Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand Of Darkness

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THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
by Ursula K.Leguin
The Ekumen 04
WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD AND THE NEBULA AWARD FOR BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF THE YEAR
1969
URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN, daughter of A. L. Kroeber (anthropologist) and Theodora Kroeber (author),
was born in Berkeley, California in 1929. She attended college at Radcliffe and Columbia, and
married C. A. LeGuin in Paris in 1951. The LeGuins and their three children live in Portland,
Oregon.
Ursula LeGuin's previous novels include ROCANNON'S WORLD, PLANET OF EXILE and CITY OF ILLUSIONS,
and THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, all published by Ace Books. Like THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, each
novel is complete in itself, but they are all part of a greater, growing mosaic of far-future
history that is consistent from novel to novel.
NOTE:This universe is now known asThe Ekumen, andThe Left Hand of Darknessnow can be listed asThe
Ekumen 04 -formatting updated, missing pages scanned and restored, the whole compared to the 14th
ACE print run of June, 1977 by MollyKate for #bookz, October 26, 2002
With the awarding of the 1975 Hugo and Nebula awards to The Dispossessed [The Ekumen 05], Ursula
K. Le Guin became the first author to win both awardstwice for novels.
ACE BOOKS
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y.
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
Copyright (c)1969, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Introduction Copyright (c) 1976, by Ursula K. Le Guin
An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in U.S.A.
Converted to reader format by Kelzan
Dedication:
For Charles,sine quo non
CONTENTS
Introduction - added in 1976
1. A Parade in Erhenrang
2. The Place Inside the Blizzard
3. The Mad King
4. The Nineteenth Day
5. The Domestication of Hunch
6. One Way into Orgoreyn
7. The Question of Sex
8. Another Way into Orgoreyn
9. Estraven the Traitor
10. Conversations in Mishnory
11. Soliloquies in Mishnory
12. On Time and Darkness
13. Down on the Farm
14. The Escape
15. To the Ice
16. Between Drumner and Dremegole
17. An Orgota Creation Myth
18. On the Ice
19. Homecoming
20. A Fool's Errand
The Gethenian Calendar and Clock
Introduction
SCIENCE FICTION ISoften described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer
is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for
dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A
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prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of
a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people
who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer.
So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally
arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human
liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as 'escapist,' but
when questioned further, admit they do not read it because 'it's so depressing.'
Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game
by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether
the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life.
This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction,
as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being
in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war;
let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral
complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end;
thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which
may be very large indeed.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is
not to predict the future-indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that
the 'future,' on the quantum level,cannot be predicted-but to describe reality, the present world.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee,
and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried).
Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of
novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will
tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the
writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is
tell you what they're like, and what you're like-what's going on-what the weather is now, today,
this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the
novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what
they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming,
another third of it spent in telling lies.
"The truth against the world!"-Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments,
do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and
devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never
will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great
deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There!
That's the truth!
They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea
Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process
of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which
is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-
phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that
never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we
read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we
hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity
returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?
But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely
mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.
I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that theawen cannot come upon them, and the
god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? if they
did notknow it happens, because, they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands?
Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.
Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another
who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As
Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in
the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.
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But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful
in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word
(sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact
which is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and-ideally-quantifiable.
Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number-Apollo blinds those who press
too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer
with Dionysios, every now and then.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust
everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically
defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
Oh, it's lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science
displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be
like in 2001, and all that, but it's a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science
fiction isn't about the future. I don't know any more about the future than you do, and very
likely less.
This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by annnouncing that it's set in the 'Ekumenical
Year 1490-97,' but surely you don'tbelieve that?
Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a
millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be
androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner
proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers,
we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain
aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately
circumstantial lies.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense,
and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find-
if it's a good novel-that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have
been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before.
But it's very hard tosay just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does thisin words . The novelist says in words what cannot be
said in words.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or
metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound-a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A
sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more
clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive
intellect).
All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of
fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our
contemporary life-science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the
historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative
society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel;
and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in
informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
1. A Parade in Erhenrang
From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2-Gethen: To the Stabile on
Ollul: Report from Genly Ai, First Mobile on Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93, Ekumenical Year 1490-
97.
I'LL MAKE MY REPORTas if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is
a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling:
like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn
by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls
are. But both are sensitive.
