Characters
Genly Ai	Ai is the protagonist and primary narrator of the novel. He acts as a stand-in for the reader, a human on an alien planet, taking in a strange new world. He is a Terran man, sent by the Ekumen to the planet Gethen to convince Gethenian governments to join his interplanetary trade network. Ai is dedicated to his cause, but he’s not closed-minded—he’s a genuinely curious and empathetic person. Apart from his early interactions with Estraven, whom he finds suspicious, Ai is generally trusting. As a man, Ai’s behavior is gendered in a way that stands out against the hermaphroditic Gethenians.
Therem Harth rem ir Estraven	Estraven begins the novel as Karhide’s prime minister, but sacrifices his appointment to help Ai with his mission. To Ai, who doesn’t understand Karhidish shifgrethor, or the intricate workings of Gethenian government, Estraven seems to be lacking in loyalty, and his motives are inscrutable. However Estraven is constantly working to serve his fellow Gethenians, as opposed to the interests of any single nation. Estraven is proud and loyal, willing to sacrifice his career and even his life for the greater good. Of everyone on Gethen, he is the most interested in learning about and understanding Ai, Ai’s mission, and the Ekumen. He understands Ai in a way Ai does not seem to understand him. He deeply desires Ai’s trust and compassion, which Ai is slow to give. He has twice vowed kemmering, once to his brother, Arek, with whom he has a son named Sorve, and once to Ashe, with whom he has two children.
King Argaven XV	The “mad king” of Karhide. He is not particularly curious or intelligent. Ai judges him to be “neither sane nor shrewd,” but concedes that Argaven is well-versed and practiced in rhetorical political speech. This makes it difficult for Ai to communicate with him and communicate the nature of his diplomatic mission, as Argaven always suspects an ulterior motive. Argaven admits to being ruled by fear, and rules his country with the same emotion. Unlike Tibe, who cares for himself more than he cares for his country, Argaven believes he is working in the best interest of his nation.
Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe	Tibe is the cousin of King Argaven, and rises through the kyorremy to become his prime minister. Tibe is patriotic in a dangerous way, in that his love for his nation is entangled with a hatred of anyone he sees as a threat to Karhide. Unlike Estraven, the former prime minister he sends into exile, Tibe is not interested in Ai or the Ekumen. Similarly, he is uninterested in diplomatically resolving the Sinoth Valley dispute, and instead seems ready to press the issue until it leads to war with Orgoreyn. His actions are motivated both by a desire for self-preservation, and a desire to preserve his nation.
Ashe Foreth	Estraven’s kemmering, with whom he has two children. They were committed to each other for seven years, although Ashe is now a Foreteller and celibate. He still cares deeply about Estraven, and is willing to “share [his] ruin” after the announcement of his exile. He follows Estraven to the Orgota border, and even though Estraven hurts his feelings in order to protect him, Ashe remains loving and faithful.
Faxe	A Weaver and Foreteller who lives at the Otherhord Fastness. Ai finds Faxe very beautiful, and sharply intelligent, and is drawn to him. Ai believes Faxe is naturally empathetic and could communicate with mindspeech if he wanted, but Faxe has no desire to learn.
Goss	A young man who lives and works at the Otherhord Fastness.
Meshe	A former Handdarata Foreteller who went on to found Yomeshta. Said to be able to see everything that ever was or would be.
Yegey	An Orgota Commensal in the Open Trade Faction. He initially acts as a friend to Ai, but sells him out when the political tides turn.
Obsle	An Orgota Commensal representing the Sekeve District. He is a member of the Open Trade Faction. He initially acts as a friend to Ai, but sells him out when the political tides turn.
Ong Tot Oppong	A female Investigator who explored Gethen forty years before Ai’s arrival. The chapter “The Question of Sex” is drawn from her field notes.
Commissioner Shusgis	An Orgota Commensal. He houses Ai and appears to support him and his mission, but eventually sells him out when the political tides turn. Ai describes Shusgis as a “hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself.”
Mersen	An Orgota Commensal and Karhidish spy.
Gaum	An Orgota Commensal and member of the Sarf. He believes Ai is a fraud whose goal is to embarrass Orgoreyn. He actively works to undermine Ai’s credibility and derail his mission. He is also said to be very beautiful.
Slose	An Orgota Commensal in the Open Trade Faction. He initially acts as a friend to Ai, but sells him out when the political tides turn.
Ithepen	An Orgota Commensal and member of the Sarf who believes in Ai’s mission. He represents the Enyen District.
Asra	A man imprisoned at the Labor Farm with Genly Ai. He is dying of some kind of kidney disease, and the two men spend many days convalescing together. He shares myths and religious tales with Ai, and Ai in turn tells him about the wider universe.
Mavriva	A friendly hunter whom Estraven meets as he travels north to rescue Ai from his Labor Farm.
Arek Harth rem ir Estraven	Estraven’s brother, who died fourteen years ago. He has a son with Estraven named Sorve.
Thessicher	A farmer and old friend of Estraven who lives outside of Sassinoth.
Lang Heo Hew	One of Genly Ai’s shipmates, who works on behalf of the Ekumen.
Tulier	One of Genly Ai’s shipmates, who works on behalf of the Ekumen.
Ke'sta	One of Genly Ai’s shipmates, who works on behalf of the Ekumen.
Esvans Harth rem ir Estraven	Estraven’s father.
Sorve	Estraven’s son. Sorve’s father is Arek.

CONTENTS

Introduction
1. A Parade in Erhenrang
2. The Place Inside the Blizzard
3. The Mad King
4. The Nineteenth Day
5. The Domestication of Hunch
6. One Way into Orgoreyn
7. The Question of Sex
8. Another Way into Orgoreyn
9. Estraven the Traitor
10. Conversations in Mishnory
11. Soliloquies in Mishnory
12. On Time and Darkness
13. Down on the Farm
14. The Escape
15. To the Ice
16. Between Drumner and Dremegole
17. An Orgota Creation Myth
18. On the Ice
19. Homecoming
20. A Fool's Errand
The Gethenian Calendar and Clock

Introduction

SCIENCE FICTION IS often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The
science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and
now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If
this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results
much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and
concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to
people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost
inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrap-
olative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome
arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the
total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it
as 'escapist, ' but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because 'it's
so depressing. '

Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not
carcinogenic.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the
name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy
the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice
of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other
science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a
young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K.
Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and
so, and see what happens...In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper
to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end;
thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the
experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger
and other physicists, is not to predict the future--indeed Schrodinger's most
famous thought-experiment goes to show that the 'future, ' on the quantum level,
cannot be predicted--but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who
usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets);
and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets,
clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's
business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand
Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't
recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none
of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what
you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, today, this moment, the
rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists
say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is
what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in
sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

“The truth against the world!”--Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in
their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they
go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons,
places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling
about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and
then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's
the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may
describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of
Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes
place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described
in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-
event phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure
invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable
region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane--
bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their
voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become
Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?
But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes
puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and
futurologists.

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come
upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did
not believe that that happens? if they did not know it happens, because, they have
felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in
their lives. But once is enough.

Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The
scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night,
sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in
the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure
thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.

But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to
consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of
them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so
far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact which is comprehensible to
the rational intellect, logically sound, and--ideally--quantifiable.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo
blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go
into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a
liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psycholo-
gically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

Oh, it's lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where
Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the
newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it's a terrible
mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn't about the future. I don't
know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by annnouncing that it's set in
the 'Ekumenical Year 1490-97, ' but surely you don't believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm
predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing
that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in
the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science
fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we
already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing
certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by
inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole
thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally,
when we're done with it, we may find--if it's a good novel--that we're a bit
different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a
little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before.
But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in
words what cannot be said in words.

Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a
semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound--a
fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a
chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly
understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the
attentive intellect).

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from
older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain
great dominants of our contemporary life--science, all the sciences, and
technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space
travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative
biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these
words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used
up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that
the truth is a matter of the imagination.

--Ursula K. Le Guin

1. A Parade in Erhenrang

From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934
2-Gethen: To the Stabile on Ollul: Report from Genly Ai, First Mobile on
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93, Ekumenical Year 1490-97.

I'LL MAKE MY REPORT as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my
homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail
or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our
seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and
goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.
But both are sensitive.

The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose
story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts
seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like
best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

It starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in
the nation Karhide was Odharhahad Tuwa or the twenty-second day of the third
month of spring in the Year One. It is always the Year One here. Only the dat-
ing of every past and future year changes each New Year's Day, as one counts
backwards or forwards from the unitary Now. So it was spring of the Year One
in Erhenrang, capital city of Karhide, and I was in peril of my life, and did
not know it.

I was in a parade. I walked just behind the gossiwors and just before the king.
It was raining.

Rainclouds over dark towers, rain falling in deep streets, a dark storm-
beaten city of stone, through which one vein of gold winds slowly. First come
merchants, potentates, and artisans of the City Erhenrang, rank after rank,
magnificently clothed, advancing through the rain as comfortably as fish through
the sea. Their faces are keen and calm. They do not march in step. This is a
parade with no soldiers, not even imitation soldiers.

Next come the lords and mayors and representatives, one person, or five, or
forty-five, or four hundred, from each Domain and Co-Domain of Karhide, a
vast ornate procession that moves to the music of metal horns and hollow blocks
of bone and wood and the dry, pure lilting of electric flutes. The various banners
of the great Domains tangle in a rain-beaten confusion of color with the yellow
pennants that bedeck the way, and the various musics of each group clash and
interweave in many rhythms echoing in the deep stone street.

Next, a troop of jugglers with polished spheres of gold which they hurl up
high in flashing flights, and catch, and hurl again, making fountain-jets of bright
jugglery. All at once, as if they had literally caught the light, the gold spheres
blaze bright as glass: the sun is breaking through.

Next, forty men in yellow, playing gossiwors. The gossiwor, played only in
the king's presence, produces a preposterous disconsolate bellow. Forty of them
played together shake one's reason, shake the towers of Erhenrang, shake down a
last spatter of rain from the windy clouds. If this is the Royal Music no wonder
the kings of Karhide are all mad.

Next, the royal party, guards and functionaries and dignitaries of the city and
the court, deputies, senators, chancellors, ambassadors, lords of the Kingdom,
none of them keeping step or rank yet walking with great dignity; and among
them is King Argaven XV, in white tunic and shirt and breeches, with leggings
of saffron leather and a peaked yellow cap. A gold finger-ring is his only
adornment and sign of office. Behind this group eight sturdy fellows bear the
royal litter, rough with yellow sapphires, in which no king has ridden for
centuries, a ceremonial relic of the Very-Long-Ago. By the litter walk eight
guards armed with "foray guns," also relics of a more barbaric past but not
empty ones, being loaded with pellets of soft iron. Death walks behind the king.
Behind death come the students of the Artisan Schools, the Colleges, the Trades,
and the King's Hearths, long lines of children and young people in white and red
and gold and green; and finally a number of soft-running, slow, dark cars end the
parade.

The royal party, myself among them, gather on a platform of new timbers
beside the unfinished Arch of the River Gate. The occasion of the parade is
the completion of that arch, which completes the new Road and River Port of
Erhenrang, a great operation of dredging and building and roadmaking which
has taken five years, and will distinguish Argaven XV's reign in the annals of
Karhide. We are all squeezed rather tight on the platform in our damp and
massive finery. The rain is gone, the sun shines on us, the splendid, radiant,
traitorous sun of Winter. I remark to the person on my left, "It's hot. It's really
hot."

The person on my left-a stocky dark Karhider with sleek and heavy hair,
wearing a heavy overtunic of green leather worked with gold, and a heavy white
shirt, and heavy breeches, and a neck-chain of heavy silver links a hand broad
this person, sweating heavily, replies, "So it is."

All about us as we stand jammed on our platform lie the faces of the people of
the city, upturned like a shoal of brown, round pebbles, mica-glittering with
thousands of watching eyes.

Now the king ascends a gangplank of raw timbers that leads from the platform
up to the top of the arch whose unjoined piers tower over crowd and wharves
and river. As he mounts the crowd stirs and speaks in a vast murmur: "Argaven!"
He makes no response. They expect none. Gossiwors blow a thunderous discord-
ant blast, cease. Silence. The sun shines on city, river, crowd, and king.
Masons below have set an electric winch going, and as the king mounts higher
the keystone of the arch goes up past him in its sling, is raised, settled, and
fitted almost soundlessly, great ton-weight block though it is, into the gap be-
tween the two piers, making them one, one thing, an arch. A mason with trowel
and bucket awaits the king, up on the scaffolding; all the other workmen descend
by rope ladders, like a swarm of fleas. The king and the mason kneel, high be-
tween the river and the sun, on their bit of planking. Taking the trowel the king
begins to mortar the long joints of the keystone. He does not dab at it and
give the trowel back to the mason, but sets to work methodically. The cement he
uses is a pinkish color different from the rest of the mortarwork, and after
five or ten minutes of watching the king-bee work I ask the person on my left,
"Are your keystones always set in a red cement?" For the same color is plain
around the keystone of each arch of the Old Bridge, that soars beautifully over
the river upstream from the arch.

Wiping sweat from his dark forehead the man--man I must say, having said he
and his--the man answers, "Very-long-ago a keystone was always set in with a
mortar of ground bones mixed with blood. Human bones, human blood. Without
the bloodbond the arch would fall, you see. We use the blood of animals, these
days."

So he often speaks, frank yet cautious, ironic, as if always aware that I see and
judge as an alien: a singular awareness in one of so isolate a race and so high a
rank. He is one of the most powerful men in the country; I am not sure of the
proper historical equivalent of his position, vizier or prime minister or councillor;
the Karhidish word for it means the King's Ear. He is lord of a Domain and lord
of the Kingdom, a mover of great events. His name is Therem Harth rem ir Est-
raven.

The king seems to be finished with his masonry work, and I rejoice; but cross-
ing under the rise of the arch on his spiderweb of planks he starts in on the
other side of the keystone, which after all has two sides. It doesn't do to be
impatient in Karhide. They are anything but a phlegmatic people, yet they are
obdurate, they are pertinacious, they finish plastering joints. The crowds on
the Sess Embankment are content to watch the king work, but I am bored, and
hot. I have never before been hot, on Winter; I never will be again; yet I fail to
appreciate the event. I am dressed for the Ice Age and not for the sunshine, in
layers and layers of clothing, woven plant-fiber, artificial fiber, fur, leather, a
massive armor against the cold, within which I now wilt like a radish leaf. For
distraction I look at the crowds and the other paraders drawn up around the
platform, their Domain and Clan banners hanging still and bright in sunlight, and
idly I ask Estraven what this banner is and that one and the other. He knows each
one I ask about, though there are hundreds, some from remote domains, hearths
and tribelets of the Pering Storm-border and Kerm Land.

"I'm from Kerm Land myself," he says when I admire his knowledge.

"Anyhow it's my business to know the Domains. They are Karhide. To govern
this land is to govern its lords. Not that it's ever been done. Do.you know the
saying, Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel?" I haven't, and suspect that
Estraven made it up; it has his stamp.

At this point another member of the kyorremy, the upper chamber or parlia-
ment which Estraven heads, pushes and squeezes a way up close to him and
begins talking to him. This is the king's cousin Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe. His
voice is very low as he speaks to Estraven, his posture faintly insolent, his
smile frequent. Estraven, sweating like ice in the sun, stays slick and cold as
ice, answering Tibe's murmurs aloud in a tone whose commonplace politeness
makes the other look rather a fool. I listen, as I watch the king grouting away, but
understand nothing except the animosity between Tibe and Estraven. It's nothing
to do with me, in any case, and I am simply interested in the behavior of these
people who rule a nation, in the old-fashioned sense, who govern the fortunes of
twenty million other people. Power has become so subtle and complex a thing in
the ways taken by the Ekumen that only a subtle mind can watch it work; here it
is still limited, still visible. In Estraven, for instance, one feels the man's power
as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say
a word that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more
reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human
grandeur. Nothing succeeds like success. I don't trust Estraven, whose motives
are forever obscure; I don't like him; yet I feel and respond to his authority as
surely as I do to the warmth of the sun.

Even as I think this the world's sun dims between clouds regathering, and soon
a flaw of rain runs sparse and hard upriver, spattering the crowds on the
Embankment, darkening the sky. As the king comes down the gangplank the light
breaks through a last time, and his white figure and the great arch stand out
a moment vivid and splendid against the storm-darkened south. The clouds close.
A cold wind comes tearing up Port-and-Palace Street, the river goes gray, the
trees on the Embankment shudder. The parade is over. Half an hour later it is
snowing.

As the king's car drove off up Port-and-Palace Street and the crowds began to
move like a rocky shingle rolled by a slow tide, Estraven turned to me again and
said, "Will you have supper with me tonight, Mr. Ai?" I accepted, with more
surprise than pleasure. Estraven had done a great deal for me in the last six or
eight months, but I did not expect or desire such a show of personal favor as an
invitation to his house. Harge rem ir Tibe was still close to us, overhearing, and
I felt that he was meant to overhear. Annoyed by this sense of effeminate intrigue
I got off the platform and lost myself in the mob, crouching and slouching some-
what to do so. I'm not much taller than the Gethenian norm, but the difference is
most noticeable in a crowd. That's him, look, there's the Envoy. Of course that
was part of my job, but it was a part that got harder not easier as time went on;
more and more often I longed for anonymity, for sameness. I craved to be like
everybody else.

A couple of blocks up Breweries Street I turned off towards my lodgings and
suddenly, there where the crowd thinned out, found Tibe walking beside me.

"A flawless event," said the king's cousin, smiling at me. His long, clean,
yellow teeth appeared and disappeared in a yellow face all webbed, though he
was not an old man, with fine, soft wrinkles.

"A good augury for the success of the new Port," I said.

"Yes indeed." More teeth.

"The ceremony of the keystone is most impressive—"

"Yes indeed. That ceremony descends to us from very-long-ago. But no doubt
Lord Estraven explained all that to you."

"Lord Estraven is most obliging." I was trying to speak insipidly, yet
everything I said to Tibe seemed to take on a double meaning.

"Oh very much indeed," said Tibe. "Indeed Lord Estraven is famous for his
kindness to foreigners." He smiled again, and every tooth seemed to have a
meaning, double, multiple, thirty-two different meanings.

"Few foreigners are so foreign as I, Lord Tibe. I am very grateful for
kindnesses."

"Yes indeed, yes indeed! And gratitude's a noble, rare emotion, much praised
by the poets. Rare above all here in Erhenrang, no doubt because it's im-
practicable. This is a hard age we live in, an ungrateful age. Things aren't
as they were in our grandparents' days, are they?"

"I scarcely know, sir, but I've heard the same lament on other worlds."

Tibe stared at me for some while as if establishing lunacy. Then he brought
out the long yellow teeth. "Ah yes! Yes indeed! I keep forgetting that you
come from another planet. But of course that's not a matter you ever forget.
Though no doubt life would be much sounder and simpler and safer for you here
in Erhenrang if you could forget it, eh? Yes indeed! Here's my car, I had it
wait here out of the way. I'd like to offer to drive you to your island, but
must forego the privilege, as I'm due at the King's House very shortly and
poor relations must be in good time, as the saying is, eh? Yes indeed!" said
the king's cousin, climbing into his little black electric car, teeth bared
across his shoulder at me, eyes veiled by a net of wrinkles.

I walked on home to my island. Its front garden was revealed now that the last
of the winter's snow had melted and the winter-doors, ten feet aboveground,
were sealed off for a few months, till the autumn and the deep snow should
return. Around at the side of the building in the mud and the ice and the quick,
soft, rank spring growth of the garden, a young couple stood talking. Their right
hands were clasped. They were in the first phase of kemmer. The large, soft
snow danced about them as they stood barefoot in the icy mud, hands clasped,
eyes all for each other. Spring on Winter.

---------------------------------------------------------------
*Karhosh, island, the usual word for the apartment-boardinghouse
buildings that house the greatest part of the urban populations of Karhide.
Islands contain 20 to 200 private rooms; meals are communal; some are run
as hotels, others as cooperative communes, others combine these types.
They are certainly an urban adaptation of the fundamental Karhidish
institution of the Hearth, though lacking, of course, the topical and
genealogical stability of the Hearth
---------------------------------------------------------------

I had dinner at my island and at Fourth Hour striking on the gongs of Remny
Tower I was at the Palace.ready for supper. Karhiders eat four solid meals a
day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, along with a lot of adventitious nibbling
and gobbling in between. There are no large meat animals on Winter, and no
mammalian products, milk, butter or cheese; the only high-protein, high-carb-
ohydrate foods are the various kinds of eggs, fish, nuts, and the Hainish
grains. A lowgrade diet for a bitter climate, and one must refuel often. I had
got used to eating, as it seemed, every few minutes. It wasn't until later
in that year that I discovered the Gethenians have perfected the technique
not only of perpetually stuffing, but also of indefinitely starving.

The snow still fell, a mild spring blizzard, much pleasanter than the relent-
less rain of the Thaw just past. I made my way to and through the Palace in
the quiet and pale darkness of snowfall, losing my way only once. The Palace
of Erhenrang is an inner city, a walled wilderness of palaces, towers, gardens,
courtyards, cloisters, roofed bridgeways, roofless tunnel-walks, small forests
and dungeon-keeps, the product of centuries of paranoia on a grand scale. Over
it all rise the grim, red, elaborate walls of the Royal House, which though in
perpetual use is inhabited by no one beside the king himself. Everyone else,
servants, staff, lords, ministers, parliamentarians, guards or whatever, sleeps
in another palace or fort or keep or barracks or house inside the walls. Estra-
ven's house, sign of the king's high favor, was the Corner Red Dwelling, built
440 years ago for Harmes, beloved kemmering of Emran III, whose beauty is still
celebrated, and who was abducted, mutilated, and rendered imbecile by hirelings
of the Inner-land Faction. Emran III died forty years after, still wreaking ven-
geance on his unhappy country: Emran the Illfated. The tragedy is so old that
its horror has leached away and only a certain air of faithlessness and melan-
choly clings to the stones and shadows of the house. The garden was small and
walled; serem-trees leaned over a rocky pool. In dim shafts of light from the
windows of the house I saw snowflakes and the threadlike white sporecases of
the trees falling softly together onto the dark water. Estraven stood waiting
for me, bareheaded and coatless in the cold, watching that small secret cease-
less descent of snow and seeds in the night. He greeted me quietly and brought
me into the house. There were no other guests.

I wondered at this, but we went to table at once, and one does not talk
business while eating; besides, my wonder was diverted to the meal, which was
superb, even the eternal breadapples transmuted by a cook whose art I heartily
praised. After supper, by the fire, we drank hot beer. On a world where a
common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has
formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.

Estraven had conversed amiably at table; now, sitting across the hearth from
me, he was quiet. Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far
from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried
to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as
a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his
nature and so essential to my own. Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I
thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and
tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft
supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible
to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the
firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of
falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him? His voice
was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man's voice, but scarcely
a woman's voice either...but what was it saying?

"I'm sorry," he was saying, "that I've had to forestall for so long this pleasure
of having you in my house; and to that extent at least I'm glad there is no longer
any question of patronage between us."

I puzzled at this a while. He had certainly been my patron in court until now.
Did he mean that the audience he had arranged for me with the king tomorrow
had raised me to an equality with himself? "I don't think I follow you," I said.
At that, he was silent, evidently also puzzled. "Well, you understand," he said
at last, "being here...you understand that I am no longer acting on your behalf
with the king, of course."

He spoke as if ashamed of me, not of himself. Clearly there was a significance
in his invitation and my acceptance of it which I had missed. But my blunder
was in manners, his in morals. All I thought at first was that I had been right all
along not to trust Estraven. He was not merely adroit and not merely powerful,
he was faithless. All these months in Erhenrang it had been he who listened to
me, who answered my questions, sent physicians and engineers to verify the
alienness of my physique and my ship, introduced me to people I needed to
know, and gradually elevated me from my first year's status as a highly imag-
inative monster to my present recognition as the mysterious Envoy, about to
be received by the king. Now, having got me up on that dangerous eminence, he
suddenly and coolly announced he was withdrawing his support.

"You've led me to rely on you--"

"It was ill done."

"Do you mean that, having arranged this audience, you haven't spoken in
favor of my mission to the king, as you--" I had the sense to stop short of
"promised."

"I can't."

I was very angry, but I met neither anger nor apology in him.

"Will you tell me why?"

After a while he said, "Yes," and then paused again. During the pause I began
to think that an inept and undefended alien should not demand reasons from the
prime minister of a kingdom, above all when he does not and perhaps never will
understand the foundations of power and the workings of government in that
kingdom. No doubt this was all a matter of shifgrethor--prestige, face, place,
the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social
authority in Karhide and all civilizations of Gethen. And if it was I would not
understand it.

"Did you hear what the king said to me at the ceremony today?"

"No."

Estraven leaned forward across the hearth, lifted the beer-jug out of the hot
ashes, and refilled my tankard. He said nothing more, so I amplified, "The king
didn't speak to you in my hearing."

"Nor in mine," said he.

I saw at last that I was missing another signal. Damning his effeminate dev-
iousness, I said, "Are you trying to tell me, Lord Estraven, that you're out of
favor with the king?"

I think he was angry then, but he said nothing that showed it, only, "I'm not
trying to tell you anything, Mr. Ai."

