6. One Way into Orgoreyn

   The cook, who was always at the house very early, woke me up; I sleep sound, and he had to shake me and say in my ear, “Wake up, wake up, Lord Estraven, there’s a runner come from the King’s House!” At last I understood him, and confused by sleep and urgency got up in haste and went to the door of my room, where the messenger waited, and so I entered stark naked and stupid as a newborn child into my exile.
   Reading the paper the runner gave me I said in my mind that I had looked for this, though not so soon. But when I must watch the man nail that damned paper on the door of the house, then I felt as if he might as well be driving the nails into my eyes, and I turned from him and stood blank and bereft, undone with pain, which I had not looked for.
   That fit past, I saw to what must be done, and by Ninth Hour striking on the gongs was gone from the Palace. There was nothing to keep me long. I took what I could take. As for properties and banked monies, I could not raise cash from them without endangering the men I dealt with, and the better friends they were to me the worse their danger. I wrote to my old kemmering Ashe how he might get the profit of certain valuable things to keep for our sons’ use, but told him not to try to send me money, for Tibe would have the border watched. I could not sign the letter. To call anyone by telephone would be to send them to jail, and I hurried to be gone before some friend should come in innocence to see me, and lose his money and his freedom as a reward for his friendship.
   I set off west through the city. I stopped at a street-crossing and thought, Why should I not go east, across the mountains and the plains back to Kerm Land, a poor man afoot, and so come home to Estre where I was born, that stone house on a bitter mountainside: why not go home? Three times or four I stopped thus and looked back. Each time I saw among the indifferent street-faces one that might be the spy sent to see me out of Erhenrang, and each time I thought of the folly of trying to go home. As well kill myself. I was born to live in exile, it appeared, and my one way home was by way of dying. So I went on westward and turned back no more.
   The three days’ grace I had would see me, given no mishap, at farthest to Kuseben on the Gulf, eighty-five miles. Most exiles have had a night’s warning of the Order of their Exile and so a chance to take passage on a ship down the Sess before the shipmasters are liable to punishment for giving aid. Such courtesy was not in Tibe’s vein. No shipmaster would dare take me now; they all knew me at the Port, I having built it for Argaven. No landboat would let me ride, and to the land border from Erhenrang is four hundred miles. I had no choice but Kuseben afoot.
   The cook had seen that. I had sent him off at once, but leaving, he had set out all the ready food he could find done up in a packet as fuel for my three days’ run. That kindness saved me, and also saved my courage, for whenever on the road I ate of that fruit and bread I thought, “There’s one man thinks me no traitor; for he gave me this.”
   It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man; a name that sticks, that fits, that convinces. I was half convinced myself.
   I came to Kuseben at dusk of the third day, anxious and footsore, for these last years in Erhenrang I had gone all to grease and luxury and had lost my wind for walking; and there waiting for me at the gate of the little town was Ashe.
   Seven years we were kemmerings, and had two sons. Being of his flesh born they had his name Foreth rem ir Osboth, and were reared in that Clanhearth. Three years ago he had gone to Orgny Fastness and he wore now the gold chain of a Celibate of the Foretellers. We had not seen each other those three years, yet seeing his face in the twilight under the arch of stone I felt the old habit of our love as if it had been broken yesterday, and knew the faithfulness in him that had sent him to share my ruin. And feeling that unavailing bond close on me anew, I was angry; for Ashe’s love had always forced me to act against my heart.
   I went on past him. If I must be cruel no need to hide it, pretending kindness. “Therem,” he called after me, and followed. I went fast down the steep streets of Kuseben towards the wharves. A south wind was blowing up from the sea, rustling the black trees of the gardens, and through that warm stormy summer dusk I hastened from him as from a murderer. He caught up with me, for I was too footsore to keep up my pace. He said, “Therem, I’ll go with you.”
   I made no answer.
   “Ten years ago in this month of Tuwa we took oath—”
   “And three years ago you broke it, leaving me, which was a wise choice.”
   “I never broke the vow we swore, Therem.”
   “True. There was none to break. It was a false vow, a second vow. You know it; you knew it then. The only true vow of faithfulness I ever swore was not spoken, nor could it be spoken, and the man I swore it to is dead and the promise broken, long ago. You owe me nothing, nor I you. Let me go.”
   As I spoke my anger and bitterness turned from Ashe against myself and my own life, which lay behind me like a broken promise. But Ashe did not know this, and the tears stood in his eyes. He said, “Will you take this, Therem? I owe you nothing, but I love you well.” He held a little packet out to me.
   “No. I have money, Ashe. Let me go. I must go alone.” I went on, and he did not follow me. But my brother’s shadow followed me. I had done ill to speak of him. I had done ill in all things.
   I found no luck waiting for me at the harbor. No ship from Orgoreyn lay in port that I might board and so be off Karhide’s ground by midnight, as I was bound to be. Few men were on the wharves and those few all hurrying homeward; the one I found to speak to, a fisherman mending the engine of his boat, looked once at me and turned his back unspeaking. At that I was afraid. The man knew me; he would not have known unwarned. Tibe had sent his hirelings to forestall me and keep me in Karhide till my time ran out. I had been busy with pain and rage, but not with fear, till now; I had not thought that the Order of Exile might be mere pretext for my execution. Once Sixth Hour struck I was fair game for Tibe’s men, and none could cry Murder, but only Justice done.
   I sat down on a ballast-sack of sand there in the windy glare and darkness of the port. The sea slapped and sucked at the pilings, and fishing-boats jogged at their moorings, and out at the end of the long pier burned a lamp. I sat and stared at the light and past it at darkness over the sea. Some rise to present danger, not I. My gift is forethought. Threatened closely I grow stupid, and sit on a bag of sand wondering if a man could swim to Orgoreyn. The ice has been out of Charisune Gulf for a month or two, one might stay alive a while in the water. It is a hundred and fifty miles to the Orgota shore. I do not know how to swim. When I looked away from the sea and back up the streets of Kuseben I found myself looking for Ashe in hopes he still was following me. Having come to that, shame pushed me out of stupor, and I was able to think.
   Bribery or violence was my choice if I dealt with that fisherman still at work in his boat in the inner dock: a faulty engine seemed not worth either. Theft, then. But the engines of fishing craft are locked. To bypass the locked circuit, start the engine, steer the boat out of dock under the pier-lamps and so off to Orgoreyn, having never run a motorboat, seemed a silly desperate venture. I had not run a boat but rowed one on Icefoot Lake in Kerm; and there was a rowboat tied up in the outer dock between two launches. No sooner seen than stolen. I ran out the pier under the staring lamps, hopped into the boat, untied the painter, shipped the oars and rowed out onto the swelling harbor-water where the lights slipped and dazzled on black waves. When I was pretty well away I stopped rowing to reset the thole of one oar, for it was not working smoothly and I had, though I hoped to be picked up next day by an Orgota patrol Or fisherman, a good bit of rowing to do. As I bent to the oarlock a weakness ran all through my body. I thought I would faint, and crouched back in a heap on the thwart. It was the sickness of cowardice overcoming me. But I had not known my cowardice lay so heavy in my belly. I lifted my eyes and saw two figures on the pier’s end like two jumping black twigs in the distant electric glare across the water, and then I began to think that my paralysis was not an effect of terror, but of a gun at extreme range.
   I could see that one of them held a foray gun, and had it been past midnight I suppose he would have fired it and killed me; but the foray gun makes a loud noise and that would want explaining. So they had used a sonic gun. At stun setting a sonic gun can locate its resonance-field only within a hundred feet or so. I do not know its range at lethal setting, but I had not been far out of it, for I was doubled up like a baby with colic. I found it hard to breathe, the weakened field having caught me in the chest. As they would soon have a powered boat out to come finish me off, I could not spend any more time hunched over my oars gasping. Darkness lay behind my back, before the boat, and into darkness I must row. I rowed with weak arms, watching my hands to make sure I kept hold of the oars, for I could not feel my grip. I came thus into rough water and the dark, out on the open Gulf. There I had to stop. With each oarstroke the numbness of my arms increased. My heart kept bad time, and my lungs had forgotten how to get air. I tried to row but I was not sure my arms were moving. I tried to pull the oars into the boat then, but could not. When the sweeplight of a harbor patrol ship picked me out of the night like a snowflake on soot, I could not even turn my eyes away from the glare.
   They unclenched my hands from the oars, hauled me up out of the boat, and laid me out like a gutted black-fish on the deck of the patrol ship. I felt them look down at me but could not well understand what they said, except for one, the ship’s master by his tone; he said, “It’s not Sixth Hour yet,” and again, answering another, “What affair of mine is that? The king exiled him, I’ll follow the king’s order, no lesser man’s.”
   So against radio commands from Tibe’s men ashore and against the arguments of his mate, who feared retribution, that officer of the Kuseben Patrol took me across the Gulf of Charisune and set me ashore safe in Shelt Port in Orgoreyn. Whether he did this in shifgrethor against Tibe’s men who would kill an unarmed man, or in kindness, I do not know. Nusuth. “The admirable is inexplicable.”
   I got up on my feet when the Orgota coast came gray out of the morning fog, and I made my legs move, and walked from the ship into the waterfront streets of Shelt, but somewhere there I fell down again. When I woke I was in the Commensal Hospital of Charisune Coastal Area Four, Twenty-fourth Commensality, Sennethny. I made sure of this, for it was engraved or embroidered in Orgota script on the headpiece of the bed, the lamp-stand by the bed, the metal cup on the bedtable, the bedtable, the nurses’ hiebs, the bedcovers and the bed-shirt I wore. A physician came and said to me, “Why did you resist dothe?”
   “I was not in dothe,” I said, “I was in a sonic field.”
   “Your symptoms were those of a person who has resisted the relaxation phase of dothe.” He was a domineering old physician, and made me admit at last that I might have used dothe-strength to counter the paralysis while I rowed, not clearly knowing that I did so; then this morning, during the thangen phase when one must keep still, I had got up and walked and so near killed myself. When all that was settled to his satisfaction he told me I could leave in a day or two, and went on to the next bed. Behind him came the Inspector.
   Behind every man in Orgoreyn comes the Inspector.
   “Name?” _
   I did not ask him his. I must learn to live without shadows as they do in Orgoreyn; not to take offense; not to offend uselessly. But I did not give him my land-name, which is no business of any man in Orgoreyn.
   “Therem Harth? That is not an Orgota name. What Commensality?”
   “Karhide.”
   “That is not a Commensality of Orgoreyn. Where are your papers of entry and identification?”
   Where were my papers?
   I had been considerably rolled about in the streets of Shelt before someone had me carted off to the hospital, where I had arrived without papers, belongings, coat, shoes, or cash. When I heard this I let go of anger and laughed; at the pit’s bottom is no anger. The Inspector was offended by my laughter. “Do you not understand that you are an indigent and unregistered alien? How do you intend to return to Karhide?”
   “By coffin.”
   “You are not to give inappropriate answers to official questions. If you have no intention to return to your own country you will be sent to the Voluntary Farm, where there is a place for criminal riffraff, aliens, and unregistered persons. There is no other place for indigents and subversives in Orgoreyn. You had better declare your intention to return to Karhide within three days, or I shall be—”
   “I’m proscribed from Karhide.”
   The physician, who had turned around from the next bed at the sound of my name, drew the Inspector aside and muttered at him a while. The Inspector got to looking sour as bad beer, and when he came back to me he said, taking long to say it and grudging me each word, “Then I assume you will declare your intention to me to enter application for permission to obtain permanent residence in the Great Commensality of Orgoreyn pending your obtaining and retaining useful employment as a digit of a Commensality or Township?”
   I said, “Yes.” The joke was gone out of it with that word permanent, a skull-word if there ever was one.
   After five days I was granted permanent residence pending my registry as a digit in the Township of Mishnory (which I had requested), and was issued temporary papers of identification for the journey to that city. I would have been hungry those five days, if the old physician had not kept me in the hospital. He liked having a Prime Minister of Karhide in his ward, and the Prime Minister was grateful.
   I worked my way to Mishnory as a landboat loader on a fresh-fish caravan from Shelt. A fast smelly trip, ending in the great Markets of South Mishnory, where I soon found work in the ice-houses. There is always work in such places in summer, with the loading and packing and storing and shipping of perishable stuff. I handled mostly fish, and lodged in an island by the Markets with my fellows from the ice-house; Fish Island they called it; it stank of us. But I liked the job for keeping me most of the day in the refrigerated warehouse. Mishnory in summer is a steam-bath. The doors of the hills are shut; the river boils; men sweat. In the month of Ockre there were ten days and nights when the temperature never went below sixty degrees, and one day the heat rose to 88°. Driven out into that smelting-furnace from my cold fishy refuge at day’s end, I would walk a couple of miles to the Kunderer Embankment, where there are trees and one may see the great river, though not get down to it. There I would roam late and go back at last to Fish Island through the fierce, close night. In my part of Mishnory they broke the streetlamps, to keep their doings in the dark. But the Inspectors’ cars were forever snooping and spotlighting those dark streets, taking from poor men their one privacy, the night.
   The new Alien Registry Law enacted in the month of Kus as a move in the shadow-fight with Karhide invalidated my registration and lost me my job, and I spent a halfmonth waiting in the anterooms of infinite Inspectors. My mates at work lent me money and stole fish for my dinner, so that I got re-registered before I starved; but I had heard the lesson. I liked those hard loyal men, but they lived in a trap there was no getting out of, and I had work to do among people I liked less. I made the calls I had put off for three months.
   Next day I was washing out my shirt in the wash-house in the courtyard of Fish Island along with several others, all of us naked or half naked, when through the steam and stink of grime and fish and the clatter of water I heard someone call me by my landname: and there was Commensal Yegey in the wash-house, looking just as he had looked at the Reception of the Archipelagan Ambassador in the Ceremonial Hall of the Palace in Erhenrang seven months before. “Come along out of this, Estraven,” he said in the high, loud, nasal voice of the Mishnory rich. “Oh, leave the damned shirt.”
   “I haven’t got another.”
   “Fish it out of that soup then and come on. It’s hot in here.”
   The others stared at him with dour curiosity, knowing him a rich man, but they did not know him for a Commensal. I did not like his being there; he should have sent someone after me. Very few Orgota have any feeling for decency. I wanted to get him out of there. The shirt was no good to me wet, so I told a hearthless lad that hung about the courtyard to keep it on his back for me till I returned. My debts and rent were paid and my papers in my hieb-pocket; shirtless I left the island in the Markets, and went with Yegey back among the houses of the powerful.
   As his “secretary” I was again re-registered in the rolls of Orgoreyn, not as a digit but as a dependent. Names won’t do, they must have labels, and say the kind before they can see the thing. But this time their label fit, I was dependent, and soon was brought to curse the purpose that brought me here to eat another man’s bread. For they gave me no sign for a month yet that I was any nearer achieving that purpose than I had been at Fish Island.
   On the rainy evening of the last day of summer Yegey sent for me to his study, where I found him talking with the Commensal of the Sekeve District, Obsle, whom I had known when he headed the Orgota Naval Trade Commission in Erhenrang. Short and swaybacked, with little triangular eyes in a fat, flat face, he was an odd match with Yegey, all delicacy and bone. The frump and the fop, they looked, but they were something more than that. They were two of the Thirty-Three who rule Orgoreyn; yet again, they were something more than that.
   Politenesses exchanged and a dram of Sithish lifewater drunk, Obsle sighed and said to me, “Now tell me why you did what you did in Sassinoth, Estraven, for if there was ever a man I thought unable to err in the timing of an act or the weighing of shifgrethor, that man was you.”
   “Fear outweighed caution in me, Commensal.”
   “Fear of what the devil? What are you afraid of, Estraven?”
   “Of what’s happening now. The continuation of the prestige-struggle in the Sinoth Valley; the humiliation of Karhide, the anger that rises from humiliation; the use of that anger by the Karhidish Government.”
   “Use? To what end?”
   Obsle has no manners; Yegey, delicate and prickly, broke in, “Commensal, Lord Estraven is my guest and need not suffer questioning-”
   “Lord Estraven will answer questions when and as he sees fit, as he ever did,” said Obsle grinning, a needle hidden in a heap of grease. “He knows himself between friends, here.”
   “I take my friends where I find them, Commensal, but I no longer look to keep them long.”
   “I can see that. Yet we can pull a sledge together without being kemmerings, as we say in Eskeve—eh? What the devil, I know what you were exiled for, my dear: for liking Karhide better than its king.”
   “Rather for liking the king better than his cousin, perhaps.”
   “Or for liking Karhide better than Orgoreyn,” said Yegey. “Am I wrong, Lord Estraven?”
   “No, Commensal.”
   “You think, then,” said Obsle, “that Tibe wants to run Karhide as we run Orgoreyn—efficiently?”
   “I do. I think that Tibe, using the Sinoth Valley dispute as a goad, and sharpening it at need, may within a year work a greater change in Karhide than the last thousand years have seen. He has a model to work from, the Sarf. And he knows how to play on Argaven’s fears. That’s easier than trying to arouse Argaven’s courage, as I did. If Tibe succeeds, you gentlemen will find you have an enemy worthy of you.”
   Obsle nodded. “I waive shifgrethor,” said Yegey, “what are you getting at, Estraven?”
   “This: Will the Great Continent hold two Orgoreyns?”
   “Aye, aye, aye, the same thought,” said Obsle, “the same thought: you planted it in my head a long time ago, Estraven, and I never can uproot it. Our shadow grows too long. It will cover Karhide too. A feud between two Clans, yes; a foray between two towns, yes; a border-dispute and a few barn-burnings and murders, yes; but a feud between two nations? a foray involving fifty million souls? O by Meshe’s sweet milk, that’s a picture that has set fire to my sleep, some nights, and made me get up sweating… We are not safe, we are not safe. You know it, Yegey; you’ve said it in your own way, many times.”
   “I’ve voted thirteen times now against pressing the Sinoth Valley dispute. But what good? The Domination faction holds twenty votes ready at command, and every move of Tibe’s strengthens the Sarf’s control over those twenty. He builds a fence across the valley, puts guards along the fence armed with foray guns—foray guns! I thought they kept them in museums. He feeds the Domination faction a challenge whenever they need one.”
   “And so strengthens Orgoreyn. But also Karhide. Every response you make to his provocations, every humiliation you inflict upon Karhide, every gain in your prestige, will serve to make Karhide stronger, until it is your equal—controlled all from one center as Orgoreyn is. And in Karhide they don’t keep foray guns in museums. The King’s Guard carry them.”
   Yegey poured out another dram around of lifewater. Orgota noblemen drink that precious fire, brought five thousand miles over the foggy seas from Sith, as if it were beer. Obsle wiped his mouth and blinked his eyes.
   “Well,” he said, “all that is much as I thought, and much as I think. And I think we have a sledge to pull together. But I have a question before we get in harness, Estraven. You have my hood down over my eyes entirely. Now tell me: what was all this obscuration, obfuscation and fiddlefaddle concerning an Envoy from the far side of the moon?”
   Genly Ai, then, had requested permission to enter Orgoreyn.
   “The Envoy? He is what he says he is.”
   “And that is—”
   “An envoy from another world.”
   “None of your damned shadowy Karhidish metaphors, now, Estraven. I waive shifgrethor, I discard it. Will you answer me?”
   “I have done so.”
   “He is an alien being?” Obsle said, and Yegey, “And he has had audience with King Argaven?”
   I answered yes to both. They were silent a minute and then both started to speak at once, neither trying to mask his interest. Yegey was for circumambulating, but Obsle went to the point. “What was he in your plans, then? You staked yourself on him, it seems, and fell. Why?”
   “Because Tibe tripped me. I had my eyes on the stars, and didn’t watch the mud I walked in.”
   “You’ve taken up astronomy, my dear?”
   “We’d better all take up astronomy, Obsle.”
   “Is he a threat to us, this Envoy?”
   “I think not. He brings from his people offers of communication, trade, treaty, and alliance, nothing else. He came alone, without arms or defense, with nothing but a communicating device, and his ship, which he allowed us to examine completely. He is not to be feared, I think. Yet he brings the end of Kingdom and Commensalities with him in his empty hands.”
   “Why?”
   “How shall we deal with strangers, except as brothers? How shall Gethen treat with a union of eighty worlds, except as a world?”
   “Eighty worlds?” said Yegey, and laughed uneasily. Obsle stared at me athwart and said, “I’d like to think that you’ve been too long with the madman in his palace and had gone mad yourself… Name of Meshe! What’s this babble of alliances with the suns and treaties with the moon? How did the fellow come here, riding on a comet? astride a meteor? A ship, what sort of ship floats on air? On void space? Yet you’re no madder than you ever were, Estraven, which is to say shrewdly mad, wisely mad. All Karhiders are insane. Lead on, my lord, I follow. Go on!”
   “I go nowhere, Obsle. Where have I to go? You, however, may get somewhere. If you should follow the Envoy a little way, he might show you a way out of the Sinoth Valley, out of the evil course we’re caught in.”
   “Very good. I’ll take up astronomy in my old age. Where will it lead me?”
   “Toward greatness, if you go more wisely than I went. Gentlemen, I’ve been with the Envoy, I’ve seen his ship that crossed the void, and I know that he is truly and exactly a messenger from elsewhere than this earth. As to the honesty of his message and the truth of his descriptions of that elsewhere, there is no knowing; one can only judge as one would judge any man; if he were one of us I should call him an honest man. That you’ll judge for yourselves, perhaps. But this is certain: in his presence, lines drawn on the earth make no boundaries, and no defense. There is a greater challenger than Karhide at the doors of Orgoreyn. The men who meet that challenge, who first open the doors of earth, will be the leaders of us all. All: the Three Continents: all the.earth. Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes in circling the Sun. To stake shifgrethor on any lesser chance is a fool’s doing, now.”
   I had Yegey, but Obsle sat sunk in his fat, watching me from his small eyes. “This will take a month’s believing,” he said. “And if it came from anyone’s mouth but yours, Estraven, I’d believe it to be pure hoax, a net for our pride woven out of starshine. But I know your stiff neck. Too stiff to stoop to an assumed disgrace in order to fool us. I can’t believe you’re speaking truth and yet I know a lie would choke you… Well, well. Will he speak to us, as it seems he spoke to you?”
   “That’s what he seeks: to speak, to be heard. There or here. Tibe will silence him if he tries to be heard again in Karhide. I am afraid for him, he seems not to understand his danger.”
   “Will you tell us what you know?”
   “I will; but is there a reason why he can’t come here and tell you himself?”
   Yegey said, biting his fingernail delicately, “I think not. He has requested permission to enter the Commensality. Karhide makes no objection. His request is under consideration