The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can
judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice,
why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one
story.
It starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in the nation Karhide
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was Odhar-hahad Tuwa or the twenty-second day of the third month of spring in the Year One. It is
always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year's
Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now. So it was spring of the Year One in
Erhenrang, capital city of Karhide, and I was in peril of my life, and did not know it.
I was in a parade. I walked just behind the gossiwors and just before the king. It was raining.
Rainclouds over dark towers, rain falling in deep streets, a dark storm-beaten city of stone,
through which one vein of gold winds slowly. First come merchants, potentates, and artisans of the
City Erhenrang, rank after rank, magnificently clothed, advancing through the rain as comfortably
as fish through the sea. Their faces are keen and calm. They do not march in step. This is a
parade with no soldiers, not even imitation soldiers.
Next come the lords and mayors and representatives, one person, or five, or forty-five, or four
hundred, from each Domain and Co-Domain of Karhide, a vast ornate procession that moves to the
music of metal horns and hollow blocks of bone and wood and the dry, pure lilting of electric
flutes. The various banners of the great Domains tangle in a rain-beaten confusion of color with
the yellow pennants that bedeck the way, and the various musics of each group clash and interweave
in many rhythms echoing in the deep stone street.
Next, a troop of jugglers with polished spheres of gold which they hurl up high in flashing
flights, and catch, and hurl again, making fountain-jets of bright jugglery. All at once, as if
they had literally caught the light, the gold spheres blaze bright as glass: the sun is breaking
through.
Next, forty men in yellow, playing gossiwors. The gossiwor, played only in the king's presence,
produces a preposterous disconsolate bellow. Forty of them played together shake one's reason,
shake the towers of Erhenrang, shake down a last spatter of rain from the windy clouds. If this is
the Royal Music no wonder the kings of Karhide are all mad.
Next, the royal party, guards and functionaries and dignitaries of the city and the court,
deputies, senators, chancellors, ambassadors, lords of the Kingdom, none of them keeping step or
rank yet walking with great dignity; and among them is King Argaven XV, in white tunic and shirt
and breeches, with leggings of saffron leather and a peaked yellow cap. A gold finger-ring is his
only adornment and sign of office. Behind this group eight sturdy fellows bear the royal litter,
rough with yellow sapphires, in which no king has ridden for centuries, a ceremonial relic of the
Very-Long-Ago. By the litter walk eight guards armed with "foray guns," also relics of a more
barbaric past but not empty ones, being loaded with pellets of soft iron. Death walks behind the
king. Behind death come the students of the Artisan Schools, the Colleges, the Trades, and the
King's Hearths, long lines of children and young people in white and red and gold and green; and
finally a number of soft-running, slow, dark cars end the parade.
The royal party, myself among them, gather on a platform of new timbers beside the unfinished Arch
of the River Gate. The occasion of the parade is the completion of that arch, which completes the
new Road and River Port of Erhenrang, a great operation of dredging and building and roadmaking
which has taken five years, and will distinguish Argaven XV's reign in the annals of Karhide. We
are all squeezed rather tight on the platform in our damp and massive finery. The rain is gone,
the sun shines on us, the splendid, radiant, traitorous sun of Winter. I remark to the person on
my left, "It's hot. It's really hot."
The person on my left-a stocky dark Karhider with sleek and heavy hair, wearing a heavy overtunic
of green leather worked with gold, and a heavy white shirt, and heavy breeches, and a neck-chain
of heavy silver links a hand broad-this person, sweating heavily, replies, "So it is."
All about us as we stand jammed on our platform lie the faces of the people of the city, upturned
like a shoal of brown, round pebbles, mica-glittering with thousands of watching eyes.
Now the king ascends a gangplank of raw timbers that leads from the platform up to the top of the
arch whose unjoined piers tower over crowd and wharves and river. As he mounts the crowd stirs and
speaks in a vast murmur: "Argaven!" He makes no response. They expect none. Gossiwors blow a
thunderous discordant blast, cease. Silence. The sun shines on city, river, crowd, and king.
