Ursula LeGuin - The Left Hand Of Darkness

At Pulefen Farm we were, as I said, underfed for the work we did, and our clothing, particularly our footgear, was completely inadequate for that winter climate. The guards, most of them probationary prisoners, were not much better off. The intent of the place and its regime was punitive, but not destructive, and I think it might have been endurable, without the druggings and the examinations.

Some of the prisoners underwent the examination in groups of twelve; they merely recited a sort of confessional and catechism, got their anti-kemmer shot, and were released to work. Others, the political prisoners, were subjected every fifth day to questioning under drugs.

I don't know what drugs they used. I don't know the purpose of the questioning. I have no idea what questions they asked me. I would come to myself in the dormitory after a few hours, laid out on the sleeping-shelf with six or seven others, some waking like myself, some still slack and blank in the grip of the drug. When we were all afoot the guards would take us out to the plant to work; but after the third or fourth of these examinations I was unable to get up. They let me be, and next day I could go out with my squad, though I felt shaky. After the next examination I was helpless for two days. Either the anti-kemmer hormones or the veridicals evidently had a toxic effect on my non-Gethenian nervous system, and the effect was cumulative.

I remember planning how I would plead with the Inspector when the next examination came. I would start by promising to answer truthfully anything he asked, without drugs; and later I would say to him, "Sir, don't you see how useless it is to know the answer to the wrong question?" Then the Inspector would turn into Faxe, with the Foreteller's gold chain around his neck, and I would have long conversations with Faxe, very pleasantly, while I controlled the drip of acid from a tube into a vat of pulverized wood-chips. Of course when I came to the little room where they examined us, the Inspector's aide had pulled back my collar and given me the injection before I could speak, and all I remember from that session, or perhaps the memory is from an earlier one, is the Inspector, a tired-looking young Orgota with dirty fingernails, saying drearily, "You must answer my questions in Orgota, you must not speak any other language. You must speak in Orgota."

There was no infirmary. The principle of the Farm was work or die; but there were leniencies in practice-gaps between work and death, provided by the guards. As I said, they were not cruel; neither were they kind. They were slipshod and didn't much care, so long as they kept out of trouble themselves. They let me and another prisoner stay in the dormitory, simply left us there

in our sleeping-bags as if by oversight, when it was plain that we could not stand up on our feet.

I was extremely ill after the last examination; the other, a middle-aged fellow, had some disorder or disease of the kidney, and was dying. As he could not die all at once, he was allowed to spend some time at it, on the sleeping-shelf.

I remember him more clearly than anything else in Pulefen Farm. He was physically a typical Gethenian of the Great Continent, compactly made, short-legged and short-armed, with a solid layer of subcutaneous fat giving him even in illness a sleek roundness of body. He had small feet and hands, rather broad hips, and a deep chest, the breasts scarcely more developed than in a male of my race. His skin was dark ruddy-brown, his black hair fine and fur-like. His face was broad, with small, strong features, the cheekbones pronounced. It is a type not unlike that of various isolated Terran groups living in very high altitudes or Arctic areas. His name was Asra; he had been a carpenter. We talked.

Asra was not, I think, unwilling to die, but he was afraid of dying; he sought distraction from his fear.

We had little in common other than our nearness to death, and that was not what we wanted to talk about; so, much of the time, we did not understand each other very well. It did not matter to him. I, younger and incredulous, would have liked understanding, comprehension, explanation. But there was no explanation. We talked.

At night the barracks dormitory was glaring, crowded, and noisy. During the day the lights were turned off and the big room was dusky, empty, still. We lay close together on the sleeping-shelf and talked softly. Asra liked best to tell long meandering tales about his young days on a Commensal farm in the Kunderer Valley, that broad splendid plain I had driven through coming from the border to Mishnory. His dialect was strong, and he used many names of people, places, customs, tools, that I did not know the meaing of, so I seldom caught more than the drift of his reminiscences. When he was feeling easiest, usually around noon, I would ask him for a myth or tale. Most Gethenians are well stuffed with these. Their literature, though it exists in written form, is a live oral tradition, and they are all in this sense literate. Asra knew the Orgota staples, the Short-Tales of Meshe, the tale of Parsid, parts of the great epics and the novel-like Sea-Traders saga. These, and bits of local lore recalled from his childhood, he would tell in his soft slurry dialect, and then growing tired would ask me for a story. "What do they tell in Karhide?" he would say, rubbing his legs, which tormented him with aches and shooting pains, and turning to me his face with its shy, sly, patient smile.

Once I said, "I know a story about people who live on another world."

"What kind of world would that be?"

"One like this one, all in all; but it doesn't go around the sun. It goes around the star you call Selemy. That's a yellow star like the sun, and on that world, under that sun, live other people." "That's in the Sanovy teachings, that about the other worlds. There used to be an old Sanovy crazy-priest would come by my Hearth when I was little and tell us children all about that, where the liars go when they die, and where the suicides go, and where the thieves go- that's where we're going, me and you, eh, one of those places?"

"No, this I'm telling of isn't a spirit-world. A real one. The people that live on it are real people, alive, just like here. But very-long-ago they learned how to fly." Asra grinned.

"Not by flapping their arms, you know. They flew in machines like cars." But it was hard to say in Orgota, which lacks a word meaning precisely "to fly"; the closest one can come has more the meaning of "glide."

"Well, they learned how to make machines that went right over the air as a sledge goes over snow. And after a while they learned how to make them go farther and faster, till they went like the stone out of a sling off the earth and over the clouds and out of the air, clear to another world, going around another sun. And when they got to that world, what did they find there but men..." "Sliding in the air?"

"Maybe, maybe not...When they got to my world, we already knew how to get about in the air. But they taught us how to get from world to world, we didn't yet have the machines for that."

Asra was puzzled by the injection of the teller into the tale. I was feverish, bothered by the sores which the drugs had brought out on my arms and chest, and I could not remember how I had meant to weave the story.

"Go on," he said, trying to make sense of it. "What did they do besides go in the air?"

"Oh, they did much as people do here. But they're all in kemmer all the time."

He chuckled. There was of course no chance of concealment in this life, and my nickname among prisoners and guards was, inevitably, "the Pervert." But where there is no desire and no shame no one, however anomalous, is singled out; and I think Asra made no connection of this notion with myself and my peculiarities. He saw it merely as a variation on an old theme, and so he chuckled a