7. The Question of Sex

   From field notes of Ong Tot Oppong, Investigator, of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen/ Winter, Cycle 93 E.Y. 1448.


   Day 81. It seems likely that they were an experiment. The thought is unpleasant. But now that there is evidence to indicate that the Terran Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on a world with its own proto-hominid autochthones, the possibility cannot be ignored. Human genetic manipulation was certainly practiced by the Colonizers; nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids of Rokanan; will anything else explain Gethenian sexual physiology? Accident, possibly; natural selection, hardly. Their ambisexuality has little or no adaptive value.
   Why pick so harsh a world for an experiment? No answer. Tinibossol thinks the Colony was introduced during a major Interglacial. Conditions may have been fairly mild for their first 40 or 50,000 years here. By the time the ice was advancing again, the Hainish Withdrawal was complete and the Colonists were on their own, an experiment abandoned.
   I theorize about the origins of Gethenian sexual physiology. What do I actually know about it? Otie Nim’s communication from the Orgoreyn region has cleared up some of my earlier misconceptions. Let me set down all I know, and after that my theories; first things first.
   The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days (they tend to speak of it as 26 days, approximating it to the lunar cycle). For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pituitary control and on the 22nd or 23rd day the individual enters kemmer, estrus. In this first phase of kemmer (Karh. secher) he remains completely androgynous. Gender, and potency, are not attained in isolation. A Gethenian in first-phase kemmer, if kept alone or with others not in kemmer, remains incapable of coitus. Yet the sexual impulse is tremendously strong in this phase, controlling the entire personality, subjecting all other drives to its imperative. When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated (most importantly by touch-secretion? scent?) until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role (? without exception? If there are exceptions, resulting in kemmer-partners of the same sex, they are so rare as to be ignored). This second phase of kemmer (Karh. thorharmen), the mutual process of establishing sexuality and potency, apparently occurs within a time-span of two to twenty hours. If one of the partners is already in full kemmer, the phase for the newer partner is liable to be quite short; if the two are entering kemmer together, it is likely to take longer. Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or the female, and have no choice in the matter. (Otie Nim wrote that in the Orgoreyn region the use of hormone derivatives to establish a preferred sexuality is quite common; I haven’t seen this done in rural Karhide.) Once the sex is determined it cannot change during the kemmer-period. The culminant phase of kemmer (Karh. thokemmer) lasts from two to five days, during which sexual drive and capacity are at maximum. It ends fairly abruptly, and if conception has not taken place, the individual returns to the somer phase within a few hours (note: Otie Nim thinks this “fourth phase” is the equivalent of the menstrual cycle) and the cycle begins anew. If the individual was in the female role and was impregnated, hormonal activity of course continues, and for the 8.4-month gestation period and the 6– to 8-month lactation period this individual remains female. The male sexual organs remain retracted (as they are in somer), the breasts enlarge somewhat, and the pelvic girdle widens. With the cessation of lactation the female re-enters somer and becomes once more a perfect androgyne. No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more.
   Social observations: very superficial as yet; I have been moving about too much to make coherent social observations.
   Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once.
   Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the “parent in the flesh” (Karh. amha).
   Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (in Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.).
   What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up.
   There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the three continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical abstention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability.
   There are aspects of ambisexuality which we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex.
   Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be—psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.
   Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.
   Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.
   Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
   The following must go into my finished Directives: When you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or the opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?
   Yet you cannot think of a Gethenian as “it.” They are not neuters. They are potentials, or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish “human pronoun” used for persons in somer, I must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman.
   The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
   Back to my theory. Contemplating the motives for such an experiment, if such it was, and trying perhaps to exculpate our Hainish ancestors from the guilt of barbarism, of treating lives as things, I have made some guesses as to what they might have been after.
   The somer-kemmer cycle strikes us as degrading, a return to the estrous cycle of the lower mammals, a subjection of human beings to the mechanical imperative of rut. It is possible that the experimenters wished to see whether human beings lacking continuous sexual potentiality would remain intelligent and capable of culture.
   On the other hand, the limitation of the sexual drive to a discontinuous time-segment, and the “equalizing” of it in androgyny, must prevent, to a large extent, both the exploitation and the frustration of the drive. There must be sexual frustration (though society provides as well as it can against it; so long as the social unit is large enough that more than one person will be in kemmer at one time, sexual fulfillment is fairly certain), but at least it cannot build up; it is over when kemmer is over. Fine; thus they are spared much waste and madness; but what is left, in somer? What is there to sublimate? What would a society of eunuchs achieve? -But of course they are not eunuchs, in somer, but rather more comparable to pre-adolescents: not castrate, but latent.
   Another guess concerning the hypothetical experiment’s object: The elimination of war. Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect? Or, like Tumass Song Angot, did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped? God knows. The fact is that Gethenians, though highly competitive (as proved by the elaborate social channels provided for competition for prestige, etc.) seem not to be very aggressive; at least they apparently have never yet had what one could call a war. They kill one another readily by ones and twos; seldom by tens or twenties; never by hundreds or thousands. Why?
   It may turn out to have nothing to do with their androgyne psychology. There are not very many of them, after all. And there is the climate. The weather of Winter is so relentless, so near the limit of tolerability even to them with all their cold-adaptations, that perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold. The marginal peoples, the races that just get by, are rarely the warriors. And in the end, the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world. Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself.
   I am a woman of peaceful Chiffewar, and no expert on the attractions of violence or the nature of war. Someone else will have to think this out. But I really don’t see how anyone could put much stock in victory or glory after he had spent a winter on Winter, and seen the face of the Ice.

