The Left Hand of Darkness: Chapters 12-15

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.

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.

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.

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.

It made no stops atInspectionPoints, and I think it never passed through a town of any size. Its journey was erratic, furtive.

It made no stops atInspectionPoints, 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.

The rest of us sat and lay 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.

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.

When I huddled down with the others I began to shake with cold, a kind of shaking I had not experienced, jumping, racking spasms like the convulsions of fever.

I was unable to do anything about any of this suffering, and therefore accepted it, as they did, placidly.

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.

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.

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.

There was a small plant on the Farm, and when the weather prevented parties from going out into the forest we worked in the mill or in the plant, treating and compressing chips, bark, and sawdust into various forms, and extracting from the dried thore-needles a resin used in plastics.

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.

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.

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.

I took this lifelessness and leveling at first for the effect of the privation of food, warmth, and liberty, but I soon found out that it was more specific an effect than that: it was the result of the drugs given all prisoners to keep them out of kemmer.

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.

They were slipshod and didn’t much care, so long as they kept out of trouble themselves.

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.

Away off in the country silence beyond the barracks walls there was one tiny edge of sound, a handsaw keening: nothing else.

To wear a false name galls me, but nothing else would save me, or get me dear across the width of Orgoreyn to the coast of the Western Sea.

At the town called Turuf I dropped out of the party feigning illness.

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 .

The chief guard on duty berated me for arriving a day later than my orders specified, and sent me to the barracks.

“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.”

“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.”

I thought you understood the danger of Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe’s sudden ascendancy in the kyorremy.

Instead of proclaiming you, they hid you, and so lost their chance, and sold you to the Sarf to save their own pelts.

Bodily weakness made his indignation sound aggrieved and whining.

“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.”

“Solitude,” he explained, laconic.

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.

He was not proud of his exploit, and not able to laugh at it.

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.

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.”

“Ah, you were consciously extending the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being; one manifestation of which is exploration.”

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.”

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.

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.

One palliative of winter on Winter is that the days stay light.

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.

“First day we’ve done less than our stint,” I said.

He told me in the same peremptory tone to lie still.

He had not meant to patronize.

As we approached the end of the pass the rain-clouds 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.