"By God, I wish you would!"

He looked at me curiously. "Well, then, put it this way. There are some persons
in court who are, in your phrase, in favor with the king, but who do not favor
your presence or your mission here."

And so you're hurrying to join them, selling me out to save your skin, I thought,
but there was no point in saying it. Estraven was a courtier, a politician, and I
a fool to have trusted him. Even in a bisexual society the politician is very
often something less than an integral man. His inviting me to dinner showed that
he thought I would accept his betrayal as easily as he committed it. Clearly face
saving was more important than honesty. So I brought myself to say, "I'm sorry
that your kindness to me has made trouble for you." Coals of fire. I enjoyed a
flitting sense of moral superiority, but not for long; he was too incalculable.

He sat back so that the firelight lay ruddy on his knees and his fine, strong,
small hands and on the silver tankard he held, but left his face in shadow: a
dark face always shadowed by the thick lowgrowing hair, and heavy brows and
lashes, and by a somber blandness of expression. Can one read a cat's face, a
seal's, an otter's? Some Gethenians, I thought, are like such animals, with deep
bright eyes that do not change expression when you speak.

"I've made trouble for myself," he answered, "by an act that had nothing to do
with you, Mr. Ai. You know that Karhide and Orgoreyn have a dispute concerning
a stretch of our border in the high North Fall near Sassinoth. Argaven's grand-
father claimed the Sinoth Valley for Karhide, and the Commensals have never
recognized the claim. A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker. I've
been helping some Karhidish farmers who live in the Valley to move back east
across the old border, thinking the argument might settle itself if the Valley
were simply left to the Orgota, who have lived there for several thousand years.
I was in the Administration of the North Fall some years ago, and got to know
some of those farmers. I dislike the thought of their being killed in forays, or
sent to Voluntary Farms in Orgoreyn. Why not obviate the subject of dispute?...
But that's not a patriotic idea. In fact it's a cowardly one, and impugns the
shifgrethor of the king himself."

His ironies, and these ins and outs of a border-dispute with Orgoreyn, were of
no interest to me. I returned to the matter that lay between us. Trust him or not,
I might still get some use out of him. "I'm sorry," I said, "but it seems a pity
that this question of a few farmers may be allowed to spoil the chances of my
mission with the king. There's more at stake than a few miles of national
boundary."

"Yes. Much more. But perhaps the Ekumen, which is a hundred light-years
from border to border, will be patient with us a while."

"The Stabiles of the Ekumen are very patient men, sir. They'll wait a hundred
years or five hundred for Karhide and the rest of Gethen to deliberate and
consider whether or not to join the rest of mankind. I speak merely out of
personal hope. And personal disappointment. I own that I thought that with your
support--"

"I too. Well, the Glaciers didn't freeze overnight..." Cliché came ready to his
lips, but his mind was elsewhere. He brooded. I imagined him moving me around
with the other pawns in his power-game. "You came to my country," he said at
last, "at a strange time. Things are changing; we are taking a new turning.
No, not so much that, as following too far on the way we've been going. I
thought that your presence, your mission, might prevent our going wrong, give
us a new option entirely.

"But at the right moment–in the right place. It is all exceedingly chancy, Mr.
Ai."

Impatient with his generalities, I said, "You imply that this isn't the right
moment. Would you advise me to cancel my audience?"

My gaffe was even worse in Karhidish, but Estraven did not smile, or wince.
"I'm afraid only the king has that privilege," he said mildly.

"Oh God, yes. I didn't mean that." I put my head in my hands a moment.

Brought up in the wide-open, free-wheeling society of Earth, I would never
master the protocol, or the impassivity, so valued by Karhiders. I knew what a
king was, Earth's own history is full of them, but I had no experiential feel for
privilege--no tact. I picked up my tankard and drank a hot and violent draft.
"Well, I'll say less to the king than I intended to say, when I could count on
you."

"Good."

"Why good?" I demanded.

"Well, Mr. Ai, you're not insane. I'm not insane. But then neither of us is a
king, you see...I suppose that you intended to tell Argaven, rationally, that
your mission here is to attempt to bring about an alliance between Gethen and
the Ekumen. And, rationally, he knows that already; because, as you know, I told
him. I urged your case with him, tried to interest him in you. It was ill done, ill
timed. I forgot, being too interested myself, that he's a king, and does not see
things rationally, but as a king. All I've told him means to him simply that his
power is threatened, his kingdom is a dustmote in space, his kingship is a joke to
men who rule a hundred worlds."

"But the Ekumen doesn't rule, it coordinates. Its power is precisely the power
of its member states and worlds. In alliance with the Ekumen, Karhide will
become infinitely less threatened and more important than it's ever been."

Estraven did not answer for a while. He sat gazing at the fire, whose flames
winked, reflected, from his tankard and from the broad bright silver chain of
office over his shoulders. The old house was silent around us. There had been a
servant to attend our meal, but Karhiders, having no institutions of slavery or
personal bondage, hire services not people, and the servants had all gone off to
their own homes by now. Such a man as Estraven must have guards about him
somewhere, for assassination is a lively institution in Karhide, but I had seen no
guard, heard none. We were alone.

I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange
snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.

Everything I had said, tonight and ever since I came to Winter, suddenly
appeared to me as both stupid and incredible. How could I expect this man or
any other to believe my tales about other worlds, other races, a vague benevo-
lent government somewhere off in outer space? It was all nonsense. I had appear-
ed in Karhide in a queer kind of ship, and I differed physically from Gethenians
in some respects; that wanted explaining. But my own explanations were prepos-
terous. I did not, in that moment, believe them myself...

"I believe you," said the stranger, the alien alone with me, and so strong had
my access of self-alienation been that I looked up at him bewildered. "I'm afraid
that Argaven also believes you. But he does not trust you. In part because he no
longer trusts me. I have made mistakes, been careless. I cannot ask for your trust
any longer, either, having put you in jeopardy. I forgot what a king is, forgot
that the king in his own eyes is Karhide, forgot what patriotism is and that he
is, of necessity, the perfect patriot. Let me ask you this, Mr. Ai: do you know,
by your own experience, what patriotism is?"

"No," I said, shaken by the force of that intense personality suddenly turning
itself wholly upon me. "I don't think I do. If by patriotism you don't mean the
love of one's homeland, for that I do know."

"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the o-
ther. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It
grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We've followed our road too
far. And you, who come from a world that outgrew nations centuries ago, who
hardly know what I'm talking about, who show us the new road--" He broke off.
After a while he went on, in control again, cool and polite: "It's because of fear
that I refuse to urge your cause with the king, now. But not fear for myself, Mr.
Ai. I'm not acting patriotically. There are, after all, other nations on Gethen."

I had no idea what he was driving at, but was sure that he did not mean what
he seemed to mean. Of all the dark, obstructive, enigmatic souls I had met in this
bleak city, his was the darkest. I would not play his labyrinthine game. I made no
reply. After a while he went on, rather cautiously, "If I've understood you, your
Ekumen is devoted essentially to the general interest of mankind. Now, for
instance, the Orgota have experience in subordinating local interests to a general
interest, while Karhide has almost none. And the Commensals of Orgoreyn are
mostly sane men, if unintelligent, while the king of Karhide is not only insane
but rather stupid."

It was clear that Estraven had no loyalties at all. I said in faint disgust, "It must
be difficult to serve him, if that's the case."

"I'm not sure I've ever served the king," said the king's prime minister. "Or
ever intended to. I'm not anyone's servant. A man must cast his own shadow..."

The gongs in Remny Tower were striking Sixth Hour, midnight, and I took
them as my excuse to go. As I was putting on my coat in the hallway he said,
"I've lost my chance for the present, for I suppose you'll be leaving Ehrenrang--"
why did he suppose so?-- "but I trust a day will come when I can ask you
questions again. There's so much I want to know. About your mindspeech, in
particular; you'd scarcely begun to try to explain it to me."

His curiosity seemed perfectly genuine. He had the effrontery of the powerful.
His promises to help me had seemed genuine, too. I said yes, of course,
whenever he liked, and that was the evening's end. He showed me out through
the garden, where snow lay thin in the light of Gethen's big, dull, rufous moon.
I shivered as we went out, for it was well below freezing, and he said with po-
lite surprise, "You're cold?" To him of course it was a mild spring night.

I was tired and downcast. I said, "I've been cold ever since I came to this
world."

"What do you call it, this world, in your language?"

"Gethen."

"You gave it no name of your own?"

"Yes, the First Investigators did. They called it Winter."

We had stopped in the gateway of the walled garden. Outside, the Palace
grounds and roofs loomed in a dark snowy jumble lit here and there at various
heights by the faint gold slits of windows. Standing under the narrow arch I
glanced up, wondering if that keystone too was mortared with bone and blood.
Estraven took leave of me and turned away; he was never fulsome in his greet-
ings and farewells. I went off through the silent courts and alleys of the
Palace, my boots crunching on the thin moonlit snow, and homeward through
the deep streets of the city. I was cold, unconfident, obsessed by perfidy,
and solitude, and fear.

2. The Place Inside the Blizzard

From a soundtape collection of North Karhidish "hearth-tales" in the
archives of the College of Historians in Erhenrang, narrator unknown,
recorded during the reign of Argaven VIII.

ABOUT TWO HUNDRED years ago in the Hearth of Shath in
the Pering Storm-border there were two brothers who vowed
kemmering to each other. In those days, as now, full brothers
were permitted to keep kemmer until one of them should bear a
child, but after that they must separate; so it was never permit-
ted them to vow kemmering for life. Yet this they had done. When
a child was conceived the Lord of Shath commanded them to
break their vow and never meet in kemmer again. On hearing
this command one of the two, the one who bore the child,
despaired and would hear no comfort or counsel, and procuring
poison, committed suicide. Then the people of the Hearth rose
up against the other brother and drove him out of Hearth and
Domain, laying the shame of the suicide upon him. And since
his own lord had exiled him and his story went before him, none
would take him in, but after the three days' guesting all sent
him from their doors as an outlaw. So from place to place he
went until he saw that there was no kindness left for him in
his own land, and his crime would not be forgiven.* He had
not believed this would be so, being a young man and unhardened.
When he saw that it was so indeed, he returned over the land
to Shath and as an exile stood in the doorway of the Outer
Hearth. This he said to his hearthfellows there: "I am without
a face among men. I am not seen. I speak and am not heard.
I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for
me, nor food on the table for me, nor a bed made for me to lie
in. Yet I still have my name: Getheren is my name. That name I
lay on this Hearth as a curse, and with it my shame. Keep that
for me. Now nameless I will go seek my death." Then some of
the hearthmen jumped up with, shouts and tumult, intending to
kill him, for murder is a lighter shadow on a house than suicide.
He escaped them and ran northward over the land towards the
Ice, outrunning all who pursued him. They came back all chap-
fallen to Shath. But Getheren went on, and after two days'
journey came to the Pering Ice.**

(*His transgression of the code controlling incest became a
crime when seen as the cause of his brother's suicide.
(G.A.))

(**The Pering Ice is the glacial sheet that covers the
northernmost portion of Karhide, and is (in winter when the
Guthen Bay is frozen) contiguous with the Gobrin Ice of
Orgoreyn.)

For two days he walked northward on the Ice. He had no food
with him, nor shelter but his coat. On the Ice nothing grows
and no beasts run. It was the month of Susmy and the first
great snows were falling those days and nights. He went alone
through the storm. On the second day he knew he was growing
weaker. On the second night he must lie down and sleep a while.

On the third morning waking he saw that his hands were frost-
bitten, and found that his feet were too, though he could not
unfasten his boots to look at them, having no use left of his
hands. He began to crawl forward on knees and elbows. He had
no reason to do so, as it did not matter whether he died in one
place on the Ice or another, but he felt that he should go
northward.

After a long while the snow ceased to fall around him, and the
wind to blow. The sun shone out. He could not see far ahead as
he crawled, for the fur of his hood came forward over his eyes.
No longer feeling any cold in his legs and arms nor on his face,
he thought that the frost had benumbed him. Yet he could still
move. The snow that lay over the glacier looked strange to him,
as if it were a white grass growing up out of the ice. It bent to
his touch and straightened again, like grass-blades. He ceased to
crawl and sat up, pushing back his hood so he could see around
him. As far as he could see lay fields of the snowgrass, white
and shining. There were groves of white trees, with white leaves
growing on them. The sun shone, and it was windless, and
everything was white.

Getheren took off his gloves and looked at his hands. They
were white as the snow. Yet the frostbite was gone out of them,
and he could use his fingers, and stand upon his feet. He felt no
pain, and no cold, and no hunger.

He saw away over the ice to the north a white tower like the
tower of a Domain, and from this place far away one came
walking towards him. After a while Getheren could see that the
person was naked, his skin was all white, and his hair was all
white. He came nearer, and near enough to speak. Getheren said,

"Who are you?"

The white man said, "I am your brother and kemmering,
Hode."

Hode was the name of his brother who had killed himself.
And Getheren saw that the white man was his brother in body
and feature. But there was no longer any life in his belly,
and his voice sounded thin like the creaking of ice.

Getheren asked, "What place is this?"

Hode answered, "This is the place inside the blizzard. We
who kill ourselves dwell here. Here you and I shall keep our
vow."

Getheren was frightened, and he said, "I will not stay here.
If you had come away with me from our Hearth into the southern
lands we might have stayed together and kept our vow lifelong,
no man knowing our transgression. But you broke your vow,
throwing it away with your life. And now you cannot say my
name."

This was true. Hode moved his white lips, but could not say
his brother's name.

He came quickly to Getheren reaching out his arms to hold
him, and seized him by the left hand. Getheren broke free and
ran from him. He ran to the southward, and running saw rise up
before him a white wall of falling snow, and when he entered
into it he fell again on his knees, and could not run, but crawled.

On the ninth day after he had gone up on the Ice he was found
in their Domain by people of Orhoch Hearth, which lies north-
east of Shath. They did not know who he was nor where he
came from, for they found him crawling in the snow, starving,
snowblind, his face blackened by sun and frost, and at first he
could not speak. Yet he took no lasting harm except in his left
hand, which was frozen and must be amputated. Some of the
people there said this was Getheren of Shath, of whom they had
heard talk; others said it could not be, for that Getheren had
gone up on the Ice in the first blizzard of autumn, and was
certainly dead. He himself denied that his name was Getheren.
When he was well he left Orhoch and the Storm-border and
went into the southern lands, calling himself Ennoch.
When Ennoch was an old man dwelling in the plains of Rer
he met a man from his own country, and asked him, "How fares
Shath Domain?" The other told him that Shath fared ill. Nothing
prospered there in hearth or tilth, all being blighted with illness,
the spring seed frozen in the ground or the ripe grain rotten, and
so it had been for many years. Then Ennoch told him, "I am
Getheren of Shath," and told him how he had gone up on the Ice
and what he had met with there. At the end of his tale he said,
"Tell them at Shath that I take back my name and my shadow."
Not many days after this Getheren took sick and died. The
traveler carried his words back to Shath, and they say that from
that time on the domain prospered again, and all went as it
should go in field and house and hearth.

3. The Mad King

I SLEPT LATE and spent the tail of the morning reading over my own notes on
Palace etiquette and the observations on Gethenian psychology and manners
made by my predecessors, the Investigators. I didn't take in what I read, which
didn't matter since I knew it by heart and was reading merely to shut up the
interior voice that kept telling me It has all gone wrong. When it would not be
shut up I argued with it, asserting that I could get on without Estraven--perhaps
better than with him. After all, my job here was a one-man job. There is only one
First Mobile. The first news from the Ekumen on any world is spoken by one
voice, one man present in the flesh, present and alone. He may be killed, as
Pellelge was on Four-Taurus, or locked up with madmen, as were the first three
Mobiles on Gao, one after the other; yet the practice is kept, because it works.
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time;
plenty of time; but time is the thing that the Ekumen has plenty of...You don't
said the interior voice, but I reasoned it into silence, and arrived at the Palace
for my audience with the king at Second Hour full of calm and resolution. It was
all knocked right out of me in the anteroom, before I ever saw the king.

Palace guards and attendants had showed me to the anteroom, through the long
halls and corridors of the King's House. An aide asked me to wait and left me
alone in the high windowless room. There I stood, all decked out for a vist
with royalty. I had sold my fourth ruby (the Investigators having reported that
Gethenians value the carbon jewels much as Terrans do, I came to Winter with a
pocketful of gems to pay my way), and spent a third of the proceeds on clothes
for the parade yesterday and the audience today: everything new, very heavy and
well-made as clothing is in Karhide, a white knitfur shirt, gray breeches, the long
tabard-like overtunic, hieb, of bluegreen leather, new cap, new gloves tucked at
the proper angle under the loose belt of the hieb, new boots...The assurance of
being well dressed augmented my feeling of calm and resolution. I looked
calmly and resolutely about me.

Like all the King's House this room was high, red, old, bare, with a musty chill
on the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries.
A fire roared in the fireplace, but did no good. Fires in Karhide are to warm
the spirit not the flesh. The mechanical-industrial Age of Invention in Karhide
is at least three thousand years old, and during those thirty centuries they have
developed excellent and economical central-heating devices using steam, electri-
city, and other principles; but they do not install them in their houses. Perhaps
if they did they would lose their physiological weatherproofing, like Arctic birds
kept in warm tents, who being released get frostbitten feet. I, however, a trop-
ical bird, was cold; cold one way outdoors and cold another way indoors, cease-
lessly and more or less thoroughly cold. I walked up and down to warm myself.
There was little besides myself and the fire in the long anteroom: a stool and
a table on which stood a bowl of fingerstones and an ancient radio of carved wood
inlaid with silver and bone, a noble piece of workmanship. It was playing at a
whisper, and I turned it a touch louder, hearing the Palace Bulletin replace the
droning Chant or Lay that was being broadcast. Karhiders do not read much as a
rule, and prefer their news and literature heard not seen; books and televising
devices are less common than radios, and newspapers don't exist. I had missed
the morning Bulletin on my set at home, and half-listened now, my mind elsewhere,
until the repetition of the name several times caught my ear at last and stopped
my pacing. What was it about Estraven? A proclamation was being reread.

"Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, Lord of Estre in Kerm, by this order forfeits
title of the Kingdom and seat in the Assemblies of the Kingdom, and is com-
manded to quit the Kingdom and all Domains of Karhide. If he be not gone out
of the Kingdom and all Domains in three days' time, or if in his life he re-
turn into the Kingdom, he shall be put to death by any man without further
judgment. No countryman of Karhide shall suffer Harth rem ir Estraven to speak
to him or stay within his house or on his lands, on pain of imprisonment,
nor shall any countryman of Karhide give or lend Harth rem ir Estraven money
or goods, nor repay any debt owing him, on pain of imprisonment and fine. Let
all countrymen of Karhide know and say that the crime for which Harth rem ir
Estraven is exiled is the crime of Treason: he having urged privily and openly
in Assembly and Palace, under pretense of loyal service to the King, that the
Nation-Dominion of Karhide cast away its sovereignty and surrender up its pow-
er in order to become an inferor and subject nation in a certain Union of
Peoples, concerning which let all men know and say that no such Union does
exist, being a device and baseless fiction of certain conspiring traitors who
seek to weaken the Authority of Karhide in the King, to the profit of the real
and present enemies of the land. Odguyrny Tuwa, Eighth Hour, in the Palace in
Erhenrang:

ARGAVEN HARGE."

The order was printed and posted on several gates and road-posts about the
city, and the above is verbatim from one such copy.

My first impulse was simple. I cut off the radio as if to stop it from giving
evidence against me, and scuttled to the door. There of course I stopped. I went
back to the table by the fireplace, and stood. I was no longer calm or resolute.
I wanted to open my case, get out the ansible, and send an Advise/Urgent! through
to Hain. I suppressed this impulse also, as it was even sillier than the first.
Fortunately I had no time for more impulses. The double door at the far end of
the anteroom was opened and the aide stood aside for me to pass, announcing
me, "Genry Ai"--my name is Genly, but Karhiders can't say L--and left me in
the Red Hall with King Argaven XV.

An immense, high, long room, that Red Hall of the King's House. Half a mile
down to the fireplaces. Half a mile up to the raftered ceiling hung with red,
dusty drapes or banners all ragged with the years. The windows are only slits or
slots in the thick walls, the lights few, high, and dim. My new boots go eck,
eck, eck, eck as I walk down the hall towards the king, a six months' journey.
Argaven was standing in front of the central and largest fireplace of three, on
a low, large dais or platform: a short figure in the reddish gloom, rather
potbellied, very erect, dark and featureless in silhouette except for the glint
of the big seal-ring on his thumb.

I stopped at the edge of the dais and, as I had been instructed, did and said
nothing.

"Come up, Mr. Ai. Sit down."

I obeyed, taking the right-hand chair by the central hearth. In all this I had
been drilled. Argaven did not sit down; he stood ten feet from me with the
roaring bright flames behind him, and presently said, "Tell me what you have to
tell me, Mr. Ai. You bear a message, they say."

The face that turned towards me, reddened and cratered by firelight and
shadow, was as flat and cruel as the moon, Winter's dull rufous moon. Argaven
was less kingly, less manly, than he looked at a distance among his courtiers.
His voice was thin, and he held his fierce lunatic head at an angle of bizarre
arrogance.

"My lord, what I have to say is gone out of my head. I only just now learned
of Lord Estraven's disgrace."

Argaven smiled at that, a stretched, staring grin. He laughed shrilly like an
angry woman pretending to be amused. "Damn him," he said, "the proud, posturing,
perjuring traitor! You dined with him last night, eh? And he told youwhat a pow-
erful fellow he is, and how he runs the king, and how easy you'll find me to deal
with since he's been talking to me about you--eh? Is that what he told you, Mr.
Ai?"

I hesitated.

"I'll tell you what he's been saying to me about you, if you've an interest in
knowing. He's been advising me to refuse you audience, keep you hanging about
waiting, maybe pack you off to Orgoreyn or the Islands. All this halfmonth he's
been telling me, damn his insolence! It's he that got packed off to Orgoreyn, ha
ha ha--!" Again the shrill false laugh, and he clapped his hands together as he
laughed. A silent immediate guard appeared between curtains at the end of the
dais. Argaven snarled at him and he vanished. Still laughing and still snarling
Argaven came up close and stared straight at me. The dark irises of his eyes
glowed slightly orange. I was a good deal more afraid of him than I had expected
to be.

I could see no course to follow among these incoherencies but that of candor.
I said, "I can only ask you, sir, whether I'm considered to be implicated in
Estraven's crime."

"You? No." He stared even more closely at me. "I don't know what the devil
you are, Mr. Ai, a sexual freak or an artificial monster or a visitor from the
Domains of the Void, but you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of
one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman. Let
me give you some advice." Argaven said this with curious emphasis and satis-
faction, and even then it occurred to me that nobody else, in two years, had
ever given me advice. They answered questions, but they never openly gave
advice, not even Estraven at his most helpful. It must have to do with shif-
grethor. "Let no one else use you, Mr. Ai," the king was saying. "Keep clear
of factions. Tell your own lies, do your own deeds. And trust no one. D'you
know that? Trust no one. Damn that lying coldblooded traitor, I trusted him. I
put the silver chain around his damned neck. I wish I'd hanged him with it. I
never trusted him. Never. Don't trust anybody. Let him starve in the cesspits of
Mishnory hunting garbage, let his bowels rot, never--;" King Argaven shook,
choked, caught his breath with a retching sound, and turned his back on me. He
kicked at the logs of the great fire till sparks whirled up thick in his face
and fell on his hair and his black tunic, and he caught at them with open hands.

Not turning around he spoke in a shrill painful voice: "Say what you've got to
say, Mr. Ai."

"May I ask you a question, sir?"

"Yes." He swayed from foot to foot as he stood facing the fire. I had to
address his back.

"Do you believe that I am what I say I am?"

"Estraven had the physicians send me endless tapes about you, and more from
the engineers at the Workshops who have your vehicle, and so on. They can't
all be liars, and they all say you're not human. What then?"

"Then, sir, there are others like me. That is, I'm a representative..."

"Of this union, this Authority, yes, very well. What did they send you here for,
is that what you want me to ask?"

Though Argaven might be neither sane nor shrewd, he had had long practice
in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation
by those whose main aim in life was the achievement and maintenance of the
shifgrethor relationship on a high level. Whole areas of that relationship were
still blank to me, but I knew something about the competitive, prestige-seeking
aspect of it, and about the perpetual conversational duel which can result from
it. That I was not dueling with Argaven, but trying to communicate with him, was
itself an incommunicable fact.

"I've made no secret of it, sir. The Ekumen wants an alliance, with the nations
of Gethen."

"What for?"

"Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity
and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the
greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight."

I was not speaking the tongue spoken by those who rule men, the kings, con-
querors, dictators, generals; in that language there was no answer to his ques-
tion. Sullen and unheeding, Argaven stared at the fire, shifting from foot to
foot.

"How big is this kingdom out in Nowhere, this Ekumen?"

"There are eighty-three habitable planets in the Ekumenical Scope, and on
them about three thousand nations or anthrotypic groups-"

"Three thousand? I see. Now tell me why we, one against three thousand,
should have anything to do with all these nations of monsters living out in the
Void?" He turned around now to look at me, for he was still dueling, posing a
rhetorical question, almost a joke. But the joke did not go deep. He was--as
Estraven had warned me--uneasy, alarmed.

