair swung upright,

and he nearly fell out of if being giddy and off balance.

The man kept asking if someone had been hurt. Who was

he talking about? "Is he sure he didn't get hurt?" The polite

form of direct address in lotic was in the third person.

The man meant him, himself. He did not know why he

should have been hurt; the man kept saying something

about throwing rocks. But the rock will never hit, he

thought. He looked back at the screen for the rock, the

white stone falling down in darkness, but the screen had

gone blank.

**I am well»" he said at last, at random.

It did not appease the man. "Please come with me. I'm

a doctor."

"I am well.**

Tiease come with me, Dr. Shevek!"

^ou are a doctor," Shevek said after a pause. "I am

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not. I am called Shevek."

The doctor, a short, fair, bald man, grimaced with

anxiety. "You should be in your cabin, sir—danger of in-

fection—you weren't to be in contact with anybody but

me, I've been through two weeks of disinfection for noth-

ing, God damn that captain! Please come with me, sir. I'll

be held responsible—"

Shevek perceived that the little man was upset He felt

no compunction, no sympathy; but even where he was, in

absolute solitude, the one law held, the one law he had

ever acknowledged. "All right," he said, and stood up.

He still felt dizzy, and his right shoulder hurt. He knew

the ship must be moving, but there was no sense of mo-

tion; there was only a silence, an awful, utter silence, just

outside the walls. The doctor led him through silent metal

corridors to a room.

It was a very small room, with seamed, blank walls. It

repelled Shevek, reminding him of a place he did not want

to remember. He stopped in the doorway. But the doctor

urged and pleaded, and he went on in.

He sat down on the shelf-like bed, still feeling light-

headed and lethargic, and watched the doctor incuriously.

He felt he ought to be curious; this man was the first Ur"

rasti he had ever seen. But he was too tired. He could have

lain back and gone straight to sleep.

He had been up all the night before, going through his

papers. Three days ago he had seen Takver and the chil-

dren off to Peace-and-Plenty, and ever since then he had

been busy, running out to the radio tower to exchange

last-minute messages with people on Unas, discussing

plans and possibilities with Bedap and the others. All

through those hurried days, ever since Takver left, he had

felt not that he was doing all the things he did, but that

they were doing him. He had been in other people's bands.

His own will had not acted. It had had no need to act. It

was his own will that had started it all, that had created

this moment and these walls about him now. How long

ago? Years. Five years ago, in the silence of night in

Chakar in tke mountains, when he had said to Takver, "I

will go to Abbenay and unbuild walls." Before then, even;

long before, in the Dust, in the years of famine and de-

spair, when he had promised himself that he would never

act again but by his own free choice. And following that

promise he had brought himself here: to this moment

without time, this place without an earth, this little room,

this prison.

The doctor had examined his bruised shoulder (the

bruise puzzled Shevek; he had been too tense and hurried

to realize what had been going on at the landing field, and

had never felt the rock strike him). Now be turned to him

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file:///F|/rah/Ursula%20LeGuin/LeGuin,%20Ursula%20K%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.txtChapterI^asse^ifftfmaTherewasawall.ItdidnotlookimportantItwasbuiltofuncutrocksroughlymortared.Anadultcouldlookrightoverit,andevenachildcouldclimbit.Whereitcrossedtheroadway,insteadofhavingagateitdegeneratedintomeregeome...

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Ursula K. LeGuin - The Dispossesed

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