Masons below have set an electric winch going, and as the king mounts higher the keystone of the
arch goes up past him in its sling, is raised, settled, and fitted almost soundlessly, great ton-
weight block though it is, into the gap between the two piers, making them one, one thing, an
arch. A mason with trowel and bucket awaits the king, up on the scaffolding; all the other workmen
descend by rope ladders, like a swarm of fleas. The king and the mason kneel, high between the
river and the sun, on their bit of planking. Taking the trowel the king begins to mortar the long
joints of the keystone. He does not dab at it and give the trowel back to the mason, but sets to
work methodically. The cement he uses is a pinkish color different from the rest of the
mortarwork, and after five or ten minutes of watching the king-bee work I ask the person on my
left, "Are your keystones always set in a red cement?" For the same color is plain around the
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keystone of each arch of the Old Bridge, that soars beautifully over the river upstream from the
arch.
Wiping sweat from his dark forehead theman-man I must say, having saidhe andhis- the man answers,
"Very-long-ago a keystone was always set in with a mortar of ground bones mixed with blood. Human
bones, human blood. Without the bloodbond the arch would fall, you see. We use the blood of
animals, these days."
So he often speaks, frank yet cautious, ironic, as if always aware that I see and judge as an
alien: a singular awareness in one of so isolate a race and so high a rank. He is one of the most
powerful men in the country; I am not sure of the proper historical equivalent of his position,
vizier or prime minister or councillor; the Karhidish word for it means the King's Ear. He is lord
of a Domain and lord of the Kingdom, a mover of great events. His name is Therem Harth rem ir
Estraven.
The king seems to be finished with his masonry work, and I rejoice; but crossing under the rise of
the arch on his spiderweb of planks he starts in on the other side of the keystone, which after
all has two sides. It doesn't do to be impatient in Karhide. They are anything but a phlegmatic
people, yet they are obdurate, they are pertinacious, they finish plastering joints. The crowds on
the Sess Embankment are content to watch the king work, but I am bored, and hot. I have never
before been hot, on Winter; I never will be again; yet I fail to appreciate the event. I am
dressed for the Ice Age and not for the sunshine, in layers and layers of clothing, woven plant-
fiber, artificial fiber, fur, leather, a massive armor against the cold, within which I now wilt
like a radish leaf. For distraction I look at the crowds and the other paraders drawn up around
the platform, their Domain and Clan banners hanging still and bright in sunlight, and idly I ask
Estraven what this banner is and that one and the other. He knows each one I ask about, though
there are hundreds, some from remote domains, hearths and tribelets of the Pering Storm-border and
Kerm Land.
"I'm from Kerm Land myself," he says when I admire his knowledge. "Anyhow it's my business to know
the Domains. They are Karhide. To govern this land is to govern its lords. Not that it's ever been
done. Do.you know the saying,Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel? " I haven't, and
suspect that Estraven made it up; it has his stamp.
At this point another member of thekyorremy , the upper chamber or parliament which Estraven
heads, pushes and squeezes a way up close to him and begins talking to him. This is the king's
cousin Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe. His voice is very low as he speaks to Estraven, his posture
faintly insolent, his smile frequent. Estraven, sweating like ice in the sun, stays slick and cold
as ice, answering Tibe's murmurs aloud in a tone whose commonplace politeness makes the other look
rather a fool. I listen, as I watch the king grouting away, but understand nothing except the
animosity between Tibe and Estraven. It's nothing to do with me, in any case, and I am simply
interested in the behavior of these people who rule a nation, in the old-fashioned sense, who
govern the fortunes of twenty million other people. Power has become so subtle and complex a thing
in the ways taken by the Ekumen that only a subtle mind can watch it work; here it is still
limited, still visible. In Estraven, for instance, one feels the man's power as an augmentation of
his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a word that is not listened to. He knows it,
and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a
substantiality, a human grandeur. Nothing succeeds like success. I don't trust Estraven, whose
motives are forever obscure; I don't like him; yet I feel and respond to his authority as surely
as I do to the warmth of the sun.
Even as I think this the world's sun dims between clouds regathering, and soon a flaw of rain runs
sparse and hard upriver, spattering the crowds on the Embankment, darkening the sky. As the king
comes down the gangplank the light breaks through a last time, and his white figure and the great
arch stand out a moment vivid and splendid against the storm-darkened south. The clouds close. A
cold wind comes tearing up Port-and-Palace Street, the river goes gray, the trees on the
Embankment shudder. The parade is over. Half an hour later it is snowing.