8. Another Way into Orgoreyn

   I spent the summer more as an Investigator than a Mobile, going about the land of Karhide from town to town, from Domain to Domain, watching and listening—things a Mobile cannot do at first, while he is still a marvel and monstrosity, and must be forever on show and ready to perform. I would tell my hosts in those rural Hearths and villages who I was; most of them had heard a little about me over the radio and had a vague idea what I was. They were curious, some more, some less. Few were frightened of me personally, or showed the xenophobic revulsion. An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbor.
   During the month of Kus I lived on the Eastern coast in a Clan-Hearth called Gorinhering, a house-town-fort-farm built up on a hill above the eternal fogs of the Hodomin Ocean. Some five hundred people lived there. Four thousand years ago I should have found their ancestors living in the same place, in the same kind of house. Along in those four millennia the electric engine was developed, radios and power looms and power vehicles and farm machinery and all the rest began to be used, and a Machine Age got going, gradually, without any industrial revolution, without any revolution at all. Winter hasn’t achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid.
   Winter is an inimical world; its punishment for doing things wrong is sure and prompt: death from cold or death from hunger. No margin, no reprieve. A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
   I talked a lot with the old people of Gorinhering, and also with the children. It was my first chance to see much of Gethenian children, for in Erhenrang they are all in the private or public Hearths and Schools. A quarter to a third of the adult urban population is engaged full time in the nurture and education of the children. Here the clan looked after its own; nobody and everybody was responsible for them. They were a wild lot, chasing about over those fog-hidden hills and beaches. When I could round one up long enough to talk, I found them shy, proud, and immensely trustful.
   The parental instinct varies as widely on Gethen as anywhere. One can’t generalize. I never saw a Karhider hit a child. I have seen one speak very angrily to a child. Their tenderness toward their children struck me as being profound, effective, and almost wholly unpossessive. Only in that unpossessiveness does it perhaps differ from what we call the “maternal” instinct. I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic…
   Early in Hakanna we heard in Gorinhering on the static-fuzzed Palace Bulletin that King Argaven had announced his expectation of an heir. Not another kemmering-son, of which he already had seven, but an heir of the body, king-son. The king was pregnant.
   I found this funny, and so did the clansmen of Gorinhering, but for different reasons. They said he was too old to be bearing children, and they got hilarious and obscene on the subject. The old men went about cackling over it for days. They laughed at the king, but were not otherwise much interested in him. “The Domains are Karhide,” Estraven had said, and like so much Estraven had said it kept recurring to me as I learned more. The seeming nation, unified for centuries, was a stew of uncoordinated principalities, towns, villages, “pseudo-feudal tribal economic units,” a sprawl and splatter of vigorous, competent, quarrelsome individualities over which a grid of authority was insecurely and lightly laid. Nothing, I thought, could ever unite Karhide as a nation. Total diffusion of rapid communication devices, which is supposed to bring about nationalism almost inevitably, had not done so. The Ekumen could not appeal to these people as a social unit, a mobilizable entity: rather it must speak to their strong though undeveloped sense of humanity, of human unity. I got quite excited thinking about this. I was, of course, wrong; yet I had learned something about Gethenians which in the long run proved to be useful knowledge.
   Unless I was to spend all year in Old Karhide I must return to the West Fall before the passes of the Kargav closed. Even here on the coast there had been two light snowfalls in the last month of summer. Rather reluctantly I set off west again, and came to Erhenrang early in Gor, the first month of autumn. Argaven was now in seclusion in the summer-palace at Warrever, and had named Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe as Regent during his confinement. Tibe was already making the most of his term of power. Within a couple of hours of my arrival I began to see the flaw in my analysis of Karhide—it was already out of date—and also began to feel uncomfortable, perhaps unsafe, in Erhenrang.
   Argaven was not sane; the sinister incoherence of his mind darkened the mood of his capital; he fed on fear. All the good of his reign had been done by his ministers and the kyorremy. But he had not done much harm. His wrestles with his own nightmares had not damaged the kingdom. His cousin Tibe was another kind of fish, for his insanity had logic. Tibe knew when to act, and how to act. Only he did not know when to stop.
   Tibe spoke on the radio a good deal. Estraven when in power had never done so, and it was not in the Karhidish vein: their government was not a public performance, normally; it was covert and indirect. Tibe, however, orated. Hearing his voice on the air I saw again the long-toothed smile and the face masked with a net of fine wrinkles. His speeches were long and loud: praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn, vilifications of “disloyal factions,” discussions of the “integrity of the Kingdom’s borders,” lectures in history and ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation. He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige. Had Karhide lost so much prestige in the Sinoth Valley business that the subject could not be brought up? No; for he often talked about the Sinoth Valley. I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something which the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.”
   It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness… Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. It seemed to me as I listened to Tibe’s dull fierce speeches that what he sought to do by fear and by persuasion was to force his people to change a choice they had made before their history began, the choice between those opposites.
   The time was ripe, perhaps. Slow as their material and technological advance had been, little as they valued “progress” in itself, they had finally, in the last five or ten or fifteen centuries, got a little ahead of Nature. They weren’t absolutely at the mercy of their merciless climate any longer; a bad harvest would not starve a whole province, or a bad winter isolate every city. On this basis of material stability Orgoreyn had gradually built up a unified and increasingly efficient centralized state. Now Karhide was to pull herself together and do the same; and the way to make her do it was not by sparking her pride, or building up her trade, or improving her roads, farms, colleges, and so on; none of that; that’s all civilization, veneer, and Tibe dismissed it with scorn. He was after something surer, the sure, quick, and lasting way to make people into a nation: war. His ideas concerning it could not have been too precise, but they were quite sound. The only other means of mobilizing people rapidly and entirely is with a new religion; none was handy; he would make do with war.
   I sent the Regent a note in which I quoted to him the question I had put to the Foretellers of Otherhord and the answer I had got. Tibe made no response. I then went to the Orgota Embassy and requested permission to enter Orgoreyn.
   There are fewer people running the offices of the Stabiles of the Ekumen on Hain than there were running that embassy of one small country to another, and all of them were armed with yards of soundtapes and records. They were slow, they were thorough; none of the slapdash arrogance and sudden deviousness that marked Karhidish officialdom. I waited, while they filled out their forms.
   The waiting got rather uneasy. The number of Palace Guards and city police on the streets of Erhenrang seemed to multiply every day; they were armed, and they were even developing a sort of uniform. The mood of the city was bleak, although business was good, prosperity general, and the weather fair. Nobody wanted much to do with me. My “landlady” no longer showed people my room, but rather complained about being badgered by “people from the Palace,” and treated me less as an honored sideshow than as a political suspect. Tibe made a speech about a foray in the Sinoth Valley: “brave Karhidish farmers, true patriots,” had dashed across the border south of Sassinoth, had attacked an Orgota village, burned it, and killed nine villagers, and then dragging the bodies back had dumped them into the Ey River, “such a grave,” said the Regent, “as all the enemies of our nation will find!” I heard this broadcast in the eating-hall of my island. Some people looked grim as they listened, others uninterested, others satisfied, but in these various expressions there was one common element, a little tic or facial cramp that had not used to be there, a look of anxiety.
   That evening a man came to my room, my first visitor since I had returned to Erhenrang. He was slight, smooth-skinned, shy-mannered, and wore the gold chain of a Foreteller, one of the Celibates. “I’m a friend of one who befriended you,” he said, with the brusqueness of the timid, “I’ve come to ask you a favor, for his sake.”
   “You mean Faxe—?”
   “No. Estraven.”
   My helpful expression must have changed. There was a little pause, after which the stranger said, “Estraven, the traitor. You remember him, perhaps?”
   Anger had displaced timidity, and he was going to play shifgrethor with me. If I wanted to play, my move was to say something like, “I’m not sure; tell me something about him.” But I didn’t want to play, and was used to volcanic Karhidish tempers by now. I faced his anger deprecatingly and said, “Of course I do.”
   “But not with friendship.” His dark, down-slanted eyes were direct and keen.
   “Well, rather with gratitude, and disappointment. Did he send you to me?”
   “He did not.”
   I waited for him to explain himself.
   He said, “Excuse me. I presumed; I accept what presumption has earned me.”
   I stopped the stiff little fellow as he made for the door. “Please: I don’t know who you are, or what you want. I haven’t refused, I simply haven’t consented. You must allow me the right to a reasonable caution. Estraven was exiled for supporting my mission here—”
   “Do you consider yourself to be in his debt for that?”
   “Well, in a sense. However, the mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.”
   “If so,” said the stranger with fierce certainty, “it is an immoral mission.”
   That stopped me. He sounded like an Advocate of the Ekumen, and I had no answer. “I don’t think it is,” I said finally; “the shortcomings are in the messenger, not the message. But please tell me what it is you want me to do.”
   “I have certain monies, rents and debts, which I was able to collect from the wreck of my friend’s fortune. Hearing that you were about to go to Orgoreyn, I thought to ask you to take the money to him, if you find him. As you know, it would be a punishable offense to do so. It may also be useless. He may be in Mishnory, or on one of their damnable Farms, or dead. I have no way of finding out. I have no friends in Orgoreyn, and none here I dared ask this of. I thought of you as one above politics, free to come and go. I did not stop to think that you have, of course, your own politics. I apologize for my stupidity.”
   “Well, I’ll take the money for him. But if he’s dead or can’t be found, to whom shall I return it?”
   He stared at me. His face worked and changed, and he caught his breath in a sob. Most Karhiders cry easily, being no more ashamed of tears than of laughter. He said, “Thank you. My name is Foreth. I’m an Indweller at Orgny Fastness.”
   “You’re of Estraven’s clan?”
   “No. Foreth rem ir Osboth: I was his kemmering.”
   Estraven had had no kemmering when I knew him, but I could rouse no suspicion of this fellow in myself. He might be unwittingly serving someone else’s purpose, but he was genuine. And he had just taught me a lesson: that shifgrethor can be played on the level of ethics, and that the expert player will win. He had cornered me in about two moves. He had the money with him and gave it to me, a solid sum in Royal Karhidish Merchants’ notes of credit, nothing to incriminate me, and consequently nothing to prevent me from simply spending it.
   “If you find him …” He stuck.
   “A message?”
   “No. Only if I knew…”
   “If I do find him, I’ll try to send news of him to you.”
   “Thank you,” he said, and he held out both his hands to me, a gesture of friendship which in Karhide is not lightly made. “I wish success to your mission, Mr. Ai. He—Estraven—he believed you came here to do good, I know. He believed it very strongly.”
   There was nothing in the world for this man outside Estraven. He was one of those who are damned to love once. I said again, “Is there no word from you that I might take him?”
   “Tell him the children are well,” he said, then hesitated, and said quietly, “Nusuth, no matter,” and left me.
   Two days later I took the road out of Erhenrang, the northwest road this time, afoot. My permission to enter Orgoreyn had arrived much sooner than the clerks and officials of the Orgota Embassy had led me to expect or had themselves expected; when I went to get the papers they treated me with a sort of poisonous respect, resentful that protocol and regulations had, on somebody’s authority, been pushed aside for me. As Karhide had no regulations at all about leaving the country, I set straight off. Over the summer I had learned what a pleasant land Karhide was for walking in. Roads and inns are set for foot-traffic as well as for powered vehicles, and where inns are wanting one may count infallibly on the code of hospitality. Townsfolk of Co-Domains and the villagers, farmers, or lord of any Domain will give a traveler food and lodging, for three days by the code, and in practice for much longer than that; and what’s best is that you are always received without fuss, welcomed, as if they had been expecting you to come.
   I meandered across the splendid slanting land between the Sess and the Ey, taking my time, working out my keep a couple of mornings in the fields of the great Domains, where they were getting the harvest in, every hand and tool and machine at work to get the golden fields cut before the weather turned. It was all golden, all benign, that week of walking; and at night before I slept I would step out of the dark farmhouse or firelit Hearth-Hall where I was lodged and walk a way into the dry stubble to look up at the stars, flaring like far cities in the windy autumn dark.
   In fact I was reluctant to leave this land, which I had found, though so indifferent to the Envoy, so gentle to the stranger. I dreaded starting all over, trying to repeat my news in a new language to new hearers, failing again perhaps. I wandered more north than west, justifying my course by a curiosity to see the Sinoth Valley region, the locus of the rivalry between Karhide and Orgoreyn. Though the weather held clear it began to grow colder, and at last I turned west before I got to Sassinoth, remembering that there was a fence across that stretch of border, and I might not be so easily let out of Karhide there. Here the border was the Ey, a narrow river but fierce, glacier-fed like all rivers of the Great Continent. I doubled back a few miles south to find a bridge, and came on one linking two little villages, Passerer on the Karhide side and Siuwensin in Orgoreyn, staring sleepily at each other across the noisy Ey.
   The Karhidish bridge-keeper asked me only if I planned to return that night, and waved me on across. On the Orgota side an Inspector was called out to inspect my passport and papers, which he did for about an hour, a Karhidish hour at that. He kept the passport, telling me I must call for it next morning, and gave me in place of it a permiso for meals and lodging at the Commensal Transient-House of Siuwensin. I spent another hour in the office of the superintendent of the Transient-House, while the superintendent read my papers and checked on the authenticity of my permiso by telephoning the Inspector at the Commensal Border-Station from which I had just come.
   I can’t properly define that Orgota word here translated as “commensal,” “commensality.” Its root is a word meaning “to eat together.” Its usage includes all national/ governmental institutions of Orgoreyn, from the State as a whole through its thirty-three component substates or Districts to the sub-substates, townships, communal farms, mines, factories, and so on, that compose these. As an adjective it is applied to all the above; in the form “the Commensals” it usually means the thirty-three Heads of Districts, who form the governing body, executive and legislative, of the Great Commensality of Orgoreyn, but it may also mean the citizens, the people themselves. In this curious lack of distinction between the general and specific applications of the word, in the use of it for both the whole and the part, the state and the individual, in this imprecision is its precisest meaning.
   My papers and my presence were at last approved, and by Fourth Hour I got my first meal since early breakfast—supper: kadik-porridge and cold sliced bread-apple. For all its array of officials, Siuwensin was a very small, plain place, sunk deep in rural torpor. The Commensal Transient-House was shorter than its name. Its dining-room had one table, five chairs, and no fire; food was brought in from the village hot-shop. The other room was the dormitory: six beds, a lot of dust, a little mildew. I had it to myself. As everybody in Siuwensin appeared to have gone to bed directly after supper, I did the same. I fell asleep in that utter country silence that makes your ears ring. I slept an hour and woke in the grip of a nightmare about explosions, invasion, murder, and conflagration.
   It was a particularly bad dream, the kind in which you run down a strange street in the dark with a lot of people who have no faces, while houses go up in flames behind you, and children scream.
   I ended up in an open field, standing in dry stubble by a black hedge. The dull-red halfmoon and some stars showed through clouds overhead. The wind was bitter cold. Near me a big barn or granary bulked up in the dark, and in the distance beyond it I saw little volleys of sparks going up on the wind.
   I was bare-legged and barefoot, in my shirt, without breeches, hieb, or coat; but I had my pack. It held not only spare clothes but also my rubies, cash, documents, papers, and ansible, and I slept with it as a pillow when I traveled. Evidently I hung onto it even during bad dreams. I got out shoes and breeches and my furlined winter hieb, and dressed, there in the cold, dark country silence, while Siuwensin smoldered half a mile behind me. Then I struck out looking for a road, and soon found one, and on it, other people. They were refugees like me, but they knew where they were going. I followed them, having no direction of my own, except away from Siuwensin; which, I gathered as we walked, had been raided by a foray from Passerer across the bridge.
