The Left Hand of Darkness: Chapters 5-7

My landlady, a voluble man, arranged my journey into the East.

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.

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.

Looking up the slope of the southern face of Kostor, on 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.

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 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, bloodred, windowless.

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.

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

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 Handdara.

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...”

Behold, we must sully the plain snow with footprints, in order to get anywhere.

Everything was red and brown, dank, still, fragrant, gloomy.

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.

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.

Under that nation’s politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara.

“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 cost was high for the asker—two of my rubies went to the coffers of the Fastness—but higher for the answerers.

Goss called them “time-dividers,” which may mean schizophrenics.

...they are reticent about discussing perversion—at least, they were with me.

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

For a while I saw Faxe’s profile rigid as pale stone in a diffuse dust of light.

Nusuth, the ubiquitous and ambiguous negative of the Handdara.

But when I must watch the man nail that damn 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.

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.

I sat down on a ballast-sack of sand there in the windy glare and darkness of the port.

Having come to that, shame pushed me out of stupor, and I was able to think.

As I bent to the oarlock a weakness ran all through my body.

At stun setting a sonic gun can locate its resonance-field only within a hundred feet or so.

“Do you not understand that you are an indigent and unregistered alien? How do you intend to return to Karhide?”

“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 others stared at him with dour curiosity, knowing him a rich man, but they did not know him for a Commensal.

The frump and the fop, they looked, but they were something more than that.

“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.”

“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?”

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!"

Human genetic manipulation was certainly practiced by the Colonizers; nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids of Rokanan...

In this first phase of kemmer (Karh, secher) he remains completely androgynous.

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 furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage.

There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value.

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive.

A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation.

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.

What is there to sublimate?

What would a society of eunuchs achieve?

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?