As the king's car drove off up Port-and-Palace Street and the crowds began to move like a rocky
shingle rolled by a slow tide, Estraven turned to me again and said, "Will you have supper with me
tonight, Mr. Ai?" I accepted, with more surprise than pleasure. Estraven had done a great deal for
me in the last six or eight months, but I did not expect or desire such a show of personal favor
as an invitation to his house. Harge rem ir Tibe was still close to us, overhearing, and I felt
that he was meant to overhear. Annoyed by this sense of effeminate intrigue I got off the platform
and lost myself in the mob, crouching and slouching somewhat to do so. I'm not much taller than
the Gethenian norm, but the difference is most noticeable in a crowd.That's him, look, there's the
Envoy. Of course that was part of my job, but it was a part that got harder not easier as time
went on; more and more often I longed for anonymity, for sameness. I craved to be like everybody
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else.
A couple of blocks up Breweries Street I turned off towards my lodgings and suddenly, there where
the crowd thinned out, found Tibe walking beside me.
"A flawless event," said the king's cousin, smiling at me. His long, clean, yellow teeth appeared
and disappeared in a yellow face all webbed, though he was not an old man, with fine, soft
wrinkles.
"A good augury for the success of the new Port," I said.
"Yes indeed." More teeth.
"The ceremony of the keystone is most impressive-"
"Yes indeed. That ceremony descends to us from very-long-ago. But no doubt Lord Estraven explained
all that to you."
"Lord Estraven is most obliging." I was trying to speak insipidly, yet everything I said to Tibe
seemed to take on a double meaning.
"Oh very much indeed," said Tibe. "Indeed Lord Estraven is famous for his kindness to foreigners."
He smiled again, and every tooth seemed to have a meaning, double, multiple, thirty-two different
meanings.
"Few foreigners are so foreign as I, Lord Tibe. I am very grateful for kindnesses."
"Yes indeed, yes indeed! And gratitude's a noble, rare emotion, much praised by the poets. Rare
above all here in Erhenrang, no doubt because it's impracticable. This is a hard age we live in,
an ungrateful age. Things aren't as they were in our grandparents' days, are they?"
"I scarcely know, sir, but I've heard the same lament on other worlds."
Tibe stared at me for some while as if establishing lunacy. Then he brought out the long yellow
teeth.
"Ah yes! Yes indeed! I keep forgetting that you come from another planet. But of course that's not
a matter you ever forget. Though no doubt life would be much sounder and simpler and safer for you
here in Erhenrang if you could forget it, eh? Yes indeed! Here's my car, I had it wait here out of
the way. I'd like to offer to drive you to your island, but must forego the privilege, as I'm due
at the King's House very shortly and poor relations must be in good time, as the saying is, eh?
Yes indeed!" said the king's cousin, climbing into his little black electric car, teeth bared
across his shoulder at me, eyes veiled by a net of wrinkles.
I walked on home to my island. Its front garden was revealed now that the last of the winter's
snow had melted and the winter-doors, ten feet aboveground, were sealed off for a few months, till
the autumn and the deep snow should return. Around at the side of the building in the mud and the
ice and the quick, soft, rank spring growth of the garden, a young couple stood talking. Their
right hands were clasped. They were in the first phase of kemmer. The large, soft snow danced
about them as they stood barefoot in the icy mud, hands clasped, eyes all for each other. Spring
on Winter.
I had dinner at my island and at Fourth Hour striking on the gongs of Remny Tower I was at the
Palace.
*Karhosh, island,the usual word for the apartment-boardinghouse buildings that house the greatest
part of the urban populations of Karhide. Islands contain 20 to 200 private rooms; meals are
communal; some are run as hotels, others as cooperative communes, others combine these types. They
are certainly an urban adaptation of the fundamental Karhidish institution of the Hearth, though
lacking, of course, the topical and genealogical stability of the Hearth ready for supper.
Karhiders eat four solid meals a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, along with a lot of
adventitious nibbling and gobbling in between. There are no large meat-animals on Winter, and no
mammalian products, milk, butter or cheese; the only high-protein, high-carbohydrate foods are the
various kinds of eggs, fish, nuts, and the Hainish grains. A lowgrade diet for a bitter climate,
and one must refuel often. I had got used to eating, as it seemed, every few minutes. It wasn't
until later in that year that I discovered the Gethenians have perfected the technique not only of
perpetually stuffing, but also of indefinitely starving.
