The Left Hand of Darkness: Chapters 8-11

Few were frightened of me personally, or showed the xenophobic revulsion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.”

They were slow, they were thorough; none of the slapdash arrogance and sudden deviousness that marked Karhidish officialdom.

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 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.

For all its array of officials, Siuwensin was a very small, plain place, sunk deep in rural torpor.

I slept an hour and woke in the grip of a nightmare about explosions, invasion, murder, and conflagration.

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.

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.

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.

Great buildings of yellowish-white stone dominated it, simple stately blocks all built to a pattern, housing the offices and services of the Commensal Government and also the major temples of the Yomesh cult, which is promulgated by the Commensality.

We have to meet as equals, with some mutual understanding and candor, before my mission can even begin.

He fussed over my condescension in deigning to learn anything about his country.

Some of them had a notion, these statesmen and officials who greeted me effusively, but I had none.

All over Winter, even in frozen barbarian Perunter, it is considered execrably vulgar to talk business while eating.

He was gross, genial, and inquisitive.

Each of them was comely, strong of frame and fine of feature, straight and dark.

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.

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.

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.

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 had of course met with incredulity in Karhide, but seldom with a will to incredulity.

Member states follow their own laws; when they clash the Ekumen mediates, attempts to make a legal or ethical adjustment or collation or choice.

“This is absolutely fascinating, Mr. Ai,” said the host, Commensal Yegey, a delicate, dapper, drawling fellow with keen eyes.

“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.”

“It succinctly describes the method of propulsion of the landingboat, sir.”

“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 that will bring them out of stasis; after which they’ll consult with me by radio, or by ansible, using Ollul as relay-center.”

An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

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 Ehrenrang.

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 Ehrenrang.

There was something fluid, insubstantial, in the very heaviness of this city built of monoliths, this monolithic state that called the part and the whole by the same name.

Obsle haggles and dickers with his fellow Commensals, Yegey employs blandishments, Slose proselytizes, and the strength of their following grows.

Obsle haggles and dickers with his fellow Commensals, Yegey employs blandishments, Slose proselytizes, and the strength of their following grows.

Obsle haggles and dickers with his fellow Commensals, Yegey employs blandishments, Slose proselytizes, and the strength of their following grows.

Indeed Genly Ai demands of us an inordinate trustfulness.

The machine conceals the machinations.

Slose opposes them because they are trivial, vulgar, and blasphemous.

I ask my fellow-workers at the factory; they know nothing and think I am talking of some crazy Yomesh sectarian.

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.

Yemenbey was most obstreperous, and probably spontaneous.

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.

And yet when he says, “I am from outer space,” some of you actually shut your eyes, abase your intellects, and believe!

To judge by the tape, Ai withstood gibes and assaults with patience.

Gan you imag­ine that scene, in the Hall? We ‘Outerspacers’ victims of our own hoax, listening with bated breath to a clutter of static—and nothing else—no answer, no Message?