   They had struck, set fire, withdrawn; there had been no fight. But all at once lights glared down the dark at us, and scuttling to the roadside we watched a land-caravan, twenty trucks, come at top speed out of the west toward Siuwensin and pass us with a flash of light and a hiss of wheels twenty times repeated; then silence and the dark again.
   “We soon came to a communal farm-center, where we were halted and interrogated. I tried to attach myself to the group I had followed down the road, but no luck; no luck for them either, if they did not have their identification-papers with them. They, and I as a foreigner without passport, were cut out of the herd and given separate quarters for the night in a storage-barn, a vast stone semi-cellar with one door locked on us from outside, and no window. Now and then the door was unlocked and a new refugee thrust in by a farm-policeman armed with the Gethenian sonic “gun.” The door shut, it was perfectly dark: no light. One’s eyes, cheated of sight, sent starbursts and fiery blots whirling through the black. The air was cold, and heavy with the dust and odor of grain. No one had a handlight; these were people who had been routed out of their beds, like me; a couple of them were literally naked, and had been given blankets by others on the way. They had nothing. If they had had anything, it would have been their papers. Better to be naked than to lack papers, in Orgoreyn.
   They sat dispersed in that hollow, huge, dusty blindness. Sometimes two conversed a while, low-voiced. There was no fellowfeeling of being prisoners together. There was no complaint.
   I heard one whisper to my left: “I saw him in the street, outside my door. His head was blown off.”
   “They use those guns that fire pieces of metal. Foray guns.”
   “Tiena said they were’t from Passerer, but from Ovord Domain, come down by truck.”
   “But there isn’t any quarrel between Ovord and Siuwensin…”
   They did not understand; they did not complain. They did not protest being locked up in a cellar by their fellow-citizens after having been shot and burned out of their homes. They sought no reasons for what had happened to them. The whispers in the dark, random and soft, in the sinuous Orgota language that made Karhidish sound like rocks rattled in a can, ceased little by little. People slept. A baby fretted a while, away off in the dark, crying at the echo of its own cries.
   The door squealed open and it was broad day, sunlight like a knife in the eyes, bright and frightening. I stumbled out behind the rest and was mechanically following them when I heard my name. I had not recognized it; for one thing the Orgota could say L. Someone had been calling it at intervals ever since the door was unlocked.
   “Please come this way, Mr. Ai,” said a hurried person in red, and I was no longer a refugee. I was set apart from those nameless ones with whom I had fled down a dark road and whose lack of identity I had shared all night in a dark room. I was named, known, recognized; I existed. It was an intense relief. I followed my leader gladly.
   The office of the Local Commensal Farm Centrality was hectic and upset, but they made time to look after me, and apologized to me for the discomforts of the night past. “If only you had not chosen to enter the Commensality at Siuwensin!” lamented one fat Inspector, “if only you had taken the customary roads!” They did not know who I was or why I was to be given particular treatment; their ignorance was evident, but made no difference. Genly Ai, the Envoy, was to be treated as a distinguished person. He was. By mid-afternoon I was on my way to Mishnory in a car put at my disposal by the Commensal Farm Centrality of East Homsvashom, District Eight. I had a new passport, and a free pass to all Transient-Houses on my road, and a telegraphed invitation to the Mishnory residence of the First Commensal District Commissioner of Entry-Roads and Ports, Mr. Uth Shusgis.
   The radio of the little car came on with the engine and ran while the car did; so all afternoon as I drove through the great level grainlands of East Orgoreyn, fenceless (for there are no herd-beasts) and full of streams, I listened to the radio. It told me about the weather, the crops, road-conditions; it cautioned me to drive carefully; it gave me various kinds of news from all thirty-three Districts, the output of various factories, the shipping-information from various sea and river ports; it singsonged some Yomesh chants, and then told me about the weather again. It was all very mild, after the ranting I had heard on the radio in Erhenrang. No mention was made of the raid on Siuwensin; the Orgota government evidently meant to prevent, not rouse, excitement. A brief official bulletin repeated every so often said simply that order was being and would be maintained along the Eastern Border. I liked that; it was reassuring and unprovocative, and had the quiet toughness that I had always admired in Gethenians: Order will be maintained… I was glad, now, to be out of Karhide, an incoherent land driven towards violence by a paranoid, pregnant king and an egomaniac Regent. I was glad to be driving sedately at twenty-five miles an hour through vast, straight-furrowed grain-lands, under an even gray sky, towards a capital whose government believed in Order.
   The road was posted frequently (unlike the signless Karhidish roads on which you had to ask or guess your way) with directions to prepare to stop at the Inspection-Station of such-and-such Commensal Area or Region; at these internal customs-houses one’s identification must be shown and one’s passage recorded. My papers were valid to all examination, and I was politely waved on after minimal delay, and politely advised how far it was to the next Transient-House if I wanted to eat or sleep. At 25 mph it is a considerable journey from the North Fall to Mishnory, and I spent two nights on the way. Food at the Transient-Houses was dull but plentiful, lodging decent, lacking only privacy. Even that was supplied in some measure by the reticence of my fellow travelers. I did not strike up an acquaintance or have a real conversation at any of these halts, though I tried several times. The Orgota seemed not an unfriendly people, but incurious; they were colorless, steady, subdued. I liked them. I had had two years of color, choler, and passion in Karhide. A change was welcome.
   Following the east bank of the great River Kunderer I came on my third morning in Orgoreyn to Mishnory, the largest city on that world.
   In the weak sunlight between autumn showers it was a queer-looking city, all blank stone walls with a few narrow windows set too high, wide streets that dwarfed the crowds, street-lamps perched on ridiculous tall posts, roofs pitched steep as praying hands, shed-roofs sticking out of housewalls eighteen feet above ground like big aimless bookshelves—an ill-proportioned, grotesque city, in the sunlight. It was not built for sunlight. It was built for winter. In winter, with those streets filled ten feet up with packed, hard-rolled snow, the steep roofs icicle-fringed, sleds parked under the shed-roofs, narrow window-slits shining yellow through driving sleet, you would see the fitness of that city, its economy, its beauty.
   Mishnory was cleaner, larger, lighter than Erhenrang, more open and imposing. Great buildings of yellowish-white stone dominated it, simple stately blocks all built to a pattern, housing the offices and services of the Commensal Government and also the major temples of the Yomesh cult, which is promulgated by the Commensality. There was no clutter and contortion, no sense of always being under the shadow of something high and gloomy, as in Erhenrang; everything was simple, grandly conceived, and orderly. I felt as if I had come out of a dark age, and wished I had not wasted two years in Karhide. This, now, looked like a country ready to enter the Ekumenical Age.
   I drove about the city a while, then returned the car to the proper Regional Bureau and went on foot to the residence of the First Commensal District Commissioner of Entry-Roads and Ports. I had never made quite sure whether the invitation was a request or a polite command. Nusuth. I was in Orgoreyn to speak for the Ekumen, and might as well begin here as anywhere.
   My notions of Orgota phlegm and self-control were spoiled by Commissioner Shusgis, who advanced on me smiling and shouting, grabbed both my hands in the gesture which Karhiders reserve for moments of intense personal emotion, pumped my arms up and down as if trying to start a spark in my engine, and bellowed a greeting to the Ambassador of the Ekumen of the Known Worlds to Gethen.
   That was a surprise, for not one of the twelve or fourteen Inspectors who had studied my papers had shown any sign of recognizing my name or the terms Envoy or Ekumen—all of which had been at least vaguely familiar to all Karhiders I had met. I had decided that Karhide had never let any broadcasts concerning me be used on Orgota stations, but had tried to keep me a national secret.
   “Not Ambassador, Mr. Shusgis. Only an envoy.”
   “Future Ambassador, then. Yes, by Meshe!” Shusgis, a solid, beaming man, looked me up and down and laughed again. “You’re not what I expected, Mr. Ai! Nowhere near it. Tall as a street-lamp, they said, thin as a sledge-runner, soot-black and slant-eyed—an ice-ogre I expected, a monster! Nothing of the kind. Only you’re darker than most of us.”
   “Earth-colored,” I said.
   “And you were in Siuwensin the night of the foray? By the breasts of Meshe! what a world we live in. You might have been killed crossing the bridge over the Ey, after crossing all space to get here. Well! Well! You’re here. And a lot of people want to see you, and hear you, and make you welcome to Orgoreyn at last.”
   He installed me at once, no arguments, in an apartment of his house. A high official and wealthy man, he lived in a style that has no equivalent in Karhide, even among lords of great Domains. Shusgis’ house was a whole island, housing over a hundred employees, domestic servants, clerks, technical advisers, and so on, but no relatives, no kinfolk. The system of extended-family clans, of Hearths and Domains, though still vaguely discernible in the Commensal structure, was ‘nationalized’ several hundred years ago in Orgoreyn. No child over a year old lives with its parent or parents; all are brought up in the Commensal Hearths. There is no rank by descent. Private wills are not legal: a man dying leaves his fortune to the state. All start equal.
   But obviously they don’t go on so. Shusgis was rich, and liberal with his riches. There were luxuries in my rooms that I had not known existed on Winter—for instance, a shower. There was an electric heater as well as a well-stocked fireplace. Shusgis laughed: “They told me, keep the Envoy warm, he’s from a hot world, an oven of a world, and can’t stand our cold. Treat him as if he were pregnant, put furs on his bed and heaters in his room, heat his wash-water and keep his windows shut! Will it do? Will you be comfortable? Please tell me what else you’d like to have here.”
   Comfortable! Nobody in Karhide had ever asked me, under any circumstances, if I was comfortable.
   “Mr. Shusgis,” I said with emotion, “I feel perfectly at home.”
   He wasn’t satisfied till he had got another pesthry-fur blanket on the bed, and more logs into the fireplace. “I know how it is,” he said, “when I was pregnant I couldn’t keep warm-my feet were like ice, I sat over the fire all that winter. Long ago of course, but I remember!” —Gethenians tend to have their children young; most of them, after the age of twenty-four or so, use contraceptives, and they cease to be fertile in the female phase at about forty. Shusgis was in his fifties, therefore his “long ago of course,”! and it certainly was difficult to imagine him as a young mother. He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
   “You’re well informed as to my looks and tastes, Mr. Shusgis. I’m flattered; I thought my reputation hadn’t preceded me.”
   “No,” he said, understanding me perfectly, “they’d just as soon have kept you buried under a snowdrift, there in Erhenrang, eh? But they let you go, they let you go; and that’s when we realized, here, that you weren’t just another Karhidish lunatic but the real thing.”
   “I don’t follow you, I think.”
   “Why, Argaven and his crew were afraid of you, Mr. Ai—afraid of you and glad to see your back. Afraid if they mishandled you, or silenced you, there might be retribution. A foray from outer space, eh! So they didn’t dare touch you. And they tried to hush you up. Because they’re afraid of you and of what you bring to Gethen!”
   It was exaggerated; I certainly hadn’t been censored out of the Karhidish news, at least so long as Estraven was in power. But I already had the impression that for some reason news hadn’t got around about me much in Orgoreyn, and Shusgis confirmed my suspicions.
   “Then you aren’t afraid of what I bring to Gethen?”
   “No, we’re not, sir!”
   “Sometimes I am.”
   He chose to laugh jovially at that. I did not qualify my words. I’m not a salesman, I’m not selling Progress to the Abos. We have to meet as equals, with some mutual understanding and candor, before my mission can even begin.
   “Mr. Ai, there are a lot of people waiting to meet you, bigwigs and little ones, and some of them are the ones you’ll be wanting to talk to here, the people who get things done. I asked for the honor of receiving you because I’ve got a big house and because I’m well known as a neutral sort of fellow, not a Dominator and not an Open-Trader, just a plain Commissioner who does his job and won’t lay you open to any talk about whose house you’re staying in.” He laughed. “But that means you’ll be eating out a good deal, if you don’t mind.”
   “I’m at your disposal, Mr. Shusgis.”
   “Then tonight it’ll be a little supper with Vanake Slose.”
   “Commensal from Kuwera—Third District, is it?” Of course I had done some homework before I came. He fussed over my condescension in deigning to learn anything about his country. Manners here were certainly different from manners in Karhide; there, the fuss he was making would either have degraded his own shifgrethor or insulted mine; I wasn’t sure which, but it would have done one or the other—practically everything did.
   I needed clothes fit for a dinner-party, having lost my good Erhenrang suit in the raid on Siuwensin, so that afternoon I took a Government taxi downtown and brought myself an Orgota rig. Hieb and shirt were much as in Karhide, but instead of summer breeches they wore thigh-high leggings the year round, baggy and cumbrous; the colors were loud blues or reds, and the cloth and cut and make were all a little shoddy. It was standardized work. The clothes showed me what it was that this impressive, massive city lacked: elegance. Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it. I went back to Shusgis’ house and reveled in the hot showerbath, which came at one from all sides in a kind of prickly mist. I thought of the cold tin tubs of East Karhide that I had chattered and shuddered in last summer, the ice-ringed basin in my Erhenrang room. Was that elegance? Long live comfort! I put on my gaudy red finery, and was driven with Shusgis to the supper-party in his chauffeured private car. There are more servants, more services in Orgoreyn than in Karhide. This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so. This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.
   Commensal Slose’s fiercely-lighted, high, white reception room held twenty or thirty guests, three of them Commensals and all of them evidently notables of one kind or another. This was more than a group of Orgota curious to see “the alien.” I was not a curiosity, as I had been for a whole year in Karhide; not a freak; not a puzzle. I was, it seemed, a key.
   What door was I to unlock? Some of them had a notion, these statesmen and officials who greeted me effusively, but I had none.
   I wouldn’t find out during supper. All over Winter, even in frozen barbarian Perunter, it is considered execrably vulgar to talk business while eating. As supper was served promptly I postponed my questions and attended to a gummy fish soup and to my host and fellow guests. Slose was a frail, youngish person, with unusually light, bright eyes and a muted, intense voice; he looked like an idealist, a dedicated soul. I liked his manner, but I wondered what it was he was dedicated to. On my left sat another Commensal, a fat-faced fellow named Obsle. He was gross, genial, and inquisitive. By the third sip of soup he was asking me what the devil was I really born on some other world—what was it like there—warmer than Gethen, everybody said—how warm?
   “Well, in this same latitude on Terra, it never snows.”
   “It never snows. It never snows?” He laughed with real enjoyment, as a child laughs at a good lie, encouraging further flights.
   “Our sub-arctic regions are rather like your habitable zone; we’re farther out of our last Ice Age than you, but not out, you see. Fundamentally Terra and Gethen are very much alike. All the inhabited worlds are. Men can live only within a narrow range of environments; Geth-en’s at one extreme…”
   “Then there are worlds hotter than yours?”
   “Most of them are warmer. Some are hot; Gde, for instance. It’s mostly sand and rock desert. It was warm to start with, and an exploitive civilization wrecked its natural balances fifty or sixty thousand years ago, burned up the forests for kindling, as it were. There are still people there, but it resembles—if I understand the Text —the Yomesh idea of where thieves go after death.”
   That drew a grin from Obsle, a quiet, approving grin which made me suddenly revise my estimation of the man.
   “Some subcultists hold that those Afterlife Interims are actually, physically situated on other worlds, other planets of the real universe. Have you met with that idea, Mr. Ai?”
   “No; I’ve been variously described, but nobody’s yet explained me away as a ghost.” As I spoke I chanced to look to my right, and saying “ghost” saw one. Dark, in dark clothing, still and shadowy, he sat at my elbow, the specter at the feast.
   Obsle’s attention had been taken up by his other neighbor, and most people were listening to Slose at the head of the table. I said in a low voice, “I didn’t expect to see you here, Lord Estraven.”
   “The unexpected is what makes life possible,” he said.
   “I was entrusted with a message for you.”
   He looked inquiring.
   “It takes the form of money—some of your own– Foreth rem ir Osboth sends it. I have it with me, at Mr. Shusgis’ house. I’ll see that it comes to you.”
   “It’s kind of you, Mr. Ai.
   He was quiet, subdued, reduced—a banished man living off his wits in a foreign land. He seemed disinclined to talk with me, and I was glad not to talk with him. Yet now and then during that long, heavy, talkative supper-party, though all my attention was given to those complex and powerful Orgota who meant to befriend or use me, I was sharply aware of him: of his silence: of his dark averted face. And it crossed my mind, though I dismissed the idea as baseless, that I had not come to Mishnory to eat roast blackfish with the Commensals of my own free will; nor had they brought me here. He had.