The snow still fell, a mild spring blizzard, much pleasanter than the relentless rain of the Thaw
just past. I made my way to and through the Palace in the quiet and pale darkness of snowfall,
losing my way only once. The Palace of Erhenrang is an inner city, a walled wilderness of palaces,
towers, gardens, courtyards, cloisters, roofed bridgeways, roofless tunnel-walks, small forests
and dungeon-keeps, the product of centuries of paranoia on a grand scale. Over it all rise the
grim, red, elaborate walls of the Royal House, which though in perpetual use is inhabited by no
one beside the king himself. Everyone else, servants, staff, lords, ministers, parliamentarians,
guards or whatever, sleeps in another palace or fort or keep or barracks or house inside the
walls. Estraven's house, sign of the king's high favor, was the Corner Red Dwelling, built 440
years ago for Harmes, beloved kemmering of Emran III, whose beauty is still celebrated, and who
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was abducted, mutilated, and rendered imbecile by hirelings of the Inner-land Faction. Emran III
died forty years after, still wreaking vengeance on his unhappy country: Emran the Illfated. The
tragedy is so old that its horror has leached away and only a certain air of faithlessness and
melancholy clings to the stones and shadows of the house. The garden was small and walled; serem-
trees leaned over a rocky pool. In dim shafts of light from the windows of the house I saw
snowflakes and the threadlike white sporecases of the trees falling softly together onto the dark
water. Estraven stood waiting for me, bareheaded and coatless in the cold, watching that small
secret ceaseless descent of snow and seeds in the night. He greeted me quietly and brought me into
the house. There were no other guests.
I wondered at this, but we went to table at once, and one does not talk business while eating;
besides, my wonder was diverted to the meal, which was superb, even the eternal breadapples
transmuted by a cook whose art I heartily praised. After supper, by the fire, we drank hot beer.
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has
formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
Estraven had conversed amiably at table; now, sitting across the hearth from me, he was quiet.
Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of
the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously
seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so
irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I
thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of
substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked
and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic,
powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I
felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him? His voice was
soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man's voice, but scarcely a woman's voice
either...but what was it saying?
"I'm sorry," he was saying, "that I've had to forestall for so long this pleasure of having you in
my house; and to that extent at least I'm glad there is no longer any question of patronage
between us."
I puzzled at this a while. He had certainly been my patron in court until now. Did he mean that
the audience he had arranged for me with the king tomorrow had raised me to an equality with
himself? "I don't think I follow you," I said.
At that, he was silent, evidently also puzzled. "Well, you understand," he said at last, "being
here... you understand that I am no longer acting on your behalf with the king, of course."
He spoke as if ashamed of me, not of himself. Clearly there was a significance in his invitation
and my acceptance of it which I had missed. But my blunder was in manners, his in morals. All I
thought at first was that I had been right all along not to trust Estraven. He was not merely
adroit and not merely powerful, he was faithless. All these months in Erhenrang it had been he who
listened to me, who answered my questions, sent physicians and engineers to verify the alienness
of my physique and my ship, introduced me to people I needed to know, and gradually elevated me
from my first year's status as a highly imaginative monster to my present recognition as the
mysterious Envoy, about to be received by the king. Now, having got me up on that dangerous
eminence, he suddenly and coolly announced he was withdrawing his support.
"You've led me to rely on you-"
"It was ill done."
"Do you mean that, having arranged this audience, you haven't spoken in favor of my mission to the
king, as you-" I had the sense to stop short of "promised."
"I can't."
I was very angry, but I met neither anger nor apology in him.
"Will you tell me why?"
After a while he said, "Yes," and then paused again. During the pause I began to think that an
inept and undefended alien should not demand reasons from the prime minister of a kingdom, above
all when he does not and perhaps never will understand the foundations of power and the workings
of government in that kingdom. No doubt this was all a matter ofshifgrethor- prestige, face,
place, the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social authority
in Karhide and all civilizations of Gethen. And if it was I would not understand it.
"Did you hear what the king said to me at the ceremony today?"
"No."
Estraven leaned forward across the hearth, lifted the beer-jug out of the hot ashes, and refilled
my tankard. He said nothing more, so I amplified, "The king didn't speak to you in my hearing."
"Nor in mine," said he.