"Three thousand nations on eighty-three worlds, sir; but the nearest to Gethen
is seventeen years' journey in ships that go at near lightspeed. If you've thought
that Gethen might be involved in forays and harassments from such neighbors,
consider the distance at which they live. Forays are worth no one's trouble,
across space." I did not speak of war, for a good reason; there's no word for
it in Karhidish. "Trade, however, is worthwhile. In ideas and techniques,
communicated by ansible; in goods and artifacts, sent by manned or unmanned
ships. Ambassadors, scholars, and merchants, some of them might come here;
some of yours might go offworld. The Ekumen is not a kingdom, but a coordi-
nator, a clearinghouse for trade and knowledge; without it communication be-
tween the worlds of men would be haphazard, and trade very risky, as you can
see. Men's lives are too short to cope with the timejumps between worlds, if
there's no network and centrality, no control, no continuity to work through;
therefore they become members of the Ekumen...We are all men, you know, sir.
All of us. All the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world,
Hain. We vary, but we're all sons of the same Hearth..."

None of this caught the king's curiosity or gave him any reassurance. I went
on a bit, trying to suggest that his shifgrethor, or Karhide's, would be enhanc-
ed not threatened by the presence of the Ekumen, but it was no good. Argaven
stood there sullen as an old she-otter in a cage, swinging back and forth, from
foot to foot, back and forth, baring his teeth in a grin of pain. I stopped talk-
ing.

"Are they all as black as you?"

Gethenians are yellow-brown or red-brown, generally, but I had seen a good
many as dark as myself. "Some are blacker," I said; "we come all colors," and I
opened the case (politely examined by the guards of the Palace at four stages of
my approach to the Red Hall) that held my ansible and some pictures. The pic-
tures--films, photos, paintings, actives, and some cubes--were a little gallery
of Man: people of Hain, Chiffewar, and the Cetians, of S and Terra and Alterra,
of the Utter-mosts, Kapteyn, Ollul, Four-Taurus, Rokanan, Ensbo, Cime, Gde
and Sheashel Haven...The king glanced at a couple without interest. "What's
this?"

"A person from Cime, a female." I had to use the word that Gethenians would
apply only to a person in the culminant phase of kemmer, the alternative being
their word for a female animal.

"Permanently?"

"Yes."

He dropped the cube and stood swinging from foot to foot, staring at me or a
little past me, the firelight shifting on his face. "They're all like that--like you?"
This was the hurdle I could not lower for them. They must, in the end, learn to
take it in their stride.

"Yes. Gethenian sexual physiology, so far as we yet know, is unique among
human beings."

"So all of them, out on these other planets, are in permanent kemmer? A
society of perverts? So Lord Tibe put it; I thought he was joking. Well, it may be
the fact, but it's a disgusting idea, Mr. Ai, and I don't see why human beings here
on earth should want or tolerate any dealings with creatures so monstrously
different. But then, perhaps you're here to tell me I have no choice in the matter."

"The choice, for Karhide, is yours, sir."

"And if I send you packing, too?"

"Why, I'll go. I might try again, with another generation..."

That hit him. He snapped, "Are you immortal?"

"No, not at all, sir. But the timejumps have their uses. If I left Gethen now for
the nearest world, Ollul, I'd spend seventeen years of planetary time getting
there. Timejumping is a function of traveling nearly as fast as light. If I simply
turned around and came back, my few hours spent on the ship would, here,
amount to thirty-four years; and I could start all over." But the idea of
timejumping, which with its false hint of immortality had fascinated everyone
who listened to me, from the Horden Island fisherman on up to the Prime
Minister, left him cold. He said in his shrill harsh voice, "What's that?"--
pointing to the ansible.

"The ansible communicator, sir."

"A radio?"

"It doesn't involve radio waves, or any form of energy. The principle it works
on, the constant of simultaneity, is analogous in some ways to gravity--" I had
forgotten again that I wasn't talking to Estraven, who had read every report on
me and who listened intently and intelligently to all my explanations, but instead
to a bored king. "What it does, sir, is produce a message at any two points
simultaneously. Anywhere. One point has to be fixed, on a planet of a certain
mass, but the other end is portable. That's this end. I've set the coordinates for
the Prime World, Hain. A NAFAL ship takes 67 years to go between Gethen and
Hain, but if I write a message on that keyboard it will be received on Hain at the
same moment as I write it. Is there any communication you'd care to make with
the Stabiles on Hain, sir?"

"I don't speak Voidish," said the king with his dull, malign grin.

"They'll have an aide standing ready--I alerted them --who can handle
Karhidish."

"What d'you mean? How?"

"Well, as you know, sir, I'm not the first alien to come to Gethen. I was
preceded by a team of Investigators, who didn't announce their presence, but
passed as well as they could for Gethenians, and traveled about in Karhide and
Orgoreyn and the Archipelago for a year. They left, and reported to the Councils
of the Ekumen, over forty years ago, during your grandfather's reign. Their
report was extremely favorable. And so I studied the information they'd
gathered, and the languages they'd recorded, and came. Would you like to see
the device working, sir?"

"I don't like tricks, Mr. Ai."

"It's not a trick, sir. Some of your own scientists have examined--"

"I'm not a scientist."

"You're a sovereign, my lord. Your peers on the Prime World of the Ekumen
wait for a word from you."

He looked at me savagely. In trying to flatter and interest him I had cornered
him in a prestige-trap. It was all going wrong.

"Very well. Ask your machine there what makes a man a traitor."

I typed out slowly on the keys, which were set to Karhidish characters, "King
Argaven of Karhide asks the Stabiles on Hain what makes a man a traitor." The
letters burned across the small screen and faded. Argaven watched, his restless
shifting stilled for a minute.

There was a pause, a long pause. Somebody seventy-two light-years away was
no doubt feverishly punching demands on the language computer for Karhidish,
if not on a philosophy-storage computer. At last the bright letters burned up out
of the screen, hung a while, and faded slowly away: "To King Argaven of
Karhide on Gethen, greetings. I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No
man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out. Respectfully,
Spimolle G. F., for the Stabiles, in Saire on Hain, 93/1491/45."

When the tape was recorded I pulled it out and gave it to Argaven. He
dropped it on the table, walked again to the central fireplace, almost into it, and
kicked the flaming logs and beat down the sparks with his hands. "As useful an
answer as I might get from any Foreteller. Answers aren't enough, Mr. Ai. Nor is
your box, your machine there. Nor your vehicle, your ship. A bag of tricks and a
trickster. You want me to believe you, your tales and messages. But why need I
believe, or listen? If there are eighty thousand worlds full of monsters out there
among the stars, what of it? We want nothing from them. We've chosen our way
of life and have followed it for a long time. Karhide's on the brink of a new
epoch, a great new age. We'll go our own way." He hesitated as if he had lost the
thread of his argument--not his own argument, perhaps, in the first place.
If Estraven was no longer the King's Ear, somebody else was. "And if there
were anything these Ekumens wanted from us, they wouldn't have sent you
alone. It's a joke, a hoax. Aliens would be here by the thousand."

"But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord."

"It might to keep it open."

"The Ekumen will wait till you open it, sir. It will force nothing on you. I was
sent alone, and remain here alone, in order to make it impossible for you to fear
me."

"Fear you?" said the king, turning his shadow-scarred face, grinning, speaking
loud and high. "But I do fear you, Envoy. I fear those who sent you. I fear liars,
and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country
well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long
enough. You are what you say you are, yet you're a joke, a hoax. There's nothing
in between the stars but void and terror and darkness, and you come out of that
all alone trying to frighten me. But I am already afraid, and I am the king. Fear
is king! Now take your traps and tricks and go, there's no more needs saying. I
have ordered that you be given the freedom of Karhide."

So I departed from the royal presence-eck, eck, eck all down the long red floor
in the red gloom of the hall, until at last the double doors shut me off from him.
I had failed. Failed all around. What worried me as I left the King's House and
walked through the Palace grounds, however, was not my failure, but Estraven's
part in it. Why had the king exiled him for advocating the Ekumen's cause
(which seemed to be the meaning of the proclamation) if (according to the king
himself) he had been doing the opposite? When had he started advising the king
to steer clear of me, and why? Why was he exiled, and I let go free? Which of
them had lied more, and what the devil were they lying for?

Estraven to save his skin, I decided, and the king to save his face. The
explanation was neat. But had Estraven, in fact, ever lied to me? I discovered
that I did not know.

I was passing the Corner Red Dwelling. The gates of the garden stood open. I
glanced in at the serem trees leaning white above the dark pool, the paths of pink
brick lying deserted in the serene gray light of afternoon. A little snow still lay
in the shadow of the rocks by the pool. I thought of Estraven waiting for me there
as the snow fell last night, and felt a pang of pure pity for the man whom I had
seen in yesterday's parade sweating and superb under the weight of his panoply
and power, a man at the prime of his career, potent and magnificent--gone now,
down, done. Running for the border with his death three days behind him, and
no man speaking to him. The death-sentence is rare in Karhide. Life on Winter is
hard to live, and people there generally leave death to nature or to anger, not to
law. I wondered how Estraven, with that sentence driving him, would go. Not in
a car, for they were all Palace property here; would a ship or landboat give him
passage? Or was he afoot on the road, carrying what he could carry with him?
Karhiders go afoot, mostly; they have no beasts of burden, no flying vehicles,
the weather makes slow going for powered traffic most of the year, and they are
not a people who hurry. I imagined the proud man going into exile step by step,
a small trudging figure on the long road west to the Gulf. All this went through
my mind and out of it as I passed the gate of the Corner Red Dwelling, and with
it went my confused speculations concerning the acts and motives of Estraven
and the king. I was done with them. I had failed. What next?

I should go to Orgoreyn, Karhide's neighbor and rival. But once I went there I
might find it hard to return to Karhide, and I had unfinished business here. I had
to keep in mind that my entire life could be, and might well be, used in achieving
my mission for the Ekumen. No hurry. No need to rush off to Orgoreyn before I
had learned more about Karhide, particularly about the Fastnesses. For two years
I had been answering questions, now I would ask some. But not in Erhenrang. I
had finally understood that Estraven had been warning me, and though I might
distrust his warning I could not disregard it. He had been saying, however
indirectly, that I should get away from the city and the court. For some reason I
thought of Lord Tibe's teeth...The king had given me the freedom of the
country; I would avail myself of it. As they say in Ekumenical School, when
action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprof-
itable, sleep. I was not sleepy, yet. I would go east to the Fastnesses, and
gather information from the Foretellers, perhaps.

4. The Nineteenth Day

An East Karhidish story, as told in Gorinhering Hearth by Tobord
Chorhawa, and recorded by G. A., 93/1492.

LORD BEROSTY REM IR IPE came to Thangering Fastness and
offered forty beryls and half the year's yield from his orchards as
the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set
his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On
what day shall I die?

The Foretellers gathered and went together into the darkness.
At the end of darkness Odren spoke the answer: You will die on
Odstreth (the 19th day of any month).

"In what month? in how many years?" cried Berosty, but the
bond was broken, and there was no answer. He ran into the
circle and took the Weaver Odren by the throat choking him and
shouted that if he got no further answer he would break the
Weaver's neck. Others pulled him off and held him, though he
was a strong man. He strained against their hands and cried out,
"Give me the answer!"

Odren said, "It is given, and the price paid. Go."

Raging then Berosty rem ir Ipe returned to Charuthe, the third
Domain of his family, a poor place in northern Osnoriner, which
he had made poorer in getting together the price of a Foretelling.
He shut himself up in the strong-place, in the highest rooms of
the Hearth-Tower, and would not come out for friend or foe, for
seedtime or harvest, for kerrimer or foray, all that month and the
next and the next, and six months went by and ten months went
by, and he still kept like a prisoner to his room, waiting. On
Onnetherhad and Odstreth (the 18th and 19th days of the month)
he would not eat any food, nor would he drink, nor would he
sleep.

His kemmering by love and vow was Herbor of the Geganner
clan. This Herbor came in the month of Grende to Thangering
Fastness and said to the Weaver, "I seek a Foretelling."
"What have you to pay?" Odren asked, for he saw that the
man was poorly dressed and badly shod, and his sledge was old,
and everything about him wanted mending.

"I will give my life," said Herbor.

"Have you nothing else, my lord?" Odren asked him, speaking
now as to a great nobleman, "nothing else to give?"

"I have nothing else," said Herbor. "But I do not know if my
life is of any value to you here."

"No," said Odren, "it is of no value to us."

Then Herbor fell on his knees, struck down by shame and love,
and cried to Odren, "I beg you to answer my question. It is
not for myself!"

"For whom, then?"" asked the Weaver.

"For my lord and kemmering Ashe Berosty," said the man,
and he wept. "He has no love nor joy nor lordship since he came
here and got that answer which was no answer. He will die of
it."

"That he will: what does a man die of but his death?" said the
Weaver Odren. But Berber's passion moved him, and at length
he said, "I will seek the answer of the question you ask, Herbor,
and I will ask no price. But bethink you, there is always a price.
The asker pays what he has to pay."

Then Herbor set Odren's hands against his own eyes in sign of
gratitude, and so the Foretelling went forward. The Foretellers
gathered and went into the darkness. Herbor went among them
and asked his question, and the question was, How long will
Ashe Berosty rem ir Ipe live? For Herbor thought thus to get the
count of days or years, and so set his love's heart at rest with
certain knowledge. Then the Foretellers moved in the darkness
and at last Odren cried in great pain, as if he burned in a fire,
Longer than Herbor of Geganner!

It was not the answer Herbor had hoped, but it was the answer
he got, and having a patient heart he went home to Charuthe
with it, through the snows of Grende. He came into the Domain
and into the strong-place and climbed the tower, and there found
his kemmering Berosty sitting as ever blank and bleak by an
ash-smothered fire, his arms lying on a table of red stone, his
head sunk between his shoulders.

"Ashe," said Herbor, "I have been to Thangering Fastness,
and have been answered by the Foretellers. I asked them how
long you would live and their answer was, Berosty will live
longer than Herbor."

Berosty looked up at him as slow as if the hinge in his neck
had rusted, and said, "Did you ask them when I would die,
then?"

"I asked how long you would live."

"How long? You fool! You had a question of the Foretellers,
and did not ask them when I am to die, what day, month, year,
how many days are left to me--you asked how long? O you
fool, you staring fool, longer than you, yes, longer than you!"
Berosty took up the great table of red stone as if it had been a
sheet of tin and brought it down on Herbor's head. Herbor fell,
and the stone lay on him. Berosty stood a while demented. Then
he raised up the stone, and saw that it had crushed Herbor's
skull. He set the stone back on its pedestal. He lay down beside
the dead man and put his arms about him, as if they were in
kemmer and all was well. So the people of Charuthe found them
when they broke into the tower-room at last. Berosty was mad
thereafter and had to be kept under lock, for he would always go
looking for Herbor, who he thought was somewhere" about the
Domain. He lived a month thus, and then hanged himself, on
Odstreth, the nineteenth day of the month of Thern.

5. The Domestication of Hunch

MY LANDLADY, a voluble man, arranged my journey into the East. "If a person
wants to visit Fastnesses he's got to cross the Kargav. Over the mountains, into
Old Karhide, to Her, the old Kings' City. Now I'll tell you, a hearthfellow of
mine runs a landboat caravan over the Eskar Pass and yesterday he was telling
me over a cup of orsh that they're going to make their first trip this summer on
Getheny Osme, it having been such a warm spring and the road already clear up
to Engohar and the plows will have the pass clear in another couple of days.
Now you won't catch me crossing the Kargav, Erhenrang for me and a roof over
my head. But I'm a Yomeshta, praise to the nine hundred Throne-Upholders and
blest be the Milk of Meshe, and one can be a Yomeshta anywhere. We're a lot of
newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years-ago, but the Old Way
of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that. You have to go back
to the Old Land if you're after the Old Way. Now look here, Mr. Ai, I'll have a
room in this island for you whenever you come back, but I believe you're a wise
man to be going out of Erhenrang for a while, for everybody knows that the
Traitor made a great show of befriending you at the Palace. Now with old Tibe
as the King's Ear things will go smooth again. Now if you go down to the New
Port you'll find my hearthfellow there, and if you tell him I sent you..."

And so on. He was, as I said, voluble, and having discovered that I had no
shifgrethor took every chance to give me advice, though even he disguised it
with it's and as-ifs. He was the superintendent of my island; I thought of him as
my landlady, for he had fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, and a soft fat
face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature. He was good to me, and also
showed my room while I was out to thrill-seekers for a small fee: See the
Mysterious Envoy's room! He was so feminine in looks and manner that I once
asked him how many children he had. He looked glum. He had never borne any.
He had, however, sired four. It was one of the little jolts I was always getting.
Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered
as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time,
hermaphroditic neuters.

The radio bulletins were full of the doings of the new Prime Minister, Pemmer
Harge rem ir Tibe. Much of the news concerned affairs up north in the Sinoth
Valley. Tibe evidently was going to press Karhide's claim to that region:
precisely the kind of action which, on any other world at this stage of
civilization, would lead to war. But on Gethen nothing led to war. Quarrels,
murders, feuds, forays, vendettas, assassinations, tortures and abominations, all
these were in their repertory of human accomplishments; but they did not go to
war. They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like
animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants.
At any rate they never yet had done so. What I knew of Orgoreyn indicated that
it had become, over the last five or six centuries, an increasingly mobilizable
society, a real nation-state. The prestige-competition", heretofore mostly
economic, might force Karhide to emulate its larger neighbor, to become a
nation instead of a family quarrel, as Estraven had said; to become, as Estraven
had also said, patriotic. If this occurred the Gethenians might have an excellent
chance of achieving the condition of war.

I wanted to go to Orgoreyn and see if my guesses concerning it were sound,
but I wanted to finish up with Karhide first; so I sold another ruby to the scar
faced jeweler in Eng Street, and with no baggage but my money, my ansible, a
few instruments and a change of clothes, set off as passenger on a trade-caravan
on the first day of the first month of summer.

The landboats left at daybreak from the windswept loading-yards of the New
Port. They drove under the Arch and turned east, twenty bulky, quiet-running,
barge-like trucks on caterpillar treads, going single file down the deep streets
of Erhenrang through the shadows of morning. They carried boxes of lenses, reels
of soundtapes, spools of copper and platinum wire, bolts of plant-fiber cloth
raised and woven in the West Fall, chests of dried fish-flakes from the Gulf,
crates of ballbearings and other small machine parts, and ten truckloads of
Orgota kardik-grain: all bound for the Pering Storm-border, the northeast corner
of the land. All shipping on the Great Continent is by these electric-powered
trucks, which go on barges on the rivers and canals where possible. During the
deep-snow months, slow tractor-plows, powersledges, and the erratic ice-ships
on frozen rivers are the only transport beside skis and manhauled sledges; during
the Thaw no form of transport is reliable; so most freight traffic goes with a rush,
come summer. The roads then are thick with caravans. Traffic is controlled,
each vehicle or caravan being required to keep in constant radio touch with
checkpoints along the way. It all moves along, however crowded, quite steadily
at the rate of 25 miles per hour (Terran). Gethenians could make their vehicles
go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer "Why?" Like asking
Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer "Why not?" No
disputing tastes. Terrans tend to feel they've got to get ahead, make progress.
The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less
important than presence. My tastes were Terran, and leaving Ehrenrang I was
impatient with the methodical pace of the caravan; I wanted to get out and run. I
was glad to get clear of those long stone streets overhung with black, steep roofs.
and innumerable towers, that sunless city where all my chances had turned to
fear and betrayal.

Climbing the Kargav foothills the caravan halted briefly but often for meals at
roadside inns. Along in the afternoon we got our first full view of the range from
a foothill summit. We saw Kostor, which is four miles high, from foot to crest;
the huge slant of its western slope hid the peaks north of it, some of which go up
to thirty thousand feet. South from Kostor one peak after another stood out white
against a colorless sky; I counted thirteen, the last an undefined glimmer in the
mist of distance in the south. The driver named the thirteen for me, and told me
stories of avalanches, and landboats blown off the road by mountain winds, and
snowplow crews marooned for weeks in inaccessible heights, and so on, in a friend-
ly effort to terrify me. He described having seen the truck ahead of his skid
and go over a thousand-foot precipice; what was remarkable, he said, was the
slowness with which it fell. It seemed to take all afternoon floating down into the
abyss, and he had been very glad to see it at last vanish, with no sound at all,
into a forty-foot snowdrift at the bottom.

At Third Hour we stopped for dinner at a large inn, a grand place with vast
roaring fireplaces and vast beam-roofed rooms full of tables loaded with good
food; but we did not stay the night. Ours was a sleeper-caravan, hurrying (in its
Karhidish fashion) to be the first of the season into the Pering Storm country, to
skim the cream of the market for its merchant-entrepreneurs. The truck-batteries
were recharged, a new shift of drivers took over, and we went on. One truck of
the caravan served as sleeper, for drivers only. No beds for passengers. I spent
the night in the cold cab on the hard seat, with one break along near midnight for
supper at a little inn high in the hills. Karhide is no country for comfort.
At dawn I was awake and saw that we had left everything behind except rock,
and ice, and light, and the narrow road always going up and up under our treads.
I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is
an old woman or a cat.

No more inns now, among these appalling slopes of snow and granite. At
mealtimes the landboats came silently to a halt one after the other on some
thirty-degree, snow-encroached grade, and everybody climbed down from the
cabs and gathered about the sleeper, from which bowls of hot soup were served,
slabs of dried breadapple, and sour beer in mugs. We stood about stamping in
the snow, gobbling up food and drink, backs to the bitter wind that was filled
with a glittering dust of dry snow. Then back into the landboats, and on, and up.
At noon in the passes of Wehoth, at about 14,000 feet, it was 82°F. in the sun
and 13° in the shade. The electric engines were so quiet that one could hear
avalanches grumble down immense blue slopes on the far side of chasms twenty
miles across.

Late that afternoon we passed the summit, at Eskar, 15,200 feet. Looking up
the slope of the southern face of Kostor, up which we had been infinitesimally
crawling all day, I saw a queer rock-formation a quarter mile or so above the
road, a castle-like outcropping. "See the Fastness up there?" said the driver.

"That's a building?"

"That's Ariskostor Fastness."

"But no one could live up here."

"Oh, the Old Men can. I used to drive in a caravan that brought up their food
from Erhenrang, late in summer. Of course they can't get in or out for ten or
eleven months of the year, but they don't care. There's seven or eight Indwellers
up there."

I stared up at the buttresses of rough rock, solitary in the huge solitude of the
heights, and I did not believe the driver; but I suspended my disbelief. If any
people could survive in such a frozen aerie, they would be Karhiders.

The road descending swung far north and far south, edging along precipices,
for the east slope of the Kargav is harsher than the west, falling to the plains in
great stairsteps, the raw fault-blocks of the mountains' making. At sunset we saw
a tiny string of dots creeping through a huge white shadow seven thousand feet
below: a landboat caravan that had left Erhenrang a day ahead of us. Late the
next day we had got down there and were creeping along that same snow-slope,
very softly, not sneezing, lest we bring down the avalanche. From there we saw
for a while, away below and beyond us eastward, vague vast lands blurred with
clouds and shadows of clouds and streaked with silver of rivers, the Plains of
Rer.

At dusk of the fourth day out from Erhenrang we came to Rer. Between the
two cities lie eleven hundred miles, and a wall several miles high, and two or
three thousand years. The caravan halted outside the Western Gate, where it
would be shifted onto canal-barges. No landboat or car can enter Rer. It was
built before Karhiders used powered vehicles, and they have been using them for
over twenty centuries. There are no streets in Rer. There are covered walks,
tunnel-like, which in summer one may walk through or on top of as one pleases.
The houses and islands and Hearths sit every which way, chaotic, in a profuse
prodigious confusion that suddenly culminates (as anarchy will do in Karhide)
in splendor: the great Towers of the Un-Palace, blood-red, windowless. Built
seventeen centuries ago, those towers housed the kings of Karhide for a
thousand years, until Argaven Harge, first of his dynasty, crossed the Kargav
and settled the great valley of the West Fall. All the buildings of Rer are
fantastically massive, deep-founded, weatherproof and waterproof. In winter the
wind of the plains may keep the city clear of snow, but when it blizzards and
piles up they do not clear the streets, having no streets to clear. They use the
stone tunnels, or burrow temporary ones in the snow. Nothing of the houses but
the roof sticks out above the snow, and the winter-doors may be set under the
eaves or in the roof itself, like dormers. The Thaw is the bad time on that
plain of many rivers. The tunnels then are storm-sewers, and the spaces between
buildings become canals or lakes, on which the people of Rer boat to their
business, fending off small ice-floes with the oars. And always, over the dust
of summer, the snowy roof-jumble of winter, or the floods of spring, the red
Towers loom, the empty heart of the city, indestructible.

I lodged in a dreary overpriced inn crouching in the lee of the Towers. I got up
at dawn after many bad dreams, and paid the extortioner for bed and breakfast
and inaccurate directions as to the way I should take, and set forth afoot to find
Otherhord, an ancient Fastness not far from Rer. I was lost within fifty yards of
the inn. By keeping the Towers behind me and the huge white loom of the Kargav
on my right, I got out of the city headed south, and a farmer's child met
on the road told me where to turn off for Otherhord.