9. Estraven the Traitor

   An East Karhidish tale, as told in Gorinhering by Tobord Chorhawa and recorded by G.A. The story is well known in various versions, and a ‘habben’ play based on it is in the repertory of traveling players east of the Kargav.

 
   Long ago, before the days of King Argaven I who made Karhide one kingdom, there was blood feud between the Domain of Stok and the Domain of Estre in Kerm Land. The feud had been fought in forays and ambushes for three generations, and there was no settling it, for it was a dispute over land. Rich land is scarce in Kerm, and a Domain’s pride is in the length of its borders, and the lords of Kerm Land are proud men and umbrageous men, casting black shadows.
   It chanced that the heir of the flesh of the Lord of Estre, a young man, skiing across Icefoot Lake in the month of Irrem hunting pesthry, came onto rotten ice and fell into the lake. Though by using one ski as a lever on a firmer ice-edge he pulled himself up out of the water at last, he was in almost as bad case out of the lake as in it, for he was drenched, the air was kurem [4], and night was coming on. He saw no hope of reaching Estre eight miles away uphill, and so set off towards the village of Ebos on the north shore of the lake. As night fell the fog flowed down off the glacier and spread out all across the lake, so that he could not see his way, nor where to set his skis. Slowly he went for fear of rotten ice, yet in haste, because the cold was at his bones and before long he would not be able to move. He saw at last a light before him in the night and fog. He cast off his skis, for the lakeshore was rough going and bare of snow in places. His legs would not well hold him up any more, and he struggled as best he could to the light. He was far astray from the way to Ebos. This was a small house set by itself in a forest of the thore-trees that are all the woods of Kerm Land, and they grew close all about the house and no taller than its roof. He beat at the door with his hands and called aloud, and one opened the door and brought him into firelight.
   There was no one else there, only this one person alone. He took Estraven’s clothes off him that were like clothes of iron with the ice, and put him naked between furs, and with the warmth of his own body drove out the frost from Estraven’s feet and hands, and face, and gave him hot ale to drink. At last the young man was recovered, and looked on the one who cared for him.
   This was a stranger, young as himself. They looked at each other. Each of them was comely, strong of frame and fine of feature, straight and dark. Estraven saw that the fire of kemmer was in the face of the other.
   He said, “I am Arek of Estre.”
   The other said, “I am Therem of Stok.”
   Then Estraven laughed, for he was still weak, and said, “Did you warm me back to life in order to kill me, Stokven?”
   The other said, ‘No.’
   He put out his hand and touched Estraven’s hand, as if he were making certain that the frost was driven out. At the touch, though Estraven was a day or two from his kemmer, he felt the fire waken in himself. So for a while both held still, their hands touching.
   “They are the same,” said Stokven, and laying his palm against Estraven’s showed it was so: their hands were the same in length and form, finger by finger, matching like the two hands of one man laid palm to palm.
   “I have never seen you before,” Stokven said. “We are mortal enemies.” He rose, and built up the fire in the hearth, and returned to sit by Estraven.
   “We are mortal enemies,” said Estraven. “I would swear kemmering with you.”
   “And I with you,” said the other. Then they vowed kemmering to each other, and in Kerm Land then as now that vow of faithfulness is not to be broken, not to be replaced. That night, and the day that followed, and the night that followed, they spent in the hut in the forest by the frozen lake. On the next morning a party of men from Stok came to the hut. One of them knew young Estraven by sight. He said no word and gave no warning but drew his knife, and there in Stokven’s sight stabbed Estraven in the throat and chest, and the young man fell across the cold hearth in his blood, dead.
   “He was the heir of Estre,” the murderer said.
   Stokven said, “Put him on your sledge, and take him to Estre for burial.”
   He went back to Stok. The men set off with Estraven’s body on the sledge, but they left it far in the thore-forest for wild beasts to eat, and returned that night to Stok. Therem stood up before his parent in the flesh, Lord Harish rem ir Stokven, and said to the men, “Did you do as I bid you?” They answered, “Yes.” Therem said, “You lie, for you would never have come back alive from Estre. These men have disobeyed my command and lied to hide their disobedience: I ask their banishment.” Lord Harish granted it, and they were driven out of hearth and law.
   Soon after this Therem left his Domain, saying that he wished to indwell at Rotherer Fastness for a time, and he did not return to Stok until a year had passed.
   Now in the Domain of Estre they sought for Arek in mountain and plain, and then mourned for him: bitter the mourning through summer and autumn, for he had been the lord’s one child of the flesh. But in the end of the month Thern when winter lay heavy on the land, a man came up the mountainside on skis, and gave to the warder at Estre Gate a bundle wrapped in furs, saying, “This is Therem, the son’s son of Estre.” Then he was down the mountain on his skis like a rock skipping over water, gone before any thought to hold him.
   In the bundle of furs lay a newborn child, weeping. They brought the child in to Lord Sorve and told him the stranger’s words; and the old lord full of grief saw in the baby his lost son Arek. He ordered that the child be reared as a son of the Inner Hearth, and that he be called Therem, though that was not a name ever used by the clan of Estre.
   The child grew comely, fine and strong; he was dark of nature and silent, yet all saw in him some likeness to the lost Arek. When he was grown Lord Sorve in the willfulness of old age named him heir of Estre. Then there were swollen hearts among Sorve’s kemmering-sons, all strong men in their prime, who had waited long for lordship. They laid ambush against young Therem when he went out alone hunting pesthry in the month of Irrem. But he was armed, and not taken unawares. Two of his hearth-brothers he shot, in the fog that lay thick on Icefoot Lake in the thaw-weather, and a third he fought with, knife to knife, and killed at last, though he himself was wounded on the chest and neck with deep cuts. Then he stood above his brother’s body in the mist over the ice, and saw that night was falling. He grew sick and weak as the blood ran from his wounds, and he thought to go to Ebos village for help; but in the gathering dark he went astray, and came to the thore-forest on the east shore of the lake. There seeing an abandoned hut he entered it, and too faint to light a fire he fell down on the cold stones of the hearth, and lay so with his wounds unstanched.
   One came in out of the night, a man alone. He stopped in the doorway and was still, staring at the man who lay in his blood across the hearth. Then he entered in haste, and made a bed of furs that he took out of an old chest, and built up a fire, and cleaned Therem’s wounds and bound them. When he saw the young man look at him he said, “I am Therem of Stok.”
   “I am Therem of Estre.”
   There was silence a while between them. Then the young man smiled and said, “Did you bind up my wounds in order to kill me, Stokven?”
   “No,” said the older one.
   Estraven asked, “How does it chance that you, the Lord of Stok, are here on disputed land alone?”
   “I come here often,” Stokven replied.
   He felt the young man’s pulse and hand for fever, and for an instant laid his palm flat to Estraven’s palm; and finger by finger their two hands matched, like the two hands of one man.
   “We are mortal enemies,” said Stokven.
   Estraven answered, “We are mortal enemies. Yet I have never seen you before.”
   Stokven turned aside his face. “Once I saw you, long ago,” he said. “I wish there might be peace between our houses.”
   Estraven said, “I will vow peace with you.”
   So they made that vow, and then spoke no more, and the hurt man slept. In the morning Stokven was gone, but a party of people from Ebos village came to the hut and carried Estraven home to Estre. There none dared longer oppose the old lord’s will, the rightness of which was written plain in three men’s blood on the lake-ice; and at Sorve’s death Therem became Lord of Estre. Within the year he ended the old feud, giving up half the disputed lands to the Domain of Stok. For this, and for the murder of his hearth-brothers, he was called Estraven the Traitor. Yet his name, Therem, is still given to children of that Domain.