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I saw at last that I was missing another signal. Damning his effeminate deviousness, I said, "Are
you trying to tell me, Lord Estraven, that you're out of favor with the king?"
I think he was angry then, but he said nothing that showed it, only, "I'm not trying to tell you
anything, Mr. Ai."
"By God, I wish you would!"
He looked at me curiously. "Well, then, put it this way. There are some persons in court who are,
in your phrase, in favor with the king, but who do not favor your presence or your mission here."
And so you're hurrying to join them, selling me out to save your skin, I thought, but there was no
point in saying it. Estraven was a courtier, a politician, and I a fool to have trusted him. Even
in a bisexual society the politician is very often something less than an integral man. His
inviting me to dinner showed that he thought I would accept his betrayal as easily as he committed
it. Clearly face-saving was more important than honesty. So I brought myself to say, "I'm sorry
that your kindness to me has made trouble for you." Coals of fire. I enjoyed a flitting sense of
moral superiority, but not for long; he was too incalculable.
He sat back so that the firelight lay ruddy on his knees and his fine, strong, small hands and on
the silver tankard he held, but left his face in shadow: a dark face always shadowed by the thick
lowgrowing hair, and heavy brows and lashes, and by a somber blandness of expression. Can one read
a cat's face, a seal's, an otter's? Some Gethenians, I thought, are like such animals, with deep
bright eyes that do not change expression when you speak.
"I've made trouble for myself," he answered, "by an act that had nothing to do with you, Mr. Ai.
You know that Karhide and Orgoreyn have a dispute concerning a stretch of our border in the high
North Fall near Sassinoth. Argaven's grandfather claimed the Sinoth Valley for Karhide, and the
Commensals have never recognized the claim. A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.
I've been helping some Karhidish farmers who live in the Valley to move back east across the old
border, thinking the argument might settle itself if the Valley were simply left to the Orgota,
who have lived there for several thousand years. I was in the Administration of the North Fall
some years ago, and got to know some of those farmers. I dislike the thought of their being killed
in forays, or sent to Voluntary Farms in Orgoreyn. Why not obviate the subject of dispute?...But
that's not a patriotic idea. In fact it's a cowardly one, and impugns the shifgrethor of the king
himself."
His ironies, and these ins and outs of a border-dispute with Orgoreyn, were of no interest to me.
I returned to the matter that lay between us. Trust him or not, I might still get some use out of
him. "I'm sorry," I said, "but it seems a pity that this question of a few farmers may be allowed
to spoil the chances of my mission with the king. There's more at stake than a few miles of
national boundary."
"Yes. Much more. But perhaps the Ekumen, which is a hundred light-years from border to border,
will be patient with us a while."
"The Stabiles of the Ekumen are very patient men, sir. They'll wait a hundred years or five
hundred for Karhide and the rest of Gethen to deliberate and consider whether or not to join the
rest of mankind. I speak merely out of personal hope. And personal disappointment. I own that I
thought that with your support-"
"I too. Well, the Glaciers didn't freeze overnight..." Cliché came ready to his lips, but his mind
was elsewhere. He brooded. I imagined him moving me around with the other pawns in his power-game.
"You came to my country," he said at last, "at a strange time. Things are changing; we are taking
a new turning. No, not so much that, as following too far on the way we've been going. I thought
that your presence, your mission, might prevent our going wrong, give us a new option entirely.
"But at the right moment-in the right place. It is all exceedingly chancy, Mr. Ai."
Impatient with his generalities, I said, "You imply that this isn't the right moment. Would you
advise me to cancel my audience?"
My gaffe was even worse in Karhidish, but Estraven did not smile, or wince. "I'm afraid only the
king has that privilege," he said mildly.
"Oh God, yes. I didn't mean that." I put my head in my hands a moment. Brought up in the wide-
open, free-wheeling society of Earth, I would never master the protocol, or the impassivity, so
valued by Karhiders. I knew what a king was, Earth's own history is full of them, but I had no
experiential feel for privilege-no tact. I picked up my tankard and drank a hot and violent draft.
"Well, I'll say less to the king than I intended to say, when I could count on you."
"Good."
"Why good?" I demanded.