I came there at noon. That is, I came somewhere at noon, but I wasn't sure
where. It was mainly a forest or a thick wood; but the woods were even more
carefully tended than is usual in that country of careful foresters, and the path
led along the hillside right in among the trees. After a while I became aware that
there was a wooden hut just off the path to my right, and then I noticed a quite
large wooden building a little farther off to my left; and from somewhere there
came a delicious smell of fresh frying fish.

I went slowly along the path, a little uneasy. I didn't know how the Handdarata
felt about tourists. I knew very little about them in fact. The Handdara is a
religion without institution, without priests, without hierarchy, without vows,
without creed; I am still unable to say whether it has a God or not. It is elusive.
Itis always somewhere else. Its only fixed manifestation is in the Fastnesses,
retreats to which people may retire and spend the night or a lifetime. I wouldn't
have been pursuing this curiously intangible cult into its secret places at all,
if I hadn't wanted to answer the question left unanswered by the Investigators:
What are the Foretellers, and what do they actually do?

I had been longer in Karhide now than the Investigators had, and I doubted
that there was anything to the stories of Foretellers and their prophecies.
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man.
Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical
probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
However, the legends were worth investigating. I hadn't yet convinced any
Karhider of the existence of telepathic communication; they wouldn't believe it
till they "saw" it: my position exactly, regarding the Foretellers of the Hand-
dara. As I went on along the path I realized that a whole village or town was
scattered about in the shadow of that slanting forest, all as random as Rer was,
but secretive, peaceful, rural. Over every roof and path hung the boughs of the
hemmens, the commonest tree of Winter, a stout conifer with thick pale-scarlet
needles. Hemmen-cones littered the branching paths, the wind was scented with
hemmen-pollen, and all the houses were built of the dark hemmen-wood. I
stopped at last wondering which door to knock at, when a person came saunter-
ing out of the trees and greeted me courteously. "Will you be looking for
a dwelling-place?" he asked.

"I've come with a question for the Foretellers." I had decided to let them take
me, at first anyhow, for a Karhider. Like the Investigators I had never had any
trouble passing as a native, if I wanted to; among all the Karhidish dialects
my accent went unnoticed, and my sexual anomalies were hidden by the heavy
clothing. I lacked the fine thick hair-thatch and the downward eye-slant of the
typical Gethenian, and was blacker and taller than most, but not beyond the
range of normal variation. My beard had been permanently depilated before I
left Ollul (at that time we didn't yet know about the ‘pelted’ tribes of Perunter,
who are not only bearded but hairy all over, like White Terrans). Occasionally I
was asked how my nose got broken. I have a flat nose; Gethenian noses are
prominent and narrow, with constricted passages, well adapted to breathing
subfreezing air. The person on the path at Otherhord looked with mild curiosity
at my nose, and answered, "Then perhaps you'll want to speak to the Weaver?
He's down in the glade now, unless he went out with the woodsledge. Or would
you rather talk first to one of the Celibates?"

"I'm not sure. I'm exceedingly ignorant--"

The young man laughed and bowed. "I am honored!" he said. "I've lived here
three years, but haven't yet acquired enough ignorance to be worth mentioning."
He was highly amused, but his manner was gentle, and I managed to recollect
enough scraps of Handdara lore to realize that I had been boasting, very much as
if I'd come up to him and said, "I'm exceedingly handsome..."

"I meant, I don't know anything about the Foretellers--"

"Enviable!" said the young Indweller. "Behold, we must sully the plain snow
with footprints, in order to get anywhere. May I show you the way to the glade?
My name is Goss."

It was a first name. "Genry," I said, abandoning my ‘L’. I followed Goss
farther into the chill shade of the forest. The narrow path changed direction
often, winding up the slope and down again; here and there, near it or away off
among the massive trunks of the hemmens, stood the small, forest-colored
houses. Everything was red and brown, dank, still, fragrant, gloomy. From one
of the houses drifted the faint whistling sweetness of a Karhidish flute. Goss
went light and quick, graceful as a girl, some yards ahead of me. All at once his
white shirt blazed out, and I came out after him from shadow into full sunlight
on a wide green meadow.

Twenty feet from us stood a figure, straight, motionless, profiled, the scarlet
hieb and white shirt an inlay of bright enamel against the green of the high grass.
A hundred yards beyond him stood another statue, in blue and white; this one
never moved or glanced our way all the time we talked with the first one. They
were practicing the Handdara discipline of Presence, which is a kind of trance--
the Handdarata, given to negatives, call it an untrance-- involving self-loss
(self-augmentation?) through extreme sensual receptiveness and awareness.
Though the technique is the exact opposite of most techniques of mysticism it
probably is a mystical discipline, tending towards the experience of Immanence;
but I can't categorize any practice of the Handdarata with certainty. Goss spoke
to the person in scarlet. As he broke from his intense movelessness and looked at
us and came slowly towards us, I felt an awe of him. In that noon sunlight he
shone of his own light.

He was as tall as I, and slender, with a clear, open, and beautiful face. As his
eyes met mine I was suddenly moved to bespeak him, to try to reach him with
the mindspeech I had never used since I landed on Winter, and should not use,
yet. The impulse was stronger than the restraint. I bespoke him. There was no
response. No contact was made. He continued to look straight at me. After a
moment he smiled and said in a soft, rather high voice, "You're the Envoy, aren't
you?"

I stammered and said, "Yes."

"My name is Faxe. We're honored to receive you. Will you stay with us in
Otherhord a while?"

"Willingly. I am seeking to learn about your practice of Foretelling. And if
there's anything I can tell you in return about what I am, where I come
from--"

"Whatever you like," said Faxe with a serene smile. "This is a pleasant thing,
that you should cross the Ocean of Space, and then add another thousand miles
and a crossing of the Kargav to your journey to come to us here."

"I wanted to come to Otherhord because of the fame of its predictions."

"You want to watch us foretelling, then, perhaps. Or have you a question of
your own?"

His clear eyes compelled truth. "I don't know," I said.

"Nusuth," said he, "it doesn't matter. Perhaps if you stay a while you'll find if
you have a question, or no question...There are only certain times, you know,
when the Foretellers are able to meet together, so in any case you'd dwell with
us some days."

I did, and they were pleasant days. Time was unorganized except for the
communal work, field labor, gardening, woodcutting, maintenance, for which
transients such as myself were called on by whatever group most needed a hand.
Aside from the work, a day might pass without a word spoken; those I talked
with most often were young Goss, and Faxe the Weaver, whose extraordinary
character, as limpid and unfathomable as a well of very clear water, was a
quintessence of the character of the place. In the evenings there might be a
gathering in the hearth-room of one or another of the low, tree-surrounded
houses; there was conversation, and beer, and there might be music, the vigorous
music of Karhide, melodically simple but rhythmically complex, always played
extempore. One night two Indwellers danced, men so old that their hair had
whitened, and their limbs were skinny, and the downward folds at the outer eye
corners half hid their dark eyes. Their dancing was slow, precise, controlled; it
fascinated eye and mind. They began dancing during Third Hour after dinner.
Musicians joined in and dropped out at will, all but the drummer who never
stopped his subtle changing beat. The two old dancers were still dancing at Sixth
Hour, midnight, after five Terran hours. This was the first time I had seen the
phenomenon of dothe--the voluntary, controlled use of what we call "hysterical
strength"--and thereafter I was readier to believe tales concerning the Old Men
of the Handdara.

It was an introverted life, self-sufficient, stagnant, steeped in that singular
"ignorance" prized by the Handdarata and obedient to their rule of inactivity or
noninterference. That rule (expressed in the word nusuth, which I have to
translate as "no matter") is the heart of the cult, and I don't pretend to under-
stand it. But I began to understand Karhide better, after a halfmonth in Otherhord.
Under that nation's politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness,
passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara.

And out of that silence inexplicably rises the Foreteller's voice.
Young Goss, who enjoyed acting as my guide, told me that my question to the
Foretellers could concern anything and be phrased as I liked. "The more
qualified and limited the question, the more exact the answer," he said.
"Vagueness breeds vagueness. And some questions of course are not
answerable."

"What if I ask one of those?" I inquired. This hedging seemed sophisticated,
but not unfamiliar. But I did not expect his answer: "The Weaver will refuse it.
Unanswerable questions have wrecked Foretelling groups."

"Wrecked them?"

"Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of
Asen Fastness to answer the question What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a
couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness for six days
and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the
Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver...He
was a man named Meshe."

"The founder of the Yomesh cult?"

"Yes," said Goss, and laughed as if the story was very funny, but I didn't know
whether the joke was on the Yomeshta or on me.

I had decided to ask a yes-or-no question, which might at least make plain the
extent and kind of obscurity or ambiguity in the answer. Faxe confirmed what
Goss had said, that the matter of the question could be one of which the
Foretellers were perfectly ignorant. I could ask if the hoolm crops would be good
this year in the northern hemisphere of S, and they would answer, having no
previous knowledge even of the existence of a planet called S. This seemed to
put the business on the plane of pure chance divination, along with yarrow stalks
and flipped coins. No, said Faxe, not at all, chance was not involved. The whole
process was in fact precisely the reverse of chance.

"Then you mindread."

"No," said Faxe, with his serene and candid smile.

"You mindread without knowing you're doing it, perhaps."

"What good would that be? If the asker knew the answer he wouldn't pay our
price for it."

I chose a question to which I certainly lacked the answer. Only time could
prove the Foretelling right or wrong, unless it was, as I expected, one of those
admirable professional prophecies applicable to any outcome. It was not a trivial
question; I had given up the notion of asking when it would stop raining, or
some such trifle, when I learned that the undertaking was a hard and dangerous
one for the nine Foretellers of Otherhord. The cost was high for the asker--two
of my rubies went to the coffers of the Fastness--but higher for the answerers.
And as I got to know Faxe, if it became difficult to believe that he was a
professional faker it became still more difficult to believe that he was an honest,
self-deluded faker; his intelligence was as hard, clear, and polished as my rubies.
I dared set no trap for him. I asked what I most wanted to know.

On Onnetherhad, the 18th of the month, the nine met together in a big building
usually kept locked: one high hall, stone-floored and cold, dimly lighted by a
couple of slit-windows and a fire in the deep hearth at one end. They sat on
the bare stone in a circle, all of them cloaked and hooded, rough still shapes like
a circle of dolmens in the faint glow of the fire yards away. Goss, and a couple
of other young Indwellers, and a physician from the nearest Domain, watched in
silence from seats by the hearth while I crossed the hall and entered the circle.
It was all very informal, and very tense. One of the hooded figures looked up
as I came amongst them, and I saw a strange face, coarse-featured, heavy, with
insolent eyes watching me.

Faxe sat cross-legged, not moving, but charged, full of a gathering force that
made his light, soft voice crack like an electric bolt. "Ask," he said.

I stood within the circle and asked my question. "Will this world Gethen be a
member of the Ekumen of Known Worlds, five years from now?"

Silence. I stood there, I hung in the center of a spiderweb woven of silence.
"It is answerable," the Weaver said quietly.

There was a relaxation. The hooded stones seemed to soften into movement;
the one who had looked so strangely at me began to whisper to his neighbor.
I left the circle and joined the watchers by the hearth.

Two of the Foretellers remained withdrawn, unspeaking. One of them lifted
his left hand from time to time and patted the floor lightly and swiftly ten or
twenty times, then sat motionless again. I had seen neither of them before; they
were the Zanies, Goss said. They were insane. Goss called them "time-dividers,"
which may mean schizophrenics. Karhidish psychologists, though lacking mind-
speech and thus like blind surgeons, were ingenious with drugs, hypnosis,
spotshock, cryonic touch, and various mental therapies; I asked if these two
psychopaths could not be cured. "Cured?" Goss said. "Would you cure a singer
of his voice?"

Five others of the circle were Indwellers of Otherhord, adepts in the Handdara
disciplines of Presence and also, said Goss, so long as they remained Foretellers,
celibate, taking no mate during their periods of sexual potency. One of these
Celibates must be in kemmer during the Foretelling. I could pick him out, having
learned to notice the subtle physical intensification, a kind of brightness, that
signalizes the first phase of kemmer.

Beside the kemmerer sat the Pervert.

"He came up from Spreve with the physician," Goss told me. "Some Foretelling
groups artifically arouse perversion in a normal person--injecting female or
male hormones during the days before a session. It's better to have a natural
one. He's willing to come; likes the notoriety."

Goss used the pronoun that designates a male animal, not the pronoun for a
human being in the masculine role of kemmer. He looked a little embarrassed.
Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both
reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversions--at
least, they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with
permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they
call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physio-
logical perverts or abnormals-normals, by our standard. They are not excluded from
society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many
bisexual societies. The Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile.

The Pervert of the group, after that first long strange stare at me, paid no heed
to anyone but the one next to him, the kemmerer, whose increasingly active
sexuality would be further roused and finally stimulated into full, female sexual
capacity by the insistent, exaggerated male-ness of the Pervert. The Pervert kept
talking softly, leaning towards the kemmerer, who answered little and seemed to
recoil. None of the others had spoken for a long time now, there was no sound
but the whisper, whisper of the Pervert's voice. Faxe was steadily watching one
of the Zanies. The Pervert laid his hand quickly and softly on the kemmerer's
hand. The kemmerer avoided the touch hastily, with fear or disgust, and looked
across at Faxe as if for help. Faxe did not move. The kemmerer kept his place,
and kept still when the Pervert touched him again. One of the Zanies lifted up his
face and laughed a long false crooning laugh, "Ah-ah-ah-ah..."

Faxe raised his hand. At once each face in the circle turned to him as if he had
gathered up their gazes into a sheaf, a skein.

It had been afternoon and raining when we entered the hall. The gray light had
soon died out of the slit-windows under the eaves. Now whitish strips of light
stretched like slanting phantasmal sails, long triangles and oblongs, from wall to
floor, over the faces of the nine; dull scraps and shreds of light from the moon
rising over the forest, outside. The fire had burned down long since and there
was no light but those strips and slants of dimness creeping across the circle,
sketching out a face, a hand, a moveless back. For a while I saw Faxe's profile
rigid as pale stone in a diffuse dust of light. The diagonal of moonlight crept
on and came to a black hump, the kemmerer, head bowed on his knees, hands
clenched on the floor, body shaken by a regular tremor repeated by the slutter-
pat-pat of the Zany's hands on stone in darkness across the circle. They were all
connected, all of them, as if they were the suspension-points of a spiderweb. I
felt, whether I wished or not, the connection, the communication that ran,
wordless, inarticulate, through Faxe, and which Faxe was trying to pattern and
control, for he was the center, the Weaver. The dim light fragmented and died
away creeping up the eastern wall. The web of force, of tension, of silence,
grew.

I tried to keep out of contact with the minds of the Foretellers. I was made
very uneasy by that silent electric tension, by the sense of being drawn in, of
becoming a point or figure in the pattern, in the web. But when I set up a bar-
rier, it was worse: I felt cut off and cowered inside my own mind obsessed by
hallucinations of sight and touch, a stew of wild images and notions, abrupt
visions and sensations all sexually charged and grotesquely violent, a red-and
black seething of erotic rage. I was surrounded by great gaping pits with ragged
lips, vaginas, wounds, hellmouths, I lost my balance, I was falling...If I could
not shut out this chaos I would fall indeed, I would go mad, and there was no
shutting it out. The empathic and paraverbal forces at work, immensely powerful
and confused, rising out of the perversion and frustration of sex, out of an
insanity that distorts time, and out of an appalling discipline of total
concentration and apprehension of immediate reality, were far beyond my
restraint or control. And yet they were controlled: the center was still Faxe.
Hours and seconds passed, the moonlight shone on the wrong wall, there was no
moonlight only darkness, and in the center of all darkness Faxe: the Weaver: a
woman, a woman dressed in light. The light was silver, the silver was armor, an
armored woman with a sword. The light burned sudden and intolerable,-- the
light along her limbs, the fire, and she screamed aloud in terror and pain,
"Yes, yes, yes!"

The crooning laugh of the Zany began, "Ah-ah-ah-ah," and rose higher and
higher into a wavering yell that went on and on, much longer than any voice
could go on yelling, right across time. There was movement in the darkness,
scuffling and shuffling, a redistribution of ancient centuries, an evasion of
foreshadows. "Light, light," said an immense voice in vast syllables once or
innumerable times. "Light. Log on the fire, there. Some light." It was the
physician from Spreve. He had entered the circle. It was all broken. He was
kneeling by the Zanies, the frailest ones, the fuse-points; both of them lay
huddled up on the floor. The kemmerer lay with his head on Faxe's knees,
breathing in gasps, still trembling; Faxe's hand, with absent gentleness, stroked
his hair. The Pervert was off by himself in a corner, sullen and dejected. The
session was over, time passed as usual, the web of power had fallen apart into
indignity and weariness. Where was my answer, the riddle of the oracle, the
ambiguous utterance of prophecy?

I knelt down beside Faxe. He looked at me with his clear eyes. For that instant
I saw him as I had seen him in the dark, as a woman armed in light and burning
in a fire, crying out, "Yes--"

Faxe's soft speaking-voice broke the vision. "Are you answered, Asker?"

"I am answered, Weaver."

Indeed I was answered. Five years from now Gethen would be a member of
the Ekumen: yes. No riddles, no hedging. Even then I was aware of the quality
of that answer, not so much a prophecy as an observation. I could not evade my
own certainty that the answer was right. It had the imperative clarity of a
hunch. We have NAFAL ships and instantaneous transmission and mindspeech, but
we haven't yet tamed hunch to run in harness; for that trick we must go to
Gethen.

"I serve as the filament," Faxe said to me a day or two after the Foretelling.
"The energy builds up and builds up in us, always sent back and back, redoubl-
ing the impulse every time, until it breaks through and the light is in me,
around me, I am the light...The Old Man of Arbin Fastness once said that if
the Weaver could be put in a vacuum at the moment of the Answer, he'd go on
burning for years. That's what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past
and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of
Shorth. It's hard to believe. I doubt a man could endure it. But no matter..."

Nusuth, the ubiquitous and ambiguous negative of the Handdara.

We were strolling side by side, and Faxe looked at me. His face, one of the
most beautiful human faces I ever saw, seemed hard and delicate as carved
stone. "In the darkness," he said, "there were ten; not nine. There was a
stranger."

"Yes, there was. I had no barrier against you. You are a Listener, Faxe, a
natural empath; and probably a powerful natural telepath as well. That's why
you're the Weaver, the one who can keep the tensions and responses of the group
running in a self-augmenting pattern until the strain breaks the pattern itself
and you reach through for your answer."

He listened with grave interest. "It is strange to see the mysteries of my
discipline from outside, through your eyes. I've only seen them from within,
as a disciple."

"If you permit--if you wish, Faxe, I should like to communicate with you in
mindspeech." I was sure now that he was a natural Communicant; his consent
and a little practice should serve to lower his unwitting barrier.

"Once you did that, I would hear what others think?"

"No, no. No more than you do already as an empath. Mindspeech is communi-
cation, voluntarily sent and received."

"Then why not speak aloud?"

"Well, one can lie, speaking."

"Not mindspeaking?"

"Not intentionally."

Faxe considered a while. "That's a discipline that must arouse the interest of
kings, politicians, men of business."

"Men of business fought against the use of mindspeech when it first was
found to be a teachable skill; they outlawed it for decades."

Faxe smiled. "And kings?"

"We have no more kings."

"Yes. I see that...Well, I thank you, Genry. But my business is unlearning,
not learning. And I'd rather not yet learn an art that would change the world
entirely."

"By your own foretelling this world will change, and within five years."

"And I'll change with it, Genry. But I have no wish to change it."

It was raining, the long, fine rain of Gethenian summer. We walked under the
hemmen-trees on the slopes above the Fastness, where there were no paths.
Light fell gray among dark branches, clear water dropped from the scarlet
needles. The air was chill yet mild, and full of the sound of rain.

"Faxe, tell me this. You Handdarata have a gift that men on every world have
craved. You have it. You can predict the future. And yet you live like the
rest of us-- it doesn't seem to matter--"

."How should it matter, Genry?"

"Well, look. For instance, this rivalry between Karhide and Orgoreyn, this
quarrel about the Sinoth Valley. Karhide has lost face badly these last weeks,
I gather. Now why didn't King Argaven consult his Foretellers, asking which
course to take, or which member of the kyorremy to choose as prime minister,
or something of that sort?"

"The questions are hard to ask."

"I don't see why. He might simply ask, Who'll serve me best as prime
minister?--and leave it at that."

"He might. But he doesn't know what serving him best may mean. It might
mean the man chosen would surrender the valley to Orgoreyn, or go into exile,
or assassinate the king; it might mean many things he wouldn't expect or
accept."

"He'd have to make his question very precise."

"Yes. Then there'd be many questions, you see. Even the king must pay the
price."

"You'd charge him high?"

"Very high," said Faxe tranquilly. "The Asker pays what he can afford, as you
know. Kings have in fact come to the Foretellers; but not very often..."

"What if one of the Foretellers is himself a powerful man?"

"Indwellers of the Fastness have no ranks or status. I may be sent to
Erhenrang to the kyorremy; well, if I go, I take back my status and my shadow,
but my foretelling's at an end. If I had a question while I served in the kyorremy,
I'd go to Orgny Fastness there, pay my price, and get my answer. But we in the
Handdara don't want answers. It's hard to avoid them, but we try to."

"Faxe, I don't think I understand."

"Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to
ask."

"But you're the Answerers!"

"You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?"

"No--"

"To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong
question."

I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side through the rain,
under the dark branches of the Forest of Otherhord. Within the white hood
Faxe's face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little.
When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a
tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so
well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the
unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great
strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present...

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the
unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought.
Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there
would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But
also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion...Tell me,
Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable--the one certain
thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"

"That we shall die."

"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we
already know the answer. ...The only thing that makes life possible is
permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

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 weak-
ened 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 blackfish 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 Commens-
ality, 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 landname, 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 intent-
ion 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. Mis-
hnory 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 sha-
dow-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; shirt-
less 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 humili-
ation; 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 Eku-
menical 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 physio-
logy? 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 a-
bout the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pitui-
tary 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 (? with-
out exception? If there are exceptions, resulting in kemmer-part-
ners 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 re-
tracted (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 prom-
iscuously 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 glimps-
ed 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 appre-
ciation. 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 com-
petition 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 indus-
trial 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 respon-
sible 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 gen-
eralize. 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 kem-
mering-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 cen-
turies, 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 some-
thing 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. Ar-
gaven 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 primitive-
ness...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 in-
creasingly 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 lit-
tle 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 suspi-
cion 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 shif-
grethor 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 friend-
ship 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 ex-
pected; 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 indif-
ferent 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 per-
haps. 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," "com-
mensality." 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
breadapple. 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 interro-
gated. 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-cel-
lar 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 Dist-
ricts, 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 grainlands, 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 inter-
nal customs-houses one's identification must be shown and one's passage rec-
orded. 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, streetlamps 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 promul-
gated 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 streetlamp, they said, thin as a sledge-runner,
sootblack 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 for-
eign 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 gen-
erations, 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,* 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.

--------------------------------------
*Kurem, damp weather, 0° to -20° F.
--------------------------------------

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 faith-
fulness 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 wis-
hed 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." Estra-
ven 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.

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 plea-
santly. "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. Ex-
cuse me, I shouldn't use Karhidish, I forgot." He went on in Orgota, "Banish-
ed 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 thought 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 on planet; 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 control-
led, 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 Est-
raven 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 fa-
cades 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 Shu-
sgis, my jovial host, a heavy man, a substantial man, he too was somehow, a-
round 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 intu-
itive 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 uncom-
mitted 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 per-
suaded 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 different-
ly 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 com-
munications 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 govern-
ment 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 simpli-
city 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 Kemmer-
houses. 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 demand-
ing that the President stop this lunatic, turn him out, and get on with the
order of business. Csl. Yemenbey was most obstreperous, and probably spon-
taneous. "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 Karh-
idish 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 Thir-
ty-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 clut-
ter 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 to-
wards me is already changed. If he calls off his reception for the Envoy to-
night, 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-bro-
ther for one of those carven stones. That is ten thousand years
from now, and the bones of the murdered man will lie in this grave
where the treasure lies. O man of Sheney, I know too where your
grave is: I see you lying in it." .

The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were
seen in the Seeing of Meshe, and are in his Eye. We are the
pupils of his Eye. Our doing is his Seeing: our being his
Knowing.

A hemmen-tree in the heart of Ornen Forest, which lies a
hundred miles long and a hundred miles wide, was old and
greatly grown, with a hundred branches and on every branch a
thousand twigs and on every twig a hundred leaves. The tree
said in its rooted being, "All my leaves are seen, but one, this
one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep
secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves?
and who will count the number of them?"

Meshe passed through the Forest of Ornen in his wanderings,
and from that one tree plucked that one leaf.

No raindrop falls in the storms of autumn that ever fell before,
and the rain has fallen, and falls, and will fall throughout all
the autumns of the years. Meshe saw each drop, where it fell, and
falls, and will fall.

In the Eye of Meshe are all the stars, and the darknesses between
the stars: and all are bright.

In the answering of the Question of the Lord of Shorth, in the
moment of the Seeing, Meshe saw all the sky as if it were all
one sun. Above the earth and under the earth all the sphere of
sky was bright as the sun's surface, and there was no darkness.
For he saw not what was, nor what will be, but what is. The stars
that flee and take away their light all were present in his eye,
and all their light shone presently.*

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees
not. In the Sight of Meshe there is no darkness.