10. Conversations in Mishnory

   Next morning as I finished a late breakfast served to me in my suite in Shusgis’ mansion the house-phone emitted a polite bleat. When I switched it on, the caller spoke in Karhidish: “Therem Harth here. May I come up?”
   “Please do.”
   I was glad to get the confrontation over with at once. It was plain that no tolerable relationship could exist between Estraven and myself. Even though his disgrace and exile were at least nominally on my account, I could take no responsibility for them, feel no rational guilt; he had made neither his acts nor his motives clear to me in Erhenrang, and I could not trust the fellow. I wished that he was not mixed up with these Orgota who had, as it were, adopted me. His presence was a complication and an embarrassment.
   He was shown into the room by one of the many house-employees. I had him sit down in one of the large padded chairs, and offered him breakfast-ale. He refused. His manner was not constrained—he had left shyness a long way behind him if he ever had any—but it was restrained: tentative, aloof.
   “The first real snow,” he said, and seeing my glance at the heavily curtained window, “You haven’t looked out yet?”
   I did so, and saw snow whirling thick on a light wind down the street, over the whitened roofs; two or three inches had fallen in the night. It was Odarhad Gor, the 17th of the first month of autumn. “It’s early,” I said, caught by the snow-spell for a moment.
   “They predict a hard winter this year.”
   I left the curtains drawn back. The bleak even light from outside fell on his dark face. He looked older. He had known some hard times since I saw him last in the Corner Red Dwelling of the Palace in Erhenrang by his own fireside.
   “I have here what I was asked to bring you,” I said, and gave him the foilskin-wrapped packet of money, which I had set out on a table ready after his call. He took it and thanked me gravely. I had not sat down. After a moment, still holding the packet, he stood up.
   My conscience itched a little, but I did not scratch it. I wanted to discourage him from coming to me. That this involved humiliating him was unfortunate.
   He looked straight at me. He was shorter than I, of course, short-legged and compact, not as tall even as many women of my race. Yet when he looked at me he did not seem to be looking up at me. I did not meet his eyes. I examined the radio on the table with a show of abstracted interest.
   “One can’t believe everything one hears on that radio, here,” he said pleasantly. “Yet it seems to me that here in Mishnory you are going to be in some need of information, and advice.”
   “There seem to be a number of people quite ready to supply it.”
   “And there’s safety in numbers, eh? Ten are more trustworthy than one. Excuse me, I shouldn’t use Karhidish, I forgot.” He went on in Orgota, “Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one’s teeth like sugar-syrup. Mr. Ai, I have the right to thank you. You performed a service both for me and for my old friend and kemmering Ashe Foreth, and in his name and mine I claim my right. My thanks take the form of advice.” He paused; I said nothing. I had never heard him use this sort of harsh, elaborate courtesy, and had no idea what it signified. He went on, “You are, in Mishnory, what you were not, in Erhenrang. There they said you were; here they’ll say you’re not. You are the tool of a faction. I advise you to be careful how you let them use you. I advise you to find out what the enemy faction is, and who they are, and never to let them use you, for they will not use you well.”
   He stopped. I was about to demand that he be more specific, but he said, “Goodbye, Mr. Ai,” turned, and left. I stood benumbed. The man was like an electric shock—nothing to hold on to and you don’t know what hit you.
   He had certainly spoiled the mood of peaceful self-congratulation in which I had eaten breakfast. I went to the narrow window and looked out. The snow had thinned a little. It was beautiful, drifting in white clots and clusters like a fall of cherry-petals in the orchards of my home, when a spring wind blows down the green slopes of Borland, where I was born: on Earth, warm Earth, where trees bear flowers in spring. All at once I was utterly downcast and homesick. Two years I had spent on this damned planet, and the third winter had begun before autumn was underway—months and months of unrelenting cold, sleet, ice, wind, rain, snow, cold, cold inside, cold outside, cold to the bone and the marrow of the bone. And all that time on my own, alien and isolate, without a soul I could trust. Poor Genly, shall we cry? I saw Estraven come out of the house onto the street below me, a dark foreshortened figure in the even, vague gray-white of the snow. He looked about, adjusting the loose belt of his hieb—he wore no coat. He set off down the street, walking with a deft, definite grace, a quickness of being that made him seem in that minute the only thing alive in all Mishnory.
   I turned back to the warm room. Its comforts were stuffy and cloddish, the heater, the padded chairs, the bed piled with furs, the rugs, drapes, wrappings, mufflings.
   I put on my winter coat and went out for a walk, in a disagreeable mood, in a disagreeable world.
   I was to lunch that day with Commensals Obsle and Yegey and others I had met the night before, and to be introduced to some I had not met. Lunch is usually served from a buffet and eaten standing up, perhaps so that one will not feel he has spent the entire day sitting at table. For this formal affair, however, places were set at table, and the buffet was enormous, eighteen or twenty hot and cold dishes, mostly variations on sube-eggs and breadapple. At the sideboard, before the taboo on conversation applied, Obsle remarked to me while loading up his plate with batter-fried sube-eggs, “The fellow named Mersen is a spy from Erhenrang, and Gaum there is an open agent of the Sarf, you know.” He spoke conversationally, laughed as if I had made an amusing reply, and moved off to the pickled blackfish.
   I had no idea what the Sarf was.
   As people were beginning to sit down a young fellow came in and spoke to the host, Yegey, who then turned to us. “News from Karhide,” he said. “King Argaven’s child was born this morning, and died within the hour.”
   There was a pause, and a buzz, and then the handsome man called Gaum laughed and lifted up his beer-tankard. “May all the Kings of Karhide live as long!” he cried. Some drank the toast with him, most did not. “Name of Meshe, to laugh at a child’s death,” said a fat old man in purple sitting heavily down beside me, his leggings bunched around his thighs like skirts, his face heavy with disgust
   Discussion arose as to which of his kemmering-sons Argaven might name as his heir—for he was well over forty and would now surely have no child of his flesh– and how long he might leave Tibe as Regent. Some thought the regency would be ended at once, others were dubious. “What do you think, Mr. Ai?” asked the man called Mersen, whom Obsle had identified as a Karhidish agent, and thus presumably one of Tibe’s own men. “You’ve just come from Erhenrang, what are they saying there about these rumors that Argaven has in fact abdicated without announcement, handed the sledge over to his cousin?”
   “Well, I’ve heard the rumor, yes.”
   “Do you think it’s got any foundation?”
   “I have no idea,” I said, and at this point the host intervened with a mention of the weather; for people had begun to eat.
   After servants had cleared away the plates and the mountainous wreckage of roasts and pickles from the buffet, we all sat on around the long table; small cups of a fierce liquor were served, lifewater they called it, as men often do; and they asked me questions.
   Since my examination by the physicians and scientists of Erhenrang I had not been faced with a group of people who wanted me to answer their questions. Few Karhiders, even the fishermen and farmers with whom I had spent my first months, had been willing to satisfy their curiosity—which was often intense—by simply asking. They were involute, introvert, indirect; they did not like questions and answers. I though of Otherherd Fastness, of what Faxe the Weaver had said concerning answers… Even the experts had limited their questions to strictly physiological subjects, such as the glandular and circulatory functions in which I differed most notably from the Gethenian norm. They had never gone on to ask, for example, how the continuous sexuality of my race influenced its social institutions, how we handled our ‘permanent kemmer’. They listened, when I told them; the psychologists listened when I told them about mindspeech; but not one of them had brought himself to ask enough general questions to form any adequate picture of Terran or Ekumenical society—except, perhaps, Estraven.
   Here they weren’t quite so tied up by considerations of everybody’s prestige and pride, and questions evidently were not insulting either to the asker or the one questioned. However I soon saw that some of the questioners were out to catch me, to prove me a fraud. That threw me off balance a minute. I had of course met with incredulity in Karhide, but seldom with a will to incredulity. Tibe had put on an elaborate show of going-along-with-the-hoax, the day of the parade in Erhenrang, but as I now knew that was part of the game he had played to discredit Estraven, and I guessed that Tibe did in fact believe me. He had seen my ship, after all, the little lander that had brought me down onplanet; he had free access along with anyone else to the engineers’ reports on the ship and the ansible. None of these Orgota had seen the ship. I could show them the ansible, but it didn’t make a very convincing Alien Artifact, being so incomprehensible as to fit in with hoax as well as with reality. The old Law of Cultural Embargo stood against the importation of analyzable, imitable artifacts at this stage, and so I had nothing with me except the ship and ansible, my box of pictures, the indubitable peculiarity of my body, and the unprovable singularity of my mind. The pictures passed around the table, and were examined with the noncommittal expression you see on the faces of people looking at pictures of somebody else’s family. The questioning continued. What, asked Obsle, was the Ekumen—a world, a league of worlds, a place, a government?
   “Well, all of those and none. Ekumen is our Terran word; in the common tongue it’s called the Household; in Karhidish it would be the Hearth. In Orgota I’m not sure, I don’t know the language well enough yet. Not the Commensality, I think, though there are undoubtedly similarities between the Commensal Government and the Ekumen. But the Ekumen is not essentially a government at all. It is an attempt to reunify the mystical with the political, and as such is of course mostly a failure; but its failure has done more good for humanity so far than the successes of its predecessors. It is a society and it has, at least potentially, a culture. It is a form of education; in one aspect it’s a sort of very large school—very large indeed. The motives of communication and cooperation are of its essence, and therefore in another aspect it’s a league or union of worlds, possessing some degree of centralized conventional organization. It’s this aspect, the League, that I now represent. The Ekumen as a political entity functions through coordination, not by rule. It does not enforce laws; decisions are reached by council and consent, not by consensus or command. As an economic entity it is immensely active, looking after interworld communication, keeping the balance of trade among the Eighty Worlds. Eighty-four, to be precise, if Gethen enters the Ekumen…”
   “What do you mean, it doesn’t enforce its laws?” said Slose.
   “It hasn’t any. Member states follow their own laws; when they clash the Ekumen mediates, attempts to make a legal or ethical adjustment or collation or choice. Now if the Ekumen, as an experiment in the superorganic, does eventually fail, it will have to become a peace-keeping force, develop a police, and so on. But at this point there’s no need. All the central worlds are still recovering from a disastrous era a couple of centuries ago, reviving lost skills and lost ideas, learning how to talk again…” How could I explain the Age of the Enemy, and its aftereffects, to a people who had no word for war?
   “This is absolutely fascinating, Mr. Ai,” said the host, Commensal Yegey, a delicate, dapper, drawling fellow with keen eyes. “But I can’t see what they’d want with us. I mean to say, what particular good is an eighty-fourth world to them? And not, I take it, a very clever world, for we don’t have Star Ships and so on, as they all do.”
   “None of us did, until the Hainish and the Cetians arrived. And some worlds still weren’t allowed to, for centuries, until the Ekumen established the canons for what I think you here call Open Trade.” That got a laugh all around, for it was the name of Yegey’s party or faction within the Commensality. “Open trade is really what I’m here to try to set up. Trade not only in goods, of course, but in knowledge, technologies, ideas, philosophies, art, medicine, science, theory… I doubt that Gethen would ever do much physical coming-and-going to the other worlds. We are seventeen light-years here from the nearest Ekumenical World, Ollul, a planet of the star you call Asyomse; the farthest is two hundred and fifty light-years away and you cannot even see its star. With the ansible communicator, you could talk with that world as if by radio with the next town. But I doubt you’d ever meet any people from it… The kind of trade I speak of can be highly profitable, but it consists largely of simple communication rather than of transportation. My job here is, really, to find out if you’re willing to communicate with the rest of mankind.”
   “‘You,’” Slose repeated, leaning forward intensely: “Does that mean Orgoreyn? or does it mean Gethen as a whole?”
   I hesitated a moment, for it was not the question I had expected.