"Well, Mr. Ai, you're not insane. I'm not insane. But then neither of us is a king, you see... I
suppose that you intended to tell Argaven, rationally, that your mission here is to attempt to
bring about an alliance between Gethen and the Ekumen. And, rationally, he knows that already;
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because, as you know, I told him. I urged your case with him, tried to interest him in you. It was
ill done, ill timed. I forgot, being too interested myself, that he's a king, and does not see
things rationally, but as a king. All I've told him means to him simply that his power is
threatened, his kingdom is a dustmote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred
worlds."
"But the Ekumen doesn't rule, it co-ordinates. Its power is precisely the power of its member
states and worlds. In alliance with the Ekumen, Karhide will become infinitely less threatened and
more important than it's ever been."
Estraven did not answer for a while. He sat gazing at the fire, whose flames winked, reflected,
from his tankard and from the broad bright silver chain of office over his shoulders. The old
house was silent around us. There had been a servant to attend our meal, but Karhiders, having no
institutions of slavery or personal bondage, hire services not people, and the servants had all
gone off to their own homes by now. Such a man as Estraven must have guards about him somewhere,
for assassination is a lively institution in Karhide, but I had seen no guard, heard none. We were
alone.
I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city,
in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
Everything I had said, tonight and ever since I came to Winter, suddenly appeared to me as both
stupid and incredible. How could I expect this man or any other to believe my tales about other
worlds, other races, a vague benevolent government somewhere off in outer space? It was all
nonsense. I had appeared in Karhide in a queer kind of ship, and I differed physically from
Gethenians in some respects; that wanted explaining. But my own explanations were preposterous. I
did not, in that moment, believe them myself... "Ibelieve you," said the stranger, the alien alone
with me, and so strong had my access of self-alienation been that I looked up at him bewildered.
"I'm afraid that Argaven also believes you. But he does not trust you. In part because he no
longer trusts me. I have made mistakes, been careless. I cannot ask for your trust any longer,
either, having put you in jeopardy. I forgot what a king is, forgot that the king in his own
eyesis Karhide, forgot what patriotism is and that he is, of necessity, the perfect patriot. Let
me ask you this, Mr. Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?"
"No," I said, shaken by the force of that intense personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon
me. "I don't think I do. If by patriotism you don't mean the love of one's homeland, for that I do
know."
"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its
expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It
grows in us year by year. We've followed our road too far. And you, who come from a world that
outgrew nations centuries ago, who hardly know what I'm talking about, who show us the new road-"
He broke off. After a while he went on, in control again, cool and polite: "It's because of fear
that I refuse to urge your cause with the king, now. But not fear for myself, Mr. Ai. I'm not
acting patriotically. There are, after all, other nations on Gethen."
I had no idea what he was driving at, but was sure that he did not mean what he seemed to mean. Of
all the dark, obstructive, enigmatic souls I had met in this bleak city, his was the darkest. I
would not play his labyrinthine game. I made no reply. After a while he went on, rather
cautiously, "If I've understood you, your Ekumen is devoted essentially to the general interest of
mankind. Now, for instance, the Orgota have experience in subordinating local interests to a
general interest, while Karhide has almost none. And the Commensals of Orgoreyn are mostly sane
men, if unintelligent, while the king of Karhide is not only insane but rather stupid."
It was clear that Estraven had no loyalties at all. I said in faint disgust, "It must be difficult
to serve him, if that's the case."
"I'm not sure I've ever served the king," said the king's prime minister. "Or ever intended to.
I'm not anyone's servant. A man must cast his own shadow..."
The gongs in Remny Tower were striking Sixth Hour, midnight, and I took them as my excuse to go.
As I was putting on my coat in the hallway he said, "I've lost my chance forthe present, for I
suppose you'll be leaving Ehrenrang-" why did he suppose so?- "but I trust a day will come when I
can ask you questions again. There's so much I want to know. About your mind-speech, in
particular; you'd scarcely begun to try to explain it to me."
His curiosity seemed perfectly genuine. He had the effrontery of the powerful. His promises to
help me had seemed genuine, too. I said yes, of course, whenever he liked, and that was the
evening's end. He showed me out through the garden, where snow lay thin in the light of Gethen's
big, dull, rufous moon. I shivered as we went out, for it was well below freezing, and he said
with polite surprise, "You're cold?" To him of course it was a mild spring night.
I was tired and downcast. I said, "I've been cold ever since I came to this world."
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"What do you call it, this world, in your language?"
"Gethen."
"You gave it no name of your own?"