Therefore those that call upon the darkness** are made fools
of and spat out from the mouth of Meshe, for they name what is
not, calling it Source and End.

There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center
of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop
falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop.
There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the
light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.

One center, one seeing, one law, one light. Look now into the
Eye of Meshe!

-----------------------------------------------------
*This is a mystical expression of one of the theories used to
support the expanding-universe hypothesis, first proposed by
the Mathematical School of Sith over four thousand years
ago and generally accepted by later cosmologists, even
though meteorological conditions on Gethen prevent their
gathering much observational support from astronomy. The
rate of expansion (Hubble's constant; Rerherek's constant)
can in fact be estimated from the observed amount of light in
the night sky; the point here involved is that, if the universe
were not expanding, the night sky would not appear to be
dark.

**The Handdarata.
-----------------------------------------------------

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 door-
keeper 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 behav-
ior, 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 Orgo-
reyn. 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. Dark-
ness 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 over-
seer. 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 timid-
ly, 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 shak-
ing 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, dispel-
ling 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 Kundersha-
den, but I had no recollection of it. Eating did not seem to be a part of this ex-
istence 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. Out-
side 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 Resettle-
ment 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 for-
est had been logged for centuries there were no waste places in it, no desola-
tions of stumps, no eroded slopes. It seemed that every tree in it was account-
ed 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 com-
pressing 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 plea-
sant, 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 level-
ing 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 re-
sult of the drugs given all prisoners to keep them out of kemmer.

I knew that drugs existed which could reduce or virtually eliminate the po-
tency 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?-- especial-
ly 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 coun-
try 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 examina-
tions. 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 dorm-
itory 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 exam-
ination 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 pull-
ed 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
middleaged 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 phys-
ically a typical Gethenian of the Great Continent, compactly made, shortlegged
and short-armed, with a solid layer of subcutaneous fat giving him even in ill-
ness 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 furlike. 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 a-
bout 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
Chenewich, 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, com-
ing 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 ul-
cers 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 ofwinter. When at last I
roused and pulled myself up to look out, the tent was halfburied. Sunlight and
blue shadows lay vivid on the snow. Far and high in theeast 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, illused 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 encou-
rage 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 aud-
ience 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 weak-
ness 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 hav e 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 stop-
ped 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 do-
ing 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 complete-
ly. 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 Pule-
fen 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 dir-
ection 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 temp-
erature 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 strip-
ped 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 compe-
titive 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, uncap-
ped 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.

16. Between Drumner and Dremegole

Odyrny Thern. Ai asks from his sleeping-bag, "What is it you're writing,
Harth?"

"A record."

He laughs a little. "I ought to be keeping a journal for the Ekumenical files;
but I never could stick to it without a voice-writer."

I explain that my notes are intended for my people at Estre, who will incor-
porate them as they see fit into the Records of the Domain; this turning my
thoughts to my Hearth and my son, I seek to turn them away again, and ask,
"Your parent--your parents, that is--are they alive?"

"No," says Ai. "Seventy years dead."

I puzzled at it. Ai was not thirty years old. "You're counting years of a
different length than ours?"

"No. Oh, I see. I've timejumped. Twenty years from Earth to Hain-Davenant,
from there fifty to Ellul, from Ellul to here seventeen. I've only lived off-
Earth seven years, but I was born there a hundred and twenty years ago."

Long since in Erhenrang he had explained to me how time is shortened inside
the ships that go almost as fast as starlight between the stars, but I had not laid
this fact down against the length of a man's life, or the lives he leaves behind
him on his own world. While he lived a few hours in one of those unimaginable
ships going from one planet to another, everyone he had left behind him at home
grew old and died, and their children grew old...I said at last, "I thought my-
self an exile."

"You for my sake--I for yours," he said, and laughed again, a slight cheerful
sound in the heavy silence. These three days since we came down from the pass
have been much hard work for no gain, but Ai is no longer downcast, nor over-
hopeful; and he has more patience with me. Maybe the drugs are sweated out of
him. Maybe we have learned to pull together.

We spent this day coming down from the basaltic spur which we spent yester-
day climbing. From the valley it looked a good road up onto the Ice, but the
higher we went the more scree and slick rock-face we met, and a grade ever
steeper, till even without the sledge we could not have climbed it. Tonight we
are back down at the foot of it in the moraine, the valley of stones. Nothing
grows here. Rock, pebble-dump, boulder-fields, clay, mud. An arm of the glacier
has withdrawn from this slope within the last fifty or hundred years, leaving the
planet's bones raw to the air; no flesh of earth, of grass. Here and there fumaroles
cast a heavy yellowish fog over the ground, low and creeping. The air smells of
sulphur. It is 12°, still, overcast. I hope no heavy snow falls until we have got
over the evil ground between this place and the glacier-arm we saw some miles
to the west from the ridge. It seems to be a wide ice-river running down from the
plateau between two mountains, volcanoes, both capped with steam and smoke.
If we can get onto it from the slopes of the nearer volcano, it may provide us a
road up onto the plateau of ice. To our east a smaller glacier comes down to a
frozen lake, but it runs curving and even from here the great crevasses in it can
be seen; it is impassible to us, equipped as we are. We agreed to try the glacier
between the volcanoes, though by going west to it we lose at least two days'
mileage towards our goal, one in going west and one in regaining the distance.

Opposthe Thern. Snowing neserem* (*neserem: fine snow on a moderate gale:
a light blizzard.) No travel in this. We both slept all day. We have been hauling
nearly a halfmonth, the sleep does us good.

Ottormenbod Thern. Snowing neserem. Enough sleep. Ai taught me a Terran
game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult
game. As he remarked, there are plenty of stones here to play go with.

He endures the cold pretty well, and if courage were enough, would stand it
like a snow-worm. It is odd to see him bundled up in hieb and overcoat with the
hood up, when the temperature is above zero; but when we sledge, if the sun is
out or the wind not too bitter, he takes off the coat soon and sweats like one of
us. We must compromise as to the heating of the tent. He would keep it hot, I
cold, and either's comfort is the other's pneumonia. We strike a medium, and he
shivers outside his bag, while I swelter in mine; but considering from what
distances we have come together to share this tent a while, we do well enough.

Getheny Thanern. Clear after the blizzard, wind down, the thermometer around
15° all day. We are camped on the lower western slope of the nearer volcano:
Mount Dremegole, on my map of Orgoreyn. Its companion across the ice-river
is called Drumner. The map is poorly made; there is a great peak visible to the
west not shown on it at all, and it is all out of proportion. The Orgota ev-
idently do not often come into their Fire-Hills. Indeed there is not much to
come for, except grandeur. We hauled eleven miles today, difficult work: all
rock. Ai is asleep already. I bruised the tendon of my heel, wrenching it
like a fool when my foot was caught between two boulders, and limped out the
afternoon. The night's rest should heal it. Tomorrow we should get down onto
the glacier.

Our food-supplies seem to have sunk alarmingly, but it is because we have
been eating the bulky stuff. We had between ninety and a hundred pounds of
coarse foodstuffs, half of it the load I stole in Turuf; sixty pounds of this are
gone, after fifteen days' journey. I have started on the gichy-michy at a pound a
day, saving two sacks of kadik-germ, some sugar, and a chest of dried fishcakes
for variety later. I am glad to be rid of that heavy stuff from Turuf. The sledge
pulls lighter.

Sordny Thanern. In the 20's; frozen rain, wind pouring down the ice-river like
the draft in a tunnel. Camped a quarter mile in from the edge, on a long flat
streak of firn. The way down from Dremegole was rough and steep, on bare rock
and rock-fields; the glacier's edge heavily crevassed, and so foul with gravel and
rocks caught in the ice that we tried the sledge on wheels there too. Before we
had got a hundred yards a wheel wedged fast and the axle bent. We use runners
henceforth. We made only four miles today, still in the wrong direction. The
effluent glacier seems to run on a long curve westerly up to the Gobrin plateau.
Here between the volcanoes it is about four miles wide, and should not be hard
going farther in towards the center, though it is more crevassed than I had hoped,
and the surface rotten.

Drumner is in eruption. The sleet on one's lips tastes of smoke and sulphur. A
darkness loured all day in the west even under the rainclouds. From time to time
all things, clouds, icy rain, ice, air, would turn a dull red, then fade slowly
back to gray. The glacier shakes a little under our feet.

Eskichwe rem ir Her hypothesized that the volcanic activity in N.W. Orgoreyn
and the Archipelago has been increasing during the last ten or twenty millennia,
and presages the end of the Ice, or at least a recession of it and an interglacial
period. CO2 released by the volcanoes into the atmosphere will in time serve as
an insulator, holding in the longwave heat-energy reflected from the earth, while
permitting direct solar heat to enter undiminished. The average world tempera-
ture, he says, would in the end be raised some thirty degrees, till it attains
72°. I am glad I shall not be present. Ai says that similar theories have been
propounded by Terran scholars to explain the still incomplete recession of
their last Age of Ice. All such theories remain largely irrefutable and unprovable;
no one knows certainly why the ice comes, why it goes. The Snow of Ignorance
remains untrodden.

Over Drumner in the dark now a great table of dull fire burns.

Eps Thanern. The meter reads sixteen miles hauled today, but we are not more
than eight miles in a straight line from last night's camp. We are still in the
icepass between the two volcanoes. Drumner is in eruption. Worms of fire crawl
down its black sides, seen when wind clears off the roil and seethe of ash-cloud
and smoke-cloud and white steam. Continuously, with no pause, a hissing mutter
fills the air, so huge and so long a sound that one cannot hear it when one stops
to listen; yet it fills all the interstices of one's being. The glacier trembles
perpetually, snaps and crashes, jitters under our feet. All the snowbridges that
the blizzard may have laid across crevasses are gone, shaken down, knocked in
by this drumming and jumping of the ice and the earth beneath the ice. We go
back and forth, seeking the end of a slit in the ice that would swallow the sledge
whole, then seeking the end of the next, trying to go north and forced always to
go west or east. Above us Dremegole, in sympathy with Drumner's labor, grumbles
and farts foul smoke.

Ai's face was badly frostbitten this morning, nose, ears, chin all dead gray
when I chanced to look at him. Kneaded him back to life and no damage done,
but we must be more careful. The wind that blows down off the Ice is, in simple
truth, deadly; and we have to face it as we haul.

I shall be glad to get off this slit and wrinkled ice-arm between two growling
monsters. Mountains should be seen, not heard.

Arhad Thanern. Some sove-snow, between 15 and 20°. We went twelve miles
today, about five of them profitable, and the rim of the Gobrin is visibly nearer,
north, above us. We now see the ice-river to be miles wide: the “arm” between
Drumner and Dremegole is only one finger, and we now are on the back of the
hand. Turning and looking down from this camp one sees the glacier-flow split,
divided, torn and churned by the black steaming peaks that thwart it. Looking
ahead one sees it broaden, rising and curving slowly, dwarfing the dark ridges
of earth, meeting the ice-wall far above under veils of cloud and smoke and snow.
Cinders and ash now fall with the snow, and the ice is thick with clinkers on it
or sunk in it: a good walking surface but rather rough for hauling, and the runners
need recoating already. Two or three times volcanic projectiles hit the ice quite
near us. They hiss loudly as they strike, and burn themselves a socket in the
ice. Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infmitesimally northward
through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself.

Praise then Creation unfinished!

Netherhad Thanern. No snow since morning; overcast and windy, at about 15°.
The great multiple glacier we are on feeds down into the valley from the
west, and we are on its extreme eastern edge. Dremegole and Drumner are now
somewhat behind us, though a sharp ridge of Dremegole still rises east of us,
almost at eyelevel. We have crept and crawled up to a point where we must
choose between following the glacier on its long sweep westward and so up
gradually onto the plateau of ice, or climbing the ice-cliffs a mile north of
tonight's camp, and so saving twenty or thirty miles of hauling, at the cost of
risk.

Ai favors the risk.

There is a frailty about him. He is all unprotected, exposed, vulnerable, even
to his sexual organ which he must carry always outside himself; but he is strong,
unbelievably strong. I am not sure he can keep hauling any longer than I can, but
he can haul harder and faster than I--twice as hard. He can lift the sledge at
front or rear to ease it over an obstacle. I could not lift and hold that weight,
unless I was in dothe. To match his frailty and strength, he has a spirit easy to
despair and quick to defiance: a fierce impatient courage. This slow, hard,
crawling work we have been doing these days wears him out in body and will, so
that if he were one of my race I should think him a coward, but he is anything
but that; he has a ready bravery I have never seen the like of. He is ready, ea-
ger, to stake life on the cruel quick test of the precipice.

"Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords." He makes fear serve him. I would
have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with
him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are
senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.

Streth Thanern. No luck. No way to get the sledge up, though we spent the
day at it.

Sove-snow in flurries, thick ash mixed with it. It was dark all day, as the wind
veering around from the west again blew the pall of Drumner's smoke on us. Up
here the ice shakes less, but there came a great quake while we tried to climb a
shelving cliff; it shook free the sledge where we had wedged it and I was pulled
down five or six feet with a bump, but Ai had a good handhold and his strength
saved us from all careering down to the foot of the cliff, twenty feet or more. If
one of us breaks a leg or shoulder in these exploits, that is probably the end of
both of us; there, precisely, is the risk--rather an ugly one when looked at
closely. The lower valley of the glaciers behind us is white with steam: lava
touches ice, down there. We certainly cannot go back. Tomorrow we shall try
the ascent farther west.

Beren Thanern. No luck. We must go farther west. Dark as late twilight all
day. Our lungs are raw, not from cold (it remains well above zero even at night,
with this west wind) but from breathing the ash and fumes of the eruption. By
the end of this second day of wasted effort, scrabbling and squirming over
pressure-blocks and up ice-cliffs always to be stopped by a sheer face or
overhang, trying farther on and failing again, Ai was exhausted and enraged. He
looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or
shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he
hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual--
how can I guess why Ai must not weep? Yet his name is a cry of pain. For that I
first sought him out in Erhenrang, a long time ago it seems now; hearing talk of
“an Alien” I asked his name, and heard for answer a cry of pain from a human
throat across the night. Now he sleeps. His arms tremble and twitch, muscular
fatigue. The world around us, ice and rock, ash and snow, fire and dark, trem-
bles and twitches and mutters. Looking out a minute ago I saw the glow of the
volcano as a dull red bloom on the belly of vast clouds overhanging the
darkness.

Orny Thanern. No luck. This is the twenty-second day of our journey, and
since the tenth day we have made no progress eastward, indeed have lost twenty
or twenty-five miles by going west; since the eighteenth day we have made no
progress of any kind, and might as well have sat still. If we ever do get up on
the Ice, will we have food enough left to take us across it? This thought is hard
to dismiss. Fog and murk of the eruption cut seeing very close, so that we cannot
choose our path well. Ai wants to attack each ascent, however steep, that shows
any sign of shelving. He is impatient with my caution. We have got to watch our
tempers. I will be in kemmer in a day or so, and all strains will increase. Mean-
while we butt our heads on cliffs of ice in a cold dusk full of ashes. If I wrote
a new Yomesh Canon I should send thieves here after death. Thieves who steal
sacks of food by night in Turuf. Thieves who steal a man's hearth and name
from him and send him out ashamed and exiled. My head is thick, I must cross
out all this stuff later, too tired to reread it now.

Harhahad Thanern. On the Gobrin. The twenty-third day of our journey. We
are on the Gobrin Ice. As soon as we set out this morning we saw, only a few
hundred yards beyond last night's camp, a pathway open up to the Ice, a highway
curving broad and cinder-paved from the rubble and chasms of the glacier right
up through the cliffs of ice. We walked up it as if strolling along the Sess
Embankment. We are on the Ice. We are headed east again, homeward.

I am infected by Ai's pure pleasure in our achievement. Looked at soberly it
is as bad as ever, up here. We are on the plateau's rim. Crevasses--some wide
enough to sink villages in, not house by house but all at once--run inland,
northward, right out of sight. Most of them cut across our way, so we too must
go north, not east. The surface is bad. We screw the sledge along amongst great
lumps and chunks of ice, immense debris pushed up by the straining of the great
plastic sheet of ice against and among the Fire-Hills. The broken pressure-ridges
take queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults. A mile thick to
start with, the Ice here rises and thickens, trying to flow over the mountains and
choke the fire-mouths with silence. Some miles to the north a peak rises up out
of the Ice, the sharp graceful barren cone of a young volcano: younger by thou-
sands of years than the ice-sheet that grinds and shoves, all shattered into
chasms and jammed up into great blocks and ridges, over the six thousand feet
of lower slopes we cannot see.

During the day, turning, we saw the smoke of Drumner's eruption hang behind
us like a gray-brown extension of the surface of the Ice. A steady wind blows
along at ground level from the northeast, clearing this higher air of the soot and
stink of the planet's bowels which we have breathed for days, flattening out the
smoke behind us to cover, like a dark lid, the glaciers, the lower mountains, the
valleys of stones, the rest of the earth. There is nothing, the Ice says, but Ice.
But the young volcano there to northward has another word it thinks of saying.

No snowfall, a thin high overcast. -4° on the plateau at dusk. A jumble of
firn, new ice, and old ice underfoot. The new ice is tricky, slick blue stuff just
hidden by a white glaze. We have both been down a good deal. I slid fifteen feet
on my belly across one such slick. Ai, in harness, doubled up laughing. He
apologized and explained he had thought himself the only person on Gethen who
ever slipped on ice.

Thirteen miles today; but if we try to keep up such a pace among these cut,
heaped, crevassed pressure-ridges we shall wear ourselves out or come to worse
grief than a bellyslide.

The waxing moon is low, dull as dry blood; a great brownish, iridescent halo
surrounds it.

Guyrny Thanern. Some snow, rising wind and falling temperature. Thirteen miles
again today, which brings our distance logged since we left our first camp to
254 miles. We have averaged about ten and a half miles a day; eleven and a
half omitting the two days spent waiting out the blizzard. 75 to 100 of those
miles of hauling gave us no onward gain. We are not much nearer Karhide than
we were when we set out. But we stand a better chance, I think, of getting there.

Since we came up out of the volcano-murk our spirit is not all spent in work
and worry, and we talk again in the tent after our dinner. As I am in kemmer I
would find it easier to ignore Ai's presence, but this is difficult in a two-man
tent. The trouble is of course that he is, in his curious fashion, also in kemmer:
always in kemmer. A strange lowgrade sort of desire it must be, to be spread out
over every day of the year and never to know the choice of sex, but there it is;
and here am I. Tonight my extreme physical awareness of him was rather hard to
ignore, and I was too tired to divert it into untrance or any other channel of the
discipline. Finally he asked, had he offended me? I explained my silence, with
some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more
an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am: up here on the Ice each of us is singular,
isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from
his. There is no world full of other Gethenians here to explain and support my
existence. We are equals at last, equal, alien, alone. He did not laugh, of course.
Rather he spoke with a gentleness that I did not know was in him. After a while
he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.

"Your race is appallingly alone in its world. No other mammalian species. No
other ambisexual species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as
pets. It must color your thinking, this uniqueness. I don't mean scientific think-
ing only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers-it's extraordinary that you
arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between
yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so
solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook."

"The Yomeshta would say that man's singularity is his divinity."

"Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same
conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking
cultures.

Orgoreyn is in the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing
things around. What do the Handdarata say?"

"Well, in the Handdara ...you know, there's no theory, no dogma...Maybe
they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied
with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part."
Tormer's Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,

Light is the left hand of darkness
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the
letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.

Ai brooded, and after some time he said, "You're isolated, and undivided.
Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism."

"We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn't it? So long as there is
myself and the other."

"I and Thou," he said. "Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex..."

"Tell me, how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?"

He looked startled and in fact my question rather startled me; kemmer brings
out these spontaneities in one. We were both self-conscious. "I never thought of
that," he said. "You've never seen a woman." He used his Terran-language word,
which I knew.

"I saw your pictures of them. The women looked like pregnant Gethenians,
but with larger breasts. Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior?
Are they like a different species?"

"No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important.
I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life,
is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's
expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners--almost everything. Voc-
abulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women...women tend to eat
less...It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned
ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still
after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing..."

"Equality is not the general rule, then? Are they mentally inferior?"

"I don't know. They don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers
of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn't that they're stupid.
Physically they're less muscular, but a little more durable than men.

Psychologically--"

After he had stared a long time at the glowing stove, he shook his head.

"Harth," he said, "I can't tell you what women are like. I never thought about
it much in the abstract, you know, and--God!--by now I've practically forgotten.
I've been here two years...You don't know. In a sense, women are more alien to
me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow..." He looked away and laughed,
rueful and uneasy. My own feelings were complex, and we let the matter drop.

Yrny Thanern. Eighteen miles today, east-northeast by compass, on skis. We
got clear of the pressure-ridges and crevasses in the first hour of pulling. Both
got in harness, I ahead at first with the probe, but no more need for testing: the
firn is a couple of feet thick over solid ice, and on the firn lie several inches
of sound new snow from the last fall, with a good surface. Neither we nor the
sledge broke through at all, and the sledge pulled so light that it was hard to
believe we are still hauling about a hundred pounds apiece. During the afternoon
we took turns hauling, as one can do it easily on this splendid surface. It is a pity
that all the hard work uphill and over rock came while the load was heavy. Now
we go light. Too light: I find myself thinking about food a good deal. We eat, Ai
says, ethereally. All day we went light and fast over the level ice-plain, dead
white under a gray-blue sky, unbroken except for the few black nunatak-peaks
now far behind us, and a smudge of darkness, Drumner's breath, behind them.
Nothing else: the veiled sun, the ice.

17. An Orgota Creation Myth

The origins of this myth are prehistorical; it has been recorded in many
forms. This very primitive version is from a pre-Yomesh written text
found in the Isenpeth Cave Shrine of the Gobrin Hinterlands.

IN THE beginning there was nothing but ice and the sun. Over
many years the sun shining melted a great crevasse in the ice. In
the sides of this crevasse were great shapes of ice, and there was
no bottom to it. Drops of water melted from the ice-shapes in the
sides of the chasm and fell down and down. One of the ice shapes
said, "I bleed." Another of the ice-shapes said, "I weep." A third
one said, "I sweat."

The ice-shapes climbed up out of the abyss and stood on the
plain of ice. He that said "I bleed," he reached up to the sun
and pulled out handfuls of excrement from the bowels of the sun,
and with that dung made the hills and valleys of the earth. He
that said "I weep," he breathed on the ice and melting it made
the seas and the rivers. He that said "I sweat," he gathered up
soil and sea-water and with them made trees, plants, herbs and
grains of the field, animals, and men. The plants grew in the soil
and the sea, the beasts ran on the land and swam in the sea, but
the men did not wake. Thirty-nine of them there were. They slept
on the ice and would not move.

Then the three ice-shapes stooped down and sat with their
knees drawn up and let the sun melt them. As milk they melted,
and the milk ran into the mouths of the sleepers, and the sleep-
ers woke. That milk is drunk by the children of men alone and
without it they will not wake to life.

The first to wake up was Edondurath. So tall was he that when
he stood up his head split the sky, and snow fell down. He
saw the others stirring and awakening, and was afraid of them
when they moved, so he killed one after another with a blow of
his fist. Thirty-six of them he killed. But one of them, the next
to last one, ran away. Haharath he was called. Far he ran over the
plain of ice and over the lands of earth. Edondurath ran behind
him and caught up with him at last and smote him. Haharath died.
Then Edondurath returned to the Birthplace on the Gobrin Ice where
the bodies of the others lay, but the last one was gone: he had
escaped while Edondurath pursued Haharath.

Edondurath built a house of the frozen bodies of his brothers,
and waited there inside that house for that last one to come
back. Each day one of the corpses would speak, saying, "Does
he burn? Does he burn?" All the other corpses would say with
frozen tongues, "No, no." Then Edondurath entered kemmer as
he slept, and moved and spoke aloud in dreams, and when he
woke the corpses were all saying, "He burns! He burns!" And
the last brother, the youngest one, heard them saying that,
and came into the house of bodies and there coupled with Ed-
ondurath. Of these two were the nations of men born, out of
the flesh of Edondurath, out of Edondurath's womb. The name
of the other, the younger brother, the father, his name is not
known.

Each of the children born to them had a piece of darkness that
followed him about wherever he went by daylight. Edondurath
said, "Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?" His kemmer-
ing said, "Because they were born in the house of flesh, there-
fore death follows at their heels. They are in the middle of
time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there
was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour
itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing
left but the ice and the darkness."

18. On the Ice

SOMETIMES as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a
great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my
face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of
blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut
off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness
and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sound of the snow; barely audible,
Estraven's breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two
of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the
great darkness, the cold, death's solitude.

In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real
center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent,
the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.

I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge
across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often
anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy.
Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was
the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the
time; I mean joy.

I always woke up first, usually before daylight. My metabolic rate is slightly
over the Gethenian norm, as are my height and weight; Estraven had figured
these differences into the food-ration calculations, in his scrupulous way which
one could see as either housewifely or scientific, and from the start I had had
a couple of ounces more food per day than he. Protests of injustice fell silent
before the self-evident justice of this unequal division. However divided, the
share was small. I was hungry, constantly hungry, daily hungrier. I woke up
because I was hungry.