   “Here and now, it means Orgoreyn. But the contract cannot be exclusive. If Sith, or the Island Nations, or Karhide decide to enter the Ekumen, they may. It’s a matter of individual choice each time. Then what generally happens, on a planet as highly developed as Gethen, is that the various anthrotypes or regions or nations end up by establishing a set of representatives to function as coordinator on the planet and with the other planets—a local Stability, in our terms. A lot of time is saved by beginning this way; and money, by sharing the expense. If you decided to set up a starship of your own, for instance.”
   “By the milk of Meshe!” said fat Humery beside me. “You want us to go shooting off into the Void? Ugh!” He wheezed, like the high notes of an accordion, in disgust and amusement.
   Gaum spoke: “Where is your ship, Mr. Ai?” He put the question softly, half-smiling, as if it were extremely subtle and he wished the subtlety to be noticed. He was a most extraordinarily handsome human being, by any standards and as either sex, and I couldn’t help staring at him as I answered, and also wondered again what the Sarf was. “Why, that’s no secret; it was talked about a good bit on the Karhidish radio. The rocket that landed me on Horden Island is now in the Royal Workshop Foundry in the Artisan School; most of it, anyway; I think various experts went off with various bits of it after they’d examined it.”
   “Rocket?” inquired Humery, for I had used the Orgota word for firecracker.
   “It succinctly describes the method of propulsion of the landingboat, sir.”
   Humery wheezed some more. Gaum merely smiled, saying, “Then you have no means of returning to… well, wherever you came from?”
   “Oh, yes. I could speak to Ollul by ansible and ask them to send a NAFAL ship to pick me up. It would get here in seventeen years. Or I could radio to the starship that brought me into your solar system. It’s in orbit around your sun now. It would get here in a matter of days.”
   The sensation that caused was visible and audible, and even Gaum couldn’t hide his surprise. There was some discrepancy here. This was the one major fact I had kept concealed in Karhide, even from Estraven. If, as I had been given to understand, the Orgota knew about me only what Karhide had chosen to tell them, then this should have been only one among many surprises. But it wasn’t. It was the big one.
   “Where is this ship, sir?” Yegey demanded.
   “Orbiting the sun, somewhere between Gethen and Kuhurn.”
   “How did you get from it to here?”
   “By the firecracker,” said old Humery.
   “Precisely. We don’t land an interstellar ship on a populated planet until open communication or alliance is established. So I came in on a little rocket-boat, and landed on Horden Island.”
   “And you can get in touch with the—with the big ship by ordinary radio, Mr. Ai?” That was Obsle.
   “Yes,” I omitted mention for the present of my little relay satellite, set into orbit from the rocket; I did not want to give them the impression that their sky was full of my junk. “It would take a fairly powerful transmitter, but you have plenty of those.”
   “Then we could radio your ship?”
   “Yes, if you had the proper signal. The people aboard are in a condition we call stasis, hibernation you might say, so that they won’t lose out of their lives the years they spend waiting for me to get my business done down here. The proper signal on the proper wavelength will set machinery in motion which will bring them out of stasis; after which they’ll consult with me by radio, or by ansible using Ollul as relay-center.”
   Someone asked uneasily, “How many of them?”
   “Eleven.”
   That brought a little sound of relief, a laugh. The tension relaxed a little.
   “What if you never signaled?” Obsle asked.
   “They’ll come out of stasis automatically, about four years from now.”
   “Would they come here after you, then?”
   “Not unless they’d heard from me. They’d consult with the Stabiles on Ollul and Ham, by ansible. Most likely they’d decide to try again-send down another person as Envoy. The Second Envoy often finds things easier than the First. He has less explaining to do, and people are likelier to believe him…”
   Obsle grinned. Most of the others still looked thoughtful and guarded. Gaum gave me an airy little nod, as if applauding my quickness to reply: a conspirator’s nod. Slose was staring bright-eyed and tense at some inner vision, from which he turned abruptly to me. “Why,” he said, “Mr. Envoy, did you never speak of this other ship, during your two years in Karhide?”
   “How do we know that he didn’t?” said Gaum, smiling.
   “We know damned well that he didn’t, Mr. Gaum,” said Yegey, also smiling.
   “I didn’t,” I said. “This is why. The idea of that ship, waiting out there, can be an alarming one. I think some of you find it so. In Karhide, I never advanced to a point of confidence with those I dealt with that allowed me to take the risk of speaking of the ship. Here, you’ve had longer to think about me; you’re willing to listen to me out in the open, in public; you’re not so much ruled by fear. I took the risk because I think the time has come to take it, and that Orgoreyn is the place.”
   “You are right, Mr. Ai, you are right!” Slose said violently. “Within a month you will send for that ship, and it will be made welcome in Orgoreyn as the visible sign and seal of the new epoch. Their eyes will be opened who will not see now!”
   It went on, right on till dinner was served to us where we sat. We ate and drank and went home, I for one worn out, but pleased all in all with the way things had gone. There were warnings and obscurities, of course. Slose wanted to make a religion of me. Gaum wanted to make a sham of me. Mersen seemed to want to prove that he was not a Karhidish agent by proving that I was. But Obsle, Yegey, and some others were working on a higher level. They wanted to communicate with the Stabiles, and to bring the NAFAL ship down on Orgota ground, in order to persuade or coerce the Commensality of Orgoreyn to ally itself with the Ekumen. They believed that in doing so Orgoreyn would gain a large and lasting prestige-victory over Karhide, and that the Commensals who engineered this victory would gain according prestige and power in their government. Their Open Trade faction, a minority in the Thirty-Three, opposed the continuation of the Sinoth Valley dispute, and in general represented a conservative, unaggressive, non-nationalistic policy. They had been out of power for a long time and were calculating that their way back to power might, with some risks taken, lie on the road I pointed out. That they saw no farther than that, that my mission was a means to them and not an end, was no great harm. Once they were on the road, they might begin to get some sense of where it could take them. Meanwhile, if shortsighted, they were at least realistic.
   Obsle, speaking to persuade others, had said, “Either Karhide will fear the strength this alliance will give us– and Karhide is always afraid of new ways and new ideas, remember—and so will hang back and be left behind. Or else the Erhenrang Government will get up their courage and come and ask to join, after us, in second place. In either case the shifgrethor of Karhide will be diminished; and in either case, we drive the sledge. If we have the wits to take this advantage now, it will be a permanent advantage and a certain one!” Then turning to me, “But the Ekumen must be willing to help us, Mr. Ai. We have got to have more to show our people than you alone, one man, already known in Erhenrang.”
   “I see that, Commensal. You’d like a good, showy proof, and I’d like to offer one. But I cannot bring down the ship until its safety and your integrity are reasonably secure. I need the consent and the guarantee of your government, which I take it would mean the whole board of Commensals—publicly announced.”
   Obsle looked dour, but said, “Fair enough.”
   Driving home with Shusgis, who had contributed nothing but his jovial laugh to the afternoon’s business, I asked, “Mr. Shusgis, what is the Sarf?”
   “One of the Permanent Bureaus of the Internal Administration. Looks out after false registries, unauthorized travel, job-substitutions, forgeries, that sort of thing—trash. That’s what sarf means in gutter-Orgota, trash, it’s a nickname.”
   “Then the Inspectors are agents of the Sarf?”
   “Well, some are.”
   “And the police, I suppose they come under its authority to some extent?” I put the question cautiously and was answered in kind. “I suppose so. I’m in the External Administration, of course, and I can’t keep all the offices straight, over in Internal.”
   “They certainly are confusing; now what’s the Waters Office, for instance?” So I backed off as best I could from the subject of the Sarf. What Shusgis had not said on the subject might have meant nothing at all to a man from Hain, say, or lucky Chiffewar; but I was born on Earth. It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
   It had been entertaining and fascinating to find here on Gethen governments so similar to those in the ancient histories of Terra: a monarchy, and a genuine fullblown bureaucracy. This new development was also fascinating, but less entertaining. It was odd that in the less primitive society, the more sinister note was struck.
   So Gaum, who wanted me to be a liar, was an agent of the secret police of Orgoreyn. Did he know that Obsle knew him as such? No doubt he did. Was he then the agent provocateur? Was he nominally working with, or against, Obsle’s faction? Which of the factions within the Government of Thirty-Three controlled, or was controlled by, the Sarf? I had better get these matters straight, but it might not be easy to do so. My course, which for a while had looked so clear and hopeful, seemed likely to become as tortuous and beset with secrets as it had been in Erhenrang. Everything had gone all right, I thought, until Estraven had appeared shadowlike at my side last night.
   “What’s Lord Estraven’s position, here in Mishnory?” I asked Shusgis, who had settled back as if half asleep in the corner of the smooth-running car.
   “Estraven? Harth, he’s called here, you know. We don’t have titles in Orgoreyn, dropped all that with the New Epoch. Well, he’s a dependent of Commensal Yegey’s, I understand.”
   “He lives there?”
   “I believe so.”
   I was about to say that it was odd that he had been at Slose’s last night and not at Yegey’s today, when I saw that in the light of our brief morning interview it wasn’t very odd. Yet even the idea that he was intentionally keeping away made me uncomfortable.
   “They found him,” said Shusgis, resettling his broad hips on the cushioned seat, “over in the Southside in a glue factory or a fish cannery or some such place, and gave him a hand out of the gutter. Some of the Open Trade crowd, I mean. Of course he was useful to them when he was in the kyorremy and Prime Minister, so they stand by him now. Mainly they do it to annoy Mersen, I think. Ha, ha! Mersen’s a spy for Tibe, and of course he thinks nobody knows it but everybody does, and he can’t stand the sight of Harth—thinks he’s either a traitor or a double agent and doesn’t know which, and can’t risk shifgrethor in finding out. Ha, ha!”
   “Which do you think Harth is, Mr. Shusgis?”
   “A traitor, Mr. Ai. Pure and simple. Sold out his country’s claims in the Sinoth Valley in order to prevent Tibe’s rise to power, but didn’t manage it cleverly enough. He’d have met with worse punishment than exile, here. By Meshe’s tits! If you play against your own side you’ll lose the whole game. That’s what these fellows with no patriotism, only self-love, can’t see. Though I don’t suppose Harth much cares where he is so long as he can keep on wriggling towards some kind of power. He hasn’t done so badly here, in five months, as you see.”
   “Not so badly.”
   “You don’t trust him either, eh?”
   “No, I don’t.”
   “I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Ai. I don’t see why Yegey and Obsle hang on to the fellow. He’s a proven traitor, out for his own profit, and trying to hang onto your sledge, Mr. Ai, until he can keep himself going. That’s how I see it. Well, I don’t know that I’d give him any free rides, if he came asking me for one!” Shusgis puffed and nodded vigorously in approval of his own opinion, and smiled at me, the smile of one virtuous man to another. The car ran softly through the wide, well-lit streets. The morning’s snow was melted except for dingy heaps along the gutters; it was raining now, a cold, small rain.
   The great buildings of central Mishnory, government offices, schools, Yomesh temples, were so blurred by rain in the liquid glare of the high streetlights that they looked as if they were melting. Their corners were vague, their facades streaked, dewed, smeared. There was something fluid, insubstantial, in the very heaviness of this city built of monoliths, this monolithic state which called the part and the whole by the same name. And Shusgis, my jovial host, a heavy man, a substantial man, he too was somehow, around the corners and edges, a little vague, a little, just a little bit unreal.
   Ever since I had set off by car through the wide golden fields of Orgoreyn four days ago, beginning my successful progress towards the inner sanctums of Mishnory, I had been missing something. But what?’I felt insulated. I had not felt the cold, lately. They kept rooms decently warm, here. I had not eaten with pleasure, lately. Orgota cooking was insipid; no harm in that. But why did the people I met, whether well or ill disposed towards me, also seem insipid? There were vivid personalities among them—Obsle, Slose, the handsome and detestable Gaum —and yet each of them lacked some quality, some dimension of being; and they failed to convince. They were not quite solid.
   It was, I thought, as if they did not cast shadows.
   This kind of rather highflown speculation is an essential part of my job. Without some capacity for it I could not have qualified as a Mobile, and I received formal training in it on Hain, where they dignify it with the title of Farfetching. What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety; and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor. I was never an outstanding farfetcher, and this night I distrusted my own intuitions, being very tired. When I was back in my apartment I took refuge in a hot shower. But even there I felt a vague unease, as if the hot water was not altogether real and reliable, and could not be counted on.