"Yes, the First Investigators did. They called it Winter."
We had stopped in the gateway of the walled garden. Outside, the Palace grounds and roofs loomed
in a dark snowy jumble lit here and there at various heights by the faint gold slits of windows.
Standing under the narrow arch I glanced up, wondering if that keystone too was mortared with bone
and blood. Estraven took leave of me and turned away; he was never fulsome in his greetings and
farewells. I went off through the silent courts and alleys of the Palace, my boots crunching on
the thin moonlit snow, and homeward through the deep streets of the city. I was cold, unconfident,
obsessed by perfidy, and solitude, and fear.
2. The Place Inside the Blizzard
From a sound-tape collection of North Karhidish "hearth-tales" in the archives of the College of
Historians in Erhenrang, narrator unknown, recorded during the reign of Argaven VIII.
ABOUT TWO HUNDREDyears ago in the Hearth of Shath in the Pering Storm-border there were two
brothers who vowed kemmering to each other. In those days, as now, full brothers were permitted to
keep kemmer until one of them should bear a child, but after that they must separate; so it was
never permitted them to vow kemmering for life. Yet this they had done. When a child was conceived
the Lord of Shath commanded them to break their vow and never meet in kemmer again. On hearing
this command one of the two, the one who bore the child, despaired and would hear no comfort or
counsel, and procuring poison, committed suicide.
Then the people of the Hearth rose up against the other brother and drove him out of Hearth and
Domain, laying the shame of the suicide upon him. And since his own lord had exiled him and his
story went before him, none would take him in, but after the three days' guesting all sent him
from their doors as an outlaw. So from place to place he went until he saw that there was no
kindness left for him in his own land, and his crime would not be forgiven.*
(*His transgression of the code controlling incest became a crime when seen as the cause of his
brother's suicide. (G.A.))
He had not believed this would be so, being a young man and unhardened. When he saw that it was so
indeed, he returned over the land to Shath and as an exile stood in the doorway of the Outer
Hearth. This he said to his hearth-fellows there: "I am without a face among men. I am not seen. I
speak and am not heard. I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for me, nor food
on the table for me, nor a bed made for me to lie in. Yet I still have my name: Getheren is my
name. That name I lay on this Hearth as a curse, and with it my shame. Keep that for me. Now
nameless I will go seek my death." Then some of the hearthmen jumped up with, shouts and tumult,
intending to kill him, for murder is a lighter shadow on a house than suicide. He escaped them and
ran northward over the land towards the Ice, outrunning all who pursued him. They came back all
chapfallen to Shath. But Getheren went on, and after two days' journey came to the Pering Ice.**
(**The Pering Ice is the glacial sheet that covers the northernmost portion of Karhide, and is (in
winter when the Guthen Bay is frozen) contiguous with the Gobrin Ice of Orgoreyn.)
For two days he walked northward on the Ice. He had no food with him, nor shelter but his coat. On
the Ice nothing grows and no beasts run. It was the month of Susmy and the first great snows were
falling those days and nights. He went alone through the storm. On the second day he knew he was
growing weaker. On the second night he must lie down and sleep a while. On the third morning
waking he saw that his hands were frostbitten, and found that his feet were too, though he could
not unfasten his boots to look at them, having no use left of his hands. He began to crawl forward
on knees and elbows. He had no reason to do so, as it did not matter whether he died in one place
on the Ice or another, but he felt that he should go northward.
After a long while the snow ceased to fall around him, and the wind to blow. The sun shone out. He
could not see far ahead as he crawled, for the fur of his hood came forward over his eyes. No
longer feeling any cold in his legs and arms nor on his face, he thought that the frost had
benumbed him. Yet he could still move. The snow that lay over the glacier looked strange to him,
as if it were a white grass growing up out of the ice. It bent to his touch and straightened
again, like grass-blades. He ceased to crawl and sat up, pushing back his hood so he could see
around him. As far as he could see lay fields of the snowgrass, white and shining. There were
groves of white trees, with white leaves growing on them. The sun shone, and it was windless, and
everything was white.
Getheren took off his gloves and looked at his hands. They were white as the snow. Yet the
frostbite was gone out of them, and he could use his fingers, and stand upon his feet. He felt no
pain, and no cold, and no hunger.
He saw away over the ice to the north a white tower like the tower of a Domain, and from this
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