If it was still dark I turned up the light of the Chabe stove, and put a pan
of ice brought in the night before, now thawed, on the stove to boil. Estraven
meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if
he wrestled with an angel. Winning, he sat up, stared at me vaguely, shook his
head, and woke. By the time we were dressed and booted and had the bags rolled
up, breakfast was ready: a mug of boiling hot orsh, and one cube of gichy-michy
expanded by hot water into a sort of small, doughy bun. We chewed slowly,
solemnly, retrieving all dropped crumbs. The stove cooled as we ate. We packed
it up with the pan and mugs, pulled on our hooded overcoats and our mittens,
and crawled out into the open air. The coldness of it was perpetually incredible.
Every morning I had to believe it all over again. If one had been outside to
relieve oneself already, the second exit was only harder.

Sometimes it was snowing; sometimes the long light of early day lay wonder-
fully gold and blue across the miles of ice; most often it was gray.

We brought the thermometer into the tent with us, nights, and when we took it
outside it was interesting to watch the pointer swing to the right (Gethenian
dials read counterclockwise) almost too fast to follow, registering a drop of
twenty, fifty, eighty degrees, till it stopped somewhere between zero and -60°.

One of us collapsed the tent and folded it while the other loaded stove, bags,
etc. onto the sledge; the tent was strapped over all, and we were ready for skis
and harness. Little metal was used in our straps and fittings, but the harnesses
had buckles of aluminum alloy, too fine to fasten with mittens on, which burned
in that cold exactly as if they were redhot. I had to be very careful of my fingers
when the temperature was below minus twenty, especially if the wind blew, for I
could pick up a frostbite amazingly fast. My feet never suffered--and that is a
factor of major importance, in a winter-journey where an hour's exposure can,
after all, cripple one for a week or for life. Estraven had had to guess my size
and the snowboots he got me were a little large, but extra socks filled the
discrepancy. We put on our skis, got into harness as quick as possible, bucked
and pried and jolted the sledge free if its runners were frozen in, and set off.

Mornings after heavy snowfall we might have to spend some while digging out the
tent and sledge before we could set off. The new snow was not hard to shovel
away, though it made great impressive drifts around us, who were, after all,
the only impediment for hundreds of miles, the only thing sticking out above
the ice.

We pulled eastward by the compass. The usual direction of the wind was north
to south, off the glacier. Day after day it blew from our left as we went.
The hood did not suffice against that wind, and I wore a facial mask to protect
my nose and left cheek. Even so my left eye froze shut one day, and I thought I
had lost the use of it: even when Estraven thawed it open with breath and tongue,
I could not see with it for some while, so probably more had been frozen than
the lashes. In sunlight both of us wore the Gethenian slit-screen eyeshields, and
neither of us suffered any snowblindness. We had small opportunity. The Ice, as
Estraven had said, tends to hold a high-pressure zone above its central area,
where thousands of square miles of white reflect the sunlight. We were not in
this central zone, however, but at best on the edge of it, between it and the zone
of turbulent, deflected, precipitation-laden storms that it sends continually to
torment the subglacial lands. Wind from due north brought bare, bright weather,
but from northeast or northwest it brought snow, or harrowed up dry fallen snow
into blinding, biting clouds like sand or dust-storms, or else, sinking almost to
nothing, crept in sinuous trails along the surface, leaving the sky white, the air
white, no visible sun, no shadow: and the snow itself, the Ice, disappeared from
under our feet.

Around midday we would halt, and cut and set up a few blocks of ice for a protect-
ive wall if the wind was strong. We heated water to soak a cube of gichy-michy in,
and drank the water hot, sometimes with a bit of sugar melted in it; harnessed
up again and went on.

We seldom talked while on the march or at lunch, for our lips were sore, and
when one's mouth was open the cold got inside, hurting teeth and throat and
lungs; it was necessary to keep the mouth closed and breathe through the nose,
at least when the air was forty or fifty degrees below freezing. When it went
on lower than that, the whole breathing process was further complicated by the
rapid freezing of one's exhaled breath; if you didn't look out your nostrils
might freeze shut, and then to keep from suffocating you would gasp in a lung-
ful of razors.

Under certain conditions our exhalations freezing instantly made a tiny crack-
ling noise, like distant firecrackers, and a shower of crystals: each breath a
snowstorm.

We pulled till we were tired out or till it began to grow dark, halted, set up the
tent, pegged down the sledge if there was threat of high wind, and settled in for
the night. On a usual day we would have pulled for eleven or twelve hours, and
made between twelve and eighteen miles.

It does not seem a very good rate, but then conditions were a bit adverse. The
crust of the snow was seldom right for both skis and sledge-runners. When it
was light and new the sledge ran through rather than over it; when it was partly
hardened, the sledge would stick but we on skis would not, which meant that we
were perpetually being pulled up backward with a jolt; and when it was hard it
was often heaped up in long wind-waves, sastrugi, that in some places ran up to
four feet high. We had to haul the sledge up and over each knife-edged or fan-
tastically corniced top, then slide her down, and up over the next one: for they
never seemed to run parallel to our course. I had imagined the Gobrin Ice Pla-
teau to be all one sheet like a frozen pond, but there were hundreds of miles
of it that were rather like an abruptly frozen, storm-raised sea.

The business of setting up camp, making everything secure, getting all the
clinging snow off one's outer clothing, and so on, was trying. Sometimes it did
not seem worthwhile. It was so late, so cold, one was so tired, that it would be
much easier to lie down in a sleeping-bag in the lee of the sledge and not bother
with the tent. I remember how clear this was to me on certain evenings, and how
bitterly I resented my companion's methodical, tyrannical insistence that we do
everything and do it correctly and thoroughly. I hated him at such times, with a
hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the
harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.

When all was done we could enter the tent, and almost at once the heat of the
Chabe stove could be felt as an enveloping, protecting ambiance. A marvelous
thing surrounded us: warmth. Death and cold were elsewhere, outside.

Hatred was also left outside. We ate and drank. After we ate, we talked. When
the cold was extreme, even the excellent insulation of the tent could not keep it
out, and we lay in our bags as close to the stove as possible. A little fur of
frost gathered on the inner surface of the tent. To open the valve was to let in
a draft of cold that instantly condensed, filling the tent with a swirling mist
of fine snow. When there was blizzard, needles of icy air blew in through the
vents, elaborately protected as they were, and an impalpable dust of snow-motes
fogged the air. On those nights the storm made an incredible noise, and we could
not converse by voice, unless we shouted with our heads together. On other nights
it was still, with such a stillness as one imagines as existing before the stars
began to form, or after everything has perished.

Within an hour after our evening meal Estraven turned the stove down, if it
was feasible to do so, and turned the light-emission off. As he did so he
murmured a short and charming grace of invocation, the only ritual words I had
ever learned of the Handdara: “Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,”
he said, and there was darkness. We slept. In the morning it was all to do over.
We did it over for fifty days. Estraven kept up his journal, though during the
weeks on the Ice he seldom wrote more than a note of the weather and the dis-
tance we had come that day. Among these notes there is occasional mention of
his own thoughts or of some of our conversation, but not a word concerning the
profounder conversation between us which occupied our rest between dinner and
sleep on many nights of the first month on the Ice, while we still had enough
energy to talk, and on certain days that we spent storm-bound in the tent. I told
him that I was not forbidden, but not expected, to use paraverbal speech on a
non-Ally planet, and asked him to keep what he learned from his own people, at
least until I could discuss what I had done with my colleagues on the ship. He
assented, and kept his word. He never said or wrote anything concerning our
silent conversations.

Mindspeech was the only thing I had to give Estraven, out of all my civiliza-
tion, my alien reality in which he was so profoundly interested. I could talk
and describe endlessly; but that was all I had to give. Indeed it may be the
only important thing we have to give to Winter. But I can't say that gratitude
was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my
debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the
point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing.

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian
double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such inter-
course will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I
proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. The nearest to crisis that
our sexual desires brought us was on a night early in the journey, our second
night up on the Ice. We had spent all day struggling and backtracking in the cut
up, crevassed area east of the Fire-Hills. We were tired that evening but elated,
sure that a clear course would soon open out ahead. But after dinner Estraven
grew taciturn, and cut my talk off short. I said at last after a direct rebuff,
"Harth, I've said something wrong again, please tell me what it is." He was silent.
"I've made some mistake in shifgrethor. I'm sorry; I can't learn. I've never
even really understood the meaning of the word."

"Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow." We were both silent for
a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the
reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who
looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.

And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and
had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any
need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left
with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him,
refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only
person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he
was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked
me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had
demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been
willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust,
my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

He explained, stiffly and simply, that he was in kemmer and had been trying
to avoid me, insofar as one of us could avoid the other. "I must not touch
you," he said, with extreme constraint; saying that he looked away.

I said, "I understand. I agree completely."

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension
between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and
sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed
by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our
bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was
from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from
the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge,
across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once
more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at
that. I do not know if we were right.

We talked some more that night, and I recall being very hard put to it to an-
swer coherently when he asked me what women were like. We were both rather
stiff and cautious with each other for the next couple of days. A profound
love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing
profound hurt. It would never have occurred to me before that night that I
could hurt Estraven.

Now that the barriers were down, the limitation, in my terms, of our converse
and understanding seemed intolerable to me. Quite soon, two or three nights
later, I said to my companion as we finished our dinner--a special treat, sugared
kadik-porridge, to celebrate a twenty-mile run--"Last spring, that night in the
Corner Red Dwelling, you said you wished I'd tell you more about paraverbal
speech."

"Yes, I did."

"Do you want to see if I can teach you how to speak it?"

He laughed. "You want to catch me lying."

"If you ever lied to me, it was long ago, and in another country."

He was an honest person, but rarely a direct one. That tickled him, and he
said, "In another country I may tell you other lies. But I thought you were
forbidden to teach your mind-science to...the natives, until we join the
Ekumen."

"Not forbidden. It's not done. I'll do it, though, if you like. And if I can.
I'm no Educer."

"There are special teachers of the skill?"

"Yes. Not on Alterra, where there's a high occurrence of natural sensitivity,
and--they say--mothers mindspeak to their unborn babies. I don't know what
the babies answer. But most of us have to be taught, as if it were a foreign
language. Or rather as if it were our native language, but learned very late."
I think he understood my motive in offering to teach him the skill, and he
wanted very much to learn it. We had a go at it. I recalled what I could of how I
had been educed, at age twelve. I told him to clear his mind, let it be dark. This
he did, no doubt, more promptly and thoroughly than I ever had done: he was an
adept of the Handdara, after all. Then I mindspoke to him as clearly as I could.
No result. We tried it again. Since one cannot bespeak until one has been
bespoken, until the telepathic potentiality has been sensitized by one clear
reception, I had to get through to him first. I tried for half an hour, till I felt
hoarse of brain. He looked crestfallen. "I thought it would be easy for me," he
confessed. We were both tired out, and called the attempt off for the night.
Our next efforts were no more successful. I tried sending to Estraven while he
slept, recalling what my Educer had told me about the occurrence of "dream
messages" among pre-telepathic peoples, but it did not work.

"Perhaps my species lacks the capacity," he said. "We have enough rumors
and hints to have made up a word for the power, but I don't know of any proven
instances of telepathy among us."

"So it was with my people for thousands of years. A few natural Sensitives,
not comprehending their gift, and lacking anyone to receive from or send to. All
the rest latent, if that. You know I told you that except in the case of the born
Sensitive, the capacity, though it has a physiological basis, is a psychological
one, a product of culture, a side-effect of the use of the mind. Young children,
and defectives, and members of un-evolved or regressed societies, can't
mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can't
build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has
to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction,
intricate cultural adjustments, esthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to
reach a certain level before the connections can be made--before the potentiality
can be touched at all."

"Perhaps we Gethenians haven't attained that level."

"You're far beyond it. But luck is involved. As in the creation of amino
acids...Or to take analogies on the cultural plane--only analogies, but they
illuminate--the scientific method, for instance, the use of concrete, experi-
mental techniques in science. There are peoples of the Ekumen who possess a high
culture, a complex society, philosophies, arts, ethics, a high style and a great
achievement in all those fields; and yet they have never learned to weigh a stone
accurately. They can learn how, of course. Only for half a million years they
never did...There are peoples who have no higher mathematics at all, nothing
beyond the simplest applied arithmetic. Every one of them is capable of under-
standing the calculus, but not one of them does or ever has. As a matter of
fact, my own people, the Terrans, were ignorant until about three thousand years
ago of the uses of zero." That made Estraven blink. "As for Gethen, what I'm
curious about is whether the rest of us may find ourselves to have the capacity
for Foretelling--whether this too is a part of the evolution of the mind--if
you'll teach us the techniques."

"You think it a useful accomplishment?"

"Accurate prophecy? Well, of course!--"

"You might have to come to believe that it's a useless one, in order to practice
it."

"Your Handdara fascinates me, Harth, but now and then I wonder if it isn't
simply paradox developed into a way of life..."

We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-
receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist
praying. Presently Estraven yawned and said, "I am deaf, deaf as a rock. We'd
better sleep." I assented. He turned out the light, murmuring his brief praise of
darkness; we burrowed down into our bags, and within a minute or two he was
sliding into sleep as a swimmer slides into dark water. I felt his sleep as if it
were my own: the empathic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him,
sleepily, by his name--"Therem!"

He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud.
"Arek! is that you?"

"No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you."

His breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light,
stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. "I dreamed," he said, "I thought
I was at home--"

"You heard me mindspeak."

"You called me-- It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He's dead. You
called me--you called me Therem? I...This is more terrible than I had thought."
He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off nightmare, and then put his face
in his hands.

"Harth, I'm very sorry--"

"No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man's
voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me 'Harth’? Oh,
I see why there's no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing...All right.
All right, speak to me again."

"Wait."

"No. Go on."

With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: "Therem, my friend,
there's nothing to fear between us."

He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had.
"Ah, but there is," he said.

After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, "You spoke in my language."

"Well, you don't know mine."

"You said there would be words, I know...Yet I imagined it as--an
understanding--"

"Empathy's another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection
tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centers of the brain are activated,
as well as--"

"No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother's voice?" His
voice was strained.

"That I can't answer. I don't know. Tell me about him."

"Nusuth...My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Estraven. He was a year older
than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We...I left home, you know, for his
sake. He has been dead fourteen years."

We were both silent for some time. I could not know, or ask, what lay behind
his words: it had cost him too much to say the little he had said.

I said at last, "Bespeak me, Therem. Call me by my name." I knew he could:
the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and
of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily. Had I
been a Listener, I could have heard him think.

"No," he said. "Never. Not yet..."

But no amount of shock, awe, terror could restrain that insatiable, outreaching
mind for long. After he had cut out the light again I suddenly heard his stammer
in my inward hearing--"Genry--" Even mindspeaking he never could say “l”
properly.

I replied at once. In the dark he made an inarticulate sound of fear that had in
it a slight edge of satisfaction. "No more, no more," he said aloud. After a while
we got to sleep at last.

It never came easy to him. Not that he lacked the gift or could not develop the
skill, but it disturbed him profoundly, and he could not take it for granted. He
quickly learned to set up the barriers, but I'm not sure he felt he could count on
them. Perhaps all of us were so, when the first Educers came back centuries ago
from Rokanon's World teaching the "Last Art" to us. Perhaps a Gethenian, being
singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness, a
breach of integrity hard for him to tolerate. Perhaps it was Estraven's own
character, in which candor and reserve were both strong: every word he said rose
out of a deeper silence. He heard my voice bespeaking him as a dead man's, his
brother's voice. I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between him
and that brother, but I knew that whenever I bespoke him something in him
winced away as if I touched a wound. So that intimacy of mind established
between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much
admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the
darkness.

And day after day we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The midpoint in
time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Anner, found us far
short of our halfway point in space. By the sledge-meter we had indeed traveled
about four hundred miles, but probably only three-quarters of that was real
forward gain, and we could estimate only very roughly how far still remained to
go. We had spent days, miles, rations in our long struggle to get up onto the Ice.
Estraven was not so worried as I by the hundreds of miles that still lay ahead of
us. "The sledge is lighter," he said. "Towards the end it will be still lighter;
and we can cut rations, if necessary. We have been eating very well, you know."

I thought he was being ironic, but I should have known better.

On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard.
During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost
continuously, and ate nothing, though he drank orsh or sugar-water at mealtimes.
He insisted that I eat, though only half-rations. "You have no experience in
starvation," he said.

I was humiliated. "How much have you--Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister--?"

"Genry, we practice privation until we're experts at it. I was taught how to
starve as a child at home in Estre, and by the Handdarata in Rotherer Fastness.
I got out of practice in Erhenrang, true enough, but I began making up for it in
Mishnory...Please do as I say, my friend; I know what I'm doing."

He did, and I did.

We went on for four more days of very bitter cold, never above -25°, and
then came another blizzard whooping up in our faces from the east on a gale
wind. Within two minutes of the first strong gusts the snow blew so thick that I
could not see Estraven six feet away. I had turned my back on him and the
sledge and the plastering, blinding, suffocating snow in order to get my breath,
and when a minute later I turned around he was gone. The sledge was gone.
Nothing was there. I took a few steps to where they had been and felt about. I
shouted, and could not hear my own voice. I was deaf and alone in a universe
filled solid with small stinging gray streaks. I panicked and began to blunder
forward, mindcalling frantically, "Therem!"

Right under my hand, kneeling, he said, "Come on, give me a hand with the
tent."

I did so, and never mentioned my minute of panic. No need to.

This blizzard lasted two days; there were five days lost, and there would be
more. Nimmer and Anner are the months of the great storms.

"We're beginning to cut it rather fine, aren't we," I said one night as
I measured out our gichy-michy ration and put it to soak in hot water.
He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows
under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and
cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled.
"With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not."

It was what he had said from the start. With all my anxieties, my sense of
taking a last desperate gamble, and so on, I had not been realistic enough
to believe him. Even now I thought, Surely when we've worked so hard--
But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is
kept.

"How is your luck running, Therem?" I said at last.

He did not smile at that. Nor did he answer. Only after a while he said, "I've
been thinking about them all, down there." Down there, for us, had come to
mean the south, the world below the plateau of ice, the region of earth, men,
roads, cities, all of which had become hard to imagine as really existing. "You
know that I sent word to the king concerning you, the day I left Mishnory. I told
him what Shusgis told me, that you were going to be sent to Pulefen Farm. At
the time I wasn't clear as to my intent, but merely followed my impulse. I have
thought the impulse through, since. Something like this may happen: The king
will see a chance to play shifgrethor. Tibe will advise against it, but Argaven
should be growing a little tired of Tibe by now, and may ignore his counsel. He
will inquire. Where is the Envoy, the guest of Karhide? --Mishnory will lie. He
died of horm-fever this autumn, most lamentable. --Then how does it happen
that we are informed by our own Embassy that he's in Pulefen Farm? --He's not
there, look for yourselves. --No, no, of course not, we accept the word of the
Commensals of Orgoreyn...But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy
appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in
Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught
lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven,
Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance
you get. Bring your people to Karhide and accomplish your mission, at once,
before Argaven has had time to see the possible enemy in you, before Tibe or
some other councillor frightens him once more, playing on his madness. If he
makes the bargain with you, he will keep it. To break it would be to break his
own shifgrethor. The Harge kings keep their promises. But you must act fast,
and bring the Ship down soon."

"I will, if I receive the slightest sign of welcome."

"No: forgive my advising you, but you must not wait for welcome. You will
be welcomed, I think. So will the Ship. Karhide has been sorely humbled this
past half-year. You will give Argaven the chance to turn the tables. I think he
will take the chance."

"Very well. But you, meanwhile--"

"I am Estraven the Traitor. I have nothing whatever to do with you."

"At first."

"At first," he agreed.

"You'll be able to hide out, if there is danger at first?"

"Oh yes, certainly."

Our food was ready, and we fell to. Eating was so important and engrossing a
business that we never talked any more while we ate; the taboo was now in its
complete, perhaps its original form, not a word said till the last crumb was gone.
When it was, he said, "Well, I hope I've guessed well. You will...you do
forgive..."

"Your giving me direct advice?" I said, for there were certain things I had
finally come to understand. "Of course I do, Therem. Really, how can you doubt
it? You know I have no shifgrethor to waive." That amused him, but he was still
brooding.

"Why," he said at last, "why did you come alone--why were you sent alone?
Everything, still, will depend upon that ship coming. Why was it made so
difficult for you, and for us?"

"It's the Ekumen's custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin
to wonder if I've ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake
that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose
no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But
there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be
changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I
finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is
individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and
They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In
a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers
beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just
the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore,
by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does,
which is in certain senses its model...So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for
my own? I don't know. Yes, it has made things difficult. But I might ask you as
profitably why you've never seen fit to invent airborne vehicles? One small
stolen airplane would have spared you and me a great deal of difficulty!"

"How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?" Estraven said
sternly. It was a fair response, on a world where no living thing is winged, and
the very angels of the Yomesh Hierarchy of the Holy do not fly but only drift,
wingless, down to earth like a soft snow falling, like the windborne seeds of that
flowerless world.

Towards the middle of Nimmer, after much wind and bitter cold, we came into a
quiet weather for many days. If there was storm it was far south of us, down
there, and we inside the blizzard had only an all but windless overcast. At
first the overcast was thin, so that the air was vaguely radiant with an even,
sourceless sunlight reflected from both clouds and snow, from above and below.
Overnight the weather thickened somewhat. All brightness was gone, leaving
nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there,
Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull
light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow
showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing
else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-gray void, in which
we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my
balance. My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I
stood; they got none; I might as well be blind. It was all right while we loaded
up, but hauling, with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to
touch, as it were, it was at first disagreeable and then exhausting. We were on
skis, on a good surface of firn, without sastrugi, and solid--that was certain--for
five or six thousand feet down. We should have been making good time. But we
kept slowing down, groping our way across the totally unobstructed plain, and it
took a strong effort of will to speed up to a normal pace. Every slight variation
in the surface came as a jolt--as in climbing stairs, the unexpected stair or the
expected but absent stair--for we could not see it ahead: there was no shadow to
show it. We skied blind with our eyes open. Day after day was like this, and we
began to shorten our hauls, for by mid-afternoon both of us would be sweating
and shaking with strain and fatigue. I came to long for snow, for blizzard, for
anything; but morning after morning we came out of the tent into the void, the
white weather, what Estraven called the Unshadow.

One day about noon, Odorny Nimmer, the sixty-first day of the journey, that
bland blind nothingness about us began to flow and writhe. I thought my eyes
were fooling me, as they had been doing often, and paid scant attention to the
dim meaningless commotion of the air until, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a
small, wan, dead sun overhead. And looking down from the sun, straight ahead, I
saw a huge black shape come hulking out of the void towards us. Black tentacles
writhed upwards, groping out. I stopped dead in my tracks, slewing Estraven
around on his skis, for we were both in harness hauling. "What is it?"

He stared at the dark monstrous forms hidden in the fog, and said at last, "The
crags...It must be Esherhoth Crags." And pulled on. We were miles from the
things, which I had taken to be almost within arm's reach. As the white weather
turned to a thick low mist and then cleared off, we saw them plainly before
sunset: nunataks, great scored and ravaged pinnacles of rock jutting up out of the
ice, no more of them showing than shows of an iceberg above the sea: cold
drowned mountains, dead for eons.

They showed us to be somewhat north of our shortest course, if we could trust
the ill-drawn map that was all we had. The next day we turned for the first time a
little south of east.

19. Homecoming

IN A DARK windy weather we slogged along, trying to find encouragement in the
sighting of Esherhoth Crags, the first thing not ice or snow or sky that we
had seen for seven weeks. On the map they were marked as not far from the
Shenshey Bogs to the south, and from Guthen Bay to the east. But it was not
a trustworthy map of the Gobrin area. And we were getting very tired.

We were nearer the southern edge of the Gobrin Glacier than the map indi-
cated, for we began to meet pressure-ice and crevasses on the second day of
our turn southward. The Ice was not so upheaved and tormented as in the Fire
Hills region, but it was rotten. There were sunken pits acres across, probably
lakes in summer; false floors of snow that might subside with a huge gasp all
around you into the air-pocket a foot deep beneath; areas all slit and pocked with
little holes and crevasses; and, more and more often, there were big crevasses,
old canyons in the Ice, some wide as mountain gorges and others only two or
three feet across, but deep. On Odyrny Nimmer (by Estraven's journal, for I kept
none) the sun shone clear with a strong north wind. As we ran the sledge across
the snowbridges over narrow crevasses we could look down to left or right into
blue shafts and abysses in which bits of ice dislodged by the runners fell with a
vast, faint, delicate music, as if silver wires touched thin crystal planes, fall-
ing. I remember the racy, dreamy, light-headed pleasure of that morning's haul in
the sunlight over the abysses. But the sky began to whiten, the air to grow thick;
shadows faded, blue drained out of the sky and snow. We were not alert to the
danger of white weather on such a surface. As the ice was heavily corrugated, I
was pushing while Estraven pulled; I had my eyes on the sledge and was shoving
away, mind on nothing but how best to shove, when all at once the bar was
nearly wrenched out of my grip as the sledge shot forward in a sudden lunge. I
held on by instinct and shouted "Hey!" to Estraven to slow him down, thinking
he had speeded up on a smooth patch. But the sledge stopped dead, tilted nose
down, and Estraven was not there.