11. Soliloquies in Mishnory

   Mishnory. Streth Susmy. I am 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 Ekumen 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 Karhide, 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 Erhenrang. 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 it is—”
   “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 Karhidish 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 shifgrethor 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 uncured, 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, alarmed. 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.

12. On Time and Darkness

   From The Sayings of Tuhulme the High Priest, a book of the Yomesh Canon, composed in North Orgoreyn about 900 years ago.

 
   Meshe is 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. [5]
   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 [6] 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!

13. Down on the Farm

   Alarmed by Estraven’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 after 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 façade, 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 hemorrhaging 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; another for 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 kemmer, 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 Kundershaden, 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 unstirring, 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 served 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 Gethenian 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 lifelessness 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 druggings 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-Gethenian 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 Pulefen 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.

14. The Escape

   When Obsle 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 unintercepted, 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 where 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 town 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 Thern 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 Thern 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 Thern 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 I 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 be!”
   “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 weight of 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 life 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 thangen–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, if 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, veridicals 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 Mishnory 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; I 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 their own 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, Estraven? 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 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.”

15. To the Ice

   I woke. 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 Pulefen 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-crossing?”
   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 hard. Without luck, we will not make it.”
   “I’d rather 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 Thern 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 Estraven 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 Karhide, 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 it!”
   “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, Tormenbod Thern. 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 landname.”
   “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 Therem 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 were no 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 thore-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 my half 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 wind 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 vulcanism; 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.