I almost let go the sledge-bar to go look for him. It was pure luck that I did
not. I held on, while I stared stupidly about for him, and so I saw the lip of
the crevasse, made visible by the shifting and dropping of another section of
the broken snowbridge. He had gone right down feet-first, and nothing kept
the sledge from following him but my weight, which held the rear third of the
runners still on solid ice. It kept tipping a little farther nose-downward,
pulled by his weight as he hung in harness in the pit.

I brought my weight down on the rear-bar and pulled and rocked and levered
the sledge back away from the edge of the crevasse. It did not come easy. But
I threw my weight hard on the bar and tugged until it began grudgingly to move,
and then slid abruptly right away from the crevasse. Estraven had got his
hands onto the edge, and his weight now aided me. Scrambling, dragged by the
harness, he came up over the edge and collapsed face down on the ice.

I knelt by him trying to unbuckle his harness, alarmed by the way he sprawled
there, passive except for the great gasping rise and fall of his chest. His
lips were cyanotic, one side of his face was bruised and scraped.

He sat up unsteadily and said in a whistling whisper, "Blue--all blue--
Towers in the depths--"

"What?"

"In the crevasse. All blue--full of light."

"Are you all right?"

He started rebuckling his harness.

"You go ahead--on the rope--with the stick," he gasped. "Pick the route."

For hours one of us hauled while the other guided, mincing along like a cat on
eggshells, sounding every step in advance with the stick. In the white weather
one could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it--a little late, for
the edges overhung, and were not always solid. Every footfall was a surprise, a
drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along
inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing
was outside it. But there were cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe and step.
Probe for the invisible cracks through which one might fall out of the white glass
ball, and fall, and fall, and fall...An unrelaxable tension little by little took
hold of all my muscles. It became exceedingly difficult to take even one more step.

"What's up, Genry?"

I stood there in the middle of nothing. Tears came out and froze my eyelids
together. I said, "I'm afraid of falling."

"But you're on the rope," he said. Then, coming up and seeing that there was
no crevasse anywhere visible, he saw what was up and said, "Pitch camp."
"It's not time yet, we ought to go on."

He was already unlashing the tent.

Later on, after we had eaten, he said, "It was time to stop. I don't think we can
go this way. The Ice seems to drop off slowly, and will be rotten and crevassed
all the way. If we could see, we could make it: but not in unshadow."

"But then how do we get down onto the Shenshey Bogs?"

"Well, if we keep east again instead of trending south, we might be on sound
ice clear to Guthen Bay. I saw the Ice once from a boat on the Bay in summer.
It comes up against the Red Hills, and feeds down in ice-rivers to the Bay. If
we came down one of those glaciers we could run due south on the sea-ice to
Karhide, and so enter at the coast rather than the border, which might be
better. It will add some miles to our way, though-- something between twenty
and fifty, I should think. What's your opinion, Genry?"

"My opinion is that I can't go twenty more feet so long as the white weather
lasts."

"But if we get out of the crevassed area..."

"Oh, if we get out of the crevasses I'll be fine. And if the sun ever comes out
again, you get on the sledge and I'll give you a free ride to Karhide." That was
typical of our attempts at humor, at this stage of the journey; they were always
very stupid, but sometimes they made the other fellow smile. "There's nothing
wrong with me," I went on, "except acute chronic fear."

"Fear's very useful. Like darkness; like shadows." Estraven's smile was an ugly
split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with
two flecks of black rock. "It's queer that daylight's not enough. We need the
shadows, in order to walk."

"Give me your notebook a moment."

He had just noted down our day's journey and done some calculation of mile-
age and rations. He pushed the little tablet and carbon-pencil around the
Chabe stove to me. On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the
double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then
pushed it back to my companion. "Do you know that sign?"

He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, "No."

"It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and
yang. Light is the left hand of darkness...how did it go? Light, dark. Fear,
courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A
shadow on snow."

The next day we trudged northeast through the white absence of everything un-
til there were no longer any cracks in the floor of nothing: a day's haul. We
were on 2⁄3 ration, hoping to keep the longer route from running us right out of
food. It seemed to me that it would not matter much if it did, as the difference
between little and nothing seemed a rather fine one. Estraven, however, was on
the track of his luck, following what appeared to be hunch or intuition, but may
have been applied experience and reasoning. We went east for four days, four of
the longest hauls we had made, eighteen to twenty miles a day, and then the
quiet zero weather broke and went to pieces, turning into a whirl, whirl, whirl
of tiny snow-particles ahead, behind, to the side, in the eyes, a storm beginn-
ing as the light died. We lay in the tent for three days while the blizzard yell-
ed at us, a three-day-long, wordless, hateful yell from the unbreathing lungs.

"It'll drive me to screaming back," I said to Estraven in mindspeech, and he,
with the hesitant formality that marked his rapport: "No use. It will not listen."

We slept hour after hour, ate a little, tended our frostbites, inflammations, and
bruises, mindspoke, slept again. The three-day shriek died down into a gabbling,
then a sobbing, then a silence. Day broke. Through the opened door-valve the
sky's brightness shone. It lightened the heart, though we were too rundown to be
able to show our relief in alacrity or zest of movement. We broke camp--it took
nearly two hours, for we crept about like two old men--and set off. The way
was downhill, an unmistakable slight grade; the crust was perfect for skis. The
sun shone. The thermometer at midmorning showed -10°. We seemed to get
strength from going, and we went fast and easy. We went that day till the
stars came out.

For dinner Estraven served out full rations. At that rate, we had enough for
only seven days more.

"The wheel turns," he said with serenity. "To make a good run, we've got to
eat."

"Eat, drink, and be merry," said I. The food had got me high. I laughed
inordinately at my own words. "All one-eating-drinking-merrymaking. Can't
have merry without eats, can you?" This seemed to me a mystery quite on a par
with that of the yin-yang circle, but it did not last. Something in Estraven's
expression dispelled it. Then I felt like crying, but refrained. Estraven was
not as strong as I was, and it would not be fair, it might make him cry too. He
was already asleep: he had fallen asleep sitting up, his bowl on his lap. It
was not like him to be so unmethodical. But it was not a bad idea, sleep.

We woke rather late next morning, had a double breakfast, and then got in
harness and pulled our light sledge right off the edge of the world.

Below the world's edge, which was a steep rubbly slope of white and red in a
pallid noon light, lay the frozen sea: the Bay of Guthen, frozen from shore to
shore and from Karhide clear to the North Pole.

To get down onto the sea-ice through the broken edges and shelves and trench-
es of the Ice jammed up amongst the Red Hills took that afternoon and the
next day. On that second day we abandoned our sledge. We made up backpacks;
with the tent as the main bulk of one and the bags of the other, and our food
equally distributed, we had less than twenty-five pounds apiece to carry; I added
the Chabe stove to my pack and still had under thirty. It was good to be released
from forever pulling and pushing and hauling and prying that sledge, and I said
so to Estraven as we went on. He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in
the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. "It did well," he said. His loyalty
extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things
that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.

That evening, the seventy-fifth of our journey, our fifty-first day on the plateau,
Harhahad Anner, we came down off the Gobrin Ice onto the sea-ice of Guthen
Bay. Again we traveled long and late, till dark. The air was very cold, but clear
and still, and the clean ice-surface, with no sledge to pull, invited our skis.
When we camped that night it was strange to think, lying down, that under us
there was no longer a mile of ice, but a few feet of it, and then salt water.
But we did not spend much time thinking. We ate, and slept.

At dawn, again a clear day though terribly cold, below -40°at daybreak, we
could look southward and see the coastline, bulged out here and there with
protruding tongues of glacier, fall away southward almost in a straight line. We
followed it close inshore at first. A north wind helped us along till we skied up
abreast a valley-mouth between two high orange hills; out of that gorge howled a
gale that knocked us both off our feet. We scuttled farther east, out on the level
sea-plain, where we could at least stand up and keep going. "The Gobrin Ice has
spewed us out of its mouth," I said.

The next day, the eastward curve of the coastline was plain, straight ahead of
us. To our right was Orgoreyn, but that blue curve ahead was Karhide.

On that day we used up the last grains of orsh, and the last few ounces of
kadik-germ; we had left now two pounds apiece of gichy-michy, and six ounces
of sugar.

I cannot describe these last days of our journey very well, I find, because I
cannot really remember them. Hunger can heighten perception, but not when
combined with extreme fatigue; I suppose all my senses were very much dead-
ened. I remember having hunger-cramps, but I don't remember suffering from
them. I had, if anything, a vague feeling all the time of liberation, of having got
beyond something, of joy; also of being terribly sleepy. We reached land on
the twelfth, Posthe Anner, and clambered over a frozen beach and into the
rocky, snowy desolation of the Guthen Coast.

We were in Karhide. We had achieved our goal. It came near being an empty
achievement, for our packs were empty. We had a feast of hot water to celebrate
our arrival. The next morning we got up and set off to find a road, a settlement.
It is a desolate region, and we had no map of it. What roads there might be were
under five or ten feet of snow, and we may have crossed several without know-
ing it. There was no sign of cultivation. We strayed south and west that day, and
the next, and on the evening of the next, seeing a light shine on a distant hill-
side through the dusk and thin falling snow, neither of us said anything for
some time. We stood and stared. Finally my companion croaked, "Is that a
light?"

It was long after dark when we came shambling into a Karhidish village, one
street between high-roofed dark houses, the snow packed and banked up to their
winter-doors. We stopped at the hot-shop, through the narrow shutters of which
flowed, in cracks and rays and arrows, the yellow light we had seen across the
hills of winter. We opened the door and went in.

It was Odsordny Anner, the eighty-first day of our journey; we were eleven
days over Estraven's proposed schedule. He had estimated our food supply ex-
actly: seventy-eight days' worth at the outside. We had come 840 miles, by the
sledge-meter plus a guess for the last few days. Many of those miles had been
wasted in backtracking, and if we had really had eight hundred miles to cover we
should never have made it; when we got a good map we figured that the distance
between Pulefen Farm and this village was less than 730 miles. All those miles
and days had been across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky,
and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other.

We entered into a big steaming-hot bright-lit room full of food and the smells
of food, and people and the voices of people. I caught hold of Estraven's
shoulder. Strange faces turned to us, strange eyes. I had forgotten there was
anyone alive who did not look like Estraven. I was terrified.

In fact it was rather a small room, and the crowd of strangers in it was seven
or eight people, all of whom were certainly as taken aback as I was for a while.
Nobody comes to Kurkurast Domain in midwinter from the north at night. They
stared, and peered, and all the voices had fallen silent.

Estraven spoke, a barely audible whisper. "We ask the hospitality of the
Domain."

Noise, buzz, confusion, alarm, welcome.

"We came over the Gobrin Ice."

More noise, more voices, questions; they crowded in on us.

"Will you look to my friend?"

I thought I had said it, but Estraven had. Somebody was making me sit down.
They brought us food; they looked after us, took us in, welcomed us home.
Benighted, contentious, passionate, ignorant souls, countryfolk of a poor land,
their generosity gave a noble ending to that hard journey. They gave with both
hands. No doling out, no counting up. And so Estraven received what they gave
us, as a lord among lords or a beggar among beggars, a man among his own
people.

To those fishermen-villagers who live on the edge of the edge, on the extreme
habitable limit of a barely habitable continent, honesty is as essential as food.
They must play fair with one another; there's not enough to cheat with. Estraven
knew this, and when after a day or two they got around to asking, discreetly and
indirectly, with due regard to shifgrethor, why we had chosen to spend a winter
rambling on the Gobrin Ice, he replied at once, "Silence is not what I should
choose, yet it suits me better than a lie."

"It's well known that honorable men come to be outlawed, yet their shadow does
not shrink," said the hot-shop cook, who ranked next to the village chief in
consequence, and whose shop was a sort of living-room for the whole Domain in
winter.

"One person may be outlawed in Karhide, another in Orgoreyn," said Estraven.

"True; and one by his clan, another by the king in Erhenrang."

"The king shortens no man's shadow, though he may try," Estraven remarked,
and the cook looked satisfied. If Estraven's own clan had cast him out he would
be a suspect character, but the king's strictures were unimportant. As for me,
evidently a foreigner and so the one outlawed by Orgoreyn, that was if anything
to my credit.

We never told our names to our hosts in Kurkurast. Estraven was very reluc-
tant to use a false name, and our true ones could not be avowed. It was,
after all, a crime to speak to Estraven, let alone to feed and clothe and
house him, as they did. Even a remote village of the Guthen Coast has radio,
and they could not have pleaded ignorance of the Order of Exile; only real ig-
norance of their guest's identity might give them some excuse. Their vulnerability
weighed on Estraven's mind, before I had even thought of it. On our third night
there he came into my room to discuss our next move. A Karhidish village is like
an ancient castle of Earth in having few or no separate, private dwellings. Yet
in the high, rambling old buildings of the Hearth, the Commerce, the Co-Domain
(there was no Lord of Kurkurast) and the Outer-House, each of the five hundred
villagers could have privacy, even seclusion, in rooms off those ancient corridors
with walls three feet thick. We had been given a room apiece, on the top floor of
the Hearth. I was sitting in mine beside the fire, a small, hot, heavy-scented
fire of peat from the Shenshey Bogs, when Estraven came in. He said."

"We must soon be going on from here, Genry."

I remember him standing there in the shadows of the firelit room barefoot and
wearing nothing but the loose fur breeches the chief had given him. In the
privacy and what they consider the warmth of their houses Karhiders often go
half-clothed or naked. On our journey Estraven had lost all the smooth, compact
solidity that marks the Gethenian physique; he was gaunt and scarred, and his
face was burned by cold almost as by fire. He was a dark, hard, and yet elusive
figure in the quick, restless light.

"Where to?"

"South and west, I think. Towards the border. Our first job is to find you a
radio transmitter strong enough to reach your ship. After that, I must find a
hiding place, or else go back into Orgoreyn for a while, to avoid bringing
punishment on those who help us here."

"How will you get back into Orgoreyn?"

"As I did before--cross the border. The Orgota have nothing against me."

"Where will we find a transmitter?"

"No nearer than Sassinoth."

I winced. He grinned.

"Nothing closer?"

"A hundred and fifty miles or so; we've come farther over worse ground.
There are roads all the way; people will take us in; we may get a lift on a
powersledge."

I assented, but I was depressed by the prospect of still another stage of our
winter-journey, and this one not towards haven but back to that damned border
where Estraven might go back into exile, leaving me alone.

I brooded over it and finally said, "There'll be one condition which Karhide
must fulfill before it can join the Ekumen. Argaven must revoke your
banishment."

He said nothing, but stood gazing at the fire.

"I mean it," I insisted. "First things first."

"I thank you, Genry," he said. His voice, when he spoke very softly as now,
did have much the timbre of a woman's voice, husky and unresonant. He looked
at me, gently, not smiling. "But I haven't expected to see my home again for a
long time now. I've been in exile for twenty years, you know. This is not so
much different, this banishment. I'll look after myself; and you look after
yourself, and your Ekumen. That you must do alone. But all this is said too
soon. Tell your ship to come down! When that's done, then I'll think beyond
it."

We stayed two more days in Kurkurast, getting well fed and rested, waiting
for a road-packer that was due in from the south and would give us a lift when
it went back again. Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our
crossing of the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition
can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locutions and
even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the
pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from mountain-gaps
that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the
crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice,
of the shadowless weather, of the night's darkness. I listened as fascinated as
all the rest, my gaze on my friend's dark face.

We left Kurkurast riding elbow-jammed in the cab of a road-packer, one of
the big powered vehicles that rolls and packs down the snow on Karhidish roads,
the main means of keeping roads open in winter, since to try to keep them
plowed clear would take half the kingdom's time and money, and all traffic is
on runners in the winter anyway. The packer ground along at two miles an hour,
and brought us into the next village south of Kurkurast long after nightfall.
There, as always, we were welcomed, fed, and housed for the night; the next day
we went on afoot. We were now landward of the coastal hills that take the brunt
of the north wind off the Bay of Guthen, in a more heavily settled region, and
so went not from camp to camp but from Hearth to Hearth. A couple of times we
did get a lift on a powersledge, once for thirty miles. The roads, despite frequent
heavy snowfall, were hard-packed and well-marked. There was always food in
our packs, put there by the last night's hosts; there was always a roof and a
fire at the end of the day's going.

Yet those eight or nine days of easy hiking and skiing through a hospitable land
were the hardest and dreariest part of all our journey, worse than the ascent
of the glacier, worse than the last days of hunger. The saga was over, it belonged
to the Ice. We were very tired. We were going the wrong direction. There was no
more joy in us.

"Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn," Estraven said. He was as stea-
dy as ever, but in his walk, his voice, his bearing, vigor had been replaced by
patience, and certainty by stubborn resolve. He was very silent, nor would he
mindspeak with me much.

We came to Sassinoth. A town of several thousand, perched up on hills above
the frozen Ey: roofs white, walls gray, hills spotted black with forest and rock
outcropping, fields and river white; across the river the disputed Sinoth Valley,
all white...

We came there all but empty-handed. Most of what remained of our travel equip-
ment we had given away to various kindly hosts, and by now we had nothing but
the Chabe stove, our skis, and the clothes we wore. Thus unburdened we made
our way, asking directions a couple of times, not into the town but to an outlying
farm. It was a meager place, not part of a Domain but a single-farm under the
Sinoth Valley Administration. When Estraven was a young secretary in that Ad-
ministration he had been a friend of the owner, and in fact had bought this
farm for him, a year or two ago, when he was helping people resettle east of
the Ey in hopes of obviating dispute over the ownership of the Sinoth Valley.
The farmer himself opened his door to us, a stocky soft-spoken man of about
Estraven's age, His name was Thessicher.

Estraven had come through this region with hood pulled up and forward to
hide his face. He feared recognition, here. He hardly needed to; it took a keen
eye to see Harth rem ir Estraven in the thin weatherworn tramp. Thessicher kept
staring at him covertly, unable to believe that he was who he said he was.

Thessicher took us in, and his hospitality was up to standard though his means
were small. But he was uncomfortable with us, he would rather not have had us.
It was understandable; he risked the confiscation of his property by sheltering
us. Since he owed that property to Estraven, and might by now have been as des-
titute as we if Estraven had not provided for him, it seemed not unjust to ask
him to run some risk in return. My friend, however, asked his help not in re-
payment but as a matter of friendship, counting not on Thessicher's obligation
but on his affection. And indeed Thessicher thawed after his first alarm was past,
and with Karhidish volatility became demonstrative and nostalgic, recalling old
days and old acquaintances with Estraven beside the fire half the night. When
Estraven asked him if he had any idea as to a hiding place, some deserted or
isolated farm where a banished man might lie low for a month or two in hopes of
a revocation of his exile, Thessicher at once said, "Stay with me."

Estraven's eyes lit up at that, but he demurred; and agreeing that he might not
be safe so near Sassinoth, Thessicher promised to find him a hideout. It wouldn't
be hard, he said, if Estraven would take a false name and hire out as a cook or
farmhand, which would not be pleasant, perhaps, but certainly better than
returning to Orgoreyn. "What the devil would you do in Orgoreyn? What would
you live on, eh?"

"On the Commensality," said my friend, with a trace of his otter's smile.
"They provide all Units with jobs, you know. No trouble. But I'd rather be
in Karhide...if you really think it could be managed..."

We had kept the Chabe stove, the only thing of value left to us. It served us,
one way or another, right to the end of our journey. The morning after our arrival
at Thessicher's farm, I took the stove and skied into town. Estraven of course did
not come with me, but he had explained to me what to do, and it all went well. I
sold the stove at the Town Commerce, then took the solid sum of money it had
fetched up the hill to the little College of the Trades, where the radio station was
housed, and bought ten minutes of "private transmission to private reception."
All stations set aside a daily period of time for such shortwave transmissions; as
most of them are sent by merchants to their overseas agents or customers in the
Archipelago, Sith, or Perunter, the cost is rather high, but not unreasonable.
Less, anyway, than the cost of a secondhand Chabe stove. My ten minutes were
to be early in Third Hour, late afternoon. I did not want to be skiing back and
forth from Thessicher's farm all day long, so I hung around Sassinoth, and
bought a large, good, cheap lunch at one of the hot-shops. No doubt that
Karhidish cooking was better than Orgota. As I ate, I remembered Estraven's
comment on that, when I had asked him if he hated Orgoreyn; I remembered his
voice last night, saying with all mildness, "I'd rather be in Karhide..." And I
wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country
truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice
arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a
bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

After lunch I wandered about Sassinoth. The business of the town, the shops
and markets and streets, lively despite snow-flurries and zero temperature,
seemed like a play, unreal, bewildering. I had not yet come altogether out of the
solitude of the Ice. I was uneasy among strangers, and constantly missed
Estraven's presence beside me.

I climbed the steep snow-packed street in dusk to the College and was
admitted and shown how to operate the public-use transmitter. At the time
appointed I sent the wake signal to the relay satellite which was in stationary
orbit about 300 miles over South Karhide. It was there as insurance for just a
situation as this, when my ansible was gone so that I could not ask Ollul to
signal the ship, and I had not time or equipment to make direct contact with the
ship in solar orbit. The Sassinoth transmitter was more than adequate, but as the
satellite was not equipped to respond except by sending to the ship, there was
nothing to do but signal it and let it go at that. I could not know if the message
had been received and relayed to the ship. I did not know if I had done right to
send it. I had come to accept such uncertainties with a quiet heart.

It had come on to snow hard, and I had to spend the night in town, not know-
ing the roads well enough to want to set off on them in the snow and dark.
Having a bit of money still, I inquired for an inn, at which they insisted that I put
up at the College; I had dinner with a lot of cheerful students, and slept in one of
the dormitories. I fell asleep with a pleasant sense of security, an assurance of
Karhide's extraordinary and unfailing kindness to the stranger. I had landed in
the right country in the first place, and now I was back. So I fell asleep; but I
woke up very early and set off for Thessicher's farm before breakfast, having
spent an uneasy night full of dreams and wakenings.

The rising sun, small and cold in a bright sky, sent shadows westward from
every break and hummock in the snow. The road lay all streaked with dark and
bright. No one moved in all the snowy fields; but away off on the road a small
figure came toward me with the flying, gliding gait of the skier. Long before I
could see the face I knew it for Estraven.

"What's up, Therem?"

"I've got to get to the border," he said, not even stopping as we met. He was
already out of breath. I turned and we both went west, I hard put to keep up with
him. Where the road turned to enter Sassinoth he left it, skiing out across the
unfenced fields. We crossed the frozen Ey a mile or so north of town. The banks
were steep, and at the end of the climb we both had to stop and rest. We were not
in condition for this kind of race.

"What happened? Thessicher--?"

"Yes. Heard him on his wireless set. At daybreak." Estraven's chest rose and
fell in gasps as it had when he lay on the ice beside the blue crevasse. "Tibe
must have a price on my head."

"The damned ungrateful traitor!" I said stammering, not meaning Tibe but
Thessicher, whose betrayal was of a friend.

"He is that," said Estraven, "but I asked too much of him, strained a small
spirit too far. Listen, Genry. Go back to Sassinoth."

"I'll at least see you over the border, Therem."

"There may be Orgota guards there."

"I'll stay on this side. For God's sake--"

He smiled. Still breathing very hard, he got up and went on, and I went with
him.

We skied through small frosty woods and over the hillocks and fields of the
disputed valley. There was no hiding, no skulking. A sunlit sky, a white world,
and we two strokes of shadow on it, fleeing. Uneven ground hid the border from
us till we were less than an eighth of a mile from it: then we suddenly saw it
plain, marked with a fence, only a couple of feet of the poles showing above the
snow, the pole-tops painted red. There were no guards to be seen on the Orgota
side. On the near side there were ski-tracks, and, southward, several small
figures moving.

"There are guards on this side. You'll have to wait till dark, Therem."

"Tibe's Inspectors," he gasped bitterly, and swung aside.

We shot back over the little rise we had just topped, and took the nearest
cover. There we spent the whole long day, in a dell among the thick-growing
hemmen trees, their reddish boughs bent low around us by loads of snow. We
debated many plans of moving north or south along the border to get out of this
particularly troubled zone, of trying to get up into the hills east of Sassinoth,
even of going back up north into the empty country, but each plan had to be
vetoed. Estraven's presence had been betrayed, and we could not travel in
Karhide openly as we had been doing. Nor could we travel secretly for any
distance at all: we had no tent, no food, and not much strength. There was
nothing for it but the straight dash over the border, no way was open but one.

We huddled in the dark hollow under dark trees, in the snow. We lay right
together for warmth. Around midday Estraven dozed off for a while, but I was
too hungry and too cold for sleep; I lay there beside my friend in a sort of stupor,
trying to remember the words he had quoted to me once: Two are one, life and
death, lying together. ...It was a little like being inside the tent up on the Ice,
but without shelter, without food, without rest: nothing left but our
companionship, and that soon to end.

The sky hazed over during the afternoon, and the temperature began to drop.
Even in the windless hollow it became too cold to sit motionless. We had to
move about, and still around sunset I was taken by fits of shuddering like those
I had experienced in the prison-truck crossing Orgoreyn. The darkness seemed
to take forever coming on. In the late blue twilight we left the dell and went
creeping behind trees and bushes over the hill till we could make out the line
of the border-fence, a few dim dots along the pallid snow. No lights, nothing
moving, no sound. Away off in the southwest shone the yellow glimmer of a
small town, some tiny Commensal Village of Orgoreyn, where Estraven could
go with his unacceptable identification papers and be assured at least of a night's
lodging in the Commensal Jail or perhaps on the nearest Commensal Voluntary
Farm. All at once--there, at that last moment, no sooner--I realized what my
selfishness and Estraven's silence had kept from me, where he was going and
what he was getting into. I said, "Therem--wait--"

But he was off, downhill: a magnificent fast skier, and this time not holding
back for me. He shot away on a long quick curving descent through the shadows
over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the guns of the border-guards. I
think they shouted warnings or orders to halt, and a light sprang up somewhere,
but I am not sure; in any case he did not stop, but flashed on towards the fence,
and they shot him down before he reached it. They did not use the sonic stunners
but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a
burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and
twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot
away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me;
only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck
and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once,
clearly, "Arek!" Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while
he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one
way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

20. A Fool's Errand

SOMEWHERE IN the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice
he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even
then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth
Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond
fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.

I was taken back to Sassinoth and imprisoned, because I had been in the
company of an outlaw, and probably because they did not know what else to do
with me. From the start, even before official orders came from Erhenrang, they
treated me well. My Karhidish jail was a furnished room in the Tower of the
Lords-Elect in Sassinoth; I had a fireplace, a radio, and five large meals daily.
It was not comfortable. The bed was hard, the covers thin, the floor bare, the air
cold--like any room in Karhide. But they sent in a physician, in whose hands
and voice was a more enduring, a more profitable comfort than any I ever found
in Orgoreyn. After he came, I think the door was left unlocked. I recall it
standing open, and myself wishing it were shut, because of the chill draft of air
from the hall. But I had not the strength, the courage, to get off my bed and shut
my prison door.

The physician, a grave, maternal young fellow, told me with an air of
peaceable certainty, "You have been underfed and overtaxed for five or six
months. You have spent yourself. There's nothing more to spend. Lie down,
rest. Lie down like the rivers frozen in the valleys in winter. Lie still. Wait."

But when I slept I was always in the truck, huddling together with the others,
all of us stinking, shivering, naked, squeezed together for warmth, all but one.
One lay by himself against the barred door, the cold one, with a mouth full of
clotted blood. He was the traitor. He had gone on by himself, deserting us,
deserting me. I would wake up full of rage, a feeble shaky rage that turned into
feeble tears.

I must have been rather ill, for I remember some of the effects of high fever,
and the physician stayed with me one night or perhaps more. I can't recall those
nights, but do remember saying to him, and hearing the querulous keening note
in my own voice, "He could have stopped. He saw the guards. He ran right into
the guns."

The young physician said nothing for a while. "You're not saying that he
killed himself?"

"Perhaps--"

"That's a bitter thing to say of a friend. And I will not believe it of Harth rem
ir Estraven."

I had not had in mind when I spoke the contemptibility of suicide to these people.
It is not to them, as to us, an option. It is the abdication from option, the act
of betrayal itself. To a Karhider reading our canons, the crime of Judas lies not
in his betrayal of Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance
of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide. "Then you don't call him Estraven the
Traitor?"

"Nor ever did. There are many who never heeded the accusations against him,
Mr. Ai."

But I was unable to see any solace in that, and only cried out in the same
torment, "Then why did they shoot him? Why is he dead?" To this he made no
answer, there being none. I was never formally interrogated. They asked how I
had got out of Pulefen Farm and into Karhide, and they asked the destination
and intent of the code message I had sent on their radio. I told them. That
information went straight to Erhenrang, to the king. The matter of the ship was
apparently held secret, but the news of my escape from an Orgota prison, my
journey over the Ice in winter, my presence in Sassinoth, was freely reported and
discussed. Estraven's part in this was not mentioned on the radio, nor was his
death. Yet it was known. Secrecy in Karhide is to an extraordinary extent a
matter of discretion, of an agreed, understood silence--an omission of questions,
yet not an omission of answers. The Bulletins spoke only of the Envoy Mr. Ai,
but everybody knew that it was Harth rem ir Estraven who had stolen me from
the hands of the Orgota and come with me over the Ice to Karhide to give the
staring lie to the Commensals' tale of my sudden death from horm-fever in
Mishnory last autumn... Estraven had predicted the effects of my return fairly
accurately; he had erred mainly in underestimating them. Because of the alien
who lay ill, not acting, not caring, in a room in Sassinoth, two governments
fell within ten days.

To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group
of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices
of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in
Karhide. The Sarf faction that had sent me off to Pulefen hung on, despite the
not unprecedented embarrassment of being caught lying, until Argaven's public
announcement of the imminent arrival of the Star Ship in Karhide. That day
Obsle's party, the Open Trade faction, took over the presiding offices of the
Thirty-Three. So I was of some service to them after all.

In Karhide the fall of a government is most likely to mean the disgrace and
replacement of a Prime Minister along with a reshuffling of the kyorremy; al-
though assassination, abdication, and insurrection are all frequent alternatives.
Tibe made no effort to hang on. My current value in the game of international
shifgrethor, plus my vindication (by implication) of Estraven, gave me as it were
a prestige-weight so clearly surpassing his, that he resigned, as I later learned,
even before the Erhenrang Government knew that I had radioed to my ship. He
acted on the tip-off from Thessicher, waited only until he got word of Estraven's
death, and then resigned. He had his defeat and his revenge for it all in one.
Once Argaven was fully informed, he sent me a summons, a request to come
at once to Erhenrang, and along with it a liberal allowance for expenses. The
City of Sassinoth with equal liberality sent their young physician along with me,
for I was not in very good shape yet. We made the trip in powersledges. I
remember only parts of it; it was smooth and unhurried, with long halts waiting
for packers to clear the road, and long nights spent at inns. It could only have
taken two or three days, but it seemed a long trip and I can't recall much of
it till the moment when we came through the Northern Gates of Erhenrang into
the deep streets full of snow and shadow.

I felt then that my heart hardened somewhat and my mind cleared. I had been
all in pieces, disintegrated. Now, though tired from the easy journey, I found
some strength left whole in me. Strength of habit, most likely, for here at last
was a place I knew, a city I had lived in, worked in, for over a year. I knew the
streets, the towers, the somber courts and ways and facades of the Palace. I knew
my job here. Therefore for the first time it came plainly to me that, my friend
being dead, I must accomplish the thing he died for. I must set the keystone in
the arch.

At the Palace gates the order was for me to proceed to one of the guest-houses
within the Palace walls. It was the Round-Tower Dwelling, which signaled a
high degree of shifgrethor in the court: not so much the king's favor, as his
recognition of a status already high. Ambassadors from friendly powers were
usually lodged there. It was a good sign. To get to it, however, we had to pass by
the Corner Red Dwelling, and I looked in the narrow arched gateway at the bare
tree over the pool, gray with ice, and the house that still stood empty.

At the door of the Round-Tower I was met by a person in white hieb and
crimson shirt, with a silver chain over his shoulders: Faxe, the Foreteller of
Otherhord Fastness. At sight of his kind and handsome face, the first known face
that I had seen for many days, a rush of relief softened my mood of strained
resolution. When Faxe took my hands in the rare Karhidish greeting and
welcomed me as his friend, I could make some response to his warmth.

He had been sent to the kyorremy from his district, South Rer, early in
the autumn. Election of council-members from the Indwellers of Handdara
Fastnesses is not uncommon; it is however not common for a Weaver to ac-
cept office, and I believe Faxe would have refused if he had not been much
concerned by Tibe's government and the direction in which it was leading the
country. So he had taken off the Weaver's gold chain and put on the council-
lor's silver one; and he had not spent long in making his mark, for he had been
since Thern a member of the Hes-kyorremy or Inner Council, which serves
as counterweight to the Prime Minister, and it was the king who had named
him to that position. He was perhaps on his way up to the eminence from which
Estraven, less than a year ago, had fallen. Political careers in Karhide are
abrupt, precipitous.

In the Round-Tower, a cold pompous little house, Faxe and I talked at some
length before I had to see anyone else or make any formal statement or
appearance. He asked with his clear gaze on me, "There is a ship coming, then,
coming down to earth: a larger ship than the one you came to Horden Island on,
three years ago. Is that right?"

"Yes. That is, I sent a message that should prepare it to come."

"When will it come?"

When I realized that I did not even know what day of the month it was, I be-
gan to realize how badly off I had in fact been, lately. I had to count back to
the day before Estraven's death. When I found that the ship, if it had been at
minimum distance, would already be in planetary orbit awaiting some word from
me, I had another shock.

"I must communicate with the ship. They'll want instructions. Where does the
king want them to come down? It should be an uninhabited area, fairly large. I
must get to a transmitter--"

Everything was arranged expeditiously, with ease. The endless convolutions
and frustrations of my previous dealings with the Erhenrang Government were
melted away like ice-pack in a flooding river. The wheel turned... Next day I
was to have an audience with the king.

It had taken Estraven six months to arrange my first audience. It had taken the
rest of his life to arrange this second one.

I was too tired to be apprehensive, this time, and there were things on my
mind that outweighed self-consciousness. I went down the long red hall under the
dusty banners and stood before the dais with its three great hearths, where three
bright fires cracked and sparkled. The king sat by the central fireplace, hunched
up on a carven stool by the table.

"Sit down, Mr. Ai."

I sat down across the hearth from Argaven, and saw his face in the light of the
flames. He looked unwell, and old. He looked like a woman who has lost her
baby, like a man who has lost his son.

"Well, Mr. Ai, so your ship's going to land."

"It will land in Athten Fen, as you requested, sir. They should bring it down
this evening at the beginning of Third Hour."

"What if they miss the place? Will they burn everything up?"

"They'll follow a radio-beam straight in; that's all been arranged. They won't
miss."

"And how many of them are there--eleven? Is that right?"

"Yes. Not enough to be afraid of, my lord."

Argaven's hands twitched in an unfinished gesture. "I am no longer afraid of
you, Mr. Ai."

I'm glad of that."

"You've served me well."

"But I am not your servant."

"I know it," he said indifferently. He stared at the fire, chewing the inside of
his lip.

"My ansible transmitter is in the hands of the Sarf in Mishnory, presumably.
However, when the ship comes down it will have an ansible aboard. I will have
thenceforth, if acceptable to you, the position of Envoy Plenipotentiary of the
Ekumen, and will be empowered to discuss, and sign, a treaty of alliance with
Karhide. All this can be confirmed with Hain and the various Stabilities by
ansible."

"Very well."

I said no more, for he was not giving me his whole attention. He moved a log
in the fire with his boot-toe, so that a few red sparks crackled up from it. "Why
the devil did he cheat me?" he demanded in his high strident voice, and for the
first time looked straight at me.

"Who?" I said, sending back his stare.

"Estraven."

"He saw to it that you didn't cheat yourself. He got me out of sight when you
began to favor a faction unfriendly to me. He brought me back to you when my
return would in itself persuade you to receive the Mission of the Ekumen, and
the credit for it."

"Why did he never say anything about this larger ship to me?"

"Because he didn't know about it: I never spoke to anyone of it until I went to
Orgoreyn."

"And a fine lot you chose to blab to there, you two. He tried to get the Orgota
to receive your Mission. He was working with their Open Traders all along.
You'll tell me that was not betrayal?"

"It was not. He knew that, whichever nation first made alliance with the
Ekumen, the other would follow soon: as it will: as Sith and Perunter and the
Archipelago will also follow, until you find unity. He loved his country very
dearly, sir, but he did not serve it, or you. He served the master I serve."

"The Ekumen?" said Argaven, startled.

"No. Mankind."

As I spoke I did not know if what I said was true. True in part; an aspect of the
truth. It would be no less true to say that Estraven's acts had risen out of pure
personal loyalty, a sense of responsibility and friendship towards one single
human being, myself. Nor would that be the whole truth.

The king made no reply. His somber, pouched, furrowed face was turned
again to the fire.

"Why did you call to this ship of yours before you notified me of your return
to Karhide?"

"To force your hand, sir. A message to you would also have reached Lord
Tibe, who might have handed me over to the Orgota. Or had me shot. As he had
my friend shot."

The king said nothing.

"My own survival doesn't matter all that much, but I have and had then a duty
towards Gethen and the Ekumen, a task to fulfill. I signaled the ship first, to
ensure myself some chance of fulfilling it. That was Estraven's counsel, and it
was right."

"Well, it was not wrong. At any rate they'll land here; we shall be the first...
And they're all like you, eh? All perverts, always in kemmer? A queer lot to vie
for the honor of receiving... Tell Lord Gorchern, the chamberlain, how they
expect to be received. See to it that there's no offense or omission. They'll be
lodged in the Palace, wherever you think suitable. I wish to show them honor.
You've done me a couple of good turns, Mr. Ai. Made liars of the Commensals,
and then fools."

"And presently allies, my lord."

"I know!" he said shrilly. "But Karhide first--Karhide first!"

I nodded.

After some silence, he said, "How was it, that pull across the Ice?"

"Not easy."

"Estraven would be a good man to pull with, on a crazy trek like that. He was
tough as iron. And never lost his temper. I'm sorry he's dead."

I found no reply.

"I'll receive your...countrymen in audience tomorrow afternoon at Second
Hour. Is there more needs saying now?"

"My lord, will you revoke the Order of Exile on Estraven, to clear his name?"

"Not yet, Mr. Ai. Don't rush it. Anything more?"

"No more."

"Go on, then."

Even I betrayed him. I had said I would not bring the ship down till his
banishment was ended, his name cleared. I could not throw away what he
had died for, by insisting on the condition. It would not bring him out of this
exile. The rest of that day went in arranging with Lord Gorchern and others for
the reception and lodging of the ship's company. At Second Hour we set out by
powersledge to Athten Fen, about thirty miles northeast of Erhenrang. The land-
ing site was at the near edge of the great desolate region, a peat-marsh too
boggy to be farmed or settled, and now in mid-Irrem a flat frozen waste many
feet deep in snow. The radio beacon had been functioning all day, and they had
received confirmation signals from the ship.

On the screens, coming in, the crew must have seen the terminator lying clear
across the Great Continent along the border, from Guthen Bay to the Gulf of
Charisune, and the peaks of the Kargav still in sunlight, a chain of stars;
for it was twilight when we, looking up, saw the one star descending.

She came down in a roar and glory, and steam went roaring up white as her
stabilizers went down in the great lake of water and mud created by the retro;
down underneath the bog there was permafrost like granite, and she came to
rest balanced neatly, and sat cooling over the quickly refreezing lake, a great,
delicate fish balanced on its tail, dark silver in the twilight of Winter.

Beside me Faxe of Otherhord spoke for the first time since the sound and
splendor of the ship's descent. "I'm glad I have lived to see this," he said.
So Estraven had said when he looked at the Ice, at death; so he should have said
this night. To get away from the bitter regret that beset me I started to walk
forward over the snow towards the ship. She was frosted already by the interhull
coolants, and as I approached the high port slid open and the exitway was
extruded, a graceful curve down onto the ice. The first off was Lang Heo Hew,
unchanged, of course, precisely as I had last seen her, three years ago in my life
and a couple of weeks in hers. She looked at me, and at Faxe, and at the others
of the escort who had followed me, and stopped at the foot of the ramp. She said
solemnly in Karhidish, "I have come in friendship." To her eyes we were all
aliens. I let Faxe greet her first.

He indicated me to her, and she came and took my right hand in the fashion of
my people, looking into my face. "Oh Genly," she said, "I didn't know you!" It
was strange to hear a woman's voice, after so long. The others came out of the
ship, on my advice: evidence of any mistrust at this point would humiliate the
Karhidish escort, impugning their shifgrethor. Out they came, and met the Kar-
hiders with a beautiful courtesy. But they all looked strange to me, men and
women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill.
They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species: great
apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer... They took my hand,
touched me, held me.

I managed to keep myself in control, and to tell Heo Hew and Tulier what they
most urgently needed to know about the situation they had entered, during the
sledge-ride back to Erhenrang. When we got to the Palace, however, I had to
get to my room at once.

The physician from Sassinoth came in. His quiet voice and his face, a young,
serious face, not a man's face and not a woman's, a human face, these were a
relief to me, familiar, right... But he said, after ordering me to get to bed and
dosing me with some mild tranquilizer, "I've seen your fellow-Envoys. This is
a marvelous thing, the coming of men from the stars. And in my lifetime!"

There again was the delight, the courage, that is most admirable in the
Karhidish spirit-and in the human spirit--and though I could not share it with
him, to deny it would be a detestable act. I said, without sincerity, but with
absolute truth, "It is a marvelous thing indeed for them as well, the coming to a
new world, a new mankind."

At the end of that spring, late in Tuwa when the Thaw-floods were going down
and travel was possible again, I took a vacation from my little Embassy in
Erhenrang, and went east. My people were spread out by now all over the planet.
Since we had been authorized to use the aircars, Heo Hew and three others had
taken one and flown over to Sith and the Archipelago, nations of the Sea
Hemisphere which I had entirely neglected. Others were in Orgoreyn, and two,
reluctant, in Perunter, where the Thaws do not even begin until Tuwa and
everything refreezes (they say) a week later. Tulier and Ke'sta were getting on
very well in Erhenrang, and could handle what might come up. Nothing was ur-
gent. After all, a ship setting out at once from the closest of Winter's new
allies could not arrive before seventeen years, planetary time, had passed. It
is a marginal world, on the edge. Out beyond it towards the South Orion Arm no
world has been found where men live. And it is a long way back from Winter to
the prime worlds of the Ekumen, the hearth-worlds of our race: fifty years to
Hain-Davenant, a man's lifetime to Earth. No hurry.

I crossed the Kargav, this time on lower passes, on a road that winds along
above the coast of the southern sea. I paid a visit to the first village I had
stayed in, when the fishermen brought me in from Horden Island three years ago;
the folk of that Hearth received me, now as then, without the least surprise. I
spent a week in the big port city Thather at the mouth of the River Ench, and
then in early summer started on foot into Kerm Land.

I walked east and south into the steep harsh country full of crags and green
hills and great rivers and lonely houses, till I came to Icefoot Lake. From the
lakeshore looking up southward at the hills I saw a light I knew: the blink, the
white suffusion of the sky, the glare of the glacier lying high beyond. The Ice
was there.

Estre was a very old place. Its Hearth and outbuildings were all of gray stone
cut from the steep mountainside to which it clung. It was bleak, full of the sound
of wind.

I knocked and the door was opened. I said, "I ask the hospitality of the
Domain. I was a friend of Therem of Estre."

The one who opened to me, a slight, grave-looking fellow of nineteen or twenty,
accepted my words in silence and silently admitted me to the Hearth. He took
me to the wash-house, the tiring-rooms, the great kitchen, and when he had seen
to it that the stranger was clean, clothed, and fed, he left me to myself in a
bedroom that looked down out of deep slit-windows over the gray lake and the
gray thore-forests that lie between Estre and Stok. It was a bleak land, a bleak
house. Fire roared in the deep hearth, giving as always more warmth for the eye
and spirit than for the flesh, for the stone floor and walls, the wind outside
blowing down off the mountains and the Ice, drank up most of the heat of the
flames. But I did not feel the cold as I used to, my first two years on Winter;
I had lived long in a cold land, now.

In an hour or so the boy (he had a girl's quick delicacy in his looks and
movements, but no girl could keep so grim a silence as he did) came to tell me
that the Lord of Estre would receive me if it pleased me to come. I followed him
downstairs, through long corridors where some kind of game of hide-and-seek
was going on. Children shot by us, darted around us, little ones shrieking with
excitement, adolescents slipping like shadows from door to door, hands over
their mouths to keep laughter still. One fat little thing of five or six caromed
into my legs, then plunged and grabbed my escort's hand for protection. "Sorve!"
he squeaked, staring up wide-eyed at me all the time, "Sorve, I'm going to hide in
the brewery--!" Off he went like a round pebble from a sling. The young man
Sorve, not at all discomposed, led me on and brought me into the Inner Hearth to
the Lord of Estre.

Esvans Harth rem ir Estraven was an old man, past seventy, crippled by an arth-
ritic disease of the hips. He sat erect in a rolling-chair by the fire. His face
was broad, much blunted and worn down by time, like a rock in a torrent: a calm
face, terribly calm.

"You are the Envoy, Genry Ai?"

"I am."

He looked at me, and I at him. Therem had been the son, child of the flesh, of
this old lord. Therem the younger son; Arek the elder, that brother whose voice
he had heard in mine bespeaking him; both dead now. I could not see anything
of my friend in that worn, calm, hard old face that met my gaze. I found nothing
there but the certainty, the sure fact of Therem's death.

I had come on a fool's errand to Estre, hoping for solace. There was no solace;
and why should a pilgrimage to the place of my friend's childhood make any
difference, fill any absence, soothe any remorse? Nothing could be changed
now. My coming to Estre had, however, another purpose, and this I could
accomplish.

"I was with your son in the months before his death. I was with him when he
died. I've brought you the journals he kept. And if there's anything I can tell
you of those days--"

No particular expression showed on the old man's face. That calmness was not
to be altered. But the young one with a sudden movement came out of the sha-
dows into the light between the window and the fire, a bleak uneasy light,
and he spoke harshly: "In Erhenrang they still call him Estraven the Traitor."

The old lord looked at the boy, then at me.

"This is Sorve Harth," he said, "heir of Estre, my sons' son."

There is no ban on incest there, I knew it well enough. Only the strangeness of
it, to me a Terran, and the strangeness of seeing the flash of my friend's spirit
in this grim, fierce, provincial boy, made me dumb for a while. When I spoke my
voice was unsteady. "The king will recant. Therem was no traitor. What does it
matter what fools call him?"

The old lord nodded slowly, smoothly. "It matters," he said.

"You crossed the Gobrin Ice together," Sorve demanded, "you and he?"

"We did."

"I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy," said old Esvans, very calm.
But the boy, Therem's son, said stammering, "Will you tell us how he died? Will
you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars-- the other kinds of men,
the other lives?"

The Gethenian Calendar and Clock

THE YEAR.

Gethen's period of revolution is 8401 Terran Standard Hours, or .96 of the
Terran Standard Year.

The period of rotation is 23.08 Terran Standard
Hours: the Gethenian year contains 364 days.

In Karhide/Orgoreyn years are not numbered consecutively from a base
year forward to the present; the base year is the current year. Every New
Years Day (Getheny Thern) the year just past becomes the year "one-ago,"
and every past date is increased by one. The future is similarly counted,
next year being the year "one-to-come," until it in turn becomes the Year
One.

The inconvenience of this system in record-keeping is palliated by various
devices, for instance reference to well-known events, reigns of kings,
dynasties, local lords, etc. The Yomeshta count in 144-year cycles from the
Birth of Meshe (2202 years-ago, in Ekumenical Year 1492), and keep ritual
celebrations every twelfth year; but this system is strictly cultic and is not
officially employed even by the government of Orgoreyn, which sponsors
the Yomesh religion.

THE MONTH

The period of revolution of Gethen's moon is 26 Gethenian days; the rota-
tion is captured, so that the moon presents the same face to the planet
always. There are 14 months in the year, and as solar and lunar calendars
concur so closely that adjustment is required only about once in 200 years,
the days of the month are invariable, as are the dates of the-phases of the
moon. The Karhidish names of the months:

Winter:

1. Thern
2. Thanern
3. Nimmer
4. Anner

Spring:

5. Irrem
6. Moth
7. Tuwa

Summer:

8. Osme
9. Ockre
10. Kus
11. Hakanna

Autumn:

12. Gor
13. Susmy
14. Grende

The 26-day month is divided into two halfmonths of 13 days.

THE DAY.

The day (23.08 T.S.H.) is divided into 10 hours (see below); being
invariable, the days of the month are generally referred to by name, like our
days of the week, not by number. (Many of the names refer to the phase of
the moon, e.g. Getheny, "darkness," Arhad, "first crescent," etc. The prefix
od- used in the second halfmonth is a reversive, giving a contrary meaning,
so that Odgetheny might be translated as "undarkness.") The Karhidish
names of the days of the month:

1.Getheny
2. Sordny
3. Eps
4. Arhad
5. Netherhad
6. Streth
7. Berny
8. Orny
9. Harhahad
10. Guyrny
11. Yrny
12. Posthe
13. Tormenbod
14. Odgetheny
15. Odsordny
16. Odeps
17. Odarhad
18. Onnetherhad
19. Odstreth
20. Obberny
21. Odorny
22. Odharhahad
23. Odguyrny
24. Odyrny
25. Opposthe
26. Ottormenbod

THE HOUR.

The decimal clock used in all Gethenian cultures converts as follows, very
roughly, to the Terran double-twelve-hour clock (Note: This is a mere guide
to the time of day implied by a Gethenian "Hour"; the complexities of an
exact conversion, given the fact that the Gethenian day contains only 23.08
Terran Standard Hours, are irrelevant to my purpose):

First Hour noon to 2:30 p.m.
Second Hour 2:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Third Hour 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Fourth Hour 7:00 to 9:30 p.m.
Fifth Hour 9:30 to midnight
Sixth Hour midnight to 2:30 a.m.
Seventh Hour 2:30 to 5:00 a.m.
Eighth Hour 5:00 to 7:00 a.m.
Ninth Hour 7:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Tenth Hour 9:30 to noon